User:Nizolan/Body politic

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Unfinished sections for body politic:

Salus populi and the revolutionary body politic

From its ancient origins, the body politic metaphor was closely tied to the concept of the salus populi, the public welfare or safety.

Pufendorf: "The general Rule which Sovereigns are to proceed by" is "Let the Safety of the People be the Supreme Law"^[1]

Immunological turn (Esposito)

The French Revolution fundamentally altered the concept of the body politic by displacing the image of the king as its natural head: remarking on the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, the literary historian Ronald Paulson notes that "in the model of the Body Politic the king is the 'head' of state, and so it is appropriate, indeed necessary, that his removal should be accomplished by decapitation".^[2]

Esposito:

Rousseau: dismisses metaphor but reinstates it - "a moral and collective body"
Sieyès: "privileged classes" a "malignant tumour" - regeneration through purgatives
"Unlike the old concept of the body as a structure differentiated according to a clear hierarchy between its members ... what we have now is its representation as an integrated system of function", in which "potentially destructive elements can be used productively to strengthen the whole" (e.g. enemy infiltrators as purgatives, agents provocateurs).

When the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety—committee of salus populi—assumed power in the same year with the Law of 14 Frimaire, it invoked the image of the body politic explicitly, declaring to the local revolutionary committees:

Action, which issues from the heart of the Convention, culminates in you; you are like the hands of the body politic of which the Convention is the head, and of which we are the eyes; it is through you that the national will strikes as soon as its decision is taken.^[3]

The organic state

Hegelianism
Comte
Johann Caspar Bluntschli
Fascism

^ Skinner 2018, p. 368.
^ Landes, Joan B. (1992). "Representing the Body Politic: The Paradox of Gender in the Graphic Politics of the French Revolution". In Melzer, Sara E.; Rabine, Leslie W. (eds.). Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 35 n29. ISBN 978-0-195-07016-3.
^ Aulard, François-Alphonse (1965). The French Revolution: A Political History, 1789–1804. II: The Democratic Republic, 1792–1795. Translated by Miall, Bernard. New York: Russell & Russell. p. 270.

[1] Skinner 2018, p. 368.

[2] Landes, Joan B. (1992). "Representing the Body Politic: The Paradox of Gender in the Graphic Politics of the French Revolution". In Melzer, Sara E.; Rabine, Leslie W. (eds.). Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 35 n29. ISBN 978-0-195-07016-3.

[3] Aulard, François-Alphonse (1965). The French Revolution: A Political History, 1789–1804. II: The Democratic Republic, 1792–1795. Translated by Miall, Bernard. New York: Russell & Russell. p. 270.

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