From the Kings House to the Reason of State a Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field

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 Kings House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field

Pierre Bourdieu

The aim of this project is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try andidentify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison dEtat), whichthe self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by thestate minds of state and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task athand 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 thishistorical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucraticform; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process ofautonomization of a bureaucratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than toconstruct a model of this process more precisely, a model of the transition fromthe 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 strugglesoriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods.

As R.J. Bonney points out, when studying the modern nation-state we areliable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: For the greater part ofthe period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority ofEuropean monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the perhaps fortuitous exception of France.2 Absent a clear distinction between thedynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the specificity of themodern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up tothe bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinitionperformed in its course. (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny thename of state to the dynastic state, as J.W. Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes thelimited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an electionrequiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by fac-tional, princely politics characterized by patrimonial strategies oriented towardsensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates. One finds herenone of the features of the modern state. It is only in the France and England ofthe seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modernstate appear. European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by thepersonal, proprietary vision of princes over their government, by the weight ofthe feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define thenorms of political life.)

From the Kings House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 17

2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The Specificity of the Dynastic StateThe initial accumulation of capital is performed according to the logic character-istic of the house (maison), an entirely original economic and social structure,particularly on account of the system of strategies of reproduction through whichit ensures its perpetuation. The king, acting as head of the house, makes use ofthe properties of the house (in particular nobility as symbolic capital accumulatedby a domestic group through a range of strategies, of which the most important ismarriage) to construct a state, as administration and as territory, that graduallyescapes from the logic of the house.

We must pause for some methodological preliminaries: the ambiguity of thedynastic state, which, from its origin, presents some modern features (e.g., theaction of jurists who enjoy a measure of autonomy vis--vis dynastic mechanismsdue to their technical competency and reliance on the academic mode of repro-duction), invites readings that tend to unravel the ambiguity of historical reality.The temptation of ethnologism can rest on archaic features such as coronation,which may be reduced to a primitive rite of consecration so long as one forgetsthat it is preceded by acclamation; or on the curing of scrofula, a warrant ofhereditary charisma transmitted by blood and divine delegation. Conversely,ethnocentrism (and the anachronism that comes with it) can point to isolatedindicators of modernity, such as the existence of abstract principles and lawsproduced by the canonists. But, above all, a superficial understanding of ethnologyprevents one from drawing on the teachings of the anthropology of house-basedsocieties to carry out a rigorous anthropology of the apex of the state.

One can posit that the most fundamental features of the dynastic state can, as itwere, be deduced from the model of the house. For the king and his family, thestate is identified with the kings house, understood as a patrimony encompass-ing a household, that is, the royal family itself, which the king must manage as agood head of the house (capmaysou, as the Barnais put it). Comprising thewhole lineage and its possessions, the house transcends the individuals whoincarnate it, starting with its head himself who must be able to sacrifice his par-ticular interests or sentiments to the perpetuation of his material and above allsymbolic patrimony (the honor of the house or the name of the lineage).

According to Andrew W. Lewis, the mode of succession defines the kingdom.4Royalty is an honor transmissible in hereditary agnatic line (the right of blood)and by primogeniture, and the state or royalty is reduced to the royal family. Inthe dynastic model, first established in the royal family and then generalized tothe whole nobility, the principal honor and the individual patrimonial lands go tothe eldest son, the heir, whose marriage is treated as a political matter of theutmost importance. One guards against the threat of division by assigning apan-ages to the younger sons, a compensation aimed to ensure harmony among thebrothers (in their testaments the kings urge each of them to accept his share andnot rebel), by marrying them to heiresses or placing them in the Church.

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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 theeconomic group and the sovereignty group.5 Paternal power constitutes thepattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance. As intraditional Kabylia, political relationships are not autonomized with respect tokinship relations and are always thought after those relations; the same goes foreconomic relations. Power rests on personal relationships and affective relation-ships such as fealty,6 love, and credit, which are socially instituted andactively maintained, especially through largesses (gifts and grants).

The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for atime is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the house and of the dynasticstate which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it. PhilipIV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; thefamily is divided into various chambers, specialized services that followthe king in his travels. The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor ofthe bonds of blood. This is how one can understand the mythology of the kingstwo bodies, which has so fascinated historians since Kantorowicz, and whichsymbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the personwho temporally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among thepeasants of Barn, where the male members of the house, understood as thetotality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were oftendesignated 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 familyname).7 The king is head of the house, socially mandated to implement adynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in theservice of the greatness and prosperity of his house.

A number of matrimonial strategies have the aim of fostering territorialextensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch.One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerablyenlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriagepolicy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comt and the Netherlands by hismarriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip theFair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was bornCharles V. Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with theso-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursuing successional strategies byother means.

