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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
For the soul of a state is nothing else than its polity, having as much power over it
as does the mind over the body; for it is this which deliberates upon all questions,
seeking to preserve what is good and to ward off what is disastrous; and it is this
which of necessity assimilates to its own nature the laws, the public orators and the
private citizens; and all the members of the state must fare well or ill according to
the kind of polity under which they live.?°
The idea of an anthropomorphic description of society also penetrates the
writings of classical Greek philosophers; its traces can easily be detected in
Plato’s Republic and The Laws, but it was Aristotle who in his Politics distinctly
articulated the organic nature of the state, meaning that society is natural and
not artificially created, and he emphasized that the individual’s relationship
to society is analogous to the relationship of the members of the human body
to the body itself:
it is evident that the state is a creature of nature and that man is by nature a political
animal. Thus the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and the individual,
since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example if the whole body be
destroyed, there will be no foot or hand... The proof that the state is a creature of
nature and prior to the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore
he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or
who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god:
he is no part of a state. (Politics 1253a I, 4-5)?5”
Inheriting this anthropomorphic view from the Greek authors, the Roman
Stoics also applied the idea of defining the individual’s position in society as if
they were members of a human body, as the following passage from Cicero’s
treatise testifies:
As, supposing each member of the body was so disposed as to think it could be well
if it should draw to itself the health of the adjacent member, it is inevitable that
the whole body would be debilitated and would perish; so if each of us should seize
for himself the interests of another, and wrest whatever he could from each for the
sake of his own emolument, the necessary consequence is, that human society and
community would be overturned. (De Officiis 3.5.22-23)°°®
Undoubtedly, the earliest Christian application of the body image to the
community of those who believed in Christ appears in the New Testament, in
Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
356 Isocrates cited in Hale: The Body Politic, 19.
357 Aristotle cited in ibid., 21.
358 Cicero cited in ibid., 25.