Leviathan calling

Some notes on
sociological anti-statism
and its consequences
Paul du Gay
Department of Organization (IOA) at Copenhagen Business School (CBS)

Abstract
A spectre has haunted many forms of ‘social’ explanation over the course of the
last century – the spectre of anti-statism. For not a few sociologists and social
theorists, the state has long been regarded as the medium of enslavement, the
very antithesis of what they take to be ‘civil society’. Here the state is viewed as
a cold monster whose conducts (impersonalism, coercion, indifference, authority
– the list is potentially endless) need to be relentlessly exposed and critiqued for
their malign influence on the ‘whole human being’ and on ‘society’, which is seen
as a naturally occurring phenomenon. This article argues that this enduring
opposition between state and civil society represents an unfortunate error, arising
from a perverse tradition which would do away with the state. This problematic
tradition was born in liberal and democratic ideas of civil society, was embodied
in the romantic apotheosis of the purely and metapolitically social, was radicalized
by Marxist designs for a society without a state, and culminated in Nazism and
Communism. It has survived, however, frequently ‘in mufti’, into our own times
and can be found in the social sciences, inter alia, in contemporary social
constructionist analyses, such as those associated with certain Foucauldian
analytics of ‘government’, and in the moralizing edicts of ‘cosmopolitanism’.
Against this tradition, the article sees the state as a remarkable, if fragile,
achievement, whose withering away does and will continue to bring forth
(predictable) monsters. Rather than the antithesis of society, the state is the major
vehicle of human liberty, of social peace and security, and, paradoxically, provides
sanctuary for the political critics who attack it.

Keywords: anti-statism, civil society, Hobbes, sociology, state, Weber

Journal of Sociology © 2012 The Australian Sociological Association, Volume 48(4): 397–409
DOI:10.1177/1440783312458073 www.sagepublications.com
398  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

In her remarkable but neglected book (neglected in sociology, at least) The

State and the Rule of Law, Blandine Kriegel (1995) convincingly argues
that a spectre has haunted many forms of ‘social’ explanation over the
course of the last century – the spectre of anti-statism. She indicates how
and why various forms of ideology – right, left, liberal and unaligned – have
entered into an unholy alliance around this spectre. For not a few sociolo-
gists and social theorists, she concludes, the state has long been regarded as
the medium of modern forms of enslavement and she highlights the manner
in which sociologists among many others assisted in the creation of an
abstraction named ‘civil society’, set up in opposition to the state (see also
Colas, 1997). For Kriegel, this enduring opposition represents an unfortu-
nate error, arising from a perverse tradition that would do away with that
western institution we have come to know as the state. This tradition, she
contends, arose from liberal and democratic ideas of civil society, was
embodied in the romantic apotheosis of the purely and metapolitically
social, was radicalized by Marxist designs for a society without a state, and
culminated in Nazism and Communism. It has survived, frequently ‘in
mufti’, into our own times and can be traced in the social sciences in con-
temporary social constructionist analyses, such as those associated with
certain Foucauldian analytics of ‘government’, and in the moralizing edicts
of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (for example Beck and Schnaider, 2006; Mitchell,
1999; Rose and Miller, 1992). For Kriegel, by contrast, the state is a
remarkable, if fragile, achievement whose withering away brings forth (pre-
dictable) monsters. Rather than seeing the state as the antithesis of society,
Kriegel views it as the major vehicle of human liberty, of social peace and
security, and, paradoxically as providing sanctuary for the political critics
who attack it; in other words, the state plays a crucial and ongoing role in
the formation and maintenance of ‘civil society’, in the literal meaning of
that contested term (see also Colas, 1997; Hunter, 1998; Koselleck, 1988).
Lest it be thought that Kriegel’s argument is resolutely anti-sociological, it
is important to note that her analysis is developed in conversation with the
work of perhaps the premier sociological theorist of the state, Max Weber.
Kriegel’s analysis of the state – like that of the Weber ‘reconstructed’ by
Wilhelm Hennis (1988, 2000, 2009) – aspires to revive classical themes and
an older wisdom derived in large part from early modern political thought,
marking a turn towards historical understanding, political prudence, insti-
tutional accommodation and an ethics of responsibility. For both Weber
and Kriegel, the state is the political reality that we possess and inhabit, and
it needs to be appreciated for what it is and what it can and cannot be
expected to do, given the conditions of its historical emergence and the vital
‘core tasks’ to which it was and continues to be attached. It would not be
an exaggeration to say that a host of economic, ideological, social, national-
ist and internationalist forces continue to have the state in their sights.
Whether the state can and will survive this onslaught is of course an empirical
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  399