The war of succession of Castile (147479) is a well-known case: if Isabella had not won,the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would havebecome possible. Charles Vs war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders intoBurgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg statewould have been formed around Cleves, Jlich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee. Butthe partition of Cleves and Jlich 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 Norwayended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark and Sweden which followed, thequestion arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the Houseof Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved and Sweden attained its naturalborders. In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynasticunion of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union in 1569. But thedynastic 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 Muscovyand in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup dtat by theboyars.8

One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape theteleological vision founded on the retrospective illusion which makes the con-struction of France a project pursued by the successive kings. Thus Cheruel, forexample, in his Histoire de ladministration monarchique en France, explicitlyrefers to the will of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state and itis not without some surprise that one sees some historians condemning theinstitution of apanages as a dismemberment of the royal domain.

The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynasticstates 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 particularassets available to the royal family which enabled it to triumph in the competitionwith its rivals. (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitlyposed the question, offers, with what he calls the law of monopoly, a solutionthat I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentiallyverbal and almost tautological: If, in a major social unit, a large number of thesmaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the largerone, 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 somewill be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer andfewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will beeliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on anever-decreasing number.9)

Endowed with the semi-liturgical power that sets him apart from all otherpotentates, his rivals,10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty,which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies adistinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation ofsymbolic capital. He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that heis 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 toeconomists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at leastto some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the othersreckon 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, theking 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 onlythrough him and he can monitor alliances. He is therefore situated above thefray 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 MuzaffarAlam, which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of NorthernIndia, correlative of the waning of imperial authority and the reinforcement of theauthority 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 unfetteredpolitical and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the declineof imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to winthe allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power. All of them strug-gled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each others position andachievements. Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance overthe others. When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed acentre to legitimize their acquisitions.11)

The Specific Contradictions of the Dynastic StateThe initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: thenascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, academic mode of managementand reproduction associated with it) remains the personal property of a housewhich continues to follow a patrimonial mode of management and reproduction.The king dispossesses private powers but for the benefit of a private power; heperpetuates, within his own dynasty, a familial mode of reproduction antinomicwith that he is establishing (or is being established) within the bureaucracy (byreference to merit and competency). He concentrates the various forms of power,in particular economic and symbolic power, and redistributes them in personalforms (largesses) liable to inducing personal forms of attachment. Whenceall kinds of contradictions that play a decisive role in the transformation of thedynastic state, although historians generally fail to count them among the factorsof rationalization (such as competition between states international wars requirethe concentration and rationalization of power, a self-sustaining process sincepower is needed to make the war which calls for the concentration of power or competition between central and local powers).

One notes first, until a late date, the permanence of old structures of the patri-monial type. There is, for example, the survival, observed by Roland Mousnier,even within the most bureaucratized sector, of the pattern master/faithful servant,protector/creature.12 Seeking to show that one cannot rely solely on the historyof institutions in order to understand the real functioning of governmental institu-tions, Richard Bonney writes:



It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind thefaade 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 theimportance of a minister, a secretary of state, an intendant, or a kings counselordepended less on his title than on his influence or that of his patron. His influencewas determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronagehe enjoyed.13

Another revealing feature is the existence of family-based clans (often designatedby the misleading name of parties), which paradoxically contributed indirectlyto imposing bureaucratization: The great noble clans, whether loyal or dissident,were structural to the monarchy and the favorite, either dissident or liable tobe so, exerts his absolute power against the royal family.14

Paradoxically, the ambiguities of a system of government that mingles thedomestic and the political, the kings house and the reason of state, are no doubtone of the major causes of the strengthening of the bureaucracy, owing to the con-tradictions they engender: the emergence of the state arises in part thanks to themisunderstandings born from the fact that one can, in all good faith, describe theambiguous structures of the dynastic state in a language, that of law in particular,which gives them a quite different foundation and thereby paves the way for theirsupersession. It was by expressing itself in the language of Roman law, assistedby an ethnocentric interpretation of the juridical texts, that the dynastic principlewas gradually converted, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a new,properly statist principle. The dynastic principle, which plays a central role asearly as the time of the Capetians (as attested to by the crowning of the heir inchildhood), reaches its full development with the constitution of the royal family,consisting of the men and women having royal blood in their veins (princes ofthe blood). The typically dynastic metaphor of the royal blood is elaboratedthrough the logic of Roman law, which uses the word blood to express filiation(jura sanguinis). Thus, when Charles V restructured the necropolis of SaintDenis, all persons of royal blood (even women and children, boys and girls, evenif they died young) were buried around Saint Louis.

