Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire
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2.2
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE
NATION-STATE
Foreigners, please don’t leave us alone with the French!
Paris graffito, 1995
We thought we were dying for the fatherland. We realized quickly
it was for the bank vaults.
Anatole France
As European modernity progressively took shape, ma-
chines of power were constructed to respond to its crisis, searching
continually for a surplus that would resolve or at least contain the
crisis. In the previous section we traced the path of one response
to the crisis that led to the development of the modern sovereign
state. The second approach centers on the concept of nation, a
development that presupposes the first path and builds on it to
construct a more perfect mechanism to reestablish order and
command.
Birth of the Nation
The concept of nation in Europe developed on the terrain of the
patrimonial and absolutist state. The patrimonial state was defined
as the property of the monarch. In a variety of analogous forms in
different countries throughout Europe, the patrimonial and absolut-
ist state was the political form required to rule feudal social relations
and relations of production.
1
Feudal property had to be delegated
94 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY
and its usage assigned according to the degrees of the social division
of power, in the same way that levels of administration would have
to be delegated in subsequent centuries. Feudal property was part
of the body of the monarch, just as, if we shift our view toward
the metaphysical domain, the sovereign monarchic body was part
of the body of God.
2
In the sixteenth century, in the midst of the Reformation and
that violent battle among the forces of modernity, the patrimonial
monarchy was still presented as the guarantee of peace and social
life. It was still granted control over social development in such a
way that it could absorb that process within its machine of domina-
tion. ‘‘Cujus regio, ejus religio’’—or really, religion had to be
subordinated to the territorial control of the sovereign. There was
nothing diplomatic about this adage; on the contrary, it confided
entirely to the power of the patrimonial sovereign the management
of the passage to the new order. Even religion was the sovereign’s
property. In the seventeenth century, the absolutist reaction to
the revolutionary forces of modernity celebrated the patrimonial
monarchic state and wielded it as a weapon for its own purposes.
At that point, however, the celebration of the patrimonial state
could not but be paradoxical and ambiguous, since the feudal bases
of its power were withering away. The processes of the primitive
accumulation of capital imposed new conditions on all the structures
of power.
3
Until the era of the three great bourgeois revolutions
(the English, the American, and the French), there was no political
alternative that could successfully oppose this model. The absolutist
and patrimonial model survived in this period only with the support
of a specific compromise of political forces, and its substance was
eroding from the inside owing primarily to the emergence of new
productive forces. The model did survive nonetheless, and, much
more important, it was transformed through the development of
some fundamental characteristics that would be bequeathed to suc-
cessive centuries.
The transformation of the absolutist and patrimonial model
consisted in a gradual process that replaced the theological founda-
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE 95
tion of territorial patrimony with a new foundation that was equally
transcendent.
4
The spiritual identity of the nation rather than the
divine body of the king now posed the territory and population as
an ideal abstraction. Or rather, the physical territory and population
were conceived as the extension of the transcendent essence of the
nation. The modern concept of nation thus inherited the patrimonial body
of the monarchic state and reinvented it in a new form. This new totality
of power was structured in part by new capitalist productive pro-
cesses on the one hand and old networks of absolutist administration
on the other. This uneasy structural relationship was stabilized by
the national identity: a cultural, integrating identity, founded on a
biological continuity of blood relations, a spatial continuity of terri-
tory, and linguistic commonality.
It is obvious that, although this process preserved the material-
ity of the relationship to the sovereign, many elements changed.
Most important, as the patrimonial horizon was transformed into
the national horizon, the feudal order of the subject (subjectus)
yielded to the disciplinary order of the citizen (cives). The shift of
the population from subjects to citizens was an index of the shift
from a passive to an active role. The nation is always presented as
an active force, as a generative form of social and political relations.
As Benedict Anderson and others point out, the nation is often
experienced as (or at least functions as if it were) a collective imagin-
ing, an active creation of the community of citizens.
5
At this point
we can see both the proximity and the specific difference between
the concepts of patrimonial state and national state. The latter
faithfully reproduces the former’s totalizing identity of both the
territory and the population, but the nation and the national state
propose new means of overcoming the precariousness of modern
sovereignty. These concepts reify sovereignty in the most rigid
way; they make the relation of sovereignty into a thing (often by
naturalizing it) and thus weed out every residue of social antagonism.
