The Heart, Egg, and Physician of the Early Modern State

'The Fate of the Animals' by Franz Marc 1913 [originally titled 'The Trees Show Their Rings, The Animals Their Veins’]

A systems theory of society would not portray society as an organisation. But neither would a systems theory need to argue — as did Friedrich Hayek in 'Law, Legislation and Liberty' — that the guiding rules of self-generating systems differ fundamentally from the rules of organisation. Organisations operate with the system, and whatever ‘rules’ or ‘codes’ apply to the system apply to organisations, even if some rules are typed as organisational and others as individual. Systems are centreless interactions, so a system theory of society explains the interactions of functional parts of the social system. The parts of such a system include persons, organisations, but also the subsystems of systems. 

Neither is it necessary theoretically to assume all parts of the social system of society are commensurate either in their type, size, or societal impact. The state as a subsystem of a social system of society is not functionally equivalent to any other subsystem, howsoever the subsystem is defined. Feasible subsystem categories of the social system include the economy, education, entertainment, art, religion, healthcare, and science. 

Given certain assumptions — excluding socialist and communist systems of governance — there are two reasons why it is not contradictory to say that systems are centreless and social systems have states at their centre. Firstly, states regulate interactions in the social system but do not themselves perform or channel the majority of these interactions. Secondly, the state as a system of separated organisational powers of authority is itself centreless.

 

Organisations, private as well as public, are structures for exercising authority and for making decisions, but they operate within one or more encompassing systems. As such, organisations submit to the system’s distinctive rules, and are subject to environmental pressures and structural imperatives that affect the development of the systems in whose orbits they are operating. Such determining pressures lie outside the social system. It is, however, the case that an evolved system of state organisations has a determining influence on the social system from within. 

In this sense the evolved social system is the single known exception to the ‘centreless’ definition of systems.

Modern social systems are unique in evolutionary terms, since they have grown within themselves a separate high-impact holistic system at their centre — the state. Should we say that the state is the ‘heart’ of society? The analogy of ‘heart’ and ‘state’ is absurd for anyone who thinks of a state as imperious, cold and bureaucratic, the thief of all liberty, impervious to heartfelt motives. 

Yet technically the analogy of heart is not misplaced. The heart is defined thus: 

Black’s Medical Dictionary:  “a hollow muscular pump with four cavities, each provided at its outlet with a valve, whose function is to maintain the circulation of the blood”. 

In modern times, in the West, we have a thing like a triple-chamber and triple-valve mechanism at the heart of society. The service chamber, with its executive valve, supplies some services that other interacting parts of the social system cannot as effectively or as economically provide. The normative chamber with its judging valve regulates interactions in the social system, for there is no subsystem of society where a crime or a misdemeanour cannot be committed. The feedback chamber with its representation valve channels all the communicated interests of society’s subsystems into what is determined to be the appropriate decision making structure. 

The contemporary Western state system is this metaphorical heart. The body of the social system has self-generated the heart. And the evolutionary motive for the selection of a heart to ‘regulate the flows’ in the interior of the system was the maintenance of social order.

 

The reason I have so dwelt on the analogy with the heart is to prepare the ground for remarks I wish to make about an eminent seventeenth century scientific validation of a state 'heart' as society’s centre.

 

William Harvey (1578–1657) discovered the “system” of the circulation of the blood, and likened his study of cardiovascular connections between “the parts” of living bodies to a study of “the composition of a general system of polity”. One should not “draw general conclusions”, Harvey wrote, by studying only the body’s parts or even “a single commonwealth”. A science of “whole” systems requires that we look for what performs the function of the heart and flows between the parts in all comparable systems. 

Harvey was none other than the physician to both Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, in the period that lay the foundations for a system of separations of power. Harvey was a royalist, it goes without saying. But his science of the systemic circulation of blood in animal bodies greatly influenced some of the theoreticians of early modern political systems, both republicans and royalists. 

Harvey and Thomas Hobbes knew each other, and in the Introduction to 'Leviathan' (1651) Hobbes memorably visualised the commonwealth or state, and the human heart, as machines, automata: 

Hobbes:  "For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?"