The juridical principle relies on reflection about the typically dynastic notionof the crown as a principle of sovereignty standing above the royal person. Fromthe fourteenth century, it is an abstract word that designates the kings estate(crown domains, crown revenue) and dynastic continuity, the chain of kingsin which his person is but a link.15 The crown implies the inalienability of thefeudal lands and rights of the royal domain, and then of the kingdom itself; itevokes the dignitas and majestas of the royal function (progressively distin-guished from the person of the king). Thus, with the idea of the crown, the notionof an autonomous entity, independent of the king as individual, takes shape littleby little through a reinterpretation of the idea of the house transcending its ownmembers. The jurists are no doubt inclined to effect a creative confusion betweenthe dynastic representation of the house, which still drives them, and the juridical



representation of the state as corpus mysticum in the manner of the Church(according to Kantorowiczs schema).

Paradoxically, it is the weight of kinship structures and the threats that palacewars bring for the perpetuation of the dynasty and the power of the prince thatfoster everywhere, from ancient empires to modern states, the development offorms of authority independent of kinship in their functioning as in their repro-duction. The state as concern is the site of an opposition analogous to thatwhich Berle and Means have introduced about the business corporation,between the hereditary owners of power and the managers, recruited for theircompetency and lacking property titles16 an opposition that one must becareful not to reify, as happened in the case of the firm. The demands of intra-dynastic struggles (especially among brothers) are at the basis of the firstoutlines of a division of the labor of domination. It is the heirs who must rely onthe managers to perpetuate themselves; it is they who, quite often, must resortto the new resources secured by bureaucratic centralization to prevail over thethreats represented by their dynastic rivals. This is the case, for example, whena king uses the resources accrued by the Treasury to buy off the heads of rivallineages or, more subtly, when he monitors the competition among his kinsmenby hierarchically distributing the symbolic profits granted by the organizationof the court.

One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with,alongside the king, the kings brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whoseauthority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the kings ministers,typically homines novi, new men recruited for their competency. One can say,at the cost of some simplification, that the king needs ministers to limit andcontrol the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers tolimit and control the power of his ministers.

The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agriculturalproducers living in communities closed unto themselves and dominated by a minoritywho ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), andthe management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear breakwith family bonds by instituting great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from politicalreproduction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links withthe people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial servicesof the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are theproperty of the state and whose goods and position can revert to the state at any time.17In ancient Egypt there was a clear-cut distinction between the royal family and the senioradministration, with power delegated to new men rather than to members of the royalfamily. Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slaveand functionary; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of the Medes and Persians, thetop civil servants were often Greeks. The same was true in the Mongol Empire, wheresenior administrators were almost all foreigners.18

The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire. From RacinesBajazet 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 theprinces brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires ofthe ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, whorose to the positions of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with acosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the collecting of talents ensured asupply of devoted individuals. The Ottoman term kul means both slave and servantof the state.

One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division of the labor ofdomination between the heirs, dynastic rivals endowed with reproductive cap-acity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful butdeprived of reproductive capacity: to limit the power of the hereditary membersof the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to thedynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve andwho can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at anymoment.

But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented byany 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 ofreproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed tocelibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastictype, 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 thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because itescaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship and because ithad no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.)

Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effectsof 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 thoselands. Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that arestrictly limited to the incumbents lifetime (cf. priestly celibacy), in particular byrecourse to oblates (parvenus, rootless individuals), even pariahs. The oblate isthe absolute antithesis to the kings brother: depending on the state (or, in anothercontext, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, towhich he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personalforce. The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment becast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of thestate (as with the boursiers, the scholarship boys, who achieved miraculous



mobility thanks to the educational system, especially during Frances ThirdRepublic).

As in the agrarian empires, in the France of Philippe Auguste the bureaucracywas recruited from among homines novi of low birth. And, as has already beenseen, the kings of France continually relied on favorites, distinguished, as theword itself implies, by an arbitrary choice, to thwart the power of the magnates.There were endless struggles between those (genealogically) closest to the kingand the favorites who supplanted them in the kings favor:

Catherine de Mdicis detests dpernon and seek by every means to oust him. Mariede Mdicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630]. GastondOrlans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny becausehe comes between the king and his family. On this account, the levy doubles becausethe favorite, now become first minister, needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed inorder to attract clienteles who would otherwise swell the ranks of his opponents. Thefabulous wealth of the dpernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with themeans to carry out their policies. Through dpernon and Joyeuse, Henri II controlsthe 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 ofthe specialist and of technical competency (techn) as principle of a virtually autonomousand therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guene points out, until 1388functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In manyancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communitiesthe artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer,etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatment, and was both fearedand 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 OttomanEmpire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted tomonopolize religious power. According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of themonopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept awayfrom the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they couldnot conspire together. These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that wereculturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control overthe means of coercion and marks of honor. They were abandoned to outcasts who allowedthe dominant group and its representatives to see them fullfilled while officially rejectingthem. The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus contained, bythe very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their fullprofits, especially in the political arena.

The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like theminorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renownedfor their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goodsand services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to beauthorized 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 powersand 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 favoriteis to the kings brothers or the members of the kings house.

