a government that is run by gentlemen and does not require many experts.
Given the fairly substantial autonomy of subnational jurisdictions, most of these amateurs are recruited from among the local or regional landed elites.
This pattern is also found in the Dutch Republic up to the late eighteenth century. A tradition of amateur government in England actually lasted until the 1960s, given the Oxbridge background (history, philosophy, languages) that Whitehall civil servants were expected to have. Wefind a tradition of amateur government also in the United States up to the late nineteenth century. However, this characterization is somewhat stereotypical and depends too much on the contrast between the English and American experience on the one hand and the French and German experience on the other. English administrators were not that amateurish, and neither were their American brethren (Fischer and Lundgreen, 1975, p. 460; Cook, 2012).
The German-French pattern is one with a unified and centralized adminis- trative structure, a subordinate subnational government, and a class of civil servants trained in specific administrative skills. This model emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the publication of the first handbooks of public administration and the creation of university chairs in public administration illustrate this development. In fact, public adminis- tration as a pursuit and study becomes more and more secular in orientation and clearly linked to the state. To understand how this came about we need a brief excursion into the separation of church and state.
some silver tableware and candleholders. Caught by the police, he was taken to the bishop’s house to inquire whether, indeed, the bishop had given the silverware to Valjean. The bishop, looking intently at Valjean, confirmed the latter’s story, noting that Valjean needed it more than himself. Javert is unaware of Valjean’s motives and answers,“There is no God. There is only the Law. Good and evil do not exist outside the law.”A few hours later Javert commits suicide.
This dramatic exchange captures beautifully one of the main events in the aftermath of the French Revolution: thede iureseparation of church and state relegating the church and spirituality to the private realm, while the state in its secular appearance occupies the public realm. It also underlines the extent to which the tables are turned: The state dominates the public realm, the church, no longer. Looking back, it is really amazing how much some people are in tune with their own time. Consider the following observation by Catherine the Great, czar of Russia, uttered somewhere in the later part of the eighteenth century:“Me, I shall be an autocrat: that is my trade; and The Good God will forgive me: that is His.” This remark would have been inconceivable, even only decades earlier. After all, monarchs ruled by divine right and were crowned by the church. The contrast between Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor by the Pope in the year 800 and Napoleon crowning himself emperor in 1804 could not be starker.
To be sure, as much as we can say that the changes at the time of the Atlantic Revolutions provided the foundation for the modern role and position of government in society, there was—as De Tocqueville remarked—
much continuity as well. With regard to the topic of church and state, their de iure separation was enshrined in the first constitutions, those of the United States in 1787, France in 1789, and the Batavian (Dutch) Republic in 1798, but really concluded a process that originated in the eleventh century whereby church and statede factostarted to demarcate their own spheres of influence. With the advantage of hindsight and in light of history, this drifting apart was both unusual as well asfitting.
That organized religion and state started to drift apart in Europe was unusual because until then they were generally closely intertwined every- where. In antiquity most, and perhaps even all, rulers played various roles:
head of state, head of the army, high priest, high judge, and so forth. From late antiquity on, these roles differentiated, but rulers did govern by a mandate from the divine. The relation between religion and government at the time is perhaps described best by Pope Gelasius I (492–496 CE) in his Two Swords Theory: The church represented the spiritual-eternal world and was superior to the state that embodied the temporal-secular sphere of
power. Almost 600 years later, in 1075, Pope Gregory VII invoked this theory to shore up his argument that the appointment of clergy was solely the prerogative of the Church of Rome and not of kings and princes. His papal decree started a conflict that lasted almost half a century and is known as the Investiture Struggle. It culminated in the 1122 Concordat of Worms that gave the church its coveted control over ecclesiastical appointments.
However, from that time on, the state slowly and surely asserted itself in the secular realm, with the church learning that its clergy andflock were increasingly reluctant to side with papal supremacy. Indeed, the people increasingly identified with the state.