question. The article attempts to provide some arguments as to why it

deserves to survive, and why certain forms of sociological enquiry might
benefit from weaning themselves off a reflex anti-statist comportment, not
least by exercising their historical imaginations a little and recalling the
‘social’ chaos and insecurity to which the emergence of the state provided
an answer.

The state under siege

If we understand the modern state minimally, as the political apparatus that
delivers the governmental capacity needed to protect the members of a ter-
ritorial population from each other and from external enemies, then it is
reasonable to say that the state has long been under siege. Certainly over
the last three to four decades the idea of the state and the ideals of state
service have been subject to extensive and near constant political, ideologi-
cal and theoretical criticism (du Gay and Scott, 2010). However, despite the
claims of politicians, management consultants, human rights activists and
sociologists (to name just some) that the state as a bundle of institutions,
purposes and conducts is, inter alia, an anachronism in a globalized world,
an ideological disappointment, and a totalitarian threat to individual liber-
ties and freedoms, it still remains difficult to imagine doing without it. The
ongoing financial crisis makes this abundantly clear. The difficulty comes in
giving positive expression to the state and state service without making
either appear to be morally higher than they actually are. This option
becomes even more remote when the norms of contemporary ethical and
political culture are, to put it mildly, deeply suspicious of, or stand in out-
right opposition to, many of the key norms and techniques of conduct
informing the activities of the state (authority, command, indifference,
detachment, impersonalism and so forth).
One way of returning some good news to the idea of the state is to
explore the historical emergence of the concept and the ‘core tasks’ attached
to it, something I shall do in the following section. After all, when we trace
the genealogy of a concept we uncover the different ways in which it may
have been used in earlier times. In so doing we equip ourselves with a means
of reflecting critically on how it is currently understood. Of late, however,
not least in sociology, we have sought to confront this quite complex intel-
lectual heritage in such a way as to leave ourselves astonishingly little of a
positive nature to say about the state. This outcome seems less than satisfac-
tory. One weakness of many recent discussions arises from an excessive
eagerness to announce (and for some to simultaneously rejoice in) the death
or transcendence of the state, both conceptually and practically.
It is my contention that a great deal has been lost by the widespread
repudiation of a distinctive, normative conception of the state that first
emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. If we can recover the
400  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

way of thinking associated with this conception – a conception articulated

most precisely and memorably, perhaps, in the work of Thomas Hobbes
and his German ‘disciple’ Samuel Pufendorf – we might potentially gain a
more fruitful understanding of the state, and of its continuing significance
for the maintenance of social peace and security, and, indeed, as the instiga-
tor and protector of that thing we call ‘civil society’.

