Book Review: The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities, by Ben Holland

• Author: Sean Fleming
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717743973
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 147

and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

2. See Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and

the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); David

Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell

and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michael Walzer,

“Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs

2 (1973): 160–80.

3. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. J. R.

Pole (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 41-42.

4. For this argument and example, see Jed W. Atkins, Roman Political Thought

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap. 5.

The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities, by Ben

Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Reviewed by: Sean Fleming, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717743973

The idea of state personality lurks just beneath the surface of modern politics.

When we blame states for historical wrongs, admonish them to keep their

promises, or talk about their identities and interests, we presuppose that they

are, in some sense, persons. Sovereign debts and treaty obligations persist

through generations because they attach not to individual persons, but to the

corporate person of the state. Although the idea of state personality fell out of

fashion in the mid-twentieth century, in large part because of its associations

with Fascism and Idealist metaphysics, it has been the subject of renewed

interest over the past two decades. Ben Holland’s The Moral Person of the

State is an outstanding study of the idea of state personality and of Samuel

von Pufendorf’s role in developing it.

The publisher describes the book as “the first detailed study in any lan-

guage of the single most influential theory of the modern state.” While most

readers will take the publisher’s word that it is “the first detailed study,” many

will doubt that Pufendorf’s is “the single most influential theory.” Some will

balk at the idea that Pufendorf, who is often thought to be a rather marginal

figure, developed a theory of the state more influential than that of Hobbes.

The book makes a very bold claim indeed.

Holland sets himself two aims. His first aim is to reconstruct Pufendorf’s

theory of the state and the political and theological context in which