The nation is a kind of ideological shortcut that attempts to free
the concepts of sovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and
crisis that define them. National sovereignty suspends the conflictual
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origins of modernity (when they are not definitively destroyed),
and it closes the alternative paths within modernity that had refused
to concede their powers to state authority.
6
The transformation of the concept of modern sovereignty
into that of national sovereignty also required certain new material
conditions. Most important, it required that a new equilibrium be
established between the processes of capitalist accumulation and
the structures of power. The political victory of the bourgeoisie,
as the English and French revolutions show well, corresponded to
the perfecting of the concept of modern sovereignty through that
of national sovereignty. Behind the ideal dimension of the concept
of nation there were the class figures that already dominated the
processes of accumulation. ‘‘Nation’’ was thus at once both the
hypostasis of the Rousseauian ‘‘general will’’ and what manufactur-
ing ideology conceived as the ‘‘community of needs’’ (that is, the
capitalist regulation of the market) that in the long era of primitive
accumulation in Europe was more or less liberal and always bour-
geois.
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the concept
of nation was taken up in very different ideological contexts and led
popular mobilizations in regions and countries within and outside
Europe that had experienced neither the liberal revolution nor the
same level of primitive accumulation, it still always was presented
as a concept of capitalist modernization, which claimed to bring
together the interclass demands for political unity and the needs of
economic development. In other words, the nation was posed as
the one and only active vehicle that could deliver modernity and
development. Rosa Luxemburg argued vehemently (and futilely)
against nationalism in the debates internal to the Third International
in the years before the First World War. Luxemburg opposed a
policy of ‘‘national self-determination’’ for Poland as an element of
the revolutionary platform, but her indictment of nationalism was
much more general.
7
Her critique of the nation was not merely a
critique of modernization as such, although she was no doubt keenly
aware of the ambiguities involved in capitalist development; and
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE 97
she was not primarily concerned with the divisions that nationalisms
would inevitably create within the European working class, al-
though her own nomadic passage through central and eastern Eu-
rope certainly made her extremely sensitive to this. Luxemburg’s
most powerful argument, rather, was that nation means dictatorship
and is thus profoundly incompatible with any attempt at democratic
organization. Luxemburg recognized that national sovereignty and
national mythologies effectively usurp the terrain of democratic
organization by renewing the powers of territorial sovereignty and
modernizing its project through the mobilization of an active com-
munity.
The process of constructing the nation, which renewed the
concept of sovereignty and gave it a new definition, quickly became
in each and every historical context an ideological nightmare. The
crisis of modernity, which is the contradictory co-presence of the
multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one—
that is, the co-presence of a new productive set of free subjectivities
and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit it—is not finally
pacified or resolved by the concept of nation, any more than it was
by the concept of sovereignty or state. The nation can only mask
the crisis ideologically, displace it, and defer its power.
The Nation and the Crisis of Modernity
Jean Bodin’s work lies at the head of the road in European thought
that leads to the concept of national sovereignty. His masterwork,
Les six livres de la Re
´
publique, which first appeared in 1576, right in
the middle of the Renaissance crisis, addressed the current civil and
religious wars in France and Europe as its fundamental problem.
Bodin confronted political crises, conflicts, and war, but these ele-
ments of rupture did not lead him to pose any idyllic alternative,
not even in simply theoretical or utopian terms. This is why Bodin’s
work was not only a seminal contribution to the modern definition
of sovereignty but also an effective anticipation of the subsequent
development of sovereignty in national terms. By adopting a realistic
standpoint, he managed to anticipate modernity’s own critique
of sovereignty.
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Sovereignty, Bodin claimed, cannot be produced by the unity
of the Prince and the multitude, the public and the private, nor
can its problem be resolved so long as one holds to either a contractu-
alist or a natural right framework. Really, the origin of political
power and the definition of sovereignty consist in the victory of
one side over the other, a victory that makes the one sovereign
and the other subject. Force and violence create the sovereign. The
physical determinations of power impose the plenitudo potestatis (the
fullness of power). This is the plenitude and the unity of power,
since ‘‘the union of [the republic’s] members depends on unity
under a single ruler, on whom the effectiveness of all the rest
depends. A sovereign prince is therefore indispensable, for it is his
power which informs all the members of the republic.’’
