Needs in Early Modern Theory of the State: The Pyramid of the Legitimacy of the Power

Abstract

The medieval concept of body politic lived on in the early modern age. The medieval anthropomorphic point of view was focusing only on the physical appearance, so it was a metaphor for the human body and the structure of the state. While in the humanist thought, the inner characteristics of the human being was described parallelly to that of the state, i.e. both the human and the state had passions and needs. For example the first need of the human being is to remain alive, just as the state should survive in wars. Then there follow the economic-demographic-intellectual needs respectively one after the other. Though the resemblance is obvious to Abraham Maslow’s world-wide known work, (Motivation and Personality New York, 1970), which deals with the final happiness, the upmost wellbeing of the human, there are several early modern works that describe the pyramid of needs too, especially in connection with the needs of the state. Therefore, I draw this parallelism between the needs of the human and the state in order to describe their road to their wellbeing upon the political-philosophic works of the epoch.