From the kings house to the reason of state (Pierre Bourdieu)

From the King’s 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 and
identify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison d’Etat), which
the self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by the
state – minds of state – and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task at
hand is less to probe the factors involved in the emergence of the state than to pinpoint the logic of the historical process which governed the crystallization of this
historical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucratic
form; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process of
autonomization of a bureaucratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than to
construct a model of this process – more precisely, a model of the transition from
the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, from the state reduced to the household of the king to the state constituted as a field of forces and a field of struggles
oriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods.
As R.J. Bonney points out, when studying the “modern nation-state” we are
liable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: “For the greater part of
the period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority of
European monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the –
perhaps fortuitous – exception of France.”2 Absent a clear distinction between the
dynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the specificity of the
modern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up to
the bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinition
performed in its course. (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny the
name of state to the dynastic state, as J.W. Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes the
limited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an election
requiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by factional, princely politics characterized by patrimonial strategies oriented towards
ensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates. One finds here
none of the features of the modern state. It is only in the France and England of
the seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modern
state appear. European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by the

personal, “proprietary” vision of princes over their government, by the weight of
the feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define the
norms of political life.)
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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu

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The Specificity of the Dynastic State
The initial accumulation of capital is performed according to the logic characteristic of the house (maison), an entirely original economic and social structure,
particularly on account of the system of strategies of reproduction through which
it ensures its perpetuation. The king, acting as “head of the house,” makes use of
the properties of the house (in particular nobility as symbolic capital accumulated
by a domestic group through a range of strategies, of which the most important is
marriage) to construct a state, as administration and as territory, that gradually
escapes from the logic of the “house.”
We must pause for some methodological preliminaries: the ambiguity of the
dynastic state, which, from its origin, presents some “modern” features (e.g., the
action of jurists who enjoy a measure of autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic mechanisms
due to their technical competency and reliance on the academic mode of reproduction), 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 forgets
that it is preceded by acclamation; or on the curing of scrofula, a warrant of
hereditary charisma transmitted by blood and divine delegation. Conversely,
ethnocentrism (and the anachronism that comes with it) can point to isolated
indicators of modernity, such as the existence of abstract principles and laws
produced by the canonists. But, above all, a superficial understanding of ethnology

prevents one from drawing on the teachings of the anthropology of “house-based
societies” 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 it
were, be deduced from the model of the house. For the king and his family, the
state is identified with the “king’s house,” understood as a patrimony encompassing a household, that is, the royal family itself, which the king must manage as a
good “head of the house” (capmaysouè, as the Béarnais put it). Comprising the
whole lineage and its possessions, the house transcends the individuals who
incarnate it, starting with its head himself who must be able to sacrifice his particular interests or sentiments to the perpetuation of his material and above all
symbolic patrimony (the honor of the house or the name of the lineage).
According to Andrew W. Lewis, the mode of succession defines the kingdom.4
Royalty 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. In
the dynastic model, first established in the royal family and then generalized to
the whole nobility, the principal honor and the individual patrimonial lands go to
the eldest son, the heir, whose marriage is treated as a political matter of the
utmost importance. One guards against the threat of division by assigning apanages to the younger sons, a compensation aimed to ensure harmony among the
brothers (in their testaments the kings urge each of them to accept his share and
not 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 the
economic group and the sovereignty group.”5 Paternal power constitutes the
pattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance. As in

traditional Kabylia, political relationships are not autonomized with respect to
kinship relations and are always thought after those relations; the same goes for
economic relations. Power rests on personal relationships and affective relationships such as fealty,6 “love,” and “credit,” which are socially instituted and
actively maintained, especially through “largesses” (gifts and grants).
The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for a
time is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the “house” and of the dynastic
state which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it. Philip
IV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; the
“family” is divided into various “chambers,” specialized services that follow
the king in his travels. The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor of
the bonds of blood. This is how one can understand the mythology of the king’s
two bodies, which has so fascinated historians since Kantorowicz, and which
symbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the person
who temporally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among the
peasants of Béarn, where the male members of the house, understood as the
totality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were often
designated 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 family
name).7 The king is “head of the house,” socially mandated to implement a
dynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in the
service of the greatness and prosperity of his “house.”
A number of matrimonial strategies have the aim of fostering territorial
extensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch.
One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerably
enlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriage
policy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comté and the Netherlands by his
marriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip the
Fair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was born
Charles V. Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with the
so-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursuing successional strategies by

other means.
The war of succession of Castile (1474–79) is a well-known case: if Isabella had not won,
the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would have
become possible. Charles V’s war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders into
Burgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg state
would have been formed around Cleves, Jülich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee. But
the partition of Cleves and Jülich in 1614 after the war of succession put an end to that
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vague possibility. In the Baltic, the union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway
ended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark and Sweden which followed, the
question arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the House
of Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved and Sweden attained its ‘natural
borders.’ In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynastic
union of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union in 1569. But the
dynastic union of Sweden and Poland was the declared aim of Sigismund III and continued to be that of the kings of Poland until 1660. They also nursed ambitions in Muscovy
and in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup d’état by the
boyars.8

One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape the
teleological vision founded on the retrospective illusion which makes the construction of France a “project” pursued by the successive kings. Thus Cheruel, for
example, in his Histoire de l’administration monarchique en France, explicitly
refers to the “will” of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state and it
is not without some surprise that one sees some historians condemning the
institution of apanages as a “dismemberment” of the royal domain.

