century Aquinas’s admirer Dante could write (in the Inferno) of the
town of Cesena in the Romagna as suspended ‘between tyranny and a
free state’ (tra tirannia e stato franco); and the Florentine historian
Giovanni Villani called the constitutional reforms of 1293 which
attempted to curb the influence of the magnates a mutazione di stato.
Both Villani and Leonardo Bruni, who described the results of the
Ciompi revolt in 1378 as status reipublicae mutatio, were using the
terminology of Aquinas along with the argument of book V of
Aristotle’s Politics, which discusses the ‘transmutation’ of constitu-
tions.^19
State as commonwealth
But talk of the state of the regime has always been in relation to that
wider community of which the regime is the focus. As historically
important as the idea of the organic nation is that of the political order-
ing of ranks or ‘estates’ into ‘the state of the commonwealth’: a benign
vision perfectly represented by H. A. L. Fisher’s description of the out-
come of the Norman conquest of England.
... the foundations were laid for the construction of a free and well-governed
state. Normans and English intermarried. Under the shelter of a government
strong enough to keep the baronage in its place a rural middle-class, that
valuable feature which most sharply distinguishes medieval England from its
continental neighbours, maintained itself in rude comfort and respectability and
in due course of time became a principal pillar of constitutional government in
our island.^20
The State which Hegel made the subject-matter of history is a much
more dynamic ‘maelstrom of external contingency and the inner
particularity of passions, private interests and selfish ends, abilities, and
virtues, vices, forces and wrong’; society was held together by the
‘fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses’, but ‘the origin
of the state is domination on the one hand, instinctive obedience on the
other’, because ‘obedience and force, fear of a ruler, is already a con-
nection of wills’.^21
State as commonwealth 5C. T. Davis, ‘Roman Patriotism and Republican Propaganda: Ptolemy of Lucca and Pope
Nicholas III’, Speculum, 50 (1975), 411–33; N. Rubinstein, ‘Politics and Constitution in
Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob
(London, 1960), 160.
(^19) Dante, Inferno, canto 27, l. 54; Rubinstein, ‘Notes on the Word stato’, p. 316; L. Bruni’s
translation of the Politics, bk. 1, ch. 9: f. 31 in the edition of the Politicsand Economics,
edited by Lefèvre d’Étaples and printed by H. Estienne (Paris, 1511); H. Baron, The Crisis of
the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Princeton UP, 1966), for Bruni’s importance.
(^20) H. A. L. Fisher, History of Europe(London, 1936), 214.
(^21) G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon