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Bourdie Birokracija
The aim of this project is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try and
identify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison d’Etat), which
the self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by the
state – minds of state – and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task at
hand is less to probe the factors involved in the emergence of the state than to pin-
point the logic of the historical process which governed the crystallization of this
historical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucratic
form; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process of
autonomization of a bureaucratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than to
construct a model of this process – more precisely, a model of the transition from
the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, from the state reduced to the house-
hold of the king to the state constituted as a field of forces and a field of struggles
oriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods.
As R.J. Bonney points out, when studying the “modern nation-state” we are
liable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: “For the greater part of
the period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority of
European monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the –
perhaps fortuitous – exception of France.”2 Absent a clear distinction between the
dynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the specificity of the
modern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up to
the bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinition
performed in its course. (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny the
name of state to the dynastic state, as J.W. Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes the
limited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an election
requiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by fac-
tional, princely politics characterized by patrimonial strategies oriented towards
ensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates. One finds here
none of the features of the modern state. It is only in the France and England of
the seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modern
state appear. European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by the
personal, “proprietary” vision of princes over their government, by the weight of
the feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define the
norms of political life.)
Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 17
One can apply to the French or English royalty, right up to a fairly late period,
what Marc Bloch said of the medieval seigneury, founded on the “fusion of the
economic group and the sovereignty group.”5 Paternal power constitutes the
pattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance. As in
traditional Kabylia, political relationships are not autonomized with respect to
kinship relations and are always thought after those relations; the same goes for
economic relations. Power rests on personal relationships and affective relation-
ships such as fealty,6 “love,” and “credit,” which are socially instituted and
actively maintained, especially through “largesses” (gifts and grants).
The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for a
time is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the “house” and of the dynastic
state which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it. Philip
IV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; the
“family” is divided into various “chambers,” specialized services that follow
the king in his travels. The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor of
the bonds of blood. This is how one can understand the mythology of the king’s
two bodies, which has so fascinated historians since Kantorowicz, and which
symbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the person
who temporally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among the
peasants of Béarn, where the male members of the house, understood as the
totality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were often
designated by their forename followed by the name of the house, which implied,
in the case of sons-in-law from a different lineage, that they lost their own family
name).7 The king is “head of the house,” socially mandated to implement a
dynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in the
service of the greatness and prosperity of his “house.”
A number of matrimonial strategies have the aim of fostering territorial
extensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch.
One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerably
enlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriage
policy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comté and the Netherlands by his
marriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip the
Fair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was born
Charles V. Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with the
so-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursuing successional strategies by
other means.
The war of succession of Castile (1474–79) is a well-known case: if Isabella had not won,
the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would have
become possible. Charles V’s war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders into
Burgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg state
would have been formed around Cleves, Jülich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee. But
the partition of Cleves and Jülich in 1614 after the war of succession put an end to that
vague possibility. In the Baltic, the union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway
ended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark and Sweden which followed, the
question arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the House
of Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved and Sweden attained its ‘natural
borders.’ In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynastic
union of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union in 1569. But the
dynastic union of Sweden and Poland was the declared aim of Sigismund III and con-
tinued to be that of the kings of Poland until 1660. They also nursed ambitions in Muscovy
and in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup d’état by the
boyars.8
One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape the
teleological vision founded on the retrospective illusion which makes the con-
struction of France a “project” pursued by the successive kings. Thus Cheruel, for
example, in his Histoire de l’administration monarchique en France, explicitly
refers to the “will” of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state and it
is not without some surprise that one sees some historians condemning the
institution of apanages as a “dismemberment” of the royal domain.
The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynastic
states by allowing us to see in them a reproduction strategy of a particular kind.