The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynastic
states 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 particular
assets available to the royal family which enabled it to triumph in the competition
with its rivals. (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitly
posed the question, offers, with what he calls the “law of monopoly,” a solution
that I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentially
verbal and almost tautological: “If, in a major social unit, a large number of the
smaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the larger
one, 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., primarily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that some
will be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer and
fewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will be
eliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on an
ever-decreasing number.”9)
Endowed with the “semi-liturgical power” that sets him “apart from all other
potentates, his rivals,”10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty,
which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies a
distinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation of
symbolic capital. He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that he
is able to call himself king, with a reasonable chance of having his claim recognized. In effect, in accordance with the logic of the “speculative bubble” dear to
economists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at least
to some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the others
reckon with the fact that he is king. A minimum differential thus suffices to create
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a maximum gap because it differentiates him from all the others. Moreover, the
king finds himself placed in the position of center and, due to this, has information on all the others – who, short of forming a coalition, communicate only
through him – and he can monitor alliances. He is therefore situated above the
fray 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 Muzaffar
Alam, which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of Northern
India, correlative of the waning of imperial authority and the reinforcement of the
authority of local notables and provincial autonomy, the local chieftains continued to perpetuate the “reference to at least an appearance of an imperial center,”
invested with a legitimating function: “Again, in the conditions of unfettered
political and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the decline
of imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to win
the allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power. All of them struggled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position and
achievements. Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over
the others. When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a
centre to legitimize their acquisitions.”11)
The Specific Contradictions of the Dynastic State
The initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: the
nascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, academic mode of management
and reproduction associated with it) remains the personal property of a “house”
which continues to follow a patrimonial mode of management and reproduction.
The king dispossesses private powers but for the benefit of a private power; he
perpetuates, within his own dynasty, a familial mode of reproduction antinomic
with that he is establishing (or is being established) within the bureaucracy (by
reference to merit and competency). He concentrates the various forms of power,
in particular economic and symbolic power, and redistributes them in “personal”
forms (“largesses”) liable to inducing “personal” forms of attachment. Whence
all kinds of contradictions that play a decisive role in the transformation of the
dynastic state, although historians generally fail to count them among the factors
of “rationalization” (such as competition between states – international wars require

the concentration and rationalization of power, a self-sustaining process since
power 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 patrimonial 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 history
of institutions in order to understand the real functioning of governmental institutions, Richard Bonney writes:
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It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind the
façade 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 the
importance of a minister, a secretary of state, an intendant, or a king’s counselor
depended less on his title than on his influence – or that of his patron. His influence
was determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronage
he enjoyed.13

Another revealing feature is the existence of family-based clans (often designated
by the misleading name of “parties”), which paradoxically contributed indirectly
to imposing bureaucratization: “The great noble clans, whether loyal or dissident,
were structural to the monarchy” and “the ‘favorite,’ either dissident or liable to
be so, exerts his absolute power against the royal family.”14
Paradoxically, the ambiguities of a system of government that mingles the
domestic and the political, the king’s house and the reason of state, are no doubt
one of the major causes of the strengthening of the bureaucracy, owing to the contradictions they engender: the emergence of the state arises in part thanks to the