The emergence of the modern state

It was in Europe, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and in the con-
text of enduring religious strife, that the state was slowly and painfully
established as an independent, free-standing entity, along three dimensions:
first, the dimension of historical reality; second, the conceptual dimension;
and, third, the moral dimension (Geuss, 2001: 49).
In western Europe in this period, entities emerged which gained the
structural properties which Weber (1994) describes as characteristics of the
modern state. For instance, the distinction between an office and the person
holding that office became sharper and began to harden as a separate,
highly structured domain of offices arose, and, associated with those
offices, a greatly accumulated set of powers developed – resources, and
instruments which were (and remain) not really under the effective personal
control of those who happened to occupy the offices at any given moment.
I shall say a little more about the relation between office and person shortly.
These developments, along with the often-cited but little-appreciated
monopoly on the legal use of violence, are the historical reality of the state,
a reality sociology should embrace (Weber, 1994). At around the same time,
conceptually, the term ‘state’ came to designate this abstractly defined set of
offices and associated powers. Finally, the moral dimension: the state came
to be seen as an entity that can claim a distinct, overriding civil authority in
its own right (Geuss, 2001: 50). As Leslie Green (1988: 19) puts it, the
authority of the state is both binding and content-independent: it forms a
premise for the subject’s action without that subject considering the merits
of what it requires. The authority of the state cannot be seen as the author-
ity of the people who constitute the subjects of the state, either individually
or collectively. Therefore the state cannot be seen as the power of its citizens
under another guise, as republican authors argue. Rather, the emergence of
the state indicates a situation in which an alternative view predominates;
one where the ends of civil or political association make it indispensable to
establish a single and supreme sovereign authority whose power remains
distinct not merely from the people over whom it is exercised, but also from
whichever office-holders may be said to have the right to wield its power at
any particular time.
In this vein, the development of the concept of the state is part of a strat-
egy for opposing the doctrine of popular sovereignty. However, it also sets
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  401

its face against the idea that the authority of the civil power is simply the
personal authority of the holder of an office of state, such as the monarch.
The legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state can and must therefore be dis-
cussed in abstraction from the will of the people, and from the personal and
moral characteristics of the persons who exercise state power. In other
words, a categorical distinction emerged between the apparatus of govern-
ment and the person of the state as much as between the nature of an office
of state and the person occupying or holding that office. As Quentin
Skinner (1989: 121–2) has indicated, this idea that the supreme authority
within a body politic should be identified as the authority of the state was:
originally the outcome of one particular theory of politics, a theory at once abso-
lutist and secular-minded in its ideological allegiances. That theory was in turn
the product of the earliest major counter-revolutionary movement within mod-
ern European history, the movement of reaction against the ideologies of popular
sovereignty developed in the course of the French religious wars, and, subse-
quently, in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.
Thus, the idea of the state was developed slowly, and with some diffi-
culty, in order to facilitate the construction of a single, integrated system of
authoritative political and legal decision-making over a given territory and
subject-population. At the heart of this novel idea was the concept of sov-
ereignty. Sovereignty is the ‘ultimate worldly authority over people and
territory’ and is located ‘within specific institutions and decisions: the right
to be obeyed without challenge’ (Skinner, 1989: 80). The right within which
that entity inhered, as I have already suggested, was no longer envisaged as
a particular human being,
but as a continuing structure of government, decision-making, legal interpreta-
tion and enforcement, which was sharply distinct from its current human incum-
bents. Such a structure could take in or lose subjects or territory without altering
its identity. It could change its system of rule or legal adjudication almost beyond
recognition, and yet remain intractably itself. (Dunn, 2000: 80–1)
For Skinner (1989: 122), it is not surprising that both the ideology of
state power and the new terminology deployed to express it provoked ‘a
series of doubts and criticisms’ which has never entirely disappeared, not
least, we could say, from sociology. Skinner identifies two distinctive
strands of critique which registered the state as an ideological disappoint-
ment, or a moral threat. The first strand wished to ‘repudiate any sugges-
tion that the aim of public authority should be purely civil or political in
character’ – that social peace and physical security were adequate or noble
enough goals in and of themselves. The state was deemed to require a
higher moral purpose to justify its existence. The second strand of critique
derived predominantly from those for whom the ideal of popular sover-
eignty continued to provide the benchmark of virtuous government, against
which the moral inadequacies of the state could be emphasized. Here,
402  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

