Charlotte Epstein has written the definitive account of how the state and the political subject emerged together in early modern England. Taking the body as her “lens” or “optic” (pp. 2–5), she shows how new understandings of space, movement, matter, and nature in the seventeenth century unsettled medieval forms of political order and ushered in the form that we now take for granted: the territorial state, concerned with security above all, with its rights-bearing, property-owning subjects. The aim of the book is both historical and critical. In addition to excavating the ideas that made possible the “corporeal” ontology of the modern state, Epstein uncovers the series of exclusions of gender, race, and class that were embedded in this form of political order from the very beginning.
The book has three parts, which examine three of the categories that structure the relation between state and subject. Part I shows how, from Hobbes onward, the concept of the body served to naturalize the state’s fixation on security (chapters 2 and 3). Part II traces how the communal liberties of the medieval body politic were transposed onto the individual body (chapters 4 and 5). Part III shows how the idea of the laboring body, beginning with Locke, brought about the shift from communal property to private property (chapter 6). Chapter 7, the final main chapter, stands outside of this three-part structure. There Epstein explains how the public anatomy lesson—a public dissection of a human body—served both to propagate the epistemology of the scientific revolution and to demarcate the limits of the law. Thus, she argues, “science and the state were born hand in hand” (p. 222).
Birth of the State makes major contributions to the fields of international relations (IR) and political theory. Not only does it provide a novel account of the origins and epistemological foundations of the modern state; the book also offers original interpretations of early modern political and scientific thought. Epstein’s macro-historical narrative is built on a fine-grained and rigorous analysis of texts. Although she is known primarily as an IR scholar, she is no dilettante when it comes to the history of political thought: Epstein can contend with the best of Hobbes and Locke scholars. She also shows an impressive range. Among others, she discusses Aristotle, Galileo, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, William Blackstone, Edward Coke, René Descartes, Robert Filmer, William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, and Samuel Pufendorf—in each case, with insightful analysis of the primary texts. Historians of science, as well as historians of political thought, will find much of value in this book.
Epstein places herself on “the critical or radical side of the spectrum” of constructivist IR scholarship (p. 5). She is doubly indebted to Foucault: first in her focus on the body, and second in her genealogical approach. Yet, Epstein does not merely read Foucault’s biopower back into the origins of the state. Her “constitutive constructivism” (p. 7) is a synthesis of insights from many other theorists and disciplines, from R. B. J. Walker to Reinhart Koselleck and from intellectual history to visual studies. Her approach to textual interpretation is broadly contextualist and apparently influenced by the Cambridge School (e.g., Annabel Brett and Quentin Skinner), but with the critical edge and the anti-essentialist orientation of radical constructivism. This synthetic approach cuts in two directions. In addition to developing a critical interpretation of early modern political thought, Epstein develops a historical critique of Foucault. Whereas Foucault traces the origins of biopower to the eighteenth century (e.g., Jeremy Bentham), Epstein argues that actually “Locke marks the passage from ‘punishment’ to ‘discipline’ that Foucault (1995) identified as the threshold of political modernity” (p. 163). This claim will, no doubt, generate significant debate among political theorists.
Epstein’s revisionist reading of Hobbes is equally intriguing. Far from being a canonical figure in the realist tradition, she argues, Hobbes was actually “the first constructivist” (p. 73). Here Epstein follows Richard Flathman, Philip Pettit, and others who emphasize the importance of artifice in Hobbes’s thought. For him, justice, the state, and even patriarchal rule were not natural; they were constructed using language, which is itself artificial (pp. 93–99). With his nominalism, Epstein shows, “Hobbes opened up a beyond nature for modern politics” (p. 76). Yet, “having staked out the path of constructivist political theorizing, he turns back at the last minute to the body,” ultimately grounding his theory of politics in the allegedly natural imperative of self-preservation (p. 100). The few antiquarians who will charge Epstein with anachronism here can safely be ignored. Although she gives Hobbes a contemporary label, she is careful not to use it as a vessel to smuggle contemporary ideas into her interpretation of Hobbes.
The problem with Epstein’s proto-constructivist reading of Hobbes is, if anything, that it understates his constructivist credentials. According to Epstein, “‘human’ (‘man,’ rather) and ‘subject’ constitute, with the body, the main categories of his political thought” (p. 80). The missing Hobbesian category here is “person.” Whereas Epstein discusses Locke’s idea of personhood at some length (pp. 204–5), she devotes only half a paragraph to Hobbes’s (p. 204). This is peculiar, because personhood is one of the primary sites of social construction in Hobbes’s thought. Personhood is the link between nominalism and artifice; it is the concept that Hobbes uses to explain how naming can bring new entities into being. Chapter 16 of Leviathan (“Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated”) is the bridge between Part I (“Of Man”), about the natural realm of bodies, and Part II (“Of Common-wealth”), about the artificial realm of politics. It is in this chapter, with the concept of personhood, that Hobbes creates space for socially constructed entities that are untethered to the material world. As Hobbes makes clear, personhood is a representational or theatrical concept, not a corporeal one. Persons need not correspond to bodies: “An Idol, or meer Figment of the brain, may be Personated; as were the Gods of the Heathen” (Leviathan, chapter 16). This helps explain how, in Hobbes’s own account of the “birth of the state,” many bodies become one person: “A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented” (Leviathan, chapter 16). To her credit, Epstein recognizes the “performative” character of Hobbes’s concept of personhood (p. 203). Yet, as if blinded by her own corporeal lens, she does not explore what Hobbes does with this noncorporeal concept of personhood. Regardless of this omission, Epstein’s reading of Hobbes is insightful and thorough. Remarkably, she manages to persuasively cast Hobbes as “the first constructivist” while barely mentioning his most constructivist concept.
Another peculiar omission is that Epstein does not address the recent book that is, on the face of it, the closest to hers: Bentley Allan’s Scientific Cosmology and International Orders (2018). Like Epstein, Allan explores how the scientific revolution gave rise to a new form of political order in the early modern period. Their historical narratives intersect, and they feature many of the same characters, including Bacon, Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Harvey, and Hobbes. It is odd that Epstein does not even mention Allan’s book. It may be that her manuscript had gone to print before his was published.
I am certainly not suggesting that Epstein’s book duplicates Allan’s in any way. On the contrary, after reading both (but only after), the fundamental differences are clear to me. First, Allan and Epstein are concerned with different levels of analysis. Whereas he focuses on how scientific ideas shaped international orders, she focuses on how scientific ideas shaped the state. Second, Allan and Epstein differ markedly in approach. Whereas he is concerned with changes in political orders over time, she is concerned with the origins of a specific political order. His story stretches from 1550 to the time of writing, whereas hers is squarely focused on the seventeenth century. More fundamentally, although Allan and Epstein both belong to the constructivist tradition, they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Allan’s constructivism is that of mainstream American IR. His aim is to explain, largely in causal terms, how changes in “scientific cosmology” brought about changes in international order. Epstein’s constructivism is more radical and is rooted in the European continent. She eschews causal explanation in favor of constitutive theorizing, hence her “constitutive constructivism” (pp. 5–7). Further, her aim is not only to trace how scientific ideas brought about a particular kind of political order, but also to uncover the forms of domination and exclusion on which this order was founded and that these scientific ideas served to naturalize and legitimize. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate that Epstein does not address Allan’s account of how science and politics came together in the early modern period, because she is undoubtedly the best equipped to critique it. It would be interesting to know whether she agrees with my characterization of the differences between the two projects.