The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between thekings brothers and the kings ministers) lies in the conflict between two modes ofreproduction. Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of powerbecomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, thenthe jurists who introduce Roman law and, later, Parliament, then the merchantsand the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of thelabor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, even contradictorycharacter of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of powerbecomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproductionbased on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to thatit is simutaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development ofeducation, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants. It fosters thecoexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureau-cratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency andmerit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding theprinciple 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 (ornoblesse 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 modeof reproduction (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a bureau-cratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school.

The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of RecognitionBut the essential point is that, like the medieval seigneury as described by MarcBloch, the dynastic state is a territory whose exploitation is organized in amanner such that part of its products goes to a single character, who is bothchief and master of the soil.26 Notwithstanding the impersonal and bureaucraticelements it may entail, the dynastic state remains oriented towards the person ofthe king: it concentrates different species of capital, various forms of power andmaterial and symbolic resources (money, distinctions, titles, indulgences, andexemptions) in the hands of the king so that the latter can, by means of selectiveredistribution, establish or maintain relations of dependency (a clientele) or,better, of personal gratitude, and perpetuate his power.

Thus, for example, the money accumulated through state taxation is continu-ously redistributed to very specific categories of subjects (particularly in the form



of the pay of soldiers and the salaries of civil servants, administrators and justiceofficials), so that the genesis of the state is inseparable from the genesis of agroup of agents whose interests are bound up with it, who have a vested interestin 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, bythe number of Easter communicants, but rather by the number of those whodirectly or indirectly owe the economic and social foundations of their socialexistence, in particular their income, to the Church, and who are for this reasoninterested in its existence.)

The state is a profitable enterprise, firstly for the king himself and for those towhom he extends the benefit of his largesses. The struggle to make the state thusbecomes increasingly indissociable from a struggle to appropriate the profitsassociated with the state (a struggle which shall extend ever more widely with theadvent of the welfare state). As Denis Crouzet has shown,27 the battles forinfluence around the throne had as stake the capture of central positions liable toprocure the financial advantages that the nobles needed to maintain their standardof living (whence, for example, the support of Duc de Nevers for Henri II or theyoung Guises siding with Henri IV in exchange for 1.2 million pounds destinedto pay off his fathers debts). In short, the dynastic state institutes the privateappropriation of public resources by a few. Just as the personal bond of the feudaltype is made contractual and remunerated no longer with land but with money orpower, so the parties fight among themselves, especially within the kingscouncil, for control over the circuit of taxation.

The ambiguity of the dynastic state is perpetuated (it will continue under otherguises after the disappearance of that state) because there exists particular, privateinterests and profits in appropriating what is public and universal, and becauseever-renewed opportunities arise for such appropriation: namely, over andbeyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices from thefourteenth century on and the heredity character of public offices the Pauletedict of 1604 made them private property instituted a new feudalism.28 Royalpower 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 idealwould be to concentrate and redistribute the totality of resources, therebycompletely controlling the process of production of symbolic capital. In reality,however, owing to the division of the labor of domination, there are alwaysleakages: the servants of the state always tend to serve themselves directly(instead of waiting for redistribution) by creaming off and diverting material andsymbolic resources. Thence a veritable structural corruption which, as Pierre-tienne Will has shown, is above all the deed of intermediate authorities: asidefrom regular irregularities, that is, extortions aimed at covering personaland professional costs, of which it is hard to determine whether it pertains toinstitutionalized corruption or to the informal financing of expenses, thereare all the advantages that lower-level functionaries can derive from their stra-



tegic position in the upward and downward circulation of information, either byselling vital data to the higher authorities or by refusing to pass on a request, or bydoing so only in exchange for payment, or yet by refusing to transmit an order.30More generally, the holders of a delegated authority can derive all kinds of profitfrom their position as intermediaries. In accordance with the logic of the law andits exemptions,31 any administrative act or process can be blocked or delayed, orfacilitated and speeded up (in exchange for a sum of money). The subordinateoften possesses an advantage over his superiors (and over supervising agencies inparticular): he is close to the field and, when he is well-established in his post,he is often part of the local society. (Jean-Jacques Laffont has proposed formalmodels of supervision conceived in terms of the theoy of contracts as a gamebetween three players, the entrepreneur, the supervisor, and the operatives.32Although the model gives a fairly good account of the strategic position of thesupervisor, who can threaten the workers with revealing information e.g.,identify who is responsible for poor results and hide the truth from theemployer, it seems rather unrealistic: it ignores in particular both the effects ofdispositions and the constraints of the bureaucratic field, which can imposecensorship on egoistic inclinations).