‘loyalty to the classical ideal of the self-governing republic’ was the main-
spring of ideological opposition to the idea of the state.
Skinner (2009: 341–54) suggests that for Hobbes, Pufendorf, and other
early modern pioneers of statist thinking, in its capacity to guarantee social
peace the state had no need for, indeed had to live without the need for,
‘higher’ religious, philosophical or moral justifications. The state’s indiffer-
ence to the transcendent beliefs of the rival communities over which it ruled
was a crucial element in its elevation to sovereignty in the political arena,
which in turn was the precondition for the social pacification it delivered.
However, indifference to moral identities and transcendent truth claims – to
the moral perfection of its citizens, or the protection of ‘natural’ rights and
freedoms – made the state appear suspect and morally ignoble, at least in
the eyes of those groups or estates whose religious or ideological affiliations
kept them committed to these ideals. This is particularly the case, as
Hobbes indicated, when long periods of peace and stability within a state
lead to forgetfulness regarding the sheer fragility and misery of human
existence that become the norm whenever the state’s power to protect is
found wanting. After all, ‘statelessness means rightlessness. Stateless people,
in practice have no rights’ (Holmes, 1994: 605). Even inhabitants of poor
or weak states tend to have few and/or laxly enforced rights. Without cen-
tralized and bureaucratic state capacities, there is no possibility of imposing
‘a single and impartial legal system – the rule of law – on the population of
a large nation. Without a well-organized political and legal system, exclu-
sive loyalties and passions are difficult to control’ (Holmes, 1994: 605).

Confronting today’s critics of the state

Because the state is imperfect – indeed, in being born it had to renounce
perfection, as Weber famously argued in The Profession and Vocation of
Politics (1994), both its own and that of those it sought to rule, making do
instead with its capacity to enforce peace and their capacity to act peaceably
– it is not necessarily wise to insist on benchmarking the state against moral
ideals which are alien to its constitution. In seeking to make the state con-
form to certain politically and morally expressivist ideals – whether liberal
or communitarian, cosmopolitan or transnationalist, or any other such ide-
als – critics of the state can come dangerously close to endorsing its re-
theologization, or its dissolution. Michael Ignatieff (2001: 35) makes
precisely this point when he argues that individual rights cannot and should
not function as transcendental limits on state action because they are them-
selves the product of action by sovereign states. They are historical entitle-
ments to legal action, contingent upon the state’s capacity to establish and
maintain security. Under conditions of peace the sovereign state, in its guise
as security state, can almost seem to disappear, and the state becomes the
addressee of a wide range of additional demands and expectations. As soon
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  403

as the security envelope is threatened, however, whether internally (incite-

ment to insurrection, domestic terrorism, economic crisis) or externally
(foreign terrorism, invasion, economic crisis) then civil liberties and rights
are retracted to the extent that is necessary to protect the space within
which they were unfolded in the first place (Hunter, 1998, 2005). It should
therefore come as no surprise – in fact it should be taken as evidence of its
‘stateness’ – that contemporary liberal-democratic states default to their
‘foundational’ security setting when under threat. It would be a worry if
they did not, for this would be evidence of their transcendence or ‘hollow-
ing out’.
What still seems so difficult for those seeking to moralize the state, and
what conjoins them with earlier critics, is their distrust of the independence
or autonomy of the state as an impersonal structure of rule. In particular,
these modern critics seem unable, or unwilling, to accept that the state can-
not possibly undertake its core functions of pacification and security unless
it can decide for itself, ‘without internal impediment’, what can be publicly
expressed or just who can own what, and why. It is the state, and the state
alone, that can and must:
judge the degree of jeopardy in every instance. The state carries, and must carry,
the authority of its own subjects’ will and choice to make that judgement on their
behalf and to act, decisively, upon it. Indeed, each subject has a right against
every other that it should do just this. (Dunn, 2000: 84)
It is in this sense, as I indicated earlier, the authority of the state is both
‘binding and content-independent’:
Part of the whole point of having such a free-standing coercive structure (the
state) is that it be independent.… As long as the basic fact remains, there is
always going to be a gap between the political power of the state and the effective
powers of the populace, and, on this argument, that is a good thing … in a world
populated by other states, many of them predatory, it is essential for the minimal
self-defence of a certain population that it be organized as a state, or one might
think that it was necessary [as recent events indicate all too clearly] to have an
independent power that could intervene in the economy to prevent it from self-
destruction. (Geuss, 2001: 129, emphasis in original)
The very rationale of the state as an ‘independent coercive apparatus’,
one beyond the direct control of its subjects, means that it will always be
antithetical to the moralizing ideal of popular sovereignty. From a statist
point of view, this is a major factor in its favour. Attempts by critics of
various sorts to neuter the authoritarian or absolutist pedigree of the state
through, for instance, abrogating its room for manoeuvre by opposing its
discretionary powers, are, from this statist viewpoint, misguided, not least
because they can in certain circumstances undermine the very conditions
that made the state and the liberal rights associated with it possible in the
first place (Geuss, 2001; Hunter, 2005).
404  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

