The State as One: The ‘Union of Men’, the ‘People’ and the ‘State’ in Early Modernity

Abstract

This chapter interrogates early-modern juridico-political thought by showing that from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries it is in the idea of the state that the fantasy of congruency emerges. The state is in a state of void, as there is nothing essential about the state. The state is thus imbued with the notion of congruency and unity but at the same time the state never fully realises its potentiality for complete unity. The congruent nature of the state is both pre-supposed and envisioned; it is both assumed and set as the ultima ratio of its own existence. This chapter serves as modernity’s ‘pre-history’ and is thus key to the book’s analysis of the rise of nation/state congruency in modernity.