The Turn to the Body

In her most recent book, Birth of the State: The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics, Charlotte Epstein offers a convincing account of how shifting views of the body helped create “two new political constructs, the state and the subject of rights” in the seventeenth century. Though she draws upon many different thinkers (most prominently, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) and discusses a wide range of subjects (from medieval natural law to the public anatomy lesson), one major argument underlies the book as a whole: It was Hobbes and his successors’ turn toward the body at the expense of the soul that became a distinguishing feature of the modern world.

The turn toward the body, Epstein argues, had three important effects on modern political philosophy: it naturalized security, individualized liberty, and privatized property. In the first part of the book, she looks at the naturalization of security. Living in a world racked by religious war, Hobbes worked to minimize what he saw as the cause of that war—people’s erroneous belief in an immaterial soul—in the name of peace. Rejecting Descartes’ dualist theory of the mind and body, which allowed for the existence of such a soul, Hobbes claimed that “knowledge originates exclusively in the body; the experience of knowing is embodied through and through.” By arguing that we experience the world solely through the body, he established it as the seat of our deepest desires—most important, the desire for self-preservation. Declaring that “the human desire for security is ‘natural’” led Hobbes to envision a fundamental right to that security and a state that protected it, one that focused not on the condition of its subjects’ souls but on the safety of their bodies.

This new attention to the body had further effects, as Epstein shows in her discussion of the individualization of liberty in the second part of her book. In the Middle Ages, a person’s liberty was inextricably tied to her corporation—the town, guild, or church (as Epstein points out, “The Church was the original corporation”) to which she belonged. Within this “collective body,” which was linked to a particular stretch of land, “liberties were granted from on high and they were revocable. They were not ‘naturally’ given, as a mere function of the individual being born.” Consequently, “the social bond, not the body, was the locus of liberty.” Hobbes and Locke, however, radically diverged from this line of thought. Hobbes, by defining liberty purely as the body’s freedom to move unhindered, both tied liberty to the body and severed it from any conception of an immaterial soul. Wholly corporeal, this liberty had no social aspect. Locke, stressing more strongly the role of consent as the foundation of a peaceful government, did not go quite so far. As Epstein claims, Locke’s emphasis forced him to examine the inner thoughts and conscience of the consenting individual. Yet Locke, too, “pivot[ed] away from the scholastic language of (immaterial) substances and souls” by “rul[ing] out locating the principle of identity in the soul.” Though Locke did not dismiss the immaterial soul as boldly as Hobbes did, he claimed the mind and soul had no character unless united with a body, making the body the linchpin of a person’s individuality. Furthermore, he proposed that human “consciousness”—the workings of a rational mind, necessarily linked to a particular body—constituted the source of a person’s liberties. The “locus of liberty,” therefore, became the individual himself.

‘The kingdomes monster vncloaked from Heaven: the Popish conspirators, malignant plotters, and cruell Irish, in one body to destroy kingdome, religion and lawes: but under colour to defend them’- Woodcut, artist unknown (London, 1643).

In the third section of the book, Epstein argues that the body also played a vital role in Locke’s privatization of property. For medieval natural law theorists such as Thomas Aquinas, there existed “a just order in which humans and other beings partook on all levels of their being.” The law of this order, which came from God, granted people what was naturally theirs. Thus, a person was not believed to have an individual right to his property. As Epstein puts it, “property relations” were “communal and collective” rather than “individual and private.” Locke drastically changed the character of these relations by claiming a person could own land simply by laboring on it—by changing it with the work of his body. He not only gave every human being—that is, everyone with a body—the natural right to private property, but also continued to elevate the body over the soul. Before Locke, “God, the fount of creation and of all mastery (dominus), was also the source of all property (dominium).” After Locke, the source of all property ownership was the labor of the individual body.

Heinrich Bünting’s “Map of Europe” 1582

Epstein’s main critique of this shift concerns the contradictions she sees in Locke’s reasoning. As she argues, Locke seemed to claim all people had the same rights due to their bodies, but actually excluded certain bodies—those of women, slaves, and prisoners—from his discussions of the rational, property-owning person. Though this critique is well worth considering, a broader assessment of the transition to modernity would have been valuable as well. How good for human beings is the increased focus on the body—and, in turn, the increased focus on our own self-preservation and material possessions? What have we gained and lost from this change? Has it made us happier? Despite their difficulty, these questions seem crucial to any thorough examination of modern life.

Emily A. Davis is a PhD student in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies Political Theory (primarily Plato, Aristotle, and Montaigne) and Comparative Politics.