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Kings, Law, and Property

This work, as the author describes it, is no "history book," but an assemblage of "reflections toward a history of the state" written "in a spirit of speculation" (p. 7). First published in 1979, shortly before Francois Mitterrand's election as president of France, and republished in 1989, at the beginning of his second septennat, these speculative reflections read like a prolegomena to Mitterrand's reign, setting out the assumptions of a postMarxist Socialist regime with a liberal face. In particular, the author sets herself the task of rescuing the modern state from its critics on the left and right: against the left, Kriegel argues that the state has been more than an organizing committee of the ruling classes, but a genuinely progressive force insofar as it liberated Europe from slavery and "feudalism"; against the right, she argues that far from posing a constant threat to individual liberty, the state has been an indispensable precondition of that liberty. What both sets of state critics share, Kriegel believes, is a warped historical perspective that has led them to misconstrue the relationship of state and society; neither a mere emanation of society, nor a constant predator on it, state power has existed in different forms, some despotic and totalitarian no doubt, but others profoundly "less bad" (p. 6). By reconfiguring the history of the state, the author seeks to restore its sense of purpose.