Conceptualizing Politics

6.   State and values
Does the state have values to represent or to pursue?
We have seen that according to contract theory, it has one existential goal, to 
provide domestic and external security for its citizens; this may include making 
a minimum wellbeing possible, the lack of which would generate insecurity. Yet 
this goal is the state’s raison d’être, not a particular goal, such as the uttermost reali-
sation of individual freedom in classical liberalism, a classless society in Marxian 
socialism, or a racially pure society in German National Socialism. The upholding 
of these substantive, not merely procedural goals has, however, retreated in recent 
decades, and so have the ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (Rawls 1993) advancing them; 
where the latter still make resounding proclamations, the people are likely to pay, 
at best, lip service to them with the exception of those fascinated by fanaticism or 

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The state  73
resurrecting nationalism. In the present widespread, though non-universal con-
ditions of recession, sluggish growth and high unemployment, the people rather 
pursue the goal to survive, if belonging to the poor or the lower middle class, or to 
get speedily much richer than they already are, if they are higher situated. Rapid 
gains in income and status are not an uncommon goal among the youth, and a 
self-centred strategy of personal success is often what the fall of lofty ideologies has 
left behind. This process is sometimes called ‘loss of values’ and happens in liberal 
capitalist countries as well as in China and India. It leads us to issues of normative 
political philosophy, in particular solidarity as one of the tenets that underpin the 
people’s coexistence in the polity, and opens up the question: can polities live with-
out a degree of shared values among citizens? What we have learned about identity 
suggests negative answers, but it depends on what type of values.
The great providers of (freely shared or imposed) values used to be and still are 
religions and churches. We are now looking at their relationship not to politics in 
general, which is too large a chapter, but to the state. This was built in Europe as 
an inclusive and (legally) egalitarian community by rescinding its ties to a church 
or more in general to religion, which happened in the aftermath of the embit-
tered wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later under 
the mighty intellectual influence of the Enlightenment movement, a transnational 
Europe-wide phenomenon (less so in South-Eastern Europe, then still part of the 
Ottoman empire and/or dominated by the Orthodox Church). The peak of this 
process was reached in France with the law of 9 December 1905, concerning the 
separation of the churches and the state and affirming both the freedom of pro-
fessing openly any religion and the individual freedom of conscience; the country 
remained bound to observe its ‘republican values’ only – liberté, egalité, fraternité/
freedom, equality, brotherhood. In the French version, or in a less radical one, the 
laicité or secular and neutral character of the state is regarded both as respecting the 
equality of all citizens and keeping the state away from the danger of ideological 
strife and oppression. The neutrality of the state and freedom of religion has been 
respected in liberal-democratic countries all over the world, not only towards vari-
ous Christian denominations and Judaism, but also Islam and Buddhism, as immi-
grants can testify. This has not been reciprocated in some Islamic countries, such as 
Saudi Arabia, while religious communities are closely watched or hindered by the 
state in the People’s Republic of China.
What the modern state cannot accept without giving up itself, that is its claim 
to include and protect all citizens, is to recognise an exclusive religious doctrine 
as state religion (confessional state) or to unify politics and religion by putting the 
state under the mastership of the clergy (theocracy). Vatican City and the Islamic 
Republic of Iran are the only existing theocracies, but the former, which has roots 
dating back to the year AD 752 and is extended over only 108 acres, is since 1870 
no more than the material support to a spiritual power (the Holy See), while the 
latter, created in 1979, is a major regional player with a population of 80 million and 
a low human rights record.
36
 This is to say that, given the present state of religions 
and religious organisations around the world, the constitutional and liberal state has 

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74  How politics works
fairly different levels of difficulty in coexisting with them. Nowhere can the state 
omit to fight with military and cultural tools against fanaticism such as Islamist jihad-
ism, in which however the alleged religious justification for killing others and one-
self in the name of God covers less spiritual motivations as well: homicidal instinct, 
neurotic quest for domination over enslaved women and children, revanchism. 
Even if we acknowledge that this extreme phenomenon is scarcely representative 
of mainstream Islam, the latter (both in the Sunni and Shia version) makes it dif-
ficult – at least in principle, since in single countries pragmatic solutions are being 
practised – to accommodate basic requirements of modern statehood: no or insuf-
ficient separation of religion and politics, uncertain acceptance of pluralism includ-
ing conversion from one faith to another, no clear endorsement of modernity not 
only in technological and economic sense, but as a civic culture as well – of which 
effective gender equality is a tenet. An additional reason for Western scholars to be 
allowed to point at these elements is that the West is well experienced in the work 
of freeing itself from its own pathologies of fanaticism and bigotry: from Catho-
lic and Protestant intolerance in early modern times, with ‘heretics’ and ‘witches’ 
burned all over the Old Continent and New England to murderous totalitarian 
ideologies in the previous century. On the other hand, there are enough Islamic 
or Buddhist communities in Western countries whose religious faith is practised in 
harmony with the Constitution and the laws.
To add a last consideration, state and values is not a topic limited to religion. With 
the secularisation of morality (divorce in Catholic countries, abortion, same-sex 
marriage, euthanasia) on the one hand, and the new moral scope of intrusive tech-
nologies (in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood), the state is bound to legislate 
on ultimate matters on which neither consensus nor chance of mediation exists. It’s 
worldviews against each other, a situation in which everybody could say, as Martin 
Luther is credited to have said before Emperor Charles V at the Diet held in Worms 
(1521) as he rejected the request to dismiss his theological opinions: ‘Here I stand, 
I can do no other.’ Now, individuals and parties act on an ethics of conviction, while 
states, if they are not theocracies or dictatorships, are expected to rule based on 
an ethics of responsibility – to use Weberian notions that will be clarified later in 
Chapter 10. This means that they have to find temporary arrangements that give full 
satisfaction to nobody, but also displease only extremists, well knowing that stable 
compromises (to be written into law) on deep-held beliefs are often impossible. It 
can be wise to procrastinate the legislative decision, provided this can favour a solu-
tion, or let for a while the courts rule in the single cases, whereas a vote by the par-
liament or the people (referendum), may disrupt the core political identity shared by 
the citizens. The deep beliefs of a people can change over time, and we have seen that 
abortion or same-sex marriage, though still divisive issues, are no longer perceived 
with the same degree of rejection as they were only a few decades ago.
This applies also to an ultimate issue that stands out as a permanent political 
question, at least since the European Enlightenment: does the state have the right to 
take the life of human beings, even if they have committed heinous crimes? Many 
states have de iure or de facto abolished the death penalty, first of all the Grand Duchy 

