From Liberties to Liberty

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.

Denaturalising Security

This chapter assesses how security was established as the first absolute and natural right of the subject. Thomas Hobbes remains in focus, insofar as he articulated the furthest what had already become an established dogma of early modern thought, notably in natural right theories, and of nascent state practice. The chapter then considers the different kinds of natures that troubled the enterprise of naturalisation. For nature was also appearing, as a result of the scientific revolution, as a source of disorder. It was no longer simply the stable referent for the task of political ordering. This new, epochal instability in the constructions of nature and the way it was addressed by Hobbes in his epistemological writings contains resources for short-circuiting the naturalising work that Hobbes, amongst others, was engaged in. These resources include Hobbes’s nominalism, which marks him as the original constructivist, and his critique of universals, including ‘paternal dominion’, his term for patriarchy. Hence, the purpose of the chapter is to parse the initial naturalisation of security as the subject’s constitutive right, in order to denaturalise it. Ultimately, Hobbes played a central role, not only in theorising the state, but in securing what the author seeks to unsettle with this book: the body as history’s great naturaliser.

The Public Anatomy Lesson

This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public anatomy lesson. The body, this piece of ‘natural’ property that every human ‘has’, was being increasingly opened up and peered into for the purposes of finally seeing human nature itself. Bringing together visual studies and international relations, the chapter charts the scopic regime that established vision as modernity’s primary ordered instrument and that was honed upon the body dissected in public. To map its contours, it begins with the writings of anatomist William Harvey and scientist-statesman Francis Bacon. The chapter then tracks how this scopic regime was institutionalised by the spread of the highly popular public anatomy lesson across early modern Europe. It then analyses Renaissance and early modern representations of the public anatomy lesson, notably the frontispiece of the first manual of modern medicine, Andrea Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1943), and Dutch painter Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson paintings. The chapter examines the work of boundary-drawing and state-building wrought by these public performances by tracking the roles of the female and the poor body in their crafting.

Privatising Property

This chapter describes how the body served to privatise property and to establish the human subject, instead of the natural order, at the centre of the law. Whereas modern science expelled humanity from the world’s centre, a second revolution in the law achieved the opposite. It begat legal modernity and the right to private property that supports capitalism. The site for this revolution was early modern theories of natural rights. The chapter traces the genealogy of the concept of private property, from Hugo Grotius via Samuel von Pufendorf to John Locke, through this tradition and under the lens of the body, underscoring the extent to which they broke from premodern Thomist theories of natural law, whose default mode of property relations were communal. It then shows how Locke deployed the most effective legitimation of capitalism by locating the original mechanism by which property is privatised in ‘the hand that grabs’ – by corporealising it. The chapter then turns to the particular, labouring bodies that were explicitly excluded from Locke’s embodied labour theory of value: slaves. Slavery was not simply a practice Locke was deeply invested in personally, or an embarrassing but secondary feature of his political writings. It was, rather, part and parcel of the constitutive logic by which he articulated a racialised right to private property.

The Corporeal Ontology of Modern Security

This chapter examines the corporeal ontology of statehood, tracing how it first emerged as a specific solution to the religious wars that were raging through Europe in the seventeenth century. It focuses on Thomas Hobbes and the new political technology of raison d’état (reason of state). The state, Hobbes argued, was created to address the ongoing threat of conflict; hence, security is its raison d’être. Hobbes demonstrated why matters of the conscience and the soul were not for the state; indeed, that its appropriate ‘matter’ is the body. The chapter then demonstrates how the body emerged from this singular convergence of political thought and practice at the seventeenth century’s midpoint as the site where the founding relation of modern sovereignty was sealed, and that somatic security is the original form that this relation took. This relation is what the state (and private actors) continues to tap into today when it promises to keep people safe. It also shapes the subject’s expectations towards their state.

Externalising and Internalising Liberty via Discipline

The role of the fundamental right to liberty in the making of the modern individual, or individualisation, is at the heart of this chapter. It tracks the place of the body in Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s texts on liberty respectively, arguing that, whereas Hobbes externalised political liberty by rooting it solely in the body, Locke instead re-internalised it by bringing into focus the mind and the body. At the heart of Lockean liberty stands a Calvinist conscience, which Locke durably established as a pillar of political modernity. The centrality of the conscience to Locke’s liberty establishes him as the first theoretician of modern discipline. Locke brought back together two distinct functions of the conscience, the moral and the epistemological, which were initially folded together in the theological notion, but had been separated out by Hobbes and Descartes schematically. Key to this recovery of the conscience was another concept that Locke coined for modernity: ‘consciousness’. Together with ‘the mind’, it enabled Locke to negotiate a complicated relationship with the old faculty of ‘reason’. The chapter then analyses how Locke’s epistemological distinctions play out in his political thought, by tracing successively the roles of discipline in his pedagogical treatises, and that of punishment in his legal projects. I argue that Locke conceived the modern state in terms of an exclusive membership of reasonable consenters, to which some innately belonged while others did not (and never would). The chapter’s last part considers the central role of the figure of the criminal in constituting the Lockean polity as an exclusive and exclusionary space, against a historical backdrop where traditional modes of living were being fast criminalised to enable the take-off of capitalism.

Introduction

This introduction discusses the wide spectrum of approaches concerned with analysing processes of social construction, broadly known as ‘constructivism’. It is interested not merely in ‘the construction of’, but properly in the ‘constitution’ of the modern political, and in how this implicates a specific form of creative political agency. The variant of radical constructivism developed in this book is termed ‘constitutive constructivism’. The chapter then elucidates the book’s recourse to the body as an optic and situates it in relation to other somatic enquiries. It explains the different ways in which the body features in the book. The book considers the body as a catalytic object of modern science, as the privileged organ of this new knowledge, and as a crucial historical vehicle for the work of naturalisation. It also distinguishes between ‘the body’ in the singular and multiple ‘bodies’. The chapter shows where the body-as-optic maps onto feminist theories of embodiment and the works of Michel Foucault. Finally, it presents three key themes running throughout the book that help circumscribe the specific juncture of the scientific and the political the book explores. These are, first, the passage from a medieval-Aristotelian notion of ‘place’ to the modern concept of ‘space’, via the new understanding of ‘motion’; second, the early modern scientific problematization of difference and identity and how it played political questions of hierarchy and equality; third, the varieties of forms of reason that were taking shape in the midst of the scientific revolution, and their relations to both the early modern practice of ‘critique’ and to the question of authority.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter returns to modernity’s defining problematique: ordering, understood coextensively as an epistemological and a political project. It discusses the extent to which the body operated as the great naturaliser of history—working to stabilise political construction, and notably the racialised and gendered figures that entered into the making of the modern category of ‘the human’ from the onset. The chapter also considers the two sets of processes, of putting together and of dividing up, that took the body as their referent and produced, respectively, the state and the individual who bears rights. It then examines the relations between construction, constitution, and another kind of corporeal agency altogether: generation (giving birth). Generation, as the distinctive agentic capacity that indexes only one kind of body, the female one, functioned throughout the seventeenth century as the ‘other’ to constitution, to the agency that was being expended and experimented with to craft the state and the subject of rights. Finally, the chapter looks at the duty of critique, considering it in its relation to agency and to the urgency of taking responsibility for the world in which people live, and therefore for changing it.