But one must still raise the question of the means or, better, of the particular
assets available to the royal family which enabled it to triumph in the competition
with its rivals. (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitly
posed the question, offers, with what he calls the “law of monopoly,” a solution
that I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentially
verbal and almost tautological: “If, in a major social unit, a large number of the
smaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the larger
one, are of roughly equal social power and are thus able to compete freely –
unhampered by pre-existing monopolies – for the means to social power, i.e., pri-
marily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that some
will be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer and
fewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will be
eliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on an
ever-decreasing number.”9)
Endowed with the “semi-liturgical power” that sets him “apart from all other
potentates, his rivals,”10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty,
which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies a
distinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation of
symbolic capital. He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that he
is able to call himself king, with a reasonable chance of having his claim recog-
nized. In effect, in accordance with the logic of the “speculative bubble” dear to
economists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at least
to some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the others
reckon with the fact that he is king. A minimum differential thus suffices to create
a maximum gap because it differentiates him from all the others. Moreover, the
king finds himself placed in the position of center and, due to this, has informa-
tion on all the others – who, short of forming a coalition, communicate only
through him – and he can monitor alliances. He is therefore situated above the
fray and predisposed to fulfill the function of an arbiter, a court of appeal.
(One can cite here as an exemplification of this model the analysis of Muzaffar
Alam, which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of Northern
India, correlative of the waning of imperial authority and the reinforcement of the
authority of local notables and provincial autonomy, the local chieftains con-
tinued to perpetuate the “reference to at least an appearance of an imperial center,”
invested with a legitimating function: “Again, in the conditions of unfettered
political and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the decline
of imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to win
the allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power. All of them strug-
gled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position and
achievements. Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over
the others. When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a
centre to legitimize their acquisitions.”11)
It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind the
façade of the official system of administration, which is certainly easier to describe.
By their very nature, relations of patronage escape the eyes of the historian; but the
importance of a minister, a secretary of state, an intendant, or a king’s counselor
depended less on his title than on his influence – or that of his patron. His influence
was determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronage
he enjoyed.13
The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agricultural
producers living in communities closed unto themselves and dominated by a minority
who ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), and
the management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear break
with family bonds by instituting great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from political
reproduction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links with
the people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial services
of the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are the
property of the state and whose goods and position can revert to the state at any time.17
In ancient Egypt there was a clear-cut distinction between the royal family and the senior
administration, with power delegated to “new men” rather than to members of the royal
family. Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slave
and “functionary”; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of the Medes and Persians, the
top civil servants were often Greeks. The same was true in the Mongol Empire, where
senior administrators were almost all foreigners.18
The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire. From Racine’s
Bajazet we are familiar with the permanent threat that his brothers and his Vizir, a
bureaucratic figure mandated, among others, to control them, represented for the prince.
A radical solution after the fifteenth century was the law of fratricide, which required the
prince’s brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires of
the ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, who
rose to the positions of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with a
cosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the “collecting” of talents ensured a
supply of “devoted individuals.” The Ottoman term kul means both “slave” and “servant
of the state.”
One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division of the labor of
domination between the heirs, dynastic rivals endowed with reproductive cap-
acity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful but
deprived of reproductive capacity: to limit the power of the hereditary members
of the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to the
dynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve and
who can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at any
moment.
But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented by
any holder of a power based on a specialized competency, more or less scarce,
these homines novi are recruited in such a manner that they have no chance of
reproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed to
celibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastic
type, or of durably grounding their power in an autonomous legitimacy, inde-
pendent of that which the state grants them, conditionally and temporarily,
through their status as functionaries. (If the papal state evolved so early, from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because it
escaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family –
sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship – and because it
had no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.)
Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effects
of this fundamental law could be enumerated, viz. measures to prevent the emer-
gence of countervailing powers of the same nature as dynastic power (fiefdoms),
i.e., powers that are independent (especially as regards reproduction) and heredi-
tary (this is where feudalism and empire bifurcate). Thus, in the Ottoman Empire,
high lords were given a timar, the income from lands, but not ownership of those
lands. Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that are
strictly limited to the incumbent’s lifetime (cf. priestly celibacy), in particular by
recourse to oblates (parvenus, rootless individuals), even pariahs. The oblate is
the absolute antithesis to the king’s brother: depending on the state (or, in another
context, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, to
which he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personal
force. The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment be
cast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of the
state (as with the “boursiers,” the “scholarship boys,” who achieved miraculous
Catherine de Médicis detests d’Épernon and seek by every means to oust him. Marie
de Médicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630]. Gaston
d’Orléans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny because
he comes between the king and his family. On this account, the levy doubles because
the ‘favorite,’ now become ‘first minister,’ needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed in
order to attract clienteles who would otherwise swell the ranks of his opponents. The
fabulous wealth of the d’Épernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with the
means to carry out their policies. Through d’Épernon and Joyeuse, Henri II controls
the state apparatus, the army, and a certain number of provincial administrations.