This having been said, one can describe corruption as a leakage in the processof accumulation and concentration of statist capital: direct embezzlement andredistribution which allow for the accumulation of economic and symbolic capitalat the lower levels (that of the proconsuls or feudal lords who are kings on asmaller scale) forbid or slow down the transition from feudalism to empire orfoster a regression from empire back to feudalism.

The Logics of the Process of BureaucratizationThus the first assertion of the distinction between the public and the privatecomes within the sphere of power. It leads to the constitution of a properly polit-ical order of public authorities, endowed with its own logic (the reason of state),its autonomous values, its specific language, and distinct from the domestic(royal) and the private. This distinction will eventually spread to the whole ofsocial life; but it must as it were start with the king, in the mind of the king and ofhis entourage, whom everything inclines, in a kind of institutional narcissism, toconfound the resources or interests of the institution with the resources andinterests of the person. The formula Ltat, cest moi expresses above all theconflation of the public order and the private order that defines the dynastic stateand against which the bureaucratic state will have to be constructed, based as it ison the dissociation of the position and its occupant, the function and the function-ary, the public interest and private interests disinterestedness being an essentialattribute of the civil servant.

The court is a space at once public and private. It can even be described as aconfiscation of social capital and symbolic capital for the benefit of one person,



a monopolization of public space. Patrimonialism is this kind of permanent coupdtat whereby a private individual appropriates public goods, a diversion of theproperties and profits attached to the function for the benefit of the person (it cantake very diverse forms and, while particularly visible in the dynastic phase, itremains a permanent possibility in later phases, with the President of the Republicusurping the attributes of the monarch or, in a quite different order of things,the professor playing the minor prophet stipended by the state of which Weberwrites). Personal power, which need be not at all absolute, is a private appropriationof public might and the private exercise of that might (viz. the Italian principalities).

The gradual rupture with the dynastic state takes the form of the dissociationbetween imperium (public might) and dominium (private power), between thepublic space, the forum, the agora, as the place of aggregation of the congregatedpeople, and the palace (for the Greeks the foremost feature of barbarian cities wastheir lack of an agora). The concentration of political means is accompanied bythe political expropriation of private powers: Everywhere the development ofthe modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way forthe expropriation of the autonomous and private bearers of executive powerwho stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means ofadministration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usablegoods of all sorts.33 But, more generally, the process of defeudalizationimplies a severing of natural bonds (of kinship) and natural processes ofreproduction, that is, those not mediated by a non-domestic agency royal power,bureaucracy, educational institution, etc. The state is essentially an antiphysis: itinstitutes (the noble, the heir, the judge, etc.), It appoints, it is bound up withinstitution, constitution, nomos, that which exists by law, nom (ex instituto), asopposed to phusei, by nature. It institutes itself in and through the establishmentof a specific loyalty that implies a rupture with all original loyalties towardsethnic group, caste, family, etc. In all this the state stands in opposition to thespecific logic of kinship, which, arbitrary as it is, remains the most natural ornaturalizable (via blood connections) of social institutions.

This process of defeudalization of the state goes hand in hand with the devel-opment of a specific mode of reproduction in which scholastic education plays animportant part. (In ancient China, the functionary had to have a specific educationand be totally detached from private interests.) The universities, which appearedas early as the twelfth century, burgeoned throughout Europe from the fourteenthcentury under the impulse of the princes: they fulfilled an essential role intraining the servants of the state, lay or clerical. But, more generally, the genesisof the state is inseparable from a veritable cultural mutation: from the twelfthcentury in western Europe, the mendicant orders that developed in the urbansetting brought to a lay audience a literature hitherto reserved solely for highlycultured churchmen. Thus began an educational process that accelerated withthe foundation of urban schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and theinvention of printing.



Correlative of the development of education, the substitution of nominationby public authorities for the inheritance of offices had as its consequence theclericalization of the nobility (particularly visible in Japan). As Marc Blochobserved, England was a unified state long before any other European kingdombecause there public office was not completely identified with fiefdom. Veryearly on, non-hereditary royal officials, the sheriffs, were directly appointed. TheCrown resisted feudal fragmentation by governing through agents drawn from thelocal society but appointed by it and similarly liable to being removed from office(Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer situate the generalized shift from the house-hold to bureaucratized forms of government around 1530). At the same time, thenobility became demilitarized: Most of the landowning class was, during theTudor epoch, turning away from its traditional training in arms to an education atthe universities or the Inns of Court.34 Similarly, the militia became a stateprerogative, with the shift from private magnate, commanding his own servants,to lord lieutenant, acting under royal commission.35

In the same way that the feudal nobility converted themselves into officersappointed by the king, so the French curia regis turned into a genuine administra-tion. In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the Parlement de Paris and theChambre des comptes emerged from it, followed by the Grand Conseil in thefifteenth; the process was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century,with the establishment of the Conseils du gouvernement (held in the presence ofthe king and chancellor) and the Conseils dadministration et de justice.36 (Butthe process of nominal differentiation Conseil troit, Conseil des affaires,Conseil secret, called, after 1643, Conseil den haut, Conseil des dpches,created around 1650, Conseil des finances, Conseil du commerce, 1730 conceals a deep interlocking of their business.)

