What are the Cornerstones of the Transition to the Modern State? Chapter 3

What are the Cornerstones of the Transition to the Modern State? Chapter 3 

Modern State Concept

Absolute monarchies had emerged in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the New Age as a result of the dissolution of feudalism and the breakdown of the power of the Church. Since absolute monarchies eliminated the political units of the feudal order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it meant that they had completed their historical mission. The thinkers who grew up with the secular and rationalist doctrine of the Enlightenment period created a new political theory by advocating fundamental rights and freedoms, free market economy, separation of powers, limitation of the state, parliamentary democracy, constitutionalism, and that the source of sovereignty is the people-nation. The first of these thinkers was John Locke.

John Locke:

Locke, like Hobbes, used the state of nature to explain the emergence of political power-state. However, while Hobbes depicted the state of nature as a state of war in which everyone is in struggle with everyone else, Locke argued that the state of nature is a period of peace. According to Locke, in the state of nature people live in complete freedom and equality. According to Locke, the state of nature is a state of perfect freedom in which people regulate their own actions, use their own property and person, within the limits of the law of nature, without depending on the wishes of others. The state of nature is also a state of equality. Because no one person has power over another. 

Although Locke depicts the state of nature as a period in which people live in freedom and equality, he does not accept it as an order of idleness. According to Locke, in the state of nature, people have certain natural rights such as the right to life, the right to property and the right to liberty, and people can exercise these rights only within the limits set by natural law, that is, by reason. People can do whatever they wish in the state of nature, but not everyone can do whatever they want. For example, one does not have the freedom to end the life of another person. Again, one can use one's property as one wishes, but one cannot use one's property to damage or take away the property of another. In short, natural law commands everyone to respect each other's natural rights (the rights to life, property and liberty). However, the existence of natural law is not enough to prevent people from attacking the rights of others. There will always be people who violate the rights of others by acting in violation of natural law. In this case, everyone whose rights are violated has the right to punish the aggressor. However, the right to punishment is not absolute. Punishment must be proportionate and proportionate to the offense. However, it is unlikely that this power granted to those whose rights have been violated will be exercised in an appropriate manner. There are serious drawbacks when individuals become the judge of their own cases. For example, there may be excesses such as acting under the influence of feelings of hatred and revenge, and looking out for the interests of oneself and one's relatives. This would lead to confusion and disorder in society. In other words, the state of war that Hobbes refers to emerges. Locke states that the state of nature and the state of war should not be confused. Living on earth by the rules of reason is a state of nature for human beings. In this environment, there is no authority with the authority to judge. The state of war, on the other hand, is a state of coercion or declaration of intention by one person over the person of another, again without a common superior with jurisdiction.  Locke, like Hobbes, explained the transition from the state of nature to the state with the social contract. However, unlike Hobbes, he does not think that people transfer all their rights to the sovereign power. According to Locke, people only transferred their right to punish to the state during the transition to the state. They reserve all other rights to themselves. 

Locke's social contract theory limited the state to human rights. The main purpose of the state is to secure people's life, property and freedom, to ensure peace, internal and external security and to realize the good of the people. The state has no other purpose. Because in order to protect the rights to life, liberty and property, people have moved from the state of nature to the state. This was realized through the conclusion of a contract. With this contract, people have transferred only their right to punishment in the state of nature to the state. The owners of other fundamental rights are still human beings and the sole duty of the state is to protect these rights. People have only authorized the state to protect these rights. Since the state is the product of the contract made by people with their own free will, it will maintain its legitimacy as long as it does not act against this contract.

In this case, the people have the right to resist a government that violates the contract. People can use their right to resist against governments that fail to protect their natural rights or act arbitrarily, overthrow them and establish new governments in their place. Locke aimed to limit the state with his theory of natural rights. Another mechanism that Locke considered for the limitation of state power is the separation of powers. In particular, Locke argued that the legislative and executive powers should not be concentrated in the same hand. Locke wanted to strictly separate the legislative and executive powers. Thus, he thought that the executive would be prevented from using the legislature for its personal interests. Thus, the legislative power would remain in the hands of society and the executive would be prevented from making regulations restricting people's fundamental rights and freedoms. The theory of separation of powers put forward by Locke was later developed by the French thinker Montesquieu and took its current form. In the seventeenth century, John Locke dealt the biggest blow to absolutist views. Locke laid the philosophical foundations of the bourgeoisie's worldview (liberalism) and systematized their political views. Therefore; John Locke is considered as the pioneer of the liberal state theory.

