The normalization of the elect acquired a corresponding theoretical framework. From the late seventeenth century the preferred explanation for physical growth had been ‘preformation’: the theory, starting with Swammerdam, that all living organisms have pre-existed from the Creation and are born as miniature versions which ‘unfold’ through predetermined stages. Leibniz suggested applying preformationism to the human mind. It was in this context that the word itself, ‘development’ (whose first appearances are better translated as ‘unfolding’), was first employed. The pioneering naturalist Charles Bonnet went on to apply the theory of preformationism to what he now expressly termed ‘psychology’. He identified psychology with the stages of regeneration in the elect (the so-called economy of grace); he linked this development of the person to the Enlightenment idea of ‘social progress’, and represented both as a gradual (rather than instantaneous) unfolding of biblical Revelation.

When influential philosophers prior to the Enlightenment such as Leibniz and Malebranche speculate about the interior life of ‘Man’ they presuppose the elect, saved man. This continues to be the case with Pierre Nicole and Jacques-Joseph Duguet, whose writings coincide with Jansenism’s turn towards a movement of political opposition to absolutism that ended up in Jacobinism. The shadows cast by predestination can still be detected even in Locke and Montesquieu, regarded as the founding figures of the Enlightenment. The theory of election would retain a subliminal presence in the history of the human sciences of the eighteenth century. So too would their increasing preoccupation with causality in psychological and social identity; out of the causes for election and reprobation came the imputation of causes for developmental normality and abnormality (‘idiocy’, ‘imbecility’ etc.) in the history of medicine.

Elsewhere I have published a series of articles describing a register in which a version of Carl Schmitt’s claim that “all the concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” was coherent, and perhaps even true in some cases. In those articles, I argued that what was, perhaps, the theoretical turning point of the French Revolution – the Abbé Sieyès’ argument for the mode of representation of the National Assembly in the mandat imperatif debates of 1789 – was an uncanny echo of the theologian Nicolas Malebranche’s argument from a century earlier regarding the mode of representation of the church.

‘The king reigns but does not govern’. This formula, which according to Carl Schmitt was coined by Adolphe Thiers, a French liberal historian and politician, enemy of Bonapartism yet suppressor of the Paris Commune, has become today the most important formula in the study of liberalism. Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben both understand this formula as capturing something essential about liberalism as a form of governmentality that guides the conduct of individuals either in the absence, or beyond the reach, of the sovereign power and its legislation through normative and normalizing orders that escape democratic control. Although not discussed as such, this formula also underlies recent attempts by jurists and historians of political ideas such as Martin Loughlin and Richard Tuck to bolster the sovereignty of the state against new forms of governing without the state that emerge in neoliberalism. This chapter proposes a new reading of this formula by situating it on the terrain of constitutionalism, rather than on that of sovereignty. In so doing, it seeks to bring together in a meaningful exchange these two different critical approaches to neoliberalism, and the emerging debates they harbour. One debate is between those who advocate a Foucauldian and biopolitical and those who adopt an Agambenian and politico-theological analysis of neoliberal governmentality. The other is the one between advocates of a republican, constitutional approach to democracy and those who argue for the revival of popular sovereignty on the basis of new ‘democratic’ interpretations of Bodin and Hobbes.