The ‘critique and expose’ line of reasoning, which seeks to somehow

evacuate, water down or occlude the continuing and crucial practical
importance of sovereignty and an associated ‘absolutist’ capacity, also
extends to contemporary sociological discussions of the state. Here, the
effects of the ongoing ‘moment of theory’, in particular some of its ‘con-
structionist’ and ‘constructivist’ variants, are evident (for a detailed discus-
sion see Hunter, 2006, 2007, 2009). Much important work in the latter vein
has sought to puncture reifications of the state as a free-standing entity,
indicating instead how ‘state effects’ are produced in, and as a result of, the
relations established between a diverse range of materials, mundane prac-
tices and devices. However, while ostensibly signalling an adherence to
empirical history and positive description, this body of work has tended to
be highly theoretical and epochal in orientation. A number of consequences
have flowed from this, not least of which has been the effective disappear-
ance of the state as an object of sociological analysis. Two pieces inspired
by the work of Michel Foucault – Rose and Miller’s (1992) ‘Political Power
beyond the State’ (with its focus on ‘governmentality’) and Timothy
Mitchell’s (1999) ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’ (with its focus on
‘disciplinary society’) – serve as representative examples of this tendency.
They do so precisely because they are more epochal theoretical positions
than they are historical descriptions. In following a certain Foucauldian
line, one which programmatically distinguishes between a ‘before’ and an
‘after’, instituting an epochal break between singular power exercised via
absolutist sovereignty and plural powers exercised via normalizing disci-
plines and techniques of conduct, these and other such analyses are simply
trading on an ahistorical theoretical distinction which supposedly contrasts
perfectly antithetical ways of exercising power. As such, they have little to
say about the historical emergence of the state and its instituted purposes,
and thus equally little to say about how and why the manner of the state’s
historical existence makes it unamenable to being reduced to theoretical
abstractions such as the ‘juridico-discursive’ or ‘governmentality’. Their
epochal theoretical orientation and concomitant lack of historical contex-
tualization effectively render them incapable of comprehending how the
absolutist security state was and remains the default setting for the contem-
porary liberal-democratic state (Hunter, 2005).
Foucault (1980: 102) famously remarked that:
[w]e must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape
from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and State institutions, and instead
base our analysis of power on the study of techniques and tactics of domination.
While Foucault is right to suggest that not everything one might conceiva-
bly wish to understand about contemporary practices of governing can be
equated with the state, he is wrong to suggest we can understand or appre-
ciate crucially significant aspects of contemporary conducts of governing
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  405

without recourse to something approximating to ‘the model of Leviathan’,

that is, to the office of sovereignty. So, while Foucault’s oeuvre undoubtedly
contains much that is valuable, his work may not be the best place to look
when seeking to combat, for instance, the routine blurring of the offices of
government and sovereignty that pervades contemporary sociological and
political theoretical analyses of the state (for a precise discussion of this
tendency see Skinner, 2009).
I would venture to suggest, à la Weber and Kriegel, that a much better
place to look is the early modern and explicitly normative literature I have
been drawing upon. For it is my contention that as sociologists, or indeed
as citizens, we cannot hope to talk coherently about the nature of public
power without making some reference to the idea of the state as an artificial
moral persona distinct from both rulers and ruled, or the distinction
between an office and the person occupying it. Early modern thinkers and
counsellors (note the twin role and its ‘practical relevance’), such as Hobbes
and Pufendorf were anxious to mark a categorical distinction between the
apparatus of government and the person of the state for at least two rea-
sons. Because these two reasons are exactly what sociology might usefully
take cognizance of to bolster its own relevance, I will set out them out as
my concluding comments.

