2 - Government in eighteenth-century thought

Summary

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a large and rapidly growing body of ideas bearing upon government was available to anyone who might want to develop a systematic view of the subject. It was to be found in the assumptions underlying contemporary practices in government and some other institutions, and in those aspects of political thought which historians have classified as individualism and the theory of the modern state. These two closely related modes of thinking, whose foundations had been laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Bodin, Hobbes and a host of lesser thinkers, had become by the middle of the eighteenth century a standard approach to problems of government. They were still being extended and developed and, while retaining most of their original character, were being made to yield new and far-reaching conclusions about institutions and their workings.

Individualism and the theory of the modern state were a commentary on and a response to the several processes that most clearly differentiated the modern from the medieval world: the centralization of legal authority and military power within the territories of any one government, the concomitant decay or destruction of corporate privileges and autonomous jurisdictions, and changes in the position of individuals as they ceased to be subject to local or corporate authorities and thus ceased to be constrained or protected by intermediate authorities between themselves and the state. In the beginning, the attention of theorists had been directed especially to the legal and psychological foundations of the new political and social relationships.