Thanks to his two friends, he felt himself to be rather more King of France.22
One cannot understand the role of the pariahs without taking due note of the ambiguity of
the specialist and of technical competency (technè) as principle of a virtually autonomous
and therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guenée points out, until 1388
functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In many
ancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communities
the artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer,
etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatment, and was both feared
and despised, even stigmatized. Possession of a specialty, whether metallurgy or magic
(which were often associated), finance, or, in another order, military capacity
(mercenaries, janissaries, elite corps of the army, condottiere, etc.), could confer a danger-
ous power. The same was true of writing: we know that the scribes (katib) of the Ottoman
Empire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted to
monopolize religious power. According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of the
monopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept away
from the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they could
not conspire together. These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that were
culturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control over
the means of coercion and marks of honor. They were abandoned to outcasts who allowed
the dominant group and its representatives to see them fullfilled while officially rejecting
them. The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus contained, by
the very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their full
profits, especially in the political arena.
The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like the
minorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renowned
for their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goods
and services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to be
authorized to manipulate instruments that, placed in the wrong hands, would be very
dangerous. One can also understand in this perspective – that of the division of powers
and palace wars – the shift from the feudal army to the mercenary army: the salaried pro-
fessional army is to the troop of “liegemen” or the “party” as the functionary or “favorite”
is to the king’s brothers or the members of the king’s house.
The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between the
king’s brothers and the king’s ministers) lies in the conflict between two modes of
reproduction. Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of power
becomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, then
the jurists – who introduce Roman law – and, later, Parliament, then the merchants
and the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of the
labor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, even contradictory
character of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of power
becomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproduction
based on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to that
it is simutaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development of
education, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants. It fosters the
coexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureau-
cratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency and
merit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding the
principle of its legitimacy, blood and birth.
The transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state is thus insepara-
ble from the movement whereby the new nobility, the “state nobility” (or
noblesse de robe), ousts the old nobility, the nobility of blood. On can see in pass-
ing that the ruling circles were the first to undergo a process which extended,
much later, to the whole of society, namely, the shift from a family-based mode
of reproduction (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a bureau-
cratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school.
of the pay of soldiers and the salaries of civil servants, administrators and justice
officials), so that the genesis of the state is inseparable from the genesis of a
group of agents whose interests are bound up with it, who have a vested interest
in its functioning. (One would need to examine here the analogy with the Church:
the power of the Church is not properly measured, as has often been supposed, by
the number of “Easter communicants,” but rather by the number of those who
directly or indirectly owe the economic and social foundations of their social
existence, in particular their income, to the Church, and who are for this reason
“interested” in its existence.)
The state is a profitable enterprise, firstly for the king himself and for those to
whom he extends the benefit of his largesses. The struggle to make the state thus
becomes increasingly indissociable from a struggle to appropriate the profits
associated with the state (a struggle which shall extend ever more widely with the
advent of the welfare state). As Denis Crouzet has shown,27 the battles for
influence around the throne had as stake the capture of central positions liable to
procure the financial advantages that the nobles needed to maintain their standard
of living (whence, for example, the support of Duc de Nevers for Henri II or the
young Guise’s siding with Henri IV in exchange for 1.2 million pounds destined
to pay off his father’s debts). In short, the dynastic state institutes the private
appropriation of public resources by a few. Just as the personal bond of the feudal
type is made contractual and remunerated no longer with land but with money or
power, so the “parties” fight among themselves, especially within the king’s
council, for control over the circuit of taxation.