Conclusion: Leviathan calling, once again

One reason Hobbes and Pufendorf sought to distinguish between govern-
ment and the person of the state was a desire to provide a means of testing
the legitimacy of the actions that governments undertake. For them, the
conduct of government must serve to promote the safety, security and wel-
fare of the population as a whole by promoting the safety, security and
welfare of the person of the state itself. As Pufendorf (1994) summarizes,
echoing Hobbes (as ever), ‘Let the Safety of the people be the Supreme
Law.’
For Pufendorf (1994), one way of ensuring that this supreme law is fol-
lowed derives from the construction of a system of impersonal and jurisdic-
tionally delimited offices. Diverging from both medieval-Christian
conceptions of office (as property held by a personal superior) and prevail-
ing contemporary concepts (a role occupied by integrated moral ‘individu-
als’), Pufendorf conceives of moral personhood as a plurality of instituted
offices and associated ‘role-personae’ (Saunders, 2002). Through his (and
Hobbes’s) distinction between sovereignty and government, this system of
offices admits federalist and/or democratic dimensions of government, or
hybridizations of public and private agencies, not least an independent
judiciary, without diluting sovereign power. Through their role-personae,
public office-holders create what Minson (2006: 78) has recently termed
(following Dobel, 1999) ‘internal moralised boundaries’ between (and
406  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

within) official and extra-official obligations. This persona-based concep-

tion is a predicate not only of public officialdom but also of citizenship.
There is of course, an obvious objection to this line of thought, one that
has been central to liberal political theory (and to the not inconsiderable
literatures within sociology and social theory which have travelled in its
wake), at least since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice
(1971). Rawls proclaims at the outset of his treatise that the first virtue of
all social institutions is justice. For his way of thinking, the proper method
of assessing the legitimacy of a state’s actions must be to ask whether they
are fair or just. If we ask what justice requires, he says, one inescapable part
of the answer is that priority must be assigned to the rights of individuals
over any attempt to promote such inclusive goals as the common good.
As Skinner (2009: 362–3) argues, of late a distinctive neoliberal version
of this argument has been noisily defended in Anglophone public debate,
not least in the USA. He points, for example, to the Republican Party’s
response in Congress to the pleas from the American automotive industry
in 2008 to grant them $30 billion in ‘bail-out’ money. The reaction of
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell was to invoke the principle of fair-
ness and the need to grant priority to the rights of individual taxpayers. “A
lot of struggling Americans … are also asking where their bailout is’, and
are wondering, ‘why one business would get support over another’. The key
priority, he concluded must be that of ‘protecting the taxpayer’; ‘we simply
cannot ask the American taxpayer to subsidise failure’ (Skinner, 2009: 363,
quoting McConnell).
It is arguable, though, that this reaction points to the limits of the tropes of
neoliberalism, refusing as it does to acknowledge that it may sometimes be
necessary – especially in times of emergency – for the maintenance of individual
rights to give way to broader notions of the public interest and to the practices
and norms of the state’s ‘security setting’ (Hunter, 2005). It is perhaps unsur-
prising that at the end of 2008 this was the reaction of President Elect Barack
Obama, whose political rhetoric had long been suffused with references to the
common good (Skinner, 2009: 363). It is, however, rather more remarkable
that the same reaction came from the then President George W. Bush. He not
only agreed to pay a large percentage of the funds being sought but spoke of
‘the challenge facing our nation’, publicly acknowledging that the basic duty of
government is ‘to safeguard the broader health and stability’ of the
entire community, ‘especially at vulnerable times’(Skinner, 2009: 363, quoting
Bush). De facto nationalization, in the great neoliberal stronghold, was subse-
quently enacted.
As Skinner (2009: 363) indicates, even when they were acknowledging
the value of promoting the common good or public interest, neither Bush
nor Obama made any reference to the state. Had they done so, Skinner
contends, they would have made their point more effectively, and, indeed,
given credence to the continuing importance and necessity of ‘the Leviathan’
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  407