misunderstandings born from the fact that one can, in all good faith, describe the
ambiguous 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 their
supersession. It was by expressing itself in the language of Roman law, assisted
by an ethnocentric interpretation of the juridical texts, that the dynastic principle
was gradually converted, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a new,
properly “statist” principle. The dynastic principle, which plays a central role as
early as the time of the Capetians (as attested to by the crowning of the heir in
childhood), reaches its full development with the constitution of the royal family,
consisting of the men and women having royal blood in their veins (“princes of
the blood”). The typically dynastic metaphor of the royal blood is elaborated
through the logic of Roman law, which uses the word blood to express filiation
(jura sanguinis). Thus, when Charles V restructured the necropolis of Saint
Denis, all persons of royal blood (even women and children, boys and girls, even
if they died young) were buried around Saint Louis.
The juridical principle relies on reflection about the typically dynastic notion
of the crown as a principle of sovereignty standing above the royal person. From
the fourteenth century, it is an abstract word that designates the king’s estate
(“crown domains,” “crown revenue”) and “dynastic continuity, the chain of kings
in which his person is but a link.”15 The crown implies the inalienability of the
feudal lands and rights of the royal domain, and then of the kingdom itself; it
evokes the dignitas and majestas of the royal function (progressively distinguished from the person of the king). Thus, with the idea of the crown, the notion
of an autonomous entity, independent of the king as individual, takes shape little
by little through a reinterpretation of the idea of the house transcending its own
members. The jurists are no doubt inclined to effect a creative confusion between
the dynastic representation of the house, which still drives them, and the juridical
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representation of the state as corpus mysticum in the manner of the Church
(according to Kantorowicz’s schema).
Paradoxically, it is the weight of kinship structures and the threats that palace
wars bring for the perpetuation of the dynasty and the power of the prince that
foster everywhere, from ancient empires to modern states, the development of
forms of authority independent of kinship in their functioning as in their reproduction. The state as concern is the site of an opposition analogous to that
which Berle and Means have introduced about the business corporation,
between the hereditary owners of power and the managers, recruited for their
competency and lacking property titles16 – an opposition that one must be
careful not to reify, as happened in the case of the firm. The demands of intradynastic struggles (especially among brothers) are at the basis of the first
outlines of a division of the labor of domination. It is the heirs who must rely on
the managers to perpetuate themselves; it is they who, quite often, must resort
to the new resources secured by bureaucratic centralization to prevail over the
threats represented by their dynastic rivals. This is the case, for example, when
a king uses the resources accrued by the Treasury to buy off the heads of rival
lineages or, more subtly, when he monitors the competition among his kinsmen
by hierarchically distributing the symbolic profits granted by the organization
of the court.
One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with,
alongside the king, the king’s brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whose
authority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the king’s 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 and
control the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers to
limit and control the power of his ministers.
The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agricultural
producers living in communities closed unto themselves and dominated by a minority

who ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), and
the management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear break
with family bonds by instituting great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from political
reproduction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links with
the people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial services
of the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are the
property of the state and whose goods and position can revert to the state at any time.17
In ancient Egypt there was a clear-cut distinction between the royal family and the senior
administration, with power delegated to “new men” rather than to members of the royal
family. Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slave
and “functionary”; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of the Medes and Persians, the
top civil servants were often Greeks. The same was true in the Mongol Empire, where
senior administrators were almost all foreigners.18
The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire. From Racine’s
Bajazet we are familiar with the permanent threat that his brothers and his Vizir, a
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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 the
prince’s brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires of
the ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, who
rose to the positions of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with a
cosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the “collecting” of talents ensured a
supply of “devoted individuals.” The Ottoman term kul means both “slave” and “servant
of the state.”

One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division of the labor of
domination between the heirs, dynastic rivals endowed with reproductive capacity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful but
deprived of reproductive capacity: to limit the power of the hereditary members
of the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to the
dynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve and
who can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at any
moment.
But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented by
any 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 of
reproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed to
celibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastic
type, or of durably grounding their power in an autonomous legitimacy, independent of that which the state grants them, conditionally and temporarily,
through their status as functionaries. (If the papal state evolved so early, from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because it
escaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family –
sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship – and because it
had no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.)
Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effects
of this fundamental law could be enumerated, viz. measures to prevent the emergence of countervailing powers of the same nature as dynastic power (fiefdoms),
i.e., powers that are independent (especially as regards reproduction) and hereditary (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 those
lands. Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that are
strictly limited to the incumbent’s lifetime (cf. priestly celibacy), in particular by
recourse to oblates (parvenus, rootless individuals), even pariahs. The oblate is
the absolute antithesis to the king’s brother: depending on the state (or, in another
context, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, to
which he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personal
force. The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment be

cast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of the
state (as with the “boursiers,” the “scholarship boys,” who achieved miraculous
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mobility thanks to the educational system, especially during France’s Third
Republic).
As in the agrarian empires, in the France of Philippe Auguste the bureaucracy
was recruited from among homines novi of low birth. And, as has already been
seen, the kings of France continually relied on “favorites,” distinguished, as the
word itself implies, by an arbitrary choice, to thwart the power of the magnates.
There were endless struggles between those (genealogically) closest to the king
and the favorites who supplanted them in the king’s favor:
Catherine de Médicis detests d’Épernon and seek by every means to oust him. Marie
de Médicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630]. Gaston
d’Orléans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny because
he comes between the king and his family. On this account, the levy doubles because
the ‘favorite,’ now become ‘first minister,’ needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed in
order to attract clienteles who would otherwise swell the ranks of his opponents. The
fabulous wealth of the d’Épernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with the
means to carry out their policies. Through d’Épernon and Joyeuse, Henri II controls
the 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 of
the specialist and of technical competency (technè) as principle of a virtually autonomous
and therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guenée points out, until 1388

functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In many
ancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communities
the artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer,
etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatment, and was both feared
and 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 dangerous power. The same was true of writing: we know that the scribes (katib) of the Ottoman
Empire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted to
monopolize religious power. According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of the
monopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept away
from the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they could
not conspire together. These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that were
culturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control over
the means of coercion and marks of honor. They were abandoned to outcasts who allowed
the dominant group and its representatives to see them fullfilled while officially rejecting
them. The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus contained, by
the very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their full
profits, especially in the political arena.
The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like the
minorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renowned
for their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goods
and services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to be
authorized to manipulate instruments that, placed in the wrong hands, would be very
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dangerous. One can also understand in this perspective – that of the division of powers
and palace wars – the shift from the feudal army to the mercenary army: the salaried professional army is to the troop of “liegemen” or the “party” as the functionary or “favorite”
is to the king’s brothers or the members of the king’s house.

The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between the
king’s brothers and the king’s ministers) lies in the conflict between two modes of
reproduction. Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of power
becomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, then
the jurists – who introduce Roman law – and, later, Parliament, then the merchants
and the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of the
labor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, even contradictory
character of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of power
becomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproduction
based on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to that
it is simutaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development of
education, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants. It fosters the
coexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureaucratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency and
merit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding the
principle of its legitimacy, blood and birth.
The transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state is thus inseparable from the movement whereby the new nobility, the “state nobility” (or
noblesse de robe), ousts the old nobility, the nobility of blood. On can see in passing 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 mode
of reproduction (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a bureaucratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school.
The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of Recognition
But the essential point is that, like the medieval seigneury as described by Marc
Bloch, the dynastic state is “a territory whose exploitation is organized in a
manner such that part of its products goes to a single character,” who is “both
chief and master of the soil.”26 Notwithstanding the impersonal and bureaucratic
elements it may entail, the dynastic state remains oriented towards the person of
the king: it concentrates different species of capital, various forms of power and

material and symbolic resources (money, distinctions, titles, indulgences, and
exemptions) in the hands of the king so that the latter can, by means of selective
redistribution, 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 continuously redistributed to very specific categories of subjects (particularly in the form
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of the pay of soldiers and the salaries of civil servants, administrators and justice
officials), so that the genesis of the state is inseparable from the genesis of a
group of agents whose interests are bound up with it, who have a vested interest
in 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, by
the number of “Easter communicants,” but rather by the number of those who
directly or indirectly owe the economic and social foundations of their social
existence, in particular their income, to the Church, and who are for this reason
“interested” in its existence.)
The state is a profitable enterprise, firstly for the king himself and for those to
whom he extends the benefit of his largesses. The struggle to make the state thus
becomes increasingly indissociable from a struggle to appropriate the profits
associated with the state (a struggle which shall extend ever more widely with the
advent of the welfare state). As Denis Crouzet has shown,27 the battles for
influence around the throne had as stake the capture of central positions liable to
procure the financial advantages that the nobles needed to maintain their standard
of living (whence, for example, the support of Duc de Nevers for Henri II or the
young Guise’s siding with Henri IV in exchange for 1.2 million pounds destined

to pay off his father’s debts). In short, the dynastic state institutes the private
appropriation of public resources by a few. Just as the personal bond of the feudal
type is made contractual and remunerated no longer with land but with money or
power, so the “parties” fight among themselves, especially within the king’s
council, for control over the circuit of taxation.
The ambiguity of the dynastic state is perpetuated (it will continue under other
guises after the disappearance of that state) because there exists particular, private
interests and profits in appropriating what is public and universal, and because
ever-renewed opportunities arise for such appropriation: namely, over and
beyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices – from the
fourteenth century on – and the heredity character of public offices – the Paulet
edict of 1604 made them private property – instituted “a new feudalism.”28 Royal
power 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 ideal
would be to concentrate and redistribute the totality of resources, thereby
completely controlling the process of production of symbolic capital. In reality,
however, owing to the division of the labor of domination, there are always
leakages: the servants of the state always tend to serve themselves directly
(instead of waiting for redistribution) by creaming off and diverting material and
symbolic resources. Thence a veritable structural corruption which, as PierreÉtienne Will has shown, is above all the deed of intermediate authorities: aside
from “regular irregularities,” that is, extortions aimed at covering personal
and professional costs, of which it is hard to determine whether it pertains to
“institutionalized corruption” or to the “informal financing of expenses,” there
are all the advantages that lower-level functionaries can derive from their stra© 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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tegic position in the upward and downward circulation of information, either by
selling vital data to the higher authorities or by refusing to pass on a request, or by
doing so only in exchange for payment, or yet by refusing to transmit an order.30
More generally, the holders of a delegated authority can derive all kinds of profit
from their position as intermediaries. In accordance with the logic of the law and
its exemptions,31 any administrative act or process can be blocked or delayed, or
facilitated and speeded up (in exchange for a sum of money). The subordinate
often possesses an advantage over his superiors (and over supervising agencies in
particular): 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 formal
models of “supervision” conceived in terms of the theoy of contracts as a game
between three players, the entrepreneur, the supervisor, and the operatives.32
Although the model gives a fairly good account of the strategic position of the
supervisor, who can threaten the workers with revealing information – e.g.,
identify who is responsible for poor results – and hide the truth from the
employer, it seems rather unrealistic: it ignores in particular both the effects of
dispositions and the constraints of the bureaucratic field, which can impose
censorship on egoistic inclinations).
This having been said, one can describe corruption as a leakage in the process
of accumulation and concentration of statist capital: direct embezzlement and
redistribution which allow for the accumulation of economic and symbolic capital
at the lower levels (that of the proconsuls or feudal lords who are “kings” on a
smaller scale) forbid or slow down the transition from feudalism to empire or
foster a regression from empire back to feudalism.
The Logics of the Process of Bureaucratization
Thus the first assertion of the distinction between the public and the private
comes within the sphere of power. It leads to the constitution of a properly political 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 of
social life; but it must as it were start with the king, in the mind of the king and of