The ambiguity of the dynastic state is perpetuated (it will continue under other
guises after the disappearance of that state) because there exists particular, private
interests and profits in appropriating what is public and universal, and because
ever-renewed opportunities arise for such appropriation: namely, over and
beyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices – from the
fourteenth century on – and the heredity character of public offices – the Paulet
edict of 1604 made them private property – instituted “a new feudalism.”28 Royal
power must then set up commissioners to regain control of the administration.29
From the point of view of the king (and of central power in general), the ideal
would be to concentrate and redistribute the totality of resources, thereby
completely controlling the process of production of symbolic capital. In reality,
however, owing to the division of the labor of domination, there are always
leakages: the servants of the state always tend to serve themselves directly
(instead of waiting for redistribution) by creaming off and diverting material and
symbolic resources. Thence a veritable structural corruption which, as Pierre-
Étienne Will has shown, is above all the deed of intermediate authorities: aside
from “regular irregularities,” that is, extortions aimed at covering personal
and professional costs, of which it is hard to determine whether it pertains to
“institutionalized corruption” or to the “informal financing of expenses,” there
are all the advantages that lower-level functionaries can derive from their stra-
as writing and law, they secure a monopoly over the most typically statist
resources very early on. Their intervention indisputably contributes to the ration-
alization of power: first, as Duby notes, they introduce rigor into the exercise of
power, by giving standard form to judgments and keeping records;38 next, they
implemented the mode of thinking typical of canon law and the scholastic logic
upon which it is founded (with, for example, the distinguo, the quaestio, and the
play of arguments for and against, or the inquisitio, the rational inquiry substitut-
ing proof for test and leading to a written report). Finally, they construct the idea
of state on the model of the Church in treatises on power that refer to Holy
Scripture, the Book of Kings, and Saint Augustine, but also to Aristotle, in which
kingship is conceived as a magistrature (he who holds it by inheritance is God’s
elect but, to show himself to be a good guardian of the res publica, he must take
account of its nature and make good use of reason). Following Georges Duby
again,39 one can show how they contribute to the genesis of a rational bureau-
cratic habitus: they invent the virtue of prudence, which inclines one to control
affective pulsions, to act lucidly in light of one’s intelligence, with a sense of
proportion, and courtesy, an instrument of social regulation. (In contrast to
Norbert Elias, who portrays the state as the fount of the “civilizing process,”
Duby suggests, very rightly, that the clerical invention of courtesy contributed to
the invention of the state, which in turn contributed to the development of courtesy;
the same is true of sapientia, a general disposition bearing on all aspects of life).
Fictio juris, the state is a fiction of jurists who contribute to producing the state
by producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public. The
political philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictive
of its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (one
of the first users of the notion of “raison d’État”) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau or
Bodin, as simple theories of the state forbid themselves from understanding the
distinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of state
institutions.40 The jurist, master of a joint social store of words, of concepts,
offers the means to think realities yet unthinkable (with, for example, the notion
of corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques and
operational models (often borrowed from the ecclesiastical tradition and destined
to undergo a process of secularization), a stock of solutions and precedents.
(As Sarah Hanley shows very clearly, there was a constant to-and-fro between
juridical theory and royal or parliamentary practice.41) So much to say that one
cannot simply draw from the reality the concepts (e.g., sovereignty, coup d’état)
one intends to use to understand that reality, of which they partake and which
they helped make. It also means that to adequately understand political writings,
which, far from being simple theoretical descriptions, are veritable practical
prescriptions, intended to bring into being a new type of social practice by giving
it a meaning and a purpose, one must reinsert the works and their authors in the
enterprise of construction of the state with which they stand in dialectical rela-
tionship. One must in particular resituate the authors in the nascent juridical field,
and in the broader social space, since their poitions – in relation to other jurists
and also to the central power – can be at the basis of their theoretical construction.
