The paper was attempting, very recklessly and compressedly, to tell a single story
(because I think it is a single story) which might, I now see, have been better presented in
three parts. In the light of the questions, I plan to separate them out roughly as follows:
The first part of the story is about sovereignty. This part of the story tells how
sovereignty replaced jurisdictional thinking as the default mode of theorising about
politics. This had the effect of replacing multiple sites of decision in different political
bodies with a single site of decision in a single body which monopolises political
authority. I wanted to show, firstly, that thinking about churches was central to this story
and, secondly, that it cannot be separated from a parallel story about the legitimacy of the
decisions taken, which is driven by the growing sentiment of individual selfdetermination that was spreading through Europe at the time, especially in religious and
commercial activities. These two stories converge in Hobbes, where the identification of
the state as the single site of authoritative decision is paralleled by an explanation of the
state as a framework of obligations individually undertaken: all rational individuals will
to live under the same laws. Subsequent western political thought (as I take it) follows in
these footsteps one way or another. I used Richard Baxter to try to show the strains that
the attempt to combine the two stories generates, in two directions: against the state as the
single source of authoritative decision in the one direction and against individual selfdetermination in the other (sects vs. the national church). This dynamic, I suggested, was
taken by Carl Schmitt to typify modern political thinking and practice: individual selfassertion in the realm of values threatened to escalate into a massively destructive freefor-all, and in the realm of politics it threatened to destroy the authority of the state from
the inside. Schmitt thought that Weber, Kelsen, and indeed most of his contemporaries,
were infected by the logic which produced it.
At the same time I was trying to tell another story, about how Weber had diagnosed a
problem in modern German political thinking and practice, a problem about the
relationship between norms and facts. On the one hand there were norms which
presented themselves authoritatively. On the other hand there was the phenomenon of
mass obedience. The problem was to account for the convergence between the two
stories distinguished above in this case: how, if at all, could the state be understood as
a site of voluntarily incurred obligation rather than simply as a scene of domination?
[Hobbes vs Baxter?] The solution was to change the way in which consensus, or
agreement, was located intellectually, from a presupposition of legitimacy to an
outcome of various legitimate processes which, taken together, validated the obedience
which otherwise had no obvious intellectual location (in practice, of course, it could be
given or withheld) and made it plausible to continue to claim that in some sense the
people governed themselves. I used Kelsen and Schmitt to illustrate how this claim, and
its grounds, could be interpreted in radically different ways. I deliberately left
the differences between the two unresolved, in order to show, as I hoped, the importance
of the wider imaginative frameworks which reconcile our normative claims and the facts
of the matter. This point about the constitutive role of fictions in political understanding
was the moral of the second story, and, suitably expanded, this is what the substance of
the read paper will be turned towards.
The third part of the story, in some ways the most important and the least well articulated,
was what I struggled to communicate in response to questions, especially Kinch's
question. What I wanted to say was that the idea of popular sovereignty combines within
its own terms the contradictory tendencies that mark out modern European political
thinking. So, when I said that, for us, if politics is simply domination, it isn't politics, I
meant that we conceive of modern politics in terms that are held in tension between the
poles of fatalism and voluntarism (I went back to the birth of modern European politics in
the paper to try to show this), and that the vitality of western political thinking is a
product of the unresolved competition between the tendencies towards one or the other
pole. It is possible to imagine the victory of one side in this struggle, but the results
would not be conceivable in the terms in which we currently think. I guess I had in
mind, or rather have in mind, something like Michael Oakeshott's vision of an ongoing
battle of styles (the politics of faith and the politics of scepticism) which are always
present in some proportion and which find their reflection in differences of emphasis,
direction of attention and so on (so Hume is different from Hobbes in some ways, as Paul
suggested, but he is also like Hobbes in other ways, so sometimes the distribution f goods
is emphasised over the inhibition of mass slaughter), and that political thinking is always
about finding a way of keeping the two tendencies together without overbalancing in
either direction.