his entourage, whom everything inclines, in a kind of institutional narcissism, to
confound the resources or interests of the institution with the resources and
interests of the person. The formula “L’État, c’est moi” expresses above all the
conflation of the public order and the private order that defines the dynastic state
and against which the bureaucratic state will have to be constructed, based as it is
on the dissociation of the position and its occupant, the function and the functionary, the public interest and private interests – disinterestedness being an essential
attribute of the civil servant.
The court is a space at once public and private. It can even be described as a
confiscation of social capital and symbolic capital for the benefit of one person,
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a monopolization of public space. Patrimonialism is this kind of permanent coup
d’état whereby a private individual appropriates public goods, a diversion of the
properties and profits attached to the function for the benefit of the person (it can
take very diverse forms and, while particularly visible in the dynastic phase, it
remains a permanent possibility in later phases, with the President of the Republic
usurping 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 Weber
writes). Personal power, which need be not at all absolute, is a private appropriation
of 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 dissociation
between imperium (public might) and dominium (private power), between the
public space, the forum, the agora, as the place of aggregation of the congregated
people, and the palace (for the Greeks the foremost feature of barbarian cities was
their lack of an agora). The concentration of political means is accompanied by

the political expropriation of private powers: “Everywhere the development of
the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for
the expropriation of the autonomous and ‘private’ bearers of executive power
who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of
administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable
goods of all sorts.”33 But, more generally, the process of “defeudalization”
implies a severing of “natural” bonds (of kinship) and “natural” processes of
reproduction, that is, those not mediated by a non-domestic agency – royal power,
bureaucracy, educational institution, etc. The state is essentially an antiphysis: it
institutes (the noble, the heir, the judge, etc.),” It appoints, it is bound up with
institution, constitution, nomos, that which exists “by law,” nomô (ex instituto), as
opposed to phusei, “by nature.” It institutes itself in and through the establishment
of a specific loyalty that implies a rupture with all original loyalties towards
ethnic group, caste, family, etc. In all this the state stands in opposition to the
specific logic of kinship, which, arbitrary as it is, remains the most “natural” or
naturalizable (via blood connections) of social institutions.
This process of defeudalization of the state goes hand in hand with the development of a specific mode of reproduction in which scholastic education plays an
important part. (In ancient China, the functionary had to have a specific education
and be totally detached from private interests.) The universities, which appeared
as early as the twelfth century, burgeoned throughout Europe from the fourteenth
century under the impulse of the princes: they fulfilled an essential role in
training the servants of the state, lay or clerical. But, more generally, the genesis
of the state is inseparable from a veritable cultural mutation: from the twelfth
century in western Europe, the mendicant orders that developed in the urban
setting brought to a lay audience a literature hitherto reserved solely for highly
cultured churchmen. Thus began an educational process that accelerated with
the foundation of urban schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the
invention of printing.
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Correlative of the development of education, the substitution of nomination
by public authorities for the inheritance of offices had as its consequence the
“clericalization” of the nobility (particularly visible in Japan). As Marc Bloch
observed, England was a unified state long before any other European kingdom
because there “public office” was not completely identified with fiefdom. Very
early on, non-hereditary royal officials, the sheriffs, were directly appointed. The
Crown resisted feudal fragmentation by governing through agents drawn from the
local society but appointed by it and similarly liable to being removed from office
(Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer situate the generalized shift from the “household” to bureaucratized forms of government around 1530). At the same time, the
nobility became demilitarized: “Most of the landowning class was, during the
Tudor epoch, turning away from its traditional training in arms to an education at
the universities or the Inns of Court.”34 Similarly, the militia became a state
prerogative, 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 officers
appointed by the king, so the French curia regis turned into a genuine administration. In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the Parlement de Paris and the
Chambre des comptes emerged from it, followed by the Grand Conseil in the
fifteenth; the process was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century,
with the establishment of the Conseils du gouvernement (held in the presence of
the king and chancellor) and the Conseils d’administration et de justice.36 (But
the process of nominal differentiation – Conseil étroit, Conseil des affaires,
Conseil secret, called, after 1643, Conseil d’en haut, Conseil des dépêches,
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 the