Jean Jacques Rousseau:

In Rousseau's theory of the state, he proceeded from the assumption of the state of nature and portrayed natural life as a state of freedom and equality in which people live a happy life. 

According to Rousseau, in the state of nature, people's only concern is the fulfillment of their physical needs. And the things to meet these simple needs are immediately at hand. In this respect, there is no reason for people to be unhappy in the state of nature. In the state of nature, there are no spiritual relationships or duties between people. Therefore, people are free from all kinds of oppression. In the state of nature, people are neither good nor bad to each other; they know neither crime nor virtue. These people have only compassion and mercy. According to Rousseau, there is no struggle and war between people in the state of nature. Because there is no reason for people whose desires are limited and who meet these desires comfortably and who act only out of compassion and mercy to fight. In the state of nature, people will prefer to flee from evil rather than do evil. People will not consider the acts of violence they encounter as an act that must be punished, but as an evil that can be compensated for, and they will not seek revenge. In such an environment, there are no distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, equality and inequality, mine and yours. In this period, there is no superiority, arrogance, coldness, jealousy, suspicion, fear, deceit and hatred between people. People are free and equal in every respect.

When did this happy-good order, in which everyone is free and equal, come to an end? Rousseau argued that this good order ended with the emergence of civilized society. When a man surrounded a piece of land with a fence and said, "This is mine" (when property came into being), civilized society was established, and with the establishment of civilized society, this good-happy order came to an end. The people of civilized society, driven by the ambition to own property, to have power and to dominate others, gradually developed distinctions between rich and poor, slave and master, superior and inferior, powerful and powerless. In other words, equality between people has disappeared. The most central concept in Rousseau's theory is equality. Rousseau attributed all negativities-evils to the disappearance of equality between people. According to Rousseau, the excessive greed for property in civilized society has destroyed the compassion and mercy in the state of nature; it has made people stingy, jealous, manipulative, selfish and evil. The struggle of men to possess more and more (extortion by the rich, banditry by the poor) has put the newborn society in a terrible state of war. No one, neither rich nor poor, is safe anymore. According to Rousseau, people who sought a solution to this situation (the state of war and insecurity) within the framework of reason, since it was no longer possible to return to the state of nature, created a social contract and formed the state.

According to Rousseau, people created the state through a social contract in order to put an end to the terrible state of war in society and to ensure that everyone's person and property are protected by a common power. 

This contract consists of everyone who constitutes the society transferring their existence and all their rights to a general will. This contract was concluded as follows: "Each of us submits his existence and all his rights to the general will and recognizes each member as an indivisible part of the whole". With everyone placing their existence and all their rights at the disposal of the general will, the common power-state emerged to govern the society.

Rousseau's sovereign, then, is the people who have become a political community through the social contract. For Rousseau, the sovereign is the totality of the citizens who constitute the general will. Thus, Rousseau identifies the people with the sovereign and arrives at the theory of "popular sovereignty". Rousseau explained the emergence of political society (state) with the social contract. With the social contract, people united their wills and transferred themselves to the political community with all their rights and powers. Thus, as a result of the unification and fusion of the wills of individuals, a "general will" emerged. The "general will" is not the sum total of individual wills; it is a collective will that is separate from them, above them, and has its own existence. The supreme power in society, i.e. sovereignty, means the exercise of this general will. In his theory of the social contract, Rousseau grounded the state on democratic foundations by basing the source of sovereignty on the people. Thus, the authority of the state over the people was based on a rational basis. Rousseau is the founder of the theory of popular sovereignty. Rousseau argued that the sovereignty belonging to the people is absolute, indivisible, inalienable and unrepresentable. He argued that the system of representation was incompatible with the understanding of popular sovereignty and that sovereignty should be exercised by the citizens themselves.

Emmanuel Sieyes:

Sieyes' most important contribution to the understanding of the modern state is his concept of nation and representation. He considered the nation as an abstract whole consisting of legally equal persons, but with a personality and will of its own, separate from their personalities and wills. Sieyes pointed to this abstract whole (nation) as the source of sovereignty. In this way, the thinker prepared the intellectual infrastructure for the theory of "national sovereignty". Sieyes put forward the mechanism of representation by stating that sovereignty can only be exercised through representatives acting on behalf of the nation. Although Sieyes did not directly use the concept of "national sovereignty", he laid the groundwork for the theory of "national sovereignty" through the perspective he offered to the concepts of "nation" and "national unity". 

Sieyes' ideas were largely realized with the French Revolution. Sieyes' concepts of "nation" and "national unity" and the development of the theory of "national sovereignty" formed the political foundations of the modern nation-state understanding after 1789.