Feudal government is personal: it is ensured by a group of men surrounding thesovereign, barons, bishops, and commoners on whom the king can count. Fromthe middle of the twelfth century the English monarchs started to recruit churchmen,but the development of common law in England and Roman law on the continentled them to rely more on more on laymen. A new group thus appeared that owedits position to its professional competency, and therefore to the state and itsculture: the civil servants.

It is in this light that one can understand the decisive role of the clerks, whoserise accompanies the emergence of the state and of whom one can say that theycreate the state which creates them, or that they make themselves by making thestate. From the beginning, their interests are bound up with it: they have their ownmode of reproduction and, as Georges Duby indicates, from the twelfth centurythe top- and middle-rank bureaucracy comes almost entirely from thecolleges.37 They would gradually construct their specific institutions, the mosttypical of which is the Parlement, guardian of the law (especially civil law, which,from the second half of the twelfth century, becomes autonomized from canonlaw). Endowed with specific resources suited to the needs of administration, such



as writing and law, they secure a monopoly over the most typically statistresources very early on. Their intervention indisputably contributes to the ration-alization of power: first, as Duby notes, they introduce rigor into the exercise ofpower, by giving standard form to judgments and keeping records;38 next, theyimplemented the mode of thinking typical of canon law and the scholastic logicupon which it is founded (with, for example, the distinguo, the quaestio, and theplay 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 ideaof state on the model of the Church in treatises on power that refer to HolyScripture, the Book of Kings, and Saint Augustine, but also to Aristotle, in whichkingship is conceived as a magistrature (he who holds it by inheritance is Godselect but, to show himself to be a good guardian of the res publica, he must takeaccount of its nature and make good use of reason). Following Georges Dubyagain,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 controlaffective pulsions, to act lucidly in light of ones intelligence, with a sense ofproportion, and courtesy, an instrument of social regulation. (In contrast toNorbert Elias, who portrays the state as the fount of the civilizing process,Duby suggests, very rightly, that the clerical invention of courtesy contributed tothe 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 stateby producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public. Thepolitical philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictiveof its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (oneof the first users of the notion of raison dtat) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau orBodin, as simple theories of the state forbid themselves from understanding thedistinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of stateinstitutions.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 notionof corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques andoperational models (often borrowed from the ecclesiastical tradition and destinedto undergo a process of secularization), a stock of solutions and precedents.(As Sarah Hanley shows very clearly, there was a constant to-and-fro betweenjuridical theory and royal or parliamentary practice.41) So much to say that onecannot simply draw from the reality the concepts (e.g., sovereignty, coup dtat)one intends to use to understand that reality, of which they partake and whichthey helped make. It also means that to adequately understand political writings,which, far from being simple theoretical descriptions, are veritable practicalprescriptions, intended to bring into being a new type of social practice by givingit a meaning and a purpose, one must reinsert the works and their authors in theenterprise 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 juristsand also to the central power can be at the basis of their theoretical construction.(A close reading of William Farr Churchs book on constitutional thought in earlymodern France42 suggests that the lgistes were distinguished by theoreticalstances that varied according to their distance from the court: absolutistdiscourse tended to come from those jurists closest to the central power whoestablished a clear division between the king and his subjects and removed allreference to intermediate powers such as the tats gnraux, whereas the Parle-ments had more ambiguous positions). Everything leads one to hypothesize thatthe 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 boundup. (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers tat during the General Estates of161415 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 ofmagistrates, of gentlemen of pen and ink as the first among the orders, to placein the first rank not the armed service but the civil service of the state; and also ofthe struggles, within the crystallizing field of power, between the king and theParlement, construed by some as a body legitimating royal power, by others asintended to limit it, to which the lit de justice gave rise.43) In short, those whomade perhaps the clearest contribution to the advance of reason and the universalhad a clear interest in the universal; one can even say that they had a privateinterest in the public interest.44

But it does not suffice to describe the logic of this process of imperceptibletransformation leading to the emergence of this historically unprecedented socialreality that is modern bureaucracy, i.e., the institution of a relatively autonomousadministrative field, independent of politics (denegation) and of the economy(disinterestedness) and obeying the specific logic of the public. Beyond theintuitive half-understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finishedstate, one must try to reconstruct the deep sense of the series of infinitesimal andyet all equally decisive inventions the bureau, signature, stamp, decree ofappointment, certificate, register, circular, etc. that led to the establishment of aproperly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in thissense, has all the appearances of rationality even as it is invested with the mostmysterious properties of magical efficacy.

