From the kings house to the reason of state (Pierre Bourdieu)

Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic FieldPierre Bourdieu The aim of this project is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try and identify the specific characteristic

Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field

Pierre Bourdieu

The aim of this project is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try and

identify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison d’Etat), which

the self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by thestate – minds of state – and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task athand is less to probe the factors involved in the emergence of the state than to pin-point the logic of the historical process which governed the crystallization of thishistorical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucraticform; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process ofautonomization of a bureaucratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than to

construct a model of this process – more precisely, a model of the transition from

the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, from the state reduced to the hold of the king to the state constituted as a field of forces and a field of strugglesoriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods

house-As R.J Bonney points out, when studying the “modern nation-state” we areliable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: “For the greater part ofthe period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority ofEuropean monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the –perhaps fortuitous – exception of France.”2 Absent a clear distinction between thedynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the specificity of themodern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up tothe bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinitionperformed in its course (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny thename of state to the dynastic state, as J.W Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes thelimited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an electionrequiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by fac-tional, princely politics characterized by patrimonial strategies oriented towardsensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates One finds herenone of the features of the modern state It is only in the France and England ofthe seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modernstate appear European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by thepersonal, “proprietary” vision of princes over their government, by the weight ofthe feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define thenorms of political life.)

The Specificity of the Dynastic State

The initial accumulation of capital is performed according to the logic

character-istic of the house (maison), an entirely original economic and social structure, particularly on account of the system of strategies of reproduction through which

it ensures its perpetuation The king, acting as “head of the house,” makes use ofthe properties of the house (in particular nobility as symbolic capital accumulated

by a domestic group through a range of strategies, of which the most important ismarriage) to construct a state, as administration and as territory, that graduallyescapes from the logic of the “house.”

We must pause for some methodological preliminaries: the ambiguity of the

dynastic state, which, from its origin, presents some “modern” features (e.g., theaction of jurists who enjoy a measure of autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic mechanismsdue to their technical competency and reliance on the academic mode of repro-duction), invites readings that tend to unravel the ambiguity of historical reality.The temptation of ethnologism can rest on archaic features such as coronation,which may be reduced to a primitive rite of consecration so long as one forgetsthat it is preceded by acclamation; or on the curing of scrofula, a warrant ofhereditary charisma transmitted by blood and divine delegation Conversely,ethnocentrism (and the anachronism that comes with it) can point to isolatedindicators of modernity, such as the existence of abstract principles and lawsproduced by the canonists But, above all, a superficial understanding of ethnologyprevents one from drawing on the teachings of the anthropology of “house-basedsocieties” to carry out a rigorous anthropology of the apex of the state

One can posit that the most fundamental features of the dynastic state can, as itwere, be deduced from the model of the house For the king and his family, thestate is identified with the “king’s house,” understood as a patrimony encompass-ing a household, that is, the royal family itself, which the king must manage as a

good “head of the house” (capmaysouè, as the Béarnais put it) Comprising the

whole lineage and its possessions, the house transcends the individuals whoincarnate it, starting with its head himself who must be able to sacrifice his par-ticular interests or sentiments to the perpetuation of his material and above allsymbolic patrimony (the honor of the house or the name of the lineage)

According to Andrew W Lewis, the mode of succession defines the kingdom.4Royalty is an honor transmissible in hereditary agnatic line (the right of blood)

and by primogeniture, and the state or royalty is reduced to the royal family Inthe dynastic model, first established in the royal family and then generalized tothe whole nobility, the principal honor and the individual patrimonial lands go to

the eldest son, the heir, whose marriage is treated as a political matter of the

utmost importance One guards against the threat of division by assigning ages to the younger sons, a compensation aimed to ensure harmony among thebrothers (in their testaments the kings urge each of them to accept his share andnot rebel), by marrying them to heiresses or placing them in the Church

apan-One can apply to the French or English royalty, right up to a fairly late period,what Marc Bloch said of the medieval seigneury, founded on the “fusion of theeconomic group and the sovereignty group.”5 Paternal power constitutes thepattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance As intraditional Kabylia, political relationships are not autonomized with respect tokinship relations and are always thought after those relations; the same goes foreconomic relations Power rests on personal relationships and affective relation-ships such as fealty,6 “love,” and “credit,” which are socially instituted and

actively maintained, especially through “largesses” (gifts and grants).

The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for atime is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the “house” and of the dynasticstate which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it Philip

IV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; the

“family” is divided into various “chambers,” specialized services that followthe king in his travels The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor ofthe bonds of blood This is how one can understand the mythology of the king’stwo bodies, which has so fascinated historians since Kantorowicz, and whichsymbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the personwho temporally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among thepeasants of Béarn, where the male members of the house, understood as thetotality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were oftendesignated by their forename followed by the name of the house, which implied,

in the case of sons-in-law from a different lineage, that they lost their own familyname).7 The king is “head of the house,” socially mandated to implement adynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in theservice of the greatness and prosperity of his “house.”

