The United Kingdom: Leviathan and the quangos

Abstract

Leviathan, you will recall, was the name given by the seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the new centralized state that was exercising men's minds so keenly in that century. The English Leviathan, in the sense of an all-powerful state, dominating the individual citizen, was largely the creation of three Tudor sovereigns. The first, Henry VII, was a shrewd, or thodox investor, a treasury man. The last, Elizabeth I, was a clever investor in the business ventures of her great sea captains. The second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII, perhaps did the most to create a governmental machine that Thomas Hobbes could later nickname Leviathan. In many ways its evolution has analogies with the power struggles and the organizational patterns of modern business. Before the Tudors, the English monarchy had been largely ineffective because the feudal system was a form of decentralization of authori ty that has some similarity with the structure of a weak business conglomerate today. The mediaeval king's relationship with his barons was not unlike that of a holding company, struggling to control operating