sovereign, barons, bishops, and commoners on whom the king can count. From
the 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 continent
led them to rely more on more on laymen. A new group thus appeared that owed
its position to its professional competency, and therefore to the state and its
culture: the civil servants.
It is in this light that one can understand the decisive role of the “clerks,” whose
rise accompanies the emergence of the state and of whom one can say that they
create the state which creates them, or that they make themselves by making the
state. From the beginning, their interests are bound up with it: they have their own
mode of reproduction and, as Georges Duby indicates, from the twelfth century
“the top- and middle-rank bureaucracy comes almost entirely from the
colleges.”37 They would gradually construct their specific institutions, the most
typical of which is the Parlement, guardian of the law (especially civil law, which,
from the second half of the twelfth century, becomes autonomized from canon
law). Endowed with specific resources suited to the needs of administration, such
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as writing and law, they secure a monopoly over the most typically statist
resources very early on. Their intervention indisputably contributes to the rationalization of power: first, as Duby notes, they introduce rigor into the exercise of
power, by giving standard form to judgments and keeping records;38 next, they
implemented the mode of thinking typical of canon law and the scholastic logic
upon which it is founded (with, for example, the distinguo, the quaestio, and the
play of arguments for and against, or the inquisitio, the rational inquiry substituting proof for test and leading to a written report). Finally, they construct the idea
of state on the model of the Church in treatises on power that refer to Holy

Scripture, the Book of Kings, and Saint Augustine, but also to Aristotle, in which
kingship is conceived as a magistrature (he who holds it by inheritance is God’s
elect but, to show himself to be a good guardian of the res publica, he must take
account of its nature and make good use of reason). Following Georges Duby
again,39 one can show how they contribute to the genesis of a rational bureaucratic habitus: they invent the virtue of prudence, which inclines one to control
affective pulsions, to act lucidly in light of one’s intelligence, with a sense of
proportion, and courtesy, an instrument of social regulation. (In contrast to
Norbert Elias, who portrays the state as the fount of the “civilizing process,”
Duby suggests, very rightly, that the clerical invention of courtesy contributed to
the 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 state
by producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public. The
political philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictive
of its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (one
of the first users of the notion of “raison d’État”) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau or
Bodin, as simple theories of the state forbid themselves from understanding the
distinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of state
institutions.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 notion
of corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques and
operational models (often borrowed from the ecclesiastical tradition and destined
to undergo a process of secularization), a stock of solutions and precedents.
(As Sarah Hanley shows very clearly, there was a constant to-and-fro between
juridical theory and royal or parliamentary practice.41) So much to say that one
cannot simply draw from the reality the concepts (e.g., sovereignty, coup d’état)
one intends to use to understand that reality, of which they partake and which
they helped make. It also means that to adequately understand political writings,
which, far from being simple theoretical descriptions, are veritable practical
prescriptions, intended to bring into being a new type of social practice by giving

it a meaning and a purpose, one must reinsert the works and their authors in the
enterprise of construction of the state with which they stand in dialectical relationship. One must in particular resituate the authors in the nascent juridical field,
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and in the broader social space, since their poitions – in relation to other jurists
and also to the central power – can be at the basis of their theoretical construction.
(A close reading of William Farr Church’s book on constitutional thought in early
modern France42 suggests that the “légistes” were distinguished by theoretical
stances that varied according to their distance from the court: “absolutist”
discourse tended to come from those jurists closest to the central power who
established a clear division between the king and his subjects and removed all
reference to intermediate powers such as the États généraux, whereas the Parlements had more ambiguous positions). Everything leads one to hypothesize that
the 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 importance by asserting the priority of the “public service” with which they were bound
up. (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers état during the General Estates of
1614–15 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 of
magistrates, of “gentlemen of pen and ink” as the first among the orders, to place
in the first rank not the armed service but the civil service of the state; and also of
the struggles, within the crystallizing field of power, between the king and the
Parlement, construed by some as a body legitimating royal power, by others as
intended to limit it, to which the “lit de justice” gave rise.43) In short, those who
made perhaps the clearest contribution to the advance of reason and the universal
had a clear interest in the universal; one can even say that they had a private