A number of matrimonial strategies have the aim of fostering territorialextensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch.One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerablyenlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriagepolicy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comté and the Netherlands by hismarriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip theFair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was bornCharles V Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with theso-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursuing successional strategies byother means

The war of succession of Castile (1474–79) is a well-known case: if Isabella had not won,the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would havebecome possible Charles V’s war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders intoBurgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg statewould have been formed around Cleves, Jülich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee Butthe partition of Cleves and Jülich in 1614 after the war of succession put an end to that

vague possibility In the Baltic, the union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norwayended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark and Sweden which followed, thequestion arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the House

of Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved and Sweden attained its ‘naturalborders.’ In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynasticunion of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union in 1569 But thedynastic union of Sweden and Poland was the declared aim of Sigismund III and con-tinued to be that of the kings of Poland until 1660 They also nursed ambitions in Muscovyand in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup d’état by theboyars.8

One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape theteleological vision founded on the retrospective illusion which makes the con-struction of France a “project” pursued by the successive kings Thus Cheruel, for

example, in his Histoire de l’administration monarchique en France, explicitly

refers to the “will” of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state and it

is not without some surprise that one sees some historians condemning theinstitution of apanages as a “dismemberment” of the royal domain

The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynasticstates by allowing us to see in them a reproduction strategy of a particular kind.But one must still raise the question of the means or, better, of the particularassets available to the royal family which enabled it to triumph in the competitionwith its rivals (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitlyposed the question, offers, with what he calls the “law of monopoly,” a solutionthat I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentiallyverbal and almost tautological: “If, in a major social unit, a large number of thesmaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the largerone, are of roughly equal social power and are thus able to compete freely –unhampered by pre-existing monopolies – for the means to social power, i.e., pri-marily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that somewill be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer andfewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will beeliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on anever-decreasing number.”9)

Endowed with the “semi-liturgical power” that sets him “apart from all otherpotentates, his rivals,”10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty,which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies a

distinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation of

symbolic capital He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that he

is able to call himself king, with a reasonable chance of having his claim

recog-nized In effect, in accordance with the logic of the “speculative bubble” dear toeconomists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at least

to some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the othersreckon with the fact that he is king A minimum differential thus suffices to create

a maximum gap because it differentiates him from all the others Moreover, the

king finds himself placed in the position of center and, due to this, has tion on all the others – who, short of forming a coalition, communicate only

informa-through him – and he can monitor alliances He is therefore situated above thefray and predisposed to fulfill the function of an arbiter, a court of appeal

(One can cite here as an exemplification of this model the analysis of MuzaffarAlam, which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of NorthernIndia, correlative of the waning of imperial authority and the reinforcement of theauthority of local notables and provincial autonomy, the local chieftains con-tinued to perpetuate the “reference to at least an appearance of an imperial center,”invested with a legitimating function: “Again, in the conditions of unfetteredpolitical and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the decline

of imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to winthe allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power All of them strug-gled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position andachievements Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over

the others When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a

centre to legitimize their acquisitions.”11)

The Specific Contradictions of the Dynastic State

The initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: thenascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, academic mode of managementand reproduction associated with it) remains the personal property of a “house”which continues to follow a patrimonial mode of management and reproduction.The king dispossesses private powers but for the benefit of a private power; heperpetuates, within his own dynasty, a familial mode of reproduction antinomicwith that he is establishing (or is being established) within the bureaucracy (byreference to merit and competency) He concentrates the various forms of power,

in particular economic and symbolic power, and redistributes them in “personal”

forms (“largesses”) liable to inducing “personal” forms of attachment Whence

all kinds of contradictions that play a decisive role in the transformation of thedynastic state, although historians generally fail to count them among the factors

of “rationalization” (such as competition between states – international wars requirethe concentration and rationalization of power, a self-sustaining process sincepower is needed to make the war which calls for the concentration of power –

or competition between central and local powers)

One notes first, until a late date, the permanence of old structures of the monial type There is, for example, the survival, observed by Roland Mousnier,

patri-even within the most bureaucratized sector, of the pattern master/faithful servant,

protector/“creature.”12 Seeking to show that one cannot rely solely on the history

of institutions in order to understand the real functioning of governmental tions, Richard Bonney writes:

institu-It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind thefaçade of the official system of administration, which is certainly easier to describe.

By their very nature, relations of patronage escape the eyes of the historian; but theimportance of a minister, a secretary of state, an intendant, or a king’s counselordepended less on his title than on his influence – or that of his patron His influencewas determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronage

he enjoyed.13

Another revealing feature is the existence of family-based clans (often designated

by the misleading name of “parties”), which paradoxically contributed indirectly

to imposing bureaucratization: “The great noble clans, whether loyal or dissident,were structural to the monarchy” and “the ‘favorite,’ either dissident or liable to

be so, exerts his absolute power against the royal family.”14

Paradoxically, the ambiguities of a system of government that mingles thedomestic and the political, the king’s house and the reason of state, are no doubtone of the major causes of the strengthening of the bureaucracy, owing to the con-tradictions they engender: the emergence of the state arises in part thanks to themisunderstandings born from the fact that one can, in all good faith, describe theambiguous structures of the dynastic state in a language, that of law in particular,which gives them a quite different foundation and thereby paves the way for theirsupersession It was by expressing itself in the language of Roman law, assisted

by an ethnocentric interpretation of the juridical texts, that the dynastic principlewas gradually converted, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a new,properly “statist” principle The dynastic principle, which plays a central role asearly as the time of the Capetians (as attested to by the crowning of the heir in

childhood), reaches its full development with the constitution of the royal family,

consisting of the men and women having royal blood in their veins (“princes ofthe blood”) The typically dynastic metaphor of the royal blood is elaboratedthrough the logic of Roman law, which uses the word blood to express filiation

(jura sanguinis) Thus, when Charles V restructured the necropolis of Saint

Denis, all persons of royal blood (even women and children, boys and girls, even

if they died young) were buried around Saint Louis

The juridical principle relies on reflection about the typically dynastic notion

of the crown as a principle of sovereignty standing above the royal person Fromthe fourteenth century, it is an abstract word that designates the king’s estate(“crown domains,” “crown revenue”) and “dynastic continuity, the chain of kings

in which his person is but a link.”15 The crown implies the inalienability of thefeudal lands and rights of the royal domain, and then of the kingdom itself; it

evokes the dignitas and majestas of the royal function (progressively

distin-guished from the person of the king) Thus, with the idea of the crown, the notion

of an autonomous entity, independent of the king as individual, takes shape little

by little through a reinterpretation of the idea of the house transcending its ownmembers The jurists are no doubt inclined to effect a creative confusion betweenthe dynastic representation of the house, which still drives them, and the juridical

representation of the state as corpus mysticum in the manner of the Church

(according to Kantorowicz’s schema)

Paradoxically, it is the weight of kinship structures and the threats that palacewars bring for the perpetuation of the dynasty and the power of the prince thatfoster everywhere, from ancient empires to modern states, the development offorms of authority independent of kinship in their functioning as in their repro-duction The state as concern is the site of an opposition analogous to thatwhich Berle and Means have introduced about the business corporation,between the hereditary owners of power and the managers, recruited for theircompetency and lacking property titles16 – an opposition that one must be

careful not to reify, as happened in the case of the firm The demands of

outlines of a division of the labor of domination It is the heirs who must rely on

the managers to perpetuate themselves; it is they who, quite often, must resort

to the new resources secured by bureaucratic centralization to prevail over thethreats represented by their dynastic rivals This is the case, for example, when

a king uses the resources accrued by the Treasury to buy off the heads of rivallineages or, more subtly, when he monitors the competition among his kinsmen

by hierarchically distributing the symbolic profits granted by the organization

of the court

One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with,

alongside the king, the king’s brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whose authority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the king’s ministers, typically homines novi, “new men” recruited for their competency One can say,

at the cost of some simplification, that the king needs ministers to limit andcontrol the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers tolimit and control the power of his ministers

The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agriculturalproducers living in communities closed unto themselves and dominated by a minoritywho ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), andthe management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear break

with family bonds by instituting great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from political

reproduction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links withthe people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial services

of the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are theproperty of the state and whose goods and position can revert to the state at any time.17

In ancient Egypt there was a clear-cut distinction between the royal family and the senioradministration, with power delegated to “new men” rather than to members of the royal

family Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slave

and “functionary”; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of the Medes and Persians, thetop civil servants were often Greeks The same was true in the Mongol Empire, wheresenior administrators were almost all foreigners.18

The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire From Racine’s

Bajazet we are familiar with the permanent threat that his brothers and his Vizir, a

bureaucratic figure mandated, among others, to control them, represented for the prince.

A radical solution after the fifteenth century was the law of fratricide, which required theprince’s brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires ofthe ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, whorose to the positions of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with acosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the “collecting” of talents ensured a

supply of “devoted individuals.” The Ottoman term kul means both “slave” and “servant

of the state.”

One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division of the labor of

cap-acity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful butdeprived of reproductive capacity: to limit the power of the hereditary members

of the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to the

dynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve and

who can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at anymoment

But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented byany holder of a power based on a specialized competency, more or less scarce,

these homines novi are recruited in such a manner that they have no chance of

reproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed tocelibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastictype, or of durably grounding their power in an autonomous legitimacy, inde-pendent of that which the state grants them, conditionally and temporarily,through their status as functionaries (If the papal state evolved so early, from thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because itescaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family –sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship – and because ithad no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.)

Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effects

of this fundamental law could be enumerated, viz measures to prevent the gence of countervailing powers of the same nature as dynastic power (fiefdoms),i.e., powers that are independent (especially as regards reproduction) and heredi-tary (this is where feudalism and empire bifurcate) Thus, in the Ottoman Empire,

emer-high lords were given a timar, the income from lands, but not ownership of those

lands Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that arestrictly limited to the incumbent’s lifetime (cf priestly celibacy), in particular byrecourse to oblates (parvenus, rootless individuals), even pariahs The oblate isthe absolute antithesis to the king’s brother: depending on the state (or, in anothercontext, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, towhich he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personalforce The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment becast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of the

state (as with the “boursiers,” the “scholarship boys,” who achieved miraculous

mobility thanks to the educational system, especially during France’s ThirdRepublic).

As in the agrarian empires, in the France of Philippe Auguste the bureaucracy

was recruited from among homines novi of low birth And, as has already been

seen, the kings of France continually relied on “favorites,” distinguished, as theword itself implies, by an arbitrary choice, to thwart the power of the magnates.There were endless struggles between those (genealogically) closest to the kingand the favorites who supplanted them in the king’s favor:

Catherine de Médicis detests d’Épernon and seek by every means to oust him Marie

de Médicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630] Gastond’Orléans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny because

he comes between the king and his family On this account, the levy doubles becausethe ‘favorite,’ now become ‘first minister,’ needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed inorder to attract clienteles who would otherwise swell the ranks of his opponents Thefabulous wealth of the d’Épernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with themeans to carry out their policies Through d’Épernon and Joyeuse, Henri II controlsthe state apparatus, the army, and a certain number of provincial administrations.Thanks to his two friends, he felt himself to be rather more King of France.22

One cannot understand the role of the pariahs without taking due note of the ambiguity of

the specialist and of technical competency (technè) as principle of a virtually autonomous

and therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guenée points out, until 1388functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In manyancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communities

the artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer,

etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatment, and was both fearedand despised, even stigmatized Possession of a specialty, whether metallurgy or magic(which were often associated), finance, or, in another order, military capacity(mercenaries, janissaries, elite corps of the army, condottiere, etc.), could confer a danger-

ous power The same was true of writing: we know that the scribes (katib) of the Ottoman

Empire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted tomonopolize religious power According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of themonopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept awayfrom the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they couldnot conspire together These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that wereculturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control overthe means of coercion and marks of honor They were abandoned to outcasts who allowedthe dominant group and its representatives to see them fullfilled while officially rejectingthem The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus contained, bythe very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their fullprofits, especially in the political arena

The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like theminorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renownedfor their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goodsand services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to beauthorized to manipulate instruments that, placed in the wrong hands, would be very

dangerous One can also understand in this perspective – that of the division of powersand palace wars – the shift from the feudal army to the mercenary army: the salaried pro-fessional army is to the troop of “liegemen” or the “party” as the functionary or “favorite”

is to the king’s brothers or the members of the king’s house

The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between the

king’s brothers and the king’s ministers) lies in the conflict between two modes of

reproduction Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of powerbecomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, thenthe jurists – who introduce Roman law – and, later, Parliament, then the merchantsand the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of thelabor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, even contradictorycharacter of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of powerbecomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproductionbased on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to that

it is simutaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development ofeducation, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants It fosters thecoexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureau-cratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency andmerit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding theprinciple of its legitimacy, blood and birth

The transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state is thus ble from the movement whereby the new nobility, the “state nobility” (or

insepara-noblesse de robe), ousts the old nobility, the nobility of blood On can see in ing that the ruling circles were the first to undergo a process which extended,much later, to the whole of society, namely, the shift from a family-based mode

pass-of reproduction (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a cratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school

bureau-The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of Recognition

But the essential point is that, like the medieval seigneury as described by MarcBloch, the dynastic state is “a territory whose exploitation is organized in amanner such that part of its products goes to a single character,” who is “bothchief and master of the soil.”26 Notwithstanding the impersonal and bureaucraticelements it may entail, the dynastic state remains oriented towards the person ofthe king: it concentrates different species of capital, various forms of power andmaterial and symbolic resources (money, distinctions, titles, indulgences, and

exemptions) in the hands of the king so that the latter can, by means of selective

redistribution, establish or maintain relations of dependency (a clientele) or,better, of personal gratitude, and perpetuate his power

Thus, for example, the money accumulated through state taxation is ously redistributed to very specific categories of subjects (particularly in the form