Statism

Origins

As a vague and contested term, l'étatisme emerged in France and then spread throughout Europe in the late 19th or early 20th century, either as a transliteration (German Etatismus, Polish etatyzm, and Swedish etatism) or in the form of a calque (Italian statalismo, Spanish estatismo, Portuguese estadismo, Turkish Devletçilik, and Finnish Valtiojohtoisuu), or as both transliteration and calque (Russian; English etatism, statism; and Dutch etatisme, statisme). Later, there emerged transliterations of the English term (e.g., Lithuanian statizmas).

The idea of the supremacy of state emerged much earlier then the term l'étatisme. Soon after Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini coined the word stato in early 16th century, signoral or kingly supremacy over a territorial polity was gradually depersonalized and conceptualized as a core notion of political order. In the mid-17th century, Thomas Hobbes identified the state as “Mortal God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence” (Leviathan, [Page 2513]chap. 17) or as the ultimate and supreme authority. He claimed that there was no power on earth to be compared with the Leviathan—“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei” (There is no power on earth that can be compared with him). Accordingly, the state was to be a departure point for all political thinking and practice.

Historical Evolution

Further development of statism in the 17th and 18th centuries was challenged both by its repersonalization by absolute monarchs (as in Louis XIV of France's declaration “L'Etat c'est moi”) and by attempts to usurp state prerogatives by political factions of all kinds. At the same time, the viability of the idea of state supremacy was confirmed by “public policy science” (Polizeiwissenschaft) and constitutionalism. They highlighted the transition from “state of estates” (Ständestaat) to “good-policy state” (Polizeistaat), and then to various forms of limited monarchy, and finally to constitutional ones.

A major problem was posed by a lack of clarity about the source or sources of state authority. A conflict of alternative viewpoints ranging from divine to popular mandate made the idea of state supremacy highly contestable. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who tried to develop a decidedly abstract perspective that would justify philosophically the supremacy of the state. In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts), he further developed the Hobbesian idea of the state as Mortal God:

In other words, the idea of the state could not be reduced to specific instances but should be enhanced to the higher abstraction of transhistorical development. The state was made a part of the divine strategy, not a mere product of human endeavor. To this day, Hegel's claim remains the purest expression of the philosophical justification of statism.

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