Today, state and church are clearly separated in most of the Western world, in much of Latin America, in most African and Asian countries as well as in Australia, and this is illustrated by the fact that most countries have no state religion. This is a recent phenomenon in terms of how widespread this has become across the globe. History is messy, though, and there never really is a clear path from one pattern to another. For example, back in sixth century Byzantium, emperor Justinian was head of state and of church, with the latter being subordinate to the former. And there are still countries with an official state religion, such as in most Islamic countries (except Indonesia); in Denmark, Iceland, and Norway; as well as a number of small (city-) states such as Vatican City and to a certain degree in England. And only in 2000 did Sweden declare the Lutheran Church to be the state religion no longer.
So the separation of church and state was unusual in the sense that hitherto powerful roles and positions in society were often combined in one person, but the separation was alsofitting in the sense that territoriality and dominance hierarchies were the two major features of social life in many species, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in his 1976The Selfish Gene.Indeed, human beings are in some respects not so different from other animals.
Territoriality is usually conceptualized in terms of geographical space, but it is clear in this presentation that it can also be defined in terms of authority. And this is not just about who has the right to appoint office- holders, but also about who controls public services. During the Middle Ages, the growing separation of church and state was mainly evident in appointments, and the growing dominance of the state was visible in its levying taxes over clergy. In the early sixteenth century, though, and in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, various services transferred from the church to the state. That is to say, the countries that turned Protestant had a tradition of strong local self-government that had not been disturbed by Roman occupation. It was there, generally, that services in the areas of
education and health voluntarily changed hands, with local governments taking over responsibilities from the church. Especially education was an area where church and state interests clashed. In France and Russia it was not until the nineteenth century that church-controlled schools were seized by public authorities. In countries such as Denmark, England, and the Netherlands, governments set up a system of nondenominational and vocational schools. With regard to hospitals, during the Reformation in northern Europe they simply were seized as part of the effort to take church property. In countries such as Spain and Italy it was only in the nineteenth century that, under pressure, ownership transferred to the state. In France, legislation since the 1880s assured that hospitals provided care to all and not just to those who were of the right denomination. Protestants in Catholic hospitals faced constant pressure to convert, especially in the face of death;
there were forced baptisms; Protestants could even be denied a minister tending to their spiritual needs; and it was rumored that care might be denied if one turned to a hospital of the“wrong” denomination (Azimi, 2002; Dhont, 2002).
While separated by law, in practice state-church relations tend to vary.
In Catholic countries, state and church recognize common tasks as in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. In several Catholic and Protes- tant countries governments support religious organizations, for instance, through the construction of buildings of worship. Examples are France, the Netherlands, and the UK. In mostly Protestant countries, a general religious tax is levied and each citizen can indicate to which denomination her/his money should go, as in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland. Then there are countries where church and state are strictly separated, as in France. We remember the Islamic scarf controversy in France that drew worldwide attention in the mid-1990s. In the foreign press, the French have often been reviled for their strict adherence to the law of 1905 that served as the capstone legislation of all laws since the 1880s concerning the separation of church and state in all areas, health care and education included. This is where knowledge of history is useful, to say the least, because people who are not French are not familiar with the extent to which Roman Catholic clergy used to proselytize Protestants against their will (Dhont, 2002).
History unfolds and is neither the product of slow, incremental change, nor the product of a process of punctuated equilibrium. Instead, time goes by, some things change, others not, and never in a predictable manner. It is as the historian Trygve Tholfsen wrote:“The cardinal features of historical thinking, then, reflect an interest in the dimension of time in human life.
The historian approaches the past through categories of diversity, change, and continuity.”(1967, p. 6) This is as true for the tumultuous years leading up to and following the French Revolution as it is for the seemingly calmer Victorian age. And yet, it was at the time of the Atlantic Revolutions that multiple processes unfolding over centuries culminated and coalesced into a new foundation for government in society. The separation of church and state is as important a cornerstone to Western systems of governance as are the separation of politics and administration and of office and officeholder.
And it is fortunate that where positive law reigns supreme, rulers can be and are held accountable to the people.