8
After discarding the framework of natural right and the tran-
scendental perspectives that it always in some way invokes, Bodin
presents us with a figure of the sovereign, or rather the state,
that realistically and thus historically constructs its own origin and
structure. The modern state arose from within this transformation,
and only there could it continue to develop. This is the theoretical
hinge on which the theory of modern sovereignty is linked to
and perfects the experience of territorial sovereignty. By taking up
Roman law and drawing on its capacities to articulate the sources
of right and order the forms of property, Bodin’s doctrine became
a theory of a united political body articulated as administration that
appeared to surmount the difficulties of the crisis of modernity.
The displacement of the center of theoretical consideration from
the question of legitimacy to that of the life of the state and its
sovereignty as a united body constituted an important advance.
When Bodin spoke of ‘‘the political right of sovereignty,’’ he al-
ready anticipated the national (and corporeal) overdetermination
of sovereignty, and he thus opened an original and direct path that
would stretch forward across the subsequent centuries.
9
After Bodin, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there
developed in Europe simultaneously two schools of thought that
also accorded the theme of sovereignty a central role and effectively
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE 99
anticipated the concept of national sovereignty: the natural right
tradition and the realist (or historicist) tradition of state theory.
10
Both schools mediated the transcendental conception of sovereignty
with a realistic methodology that grasped the terms of the material
conflict; both brought together the construction of the sovereign
state with the constitution of the sociopolitical community that
later would be called nation. As in Bodin, both of these schools
continually confronted the crisis of the theoretical conception of
sovereignty, which was itself continually reopened by the antagonis-
tic powers of modernity and the juridical and administrative con-
struction of the figure of the state.
In the natural right school, from Grotius to Althusius and from
Thomasius to Puffendorf, the transcendental figures of sovereignty
were brought down to earth and grounded in the reality of the
institutional and administrative processes. Sovereignty was distrib-
uted by setting in motion a system of multiple contracts designed
to intervene on every node of the administrative structure of power.
This process was not oriented toward the apex of the state and the
mere title of sovereignty; rather, the problem of legitimation began
to be addressed in terms of an administrative machine that functioned
through the articulations of the exercise of power. The circle of
sovereignty and obedience closed in on itself, duplicating itself,
multiplying, and extending across social reality. Sovereignty came
to be studied less from the perspective of the antagonists involved
in the crisis of modernity and more as an administrative process
that articulates these antagonisms and aims toward a unity in the
dialectic of power, abstacting and reifying it through the historical
dynamics. An important segment of the natural right school thus
developed the idea of distributing and articulating the transcendent
sovereignty through the real forms of administration.
11
The synthesis that was implicit in the natural right school,
however, became explicit in the context of historicism. Certainly,
it would be incorrect to attribute to the historicism of the Enlighten-
ment the thesis that was really only developed later by the reactionary
schools in the period after the French Revolution—the thesis, that
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is, that unites the theory of sovereignty with the theory of the
nation and grounds both of them in a common historical humus.
And yet there are already in this early period the seeds of that later
development. Whereas an important segment of the natural right
school developed the idea of articulating transcendent sovereignty
through the real forms of administration, the historicist thinkers of
the Enlightenment attempted to conceive the subjectivity of the histori-
cal process and thereby find an effective ground for the title and
exercise of sovereignty.
12
In the work of Giambattista Vico, for
example, that terrific meteor that shot across the age of Enlighten-
ment, the determinations of the juridical conception of sovereignty
were all grounded in the power of historical development. The
transcendent figures of sovereignty were translated into indexes of
a providential process, which was at once both human and divine.
This construction of sovereignty (or really reification of sovereignty)
in history was very powerful. On this historical terrain, which forces
every ideological construct to confront reality, the genetic crisis of
modernity was never closed—and there was no need for it to close,
because the crisis itself produced new figures that incessantly spurred
on historical and political development, all still under the rule of
the transcendent sovereign. What an ingenious inversion of the
problematic! And yet, at the same time, what a complete mystifica-
tion of sovereignty! The elements of the crisis, a continuous and
unresolved crisis, were now considered active elements of progress.
