By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the concept of the State – its nature, its powers, its right to command obedience – had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in European political thought. Hobbes reflects this development when he declares in the Preface to his Philosophical Rudiments, first published as De Cive in 1642, that the aim of ‘civil science’ is ‘to make a more curious search into the rights of states and duties of subjects’ (pp. x, xiv). How had this development come about? One of the main aims of this book has been to suggest an answer. The aim of these concluding remarks will be to summarise the argument by recapitulating what I take to be the most important preconditions for the acquisition of the modern concept of the State.

One precondition is clearly that the sphere of politics should be envisaged as a distinct branch of moral philosophy, a branch concerned with the art of government. This was of course an ancient assumption, classically embodied in Aristotle's Politics. The idea was lost to view, however, with Augustine's immensely influential insistence in The City of God that the true Christian ought not to concern himself with the problems of ‘this temporal life’, but ought to keep his gaze entirely fixed on ‘the ever lasting blessings that are promised for the future, using like one in a strange land any earthly and temporal things, not letting them entrap him or divert him from the path that leads to God’ (pp. 193–5).