in our contemporary political discourse and practices of government. One

reason for wishing to reintroduce the line of thought developed by Hobbes
and Pufendorf into the heart of contemporary political discourse (and con-
temporary sociology) is that this would indeed provide us with a means not
merely of testing the legitimacy of the government conduct, but of vindicat-
ing the actions governments are obliged to take in times of emergency.
There is a genuine political crisis as the financial meltdown mutates into a
‘sovereign debt crisis’, and there must be a strong case for saying that, in
this context, the person whose life most urgently needs to be saved is the
person of the state (Skinner, 2009: 363; see also Wickham and Bryan,
2012). John Gray (2010) makes a similar point in his poignant analysis of
the current coalition government in the UK. There, the Conservative Prime
Minister, David Cameron, and the Liberal deputy Prime Minister, Nick
Clegg, are both products of and allied to certain neoliberal ideas of the
1980s, which are thought to embody the only possible progressive political
philosophy. But if, as Gray (2010: 7) suggests, there is nothing certain about
progress, with the meaning of this term shifting with events, then there is
nothing to suggest that Cameron and Clegg’s conception of progress won’t
be consigned to the backburner as a result of the self-defeating effects of
(metaphysical and romantic) market liberal policies. Gray (2010) believes
this is quite likely if the consequences of contemporary fiscal orthodoxy
exacerbate the fragilities of capitalism. In contrast to everything they
believe, Gray (2010: 7) argues, Cameron and Clegg ‘may turn out to be the
politicians who lead Britain into a new era of statism’.
The second reason for conceiving of public power in terms derived from
Hobbes and Pufendorf is to help us make sense of the claim that some gov-
ernment actions have the effect of binding not merely the body of the peo-
ple but their remote posterity. Consider, for instance, the decision of any
nation’s government to incur a public debt. Who becomes the debtor? We
can hardly answer, in the manner of popular democratic theory, that the debt
attaches to the people, for if the debt is sufficiently large the people will lack
the means to pay it. But nor does it make sense to suggest that the debt must
be owed by the government that incurred it, for whether the government
stands or falls the debt will still be owed (Skinner, 2009: 364).
It therefore seems a decisive reason for accepting Hobbes’s and
Pufendorf’s arguments about the state, then, that they offer a coherent solu-
tion to this and other related issues troubling us at this time. They do so by
demonstrating that the only person sufficiently enduring to be capable of
owning and eventually repaying such debts must be the person of the state.
As a persona ficta the state is able to incur obligations that no government
and no single generation of citizens could ever hope to discharge. As
Skinner (2009: 364) puts it, there is no other way of ‘making sense of such
obligations than to invoke the idea of the state as a person possessed of
what Hobbes termed “an artificial eternity of life”’.
408  Journal of Sociology 48(4)

The argument sketched in this article has attempted to point out (espe-
cially to sociology, but also to political theory) (a) the continuing indispen-
sability of the concept and reality of the state and (b) the importance of the
practical maintenance of civil peace and security, which are the sine qua
non of society per se. While metaphysical and politically romantic advo-
cates of ‘governing without government’, of ‘cosmopolitics’ and of ‘trans-
national civil society’ noisily clamour for our attention and support, we
might instead wish to listen out for Leviathan calling.

