Body politic

For the defunct Canadian magazine, see The Body Politic (magazine).

A body politic is a metaphor in which a nation is considered to be a corporate entity,^[2] being likened to a human body. The analogy is typically continued by reference to the apex of government as the head of state,^[3] but may be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of the Aesop's fable The Belly and the Members. The metaphor also appears in the French language as the corps-état.^[4]

The metaphor developed in Renaissance times, as the medical knowledge based upon the classical work of Galen was being challenged by new thinkers such as William Harvey. Analogies were made between the supposed causes of disease and disorder and their equivalents in the political field which were considered to be plagues or infections which might be remedied by purges and nostrums.^[5]

The concept can be seen in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which declares: "The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people" But it is summarized very simply in the words of the Declaration of Independence, which posits as a self-evident truth "that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." [1]

References

^ Kenneth Olwig (2002), Landscape, nature, and the body politic, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 87, ISBN 9780299174248, "The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan ... is a particularly famous example of the depiction of the body politic ..."
^ "body politic", Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com, "A nation regarded as a corporate entity"
^ A. D. Harvey (2007), Body politic: political metaphor and political violence, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ISBN 9781847182722
^ Antoine de Baecque (1997), The body politic: corporeal metaphor in revolutionary France, 1770-1800, Stanford University Press, ISBN 9780804728171
^ Jonathan Harris (1998), Foreign bodies and the body politic: discourses of social pathology in early modern England, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521594059