The Circuit of Delegation and the Genesis of the Administrative FieldThe progressive dissociation of dynastic authority (the kings brothers) andbureaucratic authority was concretely effected through the differentiation ofpower and, more precisely, through the lengthening of the chains of authority andagency. One could say, for the sake of a pleasing formula, that the (impersonal)



state is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into theimpersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who areanswerable 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 fromhim and which they monitor and ratify by executing.

To understand what is so extraordinary about this shift from personal tobureaucratic power, one must return once more to a moment typical of the longtransition 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 theEnglish tradition calls the cabinet, non-hereditary but invested with power overthe seals. This is an extremely complex movement with advances and retreats,which different agents effect at varying rates depending on the interests attachedto their positions, and which encounters countless obstacles, linked in particularto habits of thought and unconscious dispositions. Thus, as Jacques Le Goffnotes, the bureaucracy is first understood according to model of the family; oragain, the kings ministers, still attached to the dynastic vision, sometimes wantto ensure the hereditary transmission of offices.

In his Constitutional History of England, F.W. Maitland evokes the evolutionof practices regarding the royal seals.45 From the Norman period, the royal willwas signified by acts, charters, and letters patent, closed and sealed with the royalseal, which warranted their authenticity. The great seal was entrusted to theChancellor, head of the entire secretariat. In the late Middle Ages and throughoutthe whole Tudor period, the Chancellor was the sovereigns first minister. Littleby little other seals appeared. Because the Chancellor used the great seal formany 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 underhis privy seal. The latter was later entrusted to an officer, the Keeper of thePrivy Seal. In due course, an even more private secretary, the kings clerk orkings secretary, intervened between the monarch and these great officers ofstate as keeper of the kings signet. Under the Tudors, there were two secretar-ies to the king, who were designated as secretaries of state. A routine came tobe established whereby documents signed by the kings hand, the royal signmanual, and countersigned by the secretary of state (keeper of the kings signet),were sent to the Keeper of the Privy Seal as directives for the documents to beissued under the privy seal; these in turn served as instructions to the Chancellorto issue documents bearing the great seal of the kingdom. This act implied adegree of ministerial responsibility for the acts of the king: no act was legallyvalid unless it bore the great seal or at least the privy seal, which verified that aminister had committed himself in this expression of the royal will. Ministerswere therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared beingchallenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeedroyal 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 Sealwas anxious to have the kings hand-written signature validated by the kingssecretary. As for the king, he found many advantages in this procedure: it made itincumbent upon the ministers to look after the kings interests, to know the stateof his affairs, and to make sure that he was not being deceived or misled. He actedunder the warranty but also under the oversight of his ministers, whose respon-sibility was engaged in the acts of the sovereign which they guaranteed (duringthe reign of Elizabeth, an oral order could not suffice to commit expenditure andthe 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 andresponsibilities, came into being a veritable public order founded upon a degree ofreciprocity within hierarchical relations themselves: the executant is bothcontrolled and protected by the decision-makers; and, from his vantage point, theexecutant controls and protects his superior, in particular against the abuse ofpower and the arbitrary exercise of authority. Everything takes place as if the morea rulers power increases, the greater his dependency on a whole network of exe-cutive relays. In one sense, the freedom and responsibility of each agent isreduced, 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 itselfbecame a point (an apex) in a field. (The growing differentiation of the field ofpower 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 fieldsand is for this reason the stake of struggles among the dominant from the differentfields.)

The lengthening of the chains of delegation and the development of a complexstructure 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, thatthe potential for misappropriation (via direct extraction) increases, since centralpatrimonialism can coexist with local patrimonialism (based on the familialinterests of the civil servants or corporate solidarity). The dissociation of thefunction from the person occurs only gradually, as if the bureaucratic field werestill 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 ofthe individuals who chaired it or held it. It is the fact of being held by a personalitythat gave exceptional importance to an office hitherto considered secondary, orthat pushed to a lower tier a post deemed central by virtue of its previousincumbent. . . . 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 inpractice (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 privateinterest and public interest, or, to put it more clearly, the sacrifice of egoisticinterests, the renunciation of the private use of a public power. But the paradoxis that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with theappearance and accumulation of a public capital, and with the emergence ofthe bureaucratic field as a field of struggles for control over this capital andof the corresponding power, i.e., in particular power over the redistribution ofpublic resources and their associated profits. The state nobility, which, as DenisRichet has shown, asserted itself in France between the end of the sixteenthcentury and the beginning of the seventeenth, and whose reign was not to beinterrupted quite the contrary by the Revolution of 1789, bases its domina-tion on what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called fiscal capitalism and on themonopolization of high state positions with high profits.47 The bureaucraticfield, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state,which subordinated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentratedby the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a strugglefor power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits)and symbolic profits (honors, titles, etc.) it provides, a struggle reserved in factfor a minority of claimants designated by the quasi-hereditary possession ofeducational capital. One would need to analyze in detail the two-sided processfrom which the state has issued and which is inseparably universalization andmonopolization of the universal.