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The state  75
of Tuscany in 1776, and more recently all states belonging to the European Union, 
but also the Russian Federation, Cuba and South Africa (140 states in all, plus 19 
states in the American Union). On abolishing capital punishment in Connecticut, 
the Supreme Court of the state ruled in 2015 that it ‘no longer comports with 
contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological 
purpose’. This is a utilitarian justification for the abolition; others prefer a princi-
pled one, in the sense that the state never has the right to take lives (self-defence 
being a different chapter).
Whatever the justification, abolition is now largely seen as a marker of civility and 
humanity, but this is not the place for examining the death penalty from the point of 
view of moral and legal philosophy. For political science it is interesting that the four 
countries that executed more people between 2007–2013 – China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, 
and the USA – belong to regimes and uphold values that could not be more different: 
a sign that the inclination to inflict death on presumably culpable humans has deeper – 
anthropological and ideological – roots than the political constitution of the state.
* * *
It is not possible to draw here conclusions about – I cannot avoid the pun – the 
present state of the state, because we have not yet acquired any knowledge about 
three other fundamental perspectives from which alone it makes sense today to 
look at the state:
•  the present condition of democracy, now truly or allegedly the form of gov-
ernment of most states;
• 
the international perspective, or what happens to the state when we start look-
ing at it in the plural – the states;
•  globalisation and global/lethal challenges, which are essentially changing the 
stage on which politics and state politics play out their games.
The following chapters, particularly Chapter 5 and 7, will give some answer to 
the questions that must now remain open.
Notes
 1  As a matter-of-fact, a curious and bloodletting hole in this essential monopoly exists in 
the most powerful democratic state, the USA, with its poorly regulated constitutional 
right for any citizen ‘to bear arms’ (the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which 
however originally tied this right to the training of a meanwhile vanished ‘well-regulated 
militia’), now has come to mean in fact, the dissemination of violence in a measure 
hardly compatible with the protecting mission of the state.
 2  Res publica has never lost its ambivalence of meaning both a commonwealth or a republic.
 3  Gosudarstvennoye/state is the source of the G in KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopas-
nosti/Committee for State Security), the post-Stalin name of the Soviet Intelligence 
Service from 1954 through 1991, whose possibly eternal fame is entrusted to the early 
James Bond movies.

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76  How politics works
 4  Henry VIII broke with Rome and gave birth to the Church of England (1532–37) 
because (this was at least the prima facie causation) the pope rejected his request to regard 
his marriage to Catherine of Aragon as nil.
  5  To give an example, England’s public debt went up from £22mil in 1697 to £238mil in 
1783, after the Seven Years War and the wars on the American continent.
  6  The special jurisdictions for clergy and nobility were step by step dismantled; everybody 
became subject to the same law and the same judges.
 7  Ständestaat, as the Germans, who invented this notion, say. It found a post mortem glorifi-
cation in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts/Basic Elements of the Philosophy of 
Law (1821).
  8  In England and later (after the Act of Union with Scotland of 1707) the UK, there were, 
and still are, two representative assemblies, one for the upper estates (the House of Lords) 
and one for the Commons.
  9  These ‘-isms’ will be more thoroughly examined elsewhere in this book.
 10  By this word, I am hinting at the German Staatsmaschine or the Italian Stato macchina, 
which aptly convey the sense of the robot-like working of the huge impersonal appara-
tus of state bureaucracy.
 11  So also in Italy’s Fascist dictatorship from 1922 on, then in Germany’s Third Reich 
(1933).
 12  Also known in Europe as battle of Poitiers and in Arabic according to Wikipedia as Battle 
of the Palace of the Martyrs (Arabic: 
ءادهشلا طلاب ةكرعم , transliterated as ma’arakat Balâṭ