Figgis of the period immediately after the Reformation...

Figgis of the period immediately after the Reformation, “the Absolute Individual confronts the Absolute State.”25 The state becomes distinct from society; in the Middle Ages social ties and political ties have a unity, just as they did for the Greeks, even if the unity of feudalism and the unity of the πόλις were quite different. A man is related to the state not via a web of social relations binding superiors and inferiors in all sorts of ways, but just as subject.

A man is related to the economic order not via a well-defined status in a set of linked associations and guilds, but just as one who has the legal power to make contracts. Of course this social process of transition from status to contract is not only slow and uneven, it never takes place once for all. Time and again, different sections of the community…