Body politic
Historically, the sovereign is typically portrayed as the body's head, and the analogy may also be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of Aesop's fable of "The Belly and the Members".
Analogies were drawn between supposed causes of disease and disorder and their equivalents in the political field, viewed as plagues or infections that might be remedied with purges and nostrums.
[2] The 17th century writings of Thomas Hobbes developed the image of the body politic into a modern theory of the state as an artificial person.
[3][4] Parallel terms exist in other European languages, such as Italian corpo politico, Polish ciało polityczne, and German Staatskörper ("state body").
[6] The general metaphor emerged in the 6th century BC, with the Athenian statesman Solon and the poet Theognis describing cities (poleis) in biological terms as "pregnant" or "wounded".
[8] The term itself, however—in Ancient Greek, τῆς πόλεως σῶμα, tēs poleōs sōma, "the body of the state"—appears as such for the first time in the late 4th century Athenian orators Dinarch and Hypereides at the beginning of the Hellenistic era.
[11] In its origins, the concept was particularly connected to a politicised version of Aesop's fable of "The Belly and the Members", told in relation to the first secessio plebis, the temporary departure of the plebeian order from Rome in 495–93 BC.
[17] In the Late Middle Ages, the concept of the corporation, a legal person made up of a group of real individuals, gave the idea of a body politic judicial significance.
[18] The corporation had emerged in imperial Roman law under the name universitas, and a formulation of the concept attributed to Ulpian was collected in the 6th century Digest of Justinian I during the early Byzantine era.
[19] The Digest, along with the other parts of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis, became the bedrock of medieval civil law upon its recovery and annotation by the glossators beginning in the 11th century.
[20] It remained for the glossators' 13th century successors, the commentators—especially Baldus de Ubaldis—to develop the idea of the corporation as a persona ficta, a fictive person, and apply the concept to human societies as a whole.
For the King's Supreme Power, and Royal Pleasure, is exercised and declared in this High Court of Law, and Council, after a more eminent and obligatory manner, than it can be by any personal Act or Resolution of His Own.
[37]The 18th century jurist William Blackstone, in Book I of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), summarised the doctrine of the king's body politic as it subsequently developed after the Restoration: the king "in his political capacity" manifests "absolute perfection"; he can "do no wrong", nor even is he capable of "thinking wrong"; he can have no defect, and is never in law "a minor or under age".
Indeed, Blackstone says, if an heir to the throne should accede while "attainted of treason or felony", his assumption of the crown "would purge the attainder ipso facto".
Bentham's position dominated later British legal thinking, and though aspects of the theory of the body politic would survive in subsequent jurisprudence, the idea of the Crown as a corporation sole was widely critiqued.
[49] Upon the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, however, parliamentarians such as William Bridge put forward the argument that the "ruling power" belonged originally to "the whole people or body politicke", who could revoke it from the monarch.
[55] In the 18th century, Hobbes's theory of the state as an artificial body politic gained wide acceptance both in Britain and continental Europe.
[57] At around the same time, the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel pronounced that "states are bodies politic", "moral persons" with their own "understanding and ... will", a statement that would become accepted international law.
Writing in 1780, during the American Revolutionary War, the British reformist John Cartwright emphasised the artificial and immortal character of the body politic in order to refute the use of biological analogies in conservative rhetoric.
The king is head. Next, the seneschals, bailiffs, and provosts and other judges are compared to eyes and ears. The counsellors and wise men are linked to the heart. As defenders of the commonwealth, the knights are the hands. Because of their constant voyages, the merchants are associated with the legs. Finally, laborers, who work close to the earth and support the body, are its feet.