In effect, we can already recognize in Vico the embryo of Hegel’s
apologia of ‘‘effectiveness,’’ making the present world arrangement
the telos of history.
13
What remained hints and suggestions in Vico, however,
emerged as an open and radical declaration in the late German
Enlightenment. In the Hannover school first, and then in the work
of J. G. Herder, the modern theory of sovereignty was directed
exclusively toward the analysis of what was conceived as a social
and cultural continuity: the real historical continuity of the territory,
the population, and the nation. Vico’s argument that ideal history
is located in the history of all nations became more radical in Herder
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE 101
so that every human perfection is, in a certain respect, national.
14
Identity is thus conceived not as the resolution of social and historical
differences but as the product of a primordial unity. The nation is
a complete figure of sovereignty prior to historical development; or
better, there is no historical development that is not already prefig-
ured in the origin. In other words, the nation sustains the concept
of sovereignty by claiming to precede it.
15
It is the material engine
that courses throughout history, the ‘‘genius’’ that works history.
The nation becomes finally the condition of possibility of all human
action and social life itself.
The Nation’s People
Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth centuries, the concept of national sovereignty finally emerged
in European thought in its completed form. At the base of this
definitive figure of the concept were a trauma, the French Revolu-
tion, and the resolution of that trauma, the reactionary appropriation
and celebration of the concept of nation. The fundamental elements
of this swift reconfiguration of the concept of nation that made it
a real political weapon can be seen in summary form in the work
of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieye
`
s. In his wonderful and libelous tract
What Is the Third Estate? he linked the concept of nation to that
of the Third Estate, that is, the bourgeoisie. Sieye
`
s tried to lead the
concept of sovereignty back to its humanist origins and rediscover
its revolutionary possibilities. More important for our purposes,
Sieye
`
s’s intense engagement with revolutionary activity allowed
him to interpret the concept of nation as a constructive political concept,
a constitutional mechanism. It gradually becomes clear, however,
particularly in Sieye
`
s’s later work, the work of his followers, and
above all that of his detractors, that although the nation was formed
through politics, it was ultimately a spiritual construction, and the
concept of nation was thus stripped away from the revolution,
consigned to all the Thermidors. The nation became explicitly the
concept that summarized the bourgeois hegemonic solution to the
problem of sovereignty.
16
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At those points when the concept of nation has been presented
as popular and revolutionary, as indeed it was during the French
Revolution, one might assume that the nation has broken away
from the modern concept of sovereignty and its apparatus of subju-
gation and domination, and is dedicated instead to a democratic
notion of community. The link between the concept of nation and
the concept of people was indeed a powerful innovation, and it
did constitute the center of the Jacobin sensibility as well as that
of other revolutionary groups. What appears as revolutionary and
liberatory in this notion of national, popular sovereignty, however,
is really nothing more than another turn of the screw, a further
extension of the subjugation and domination that the modern con-
cept of sovereignty has carried with it from the beginning. The
precarious power of sovereignty as a solution to the crisis of moder-
nity was first referred for support to the nation, and then when the
nation too was revealed as a precarious solution, it was further
referred to the people. In other words, just as the concept of nation
completes the notion of sovereignty by claiming to precede it, so
too the concept of the people completes that of nation through
another feigned logical regression. Each logical step back functions
to solidify the power of sovereignty by mystifying its basis, that is,
by resting on the naturalness of the concept. The identity of the
nation and even more so the identity of the people must appear
natural and originary.
We, by contrast, must de-naturalize these concepts and ask
what is a nation and how is it made, but also, what is a people and
how is it made? Although ‘‘the people’’ is posed as the originary
basis of the nation, the modern conception of the people is in fact a product
of the nation-state, and survives only within its specific ideological
context. Many contemporary analyses of nations and nationalism
from a wide variety of perspectives go wrong precisely because
they rely unquestioningly on the naturalness of the concept and
identity of the people. We should note that the concept of the
people is very different from that of the multitude.
17
Already in the
seventeenth century, Hobbes was very mindful of this difference