(Translated by Richard Nice and Loc Wacquant)

NOTES

This article originally appeared as De la maison du roi la raison dEtat: un modle dela gense du champ bureaucratique, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 118 (June 1997):5568. It is published here by kind permission of Jrome Bourdieu.

1. This text is the lightly revised transcript of a set of lectures given at the Collge de France.As a provisional summary intended mainly to serve as a research tool, it extends the analysis of theprocess of concentration of the various forms of capital ushering the constitution of a bureaucraticfield capable of controlling the other fields (cf. P. Bourdieu, Esprits dtat: Gense et structuredu champ bureaucratique, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 9697 (March 1993): 4962;English transl.: Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,Sociological Theory 121 (March 1994): 119.

2. R.J. Bonney, The European Dynastic States 15941660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991), and Guerre, fiscalit et activit dtat en France (15001660): Quelques remarques prlim-inaires sur les possibilits de recherche, in J.-P. Gent and M. Le Men, eds., Gense de lEtatmoderne. Prlvement et redistribution (Paris: ditions du CNRS, 1987), 19320, esp. 194.



3. J.W. Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel and the Secular and EcclesiasticalAuthorities in the Empire: Studies in the History of Christian Thought, XIII (Leiden: Brill, 1978),esp. 12631.

4. A.W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and theState (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1981).

5. M. Bloch, Seigneurie franaise et manoir anglais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960).6. G. Duby, Le Moyen ge (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 110.7. [Translators note: E. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study In Mediaeval

Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); P. Bourdieu, Le Bal desclibataires (Paris: Editions du Seuil/Points, 2002).]

8. Bonney, Guerre, fiscalit et activit dtat, 195.9. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, orig. 1939), 169.10. G. Duby, Preface to the French edition of A.W. Lewis, Le Sang royal. La famille capti-

enne et ltat, France, Xe-XIVe sicle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 9.11. M. Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 17081748

(Oxford & Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17 (my italics).12. R. Mousnier, Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses

universitaires de France, 1974), 8993.13. Bonney, Guerre, fiscalit et activit dtat, 199.14. J.-M. Constant, Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion, in

Gent and Le Men, eds., Gense de lEtat moderne, 224, 223.15. B. Gune, LOccident aux XIVe et XVe sicles. Les tats (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1971).16. A.A. Berle and G.C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York:

Macmillan, 1932).17. K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);

see in particular chapter 4 on the employment of real eunuchs.18. Paul Garelli, Jean-Marie Durant and Hatice Gonnet, Le Proche-Orient asiatique, Vol. 1:

Ses origines aux invasions des peuples de la mer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).19. R. Mantran, ed., LHistoire de lempire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 27, 1656.20. Ibid., 119 and 1715.21. Ibid., 161 and 16373.22. J.-M. Constant, Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,

223.23. B. Gune, LOccident aux XIVe et XVe sicles, 230.24. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).25. G. Duby, Le Moyen ge, 326.26. M. Bloch, Seigneurie franaise et manoir anglais, 17.27. D. Crouzet, La crise de laristocratie en France au XVIe sicle, Histoire, conomie, Socit

1 (1982).28. V.-L. Tapie, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1984), 55.29. F. Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit franais, des origines la Rvolution (Paris: ditions

du CNRS, 1996), 344.30. P.-E. Will, Bureaucratie officielle et bureaucratie relle. Sur quelques dilemmes de ladmin-

istration impriale lpoque des Qing, tudes chinoises 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 69141.31. P. Bourdieu, Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en uvre

des rglements, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 8182 (March 1990): 8696.32. J.-J. Laffont, Hidden Gaming in Hierarchies: Facts and Models, The Economic Record (1989):

295306.33. M. Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr., ed. and

with an introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press,1958), 82.



34. P. Williams, The Tudor Rgime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 241.35. P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 64.36. P. Goubert, Ancien Rgime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), vol. 2: 47.37. G. Duby, Le Moyen ge, 326.38. Ibid., 211.39. Ibid., 222.40. Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978).41. S. Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1983).42. W.F. Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolu-

tion of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1941.43. S. Hanley, Lit de Justice.44. On the history of the longue dure of the rise of the clerks and the gradual monopoliz-

ation of statist capital by the state nobility, beyond and because of the French Revolution,see P. Bourdieu, State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996[1989]), 369393.

45. F.W. Maitland, Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1948), 20203.

46. D. Richet, La France moderne. Lesprit des institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 7980.47. D. Richet, lite et noblesse: la formation des grands serviteurs de ltat fin XVIe-dbut

XVIIe sicle, Acta Poloniae Historica 36 (1977): 4763.

Documents

From the Kings House to the Reason of State a Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field