interest in the public interest.44
But it does not suffice to describe the logic of this process of imperceptible
transformation leading to the emergence of this historically unprecedented social
reality that is modern bureaucracy, i.e., the institution of a relatively autonomous
administrative field, independent of politics (denegation) and of the economy
(disinterestedness) and obeying the specific logic of the “public.” Beyond the
intuitive half-understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finished
state, one must try to reconstruct the deep sense of the series of infinitesimal and
yet all equally decisive inventions – the bureau, signature, stamp, decree of
appointment, certificate, register, circular, etc. – that led to the establishment of a
properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this
sense, has all the appearances of “rationality” even as it is invested with the most
mysterious properties of magical efficacy.
The Circuit of Delegation and the Genesis of the Administrative Field
The progressive dissociation of dynastic authority (the king’s brothers) and
bureaucratic authority was concretely effected through the differentiation of
power and, more precisely, through the lengthening of the chains of authority and
agency. One could say, for the sake of a pleasing formula, that the (impersonal)
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state is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into the
impersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who are
answerable 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 from
him and which they monitor and ratify by executing.

To understand what is so extraordinary about this shift from personal to
bureaucratic power, one must return once more to a moment typical of the long
transition from the dynastic principle to the juridical principle wherein the separation is gradually effected between the “household” and the bureaucracy, i.e.,
between the hereditary but politically unimportant “great offices” and what the
English tradition calls the “cabinet,” non-hereditary but invested with power over
the seals. This is an extremely complex movement with advances and retreats,
which different agents effect at varying rates depending on the interests attached
to their positions, and which encounters countless obstacles, linked in particular
to habits of thought and unconscious dispositions. Thus, as Jacques Le Goff
notes, the bureaucracy is first understood according to model of the family; or
again, the king’s ministers, still attached to the dynastic vision, sometimes want
to ensure the hereditary transmission of offices.
In his Constitutional History of England, F.W. Maitland evokes the evolution
of practices regarding the royal seals.45 From the Norman period, the royal will
was signified by acts, charters, and letters patent, closed and sealed with the royal
seal, which warranted their authenticity. The “great seal” was entrusted to the
Chancellor, head of the entire secretariat. In the late Middle Ages and throughout
the whole Tudor period, the Chancellor was the sovereign’s first minister. Little
by little other seals appeared. Because the Chancellor used the “great seal” for
many 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 under
his privy seal. The latter was later entrusted to an “officer,” the Keeper of the
Privy Seal. In due course, an even more private secretary, the “king’s clerk” or
“king’s secretary,” intervened between the monarch and these great officers of
state as keeper of the “king’s signet.” Under the Tudors, there were two secretaries to the king, who were designated as “secretaries of state.” A routine came to
be established whereby documents signed by the king’s hand, the “royal sign
manual,” and countersigned by the secretary of state (keeper of the king’s signet),
were sent to the Keeper of the Privy Seal as directives for the documents to be
issued under the privy seal; these in turn served as instructions to the Chancellor
to issue documents bearing the “great seal” of the kingdom. This act implied a

degree of ministerial responsibility for the acts of the king: no act was legally
valid unless it bore the great seal or at least the privy seal, which verified that a
minister “had committed himself in this expression of the royal will.” Ministers
were therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared being
challenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeed
royal acts. The Chancellor was fearful of applying the great seal in the absence of
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a document bearing the privy seal as a guarantee; the Keeper of the Privy Seal
was anxious to have the king’s hand-written signature validated by the king’s
secretary. As for the king, he found many advantages in this procedure: it made it
incumbent upon the ministers to look after the king’s interests, to know the state
of his affairs, and to make sure that he was not being deceived or misled. He acted
under the warranty but also under the oversight of his ministers, whose responsibility was engaged in the acts of the sovereign which they guaranteed (during
the reign of Elizabeth, an oral order could not suffice to commit expenditure and
the 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 and
responsibilities, came into being a veritable public order founded upon a degree of
reciprocity within hierarchical relations themselves: the executant is both
controlled and protected by the decision-makers; and, from his vantage point, the
executant controls and protects his superior, in particular against the abuse of
power and the arbitrary exercise of authority. Everything takes place as if the more
a ruler’s power increases, the greater his dependency on a whole network of executive relays. In one sense, the freedom and responsibility of each agent is
reduced, 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 itself
became a point (an apex) in a field. (The growing differentiation of the field of
power 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 fields
and is for this reason the stake of struggles among the dominant from the different
fields.)
The lengthening of the chains of delegation and the development of a complex
structure of power do not automatically entail the withering-away of the mechanisms aimed at securing private appropriation of economic and symbolic capital
(and of all the forms of structural corruption). One could say, on the contrary, that
the potential for misappropriation (via direct extraction) increases, since central
patrimonialism can coexist with local patrimonialism (based on the familial
interests of the civil servants or corporate solidarity). The dissociation of the
function from the person occurs only gradually, as if the bureaucratic field were
still torn between the dynastic (or personal) principle and the juridical (or impersonal) principle.
What we call the “civil service” was so bound up with its occupants that it is impossible to retrace the history of a given council or post without writing the history of
the individuals who chaired it or held it. It is the fact of being held by a personality
that gave exceptional importance to an office hitherto considered secondary, or
that pushed to a lower tier a post deemed central by virtue of its previous
incumbent. . . . The man made the function to an extent that is unthinkable now.46
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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 in