(A close reading of William Farr Church’s book on constitutional thought in early
modern France42 suggests that the “légistes” were distinguished by theoretical
stances that varied according to their distance from the court: “absolutist”
discourse tended to come from those jurists closest to the central power who
established a clear division between the king and his subjects and removed all
reference to intermediate powers such as the États généraux, whereas the Parle-
ments had more ambiguous positions). Everything leads one to hypothesize that
the writings through which the jurists sought to impose their vision of the state,
and in particular their idea of “public benefit” (of which they are the inventors),
were also strategies whereby they sought to win recognition of their own import-
ance by asserting the priority of the “public service” with which they were bound
up. (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers état during the General Estates of
1614–15 and the policy of the Parliament of Paris, especially during the Fronde,
aiming to change the hierarchy of the orders, to secure recognition of the order of
magistrates, of “gentlemen of pen and ink” as the first among the orders, to place
in the first rank not the armed service but the civil service of the state; and also of
the struggles, within the crystallizing field of power, between the king and the
Parlement, construed by some as a body legitimating royal power, by others as
intended to limit it, to which the “lit de justice” gave rise.43) In short, those who
made perhaps the clearest contribution to the advance of reason and the universal
had a clear interest in the universal; one can even say that they had a private
interest in the public interest.44
But it does not suffice to describe the logic of this process of imperceptible
transformation leading to the emergence of this historically unprecedented social
reality that is modern bureaucracy, i.e., the institution of a relatively autonomous
administrative field, independent of politics (denegation) and of the economy
(disinterestedness) and obeying the specific logic of the “public.” Beyond the
intuitive half-understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finished
state, one must try to reconstruct the deep sense of the series of infinitesimal and
yet all equally decisive inventions – the bureau, signature, stamp, decree of
appointment, certificate, register, circular, etc. – that led to the establishment of a
properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this
sense, has all the appearances of “rationality” even as it is invested with the most
mysterious properties of magical efficacy.
state is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into the
impersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who are
answerable to a superior from whom they receive their authority and their power,
but also, to some extent, answerable for him and for the orders they receive from
him and which they monitor and ratify by executing.
To understand what is so extraordinary about this shift from personal to
bureaucratic power, one must return once more to a moment typical of the long
transition from the dynastic principle to the juridical principle wherein the separ-
ation is gradually effected between the “household” and the bureaucracy, i.e.,
between the hereditary but politically unimportant “great offices” and what the
English tradition calls the “cabinet,” non-hereditary but invested with power over
the seals. This is an extremely complex movement with advances and retreats,
which different agents effect at varying rates depending on the interests attached
to their positions, and which encounters countless obstacles, linked in particular
to habits of thought and unconscious dispositions. Thus, as Jacques Le Goff
notes, the bureaucracy is first understood according to model of the family; or
again, the king’s ministers, still attached to the dynastic vision, sometimes want
to ensure the hereditary transmission of offices.
In his Constitutional History of England, F.W. Maitland evokes the evolution
of practices regarding the royal seals.45 From the Norman period, the royal will
was signified by acts, charters, and letters patent, closed and sealed with the royal
seal, which warranted their authenticity. The “great seal” was entrusted to the
Chancellor, head of the entire secretariat. In the late Middle Ages and throughout
the whole Tudor period, the Chancellor was the sovereign’s first minister. Little
by little other seals appeared. Because the Chancellor used the “great seal” for
many purposes, a “privy seal” was used for matters directly concerning the king.
The king gave directives to the Chancellor about the use of the great seal under
his privy seal. The latter was later entrusted to an “officer,” the Keeper of the
Privy Seal. In due course, an even more private secretary, the “king’s clerk” or
“king’s secretary,” intervened between the monarch and these great officers of
state as keeper of the “king’s signet.” Under the Tudors, there were two secretar-
ies to the king, who were designated as “secretaries of state.” A routine came to
be established whereby documents signed by the king’s hand, the “royal sign
manual,” and countersigned by the secretary of state (keeper of the king’s signet),
were sent to the Keeper of the Privy Seal as directives for the documents to be
issued under the privy seal; these in turn served as instructions to the Chancellor
to issue documents bearing the “great seal” of the kingdom. This act implied a
degree of ministerial responsibility for the acts of the king: no act was legally
valid unless it bore the great seal or at least the privy seal, which verified that a
minister “had committed himself in this expression of the royal will.” Ministers
were therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared being
challenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeed
royal acts. The Chancellor was fearful of applying the great seal in the absence of
a document bearing the privy seal as a guarantee; the Keeper of the Privy Seal
was anxious to have the king’s hand-written signature validated by the king’s
secretary. As for the king, he found many advantages in this procedure: it made it
incumbent upon the ministers to look after the king’s interests, to know the state
of his affairs, and to make sure that he was not being deceived or misled. He acted
under the warranty but also under the oversight of his ministers, whose respon-
sibility was engaged in the acts of the sovereign which they guaranteed (during
the reign of Elizabeth, an oral order could not suffice to commit expenditure and
the royal guarantee had to be sealed with the great seal or the privy seal, which,
far from being mere ceremonial symbols, were real instruments of rule).