Funding
Research informing this article was undertaken with the support of the Velux
Foundation. It forms part of the Velux Research Programme ‘What Makes
Organization?’ located in the Department of Organization (IOA) at Copenhagen
Business School. Thanks are due to members of the programme, especially Signe
Vikkelso, as well as to Mitchell Dean, Alan Scott, and Grahame Thompson.

References
Beck, U. and N. Schnaider (2006) ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitianism for the Social
Sciences: A Research Agenda’, British Journal of Sociology 57: 1–23.
Colas, D. (1997) Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Dobel, P. (1999) Public Integrity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Du Gay, P. and A. Scott (2010) ‘State Transformation or Regime Shift? Addressing
Some Confusions in the Theory and Sociology of the State’, Sociologica 2: 1–23.
Dunn, J. (2000) The Cunning of Unreason. London: Harper-Collins.
Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Geuss, R. (2001) History and Illusion in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gray, J. (2010) ‘Progressive, Like the 1980s’, London Review of Books 32: 3–7.
Green, L. (1988) The Authority of the State. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hennis, W. (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. K. Tribe. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Hennis, W. (2000) Max Weber’s Science of Man. Newbury: Threshold Press.
Hennis, W. (2009) Politics as a Practical Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holmes, S. (1994) ‘Liberalism in a World of Ethnic Passions and Decaying States’,
Social Research 61: 599–610.
Hunter. I (1998) ‘Uncivil Society’, pp. 242–64 in M. Dean and B. Hindess (eds)
Governing Australia. Sydney: Cambridge University Press
Hunter, I. (2005) ‘The Default Setting of the Liberal State’, Australian Policy
Online, November, URL (consulted August 2010) http://www.apo.org.au/com-
mentary/default-setting-liberal-state
Hunter, I. (2006) ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 33:78–112.
Hunter, I. (2007) ‘The Time of Theory’, Postcolonial Studies 10: 5–22.
Hunter, I. (2009) ‘Theory Time: On the History of Poststructuralism’, unpublished
keynote address delivered to ‘The Humanities in Australia: Taking Stock’, the
40th Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 19–20
November.
 du Gay: Leviathan calling  409

Ignatieff, M. (2001) Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.
Koselleck, R. (1988) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society. Oxford: Berg.
Kriegel, B. (1996) The State and the Rule of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Minson, J. (2006) ‘Civil Prudence, Sovereignty and Citizenship in the Justification
of Civil Forfeiture’, University of New South Wales Law Journal 29: 61–89.
Mitchell, T. (1999) ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, pp. 76–97 in G.
Steinmetz (ed.) State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Pufendorf, S. (1994) The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf, ed. C.L. Carr,
trans. M.J. Seidler. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Boston, MA: Belknap Press.
Rose, N. and P. Miller (1992) ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of
Government’, British Journal of Sociology 43: 173–205.
Saunders, D. (2002) ‘Within the Orbit of this Life – Samuel Pufendorf and the
Autonomy of Law’, Cardozo Law Review 26: 101–24.
Skinner, Q. (1989) ‘The State’, pp. 90–131 in T. Ball, J. Farr and R.L. Hanson (eds)
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Skinner, Q. (2009) ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, Proceedings of the British
Academy 162: 325–70.
Weber, M. (1994) Weber: Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Spiers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wickham, G. and R. Bryan (2012) ‘Money, Post-crisis Financial Regulation, and the
Fragility of Civil Peace: Maintaining Order in the Face of Chaos’, Griffith Law
Review 21(1).

Biographical note
Paul du Gay is Globaliseringsprofessor in the Department of Organization
(IOA) at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). His publications include
Consumption and Identity at Work, In Praise of Bureaucracy and
Organizing Identity. He has recently completed New Spirits of Capitalism?
Crises, Justifications, and Dynamics (edited with Glenn Morgan) for
Oxford University Press, and is currently writing a monograph for
Routledge, For State Service: Office as a Vocation. At CBS, he directs the
Velux research program ‘What Makes Organization?’ and co-directs the
Business in Society Public–Private Platform. [email: pdg.ioa@cbs.dk]