practice (with the imperceptible advance of the division of the labor of domination) of matters public, the public good, and especially of the structural conditions (tied to the emergence of a bureaucratic field) of the dissociation of private
interest and public interest, or, to put it more clearly, the sacrifice of egoistic
interests, the renunciation of the private use of a public power. But the paradox
is that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with the
appearance and accumulation of a public capital, and with the emergence of
the bureaucratic field as a field of struggles for control over this capital and
of the corresponding power, i.e., in particular power over the redistribution of
public resources and their associated profits. The state nobility, which, as Denis
Richet has shown, asserted itself in France between the end of the sixteenth
century and the beginning of the seventeenth, and whose reign was not to be
interrupted – quite the contrary – by the Revolution of 1789, bases its domination on what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called “fiscal capitalism” and on the
monopolization of high state positions with high profits.47 The bureaucratic
field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state,
which subordinated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentrated
by the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle
for power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits)
and symbolic profits (honors, titles, etc.) it provides, a struggle reserved in fact
for a minority of claimants designated by the quasi-hereditary possession of
educational capital. One would need to analyze in detail the two-sided process
from which the state has issued and which is inseparably universalization and
monopolization of the universal.
(Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant)

NOTES
This article originally appeared as “De la maison du roi à la raison d’Etat: un modèle de
la genèse du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 118 (June 1997):
55–68. It is published here by kind permission of Jérome Bourdieu.
1. This text is the lightly revised transcript of a set of lectures given at the Collège de France.
As a provisional summary intended mainly to serve as a research tool, it extends the analysis of the
process of concentration of the various forms of capital ushering the constitution of a bureaucratic

field capable of controlling the other fields (cf. P. Bourdieu, “Esprits d’État: Genèse et structure
du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 96–97 (March 1993): 49–62;
English transl.: “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,”
Sociological Theory 12–1 (March 1994): 1–19.
2. R.J. Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1594–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), and “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État en France (1500–1660): Quelques remarques préliminaires sur les possibilités de recherche,” in J.-P. Genêt and M. Le Mené, eds., Genèse de l’Etat
moderne. Prélèvement et redistribution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987), 193–20, esp. 194.
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3. J.W. Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel and the Secular and Ecclesiastical
Authorities in the Empire: Studies in the History of Christian Thought, XIII (Leiden: Brill, 1978),
esp. 126–31.
4. A.W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the
State (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1981).
5. M. Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960).
6. G. Duby, Le Moyen Âge (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 110.
7. [Translator’s note: E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study In Mediaeval
Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); P. Bourdieu, Le Bal des
célibataires (Paris: Editions du Seuil/Points, 2002).]
8. Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” 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 capétienne et l’État, France, Xe-XIVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 9.
11. M. Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1708–1748
(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), 89–93.
13. Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” 199.
14. J.-M. Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,” in
Genêt and Le Mené, eds., Genèse de l’Etat moderne, 224, 223.
15. B. Guénée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Les États (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., L’Histoire de l’empire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 27, 165–6.
20. Ibid., 119 and 171–5.
21. Ibid., 161 and 163–73.
22. J.-M. Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,”
223.
23. B. Guénée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles, 230.
24. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
25. G. Duby, Le Moyen Âge, 326.
26. M. Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais, 17.
27. D. Crouzet, “La crise de l’aristocratie en France au XVIe siècle,” Histoire, Économie, Société
1 (1982).
28. V.-L. Tapie, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 55.
29. F. Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français, des origines à la Révolution (Paris: Éditions
du CNRS, 1996), 344.
30. P.-E. Will, “Bureaucratie officielle et bureaucratie réelle. Sur quelques dilemmes de l’administration impériale à l’époque des Qing,” Études chinoises 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 69–141.
31. P. Bourdieu, “Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en œuvre
des règlements,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 81–82 (March 1990): 86–96.

32. J.-J. Laffont, “Hidden Gaming in Hierarchies: Facts and Models,” The Economic Record (1989):
295–306.
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.
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34. P. Williams, The Tudor Régime (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 Régime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), vol. 2: 47.
37. G. Duby, Le Moyen Âge, 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 Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1941.
43. S. Hanley, “Lit de Justice.”
44. On the history of the longue durée of the rise of the “clerks” and the gradual monopolization 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]), 369–393.
45. F.W. Maitland, Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1948), 202–03.

46. D. Richet, La France moderne. L’esprit des institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 79–80.
47. D. Richet, “Élite et noblesse: la formation des grands serviteurs de l’État – fin XVIe-début
XVIIe siècle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 36 (1977): 47–63.

© 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.