James Harrington, who was a republican, called his own work “political anatomy”. He praised “famous Harvey” for using scientific methods based on generalisable “principles of nature” rather than simply on “the anatomy of this or that body”, or, by implication, from this or that part of the body. Harrington’s medical analogy of England’s two houses of parliament in 'The Commonwealth of Oceana' (1656) accurately reproduces Harvey’s discovery: 

Harrington:  "The parliament is the heart which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser store, the other less and full of a purer, sucketh in and gusheth forth the life blood of Oceana [England] by a perpetual circulation."

Even more startling is Harvey’s much earlier letter to Prince Charles in 1628, informing the soon-to-be king of the completion of his treatise on circulatory system, and stating a belief that the “functions” of the sovereign, prince, or state are, with respect to the “republic”, equivalent to those of the heart.

Harvey:  "The heart of animals is the foundation of their life and the sovereign of everything within them; it is the sun of their microcosm, upon which all growth depends and from which all power proceeds. Similarly, the king is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him; he is the heart of the republic, the fountain from which all power and all grace flows. I am the more emboldened to present to your majesty, according to the custom of the present age, what I have here written of the motions of the heart because almost all things human are done after human examples and many things in a king are after the pattern of the heart. Therefore, knowledge of his heart will not be useless to a prince, as embracing a kind of divine example of his functions — and it has still been usual with men to compare small things with great. Here, at all events, best of princes, placed as you are at the pinnacle of human affairs, you may at once contemplate the prime mover in the body of man and the emblem of your own sovereign power. I most humbly implore you, illustrious prince, to accept therefore, with your accustomed clemency, this my new treatise on the heart. For you are yourself the new light of this age, and indeed its very heart …, Your Majesty’s most devoted servant, William Harvey."

Harvey’s discovery of systemic circulation influenced Descartes’s system theorisations and was one of many other conceptualisations of natural and mechanical systems or mechanisms and automata during the seventeenth century scientific revolutions. The age that gave birth to the first state system of separation of powers was, perhaps unsurprisingly, also the one that produced the first systems theories of polities and societies. 

Yet it would be remiss not to mention Harvey’s other discovery in medical science, often referred to as his refutation of “spontaneous generation”, from which we may borrow a further analogy for improving the social science of social systems. Through experiments undertaken on chicken eggs, maggots, worms, and other creatures Harvey was able in 'Anatomical Exercitations' (1649) to disprove the widespread opinion in his day, which derived mainly from Aristotle, that forms of life can emerge spontaneously from inanimate matter, soil, decaying flesh, and excrement. The phrase ex ovo omnia — “everything from an egg” — is Harvey’s enduring legacy, and he himself might have drawn more general conclusions about the unlikelihood of self-generation.

Harvey:  "Because we are here to shew after what manner the Chicken is made out of the Egge, I conceive it not useless, to demonstrate, how many several wayes one thing may be said to be made out of another: for by that means it will more clearly and distinctly appear, how many several wayes generation doth proceed from an Egge."

It is largely thanks to Harvey that we know the fertilisation of the egg ‘conceives’ the embryo. In fact it was Harrington, ever the admirer of Harvey, who in the 1660s took the discovery and made the analogy fit for studying emergent forms of governance in his book, 'A System of Politics':

Harrington:  "Those naturalists that have best written of generation do observe that all things proceed from an egg, and that there is in every egg a punctum saliens, or a part first moved, as the purple speck observed in those of hens; from the working whereof the other organs or fit members are delineated, distinguished and wrought into one organical body … A nation without government, or fallen into privation of form, is like an egg unhatched."

 

The system of state emerges from or alongside the emergence of certain rules or codes, which themselves may have been produced as solutions to double contingency problems. Thus, as in Harvey’s famous dictum everything from an egg it is reasonable to say everything from a code. 

Once the centrality of the state system is established — in history and theory — notions of pure spontaneous societal order or comprehensive self-generation will necessarily be regarded with scepticism.

The results of these early modern scientific experiments with hearts and eggs conducted by the loyal physician to two Stuart kings of England lend support for the hypothesis that systems of state with clear separations between two or three powers function indispensably to regulate the flows in increasingly evolved social systems. In their own ways, Hobbes and Harrington suggested this possibility (even though Hobbes was no advocate of a centreless separation of powers). 

In this sense we can now say state systems were ‘conceived’ from rules, and the rules were ‘conceived’ as solutions to double contingency.

Michael G Heller  ©2021