One sees here how, through the lengthening of the chain of authorities and
responsibilities, came into being a veritable public order founded upon a degree of
reciprocity within hierarchical relations themselves: the executant is both
controlled and protected by the decision-makers; and, from his vantage point, the
executant controls and protects his superior, in particular against the abuse of
power and the arbitrary exercise of authority. Everything takes place as if the more
a ruler’s power increases, the greater his dependency on a whole network of exe-
cutive relays. In one sense, the freedom and responsibility of each agent is
reduced, to the point of being completely dissolved in the field. In another sense,
it increases inasmuch as each agent is forced to act in a responsible manner,
under the cover and control of all the other agents engaged in the field. Indeed,
as the field of power becomes more differentiated, each link in the chain itself
became a point (an apex) in a field. (The growing differentiation of the field of
power takes shape at the same time as the constitution of the bureaucratic field –
the state – as a meta-field that determines the rules governing the various fields
and is for this reason the stake of struggles among the dominant from the different
fields.)
The lengthening of the chains of delegation and the development of a complex
structure of power do not automatically entail the withering-away of the mechan-
isms aimed at securing private appropriation of economic and symbolic capital
(and of all the forms of structural corruption). One could say, on the contrary, that
the potential for misappropriation (via direct extraction) increases, since central
patrimonialism can coexist with local patrimonialism (based on the familial
interests of the civil servants or corporate solidarity). The dissociation of the
function from the person occurs only gradually, as if the bureaucratic field were
still torn between the dynastic (or personal) principle and the juridical (or imper-
sonal) principle.
What we call the “civil service” was so bound up with its occupants that it is impos-
sible to retrace the history of a given council or post without writing the history of
the individuals who chaired it or held it. It is the fact of being held by a personality
that gave exceptional importance to an office hitherto considered secondary, or
that pushed to a lower tier a post deemed central by virtue of its previous
incumbent. . . . The man made the function to an extent that is unthinkable now.46
Nothing is more uncertain and more improbable than the invention, in theory
(with the self-interested work of the jurists, always both judge and jury) and in
practice (with the imperceptible advance of the division of the labor of domin-
ation) of matters public, the public good, and especially of the structural condi-
tions (tied to the emergence of a bureaucratic field) of the dissociation of private
interest and public interest, or, to put it more clearly, the sacrifice of egoistic
interests, the renunciation of the private use of a public power. But the paradox
is that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with the
appearance and accumulation of a public capital, and with the emergence of
the bureaucratic field as a field of struggles for control over this capital and
of the corresponding power, i.e., in particular power over the redistribution of
public resources and their associated profits. The state nobility, which, as Denis
Richet has shown, asserted itself in France between the end of the sixteenth
century and the beginning of the seventeenth, and whose reign was not to be
interrupted – quite the contrary – by the Revolution of 1789, bases its domina-
tion on what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called “fiscal capitalism” and on the
monopolization of high state positions with high profits.47 The bureaucratic
field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state,
which subordinated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentrated
by the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle
for power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits)
and symbolic profits (honors, titles, etc.) it provides, a struggle reserved in fact
for a minority of claimants designated by the quasi-hereditary possession of
educational capital. One would need to analyze in detail the two-sided process
from which the state has issued and which is inseparably universalization and
monopolization of the universal.
(Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant)
NOTES
This article originally appeared as “De la maison du roi à la raison d’Etat: un modèle de
la genèse du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 118 (June 1997):
55–68. It is published here by kind permission of Jérome Bourdieu.
1. This text is the lightly revised transcript of a set of lectures given at the Collège de France.
As a provisional summary intended mainly to serve as a research tool, it extends the analysis of the
process of concentration of the various forms of capital ushering the constitution of a bureaucratic
field capable of controlling the other fields (cf. P. Bourdieu, “Esprits d’État: Genèse et structure
du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 96–97 (March 1993): 49–62;
English transl.: “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,”
Sociological Theory 12–1 (March 1994): 1–19.
2. R.J. Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1594–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), and “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État en France (1500–1660): Quelques remarques prélim-
inaires sur les possibilités de recherche,” in J.-P. Genêt and M. Le Mené, eds., Genèse de l’Etat
moderne. Prélèvement et redistribution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987), 193–20, esp. 194.