Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern State

Hobbes, whose Leviathan appeared in 1651, begins the path. He argued that without a powerful sovereign, life in the state of nature would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, so rational people would agree to submit to strong central authority.

Locke answers with a different bargain in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). He argued that people hold natural rights to life, liberty and property independent of any government, and that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed.

Montesquieu turns from the origin of government to its design. His principal work, The Spirit of the Laws, developed the theory of separation of powers and influenced later constitutional documents, including the Constitution of the United States.

Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), held that legitimate political authority arises only from the general will of the people acting as sovereign. His account of popular sovereignty influenced the French Revolution and later republican and democratic thought.

Madison puts these ideas to work. He helped shape the United States Constitution at the Constitutional Convention and co-authored the Federalist Papers defending it, before serving as the fourth president of the United States.

Burke offers the conservative reply to revolutionary change. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) warned that rejecting inherited institutions would end in terror and dictatorship, and he argued that change should proceed gradually and organically.

Mill, in On Liberty (1859), argued that the only justification for restricting an individual's liberty is to prevent harm to others. He was also an early advocate of women's suffrage, introducing the first suffrage amendment debated in the British Parliament in 1867.

Marx reads politics through class. His theory of historical materialism held that societies develop through stages driven by class struggle over the means of production, and The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Friedrich Engels) and Das Kapital became foundational texts for socialist and communist movements.

Weber supplies the standard definition of the state in political science: the institution that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory, set out in his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation. He also distinguished traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority.

Arendt asks what happens when the state turns totalitarian. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) analysed the shared mechanisms of Nazi and Stalinist rule, and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) introduced the phrase the banality of evil for how ordinary bureaucratic participation could enable atrocity.

Rawls closes the path with justice as fairness. A Theory of Justice (1971) proposed principles that free and equal citizens would agree to from behind a veil of ignorance concealing their own position in society, a landmark of twentieth-century liberal political philosophy.