 So thank you, Michael, very much for that. I didn't have my headphones on when he made that introduction, but I think I caught the getting to Denmark part of it. I must say that I had never been to Denmark or even to Scandinavia before Michael invited me here to Arhus. And then for three years I was a visiting professor. It was a wonderful three years. I met some really terrific colleagues that I still feel very close to and quite a number of students. And so when he mentioned that there was this conference on the Reformation, I jumped at the chance to come back. So I'm really delighted to be here and to resume our friendship, Michael. So thank you very much for that. So the topic of the Reformation is one that I've actually thought quite a lot about. My real interest in the last few years has been on the question of political development, meaning where do political institutions come from. And modern political institutions were shaped decisively by events that happened in the 16th century, meaning that they came out of the Reformation. So what I'm going to talk about is the impact of this movement in three respects. The first has to do with how the Reformation shaped the growth of modern states. The second has to do with Luther in particular and his relationship to the concept of identity, which I believe is a modern concept and which very much shapes the way we look at our world today. And then the third topic is how the Reformation inadvertently led to the rise of modern liberalism. Because there is a connection there, but it was one that was never planned by either Luther or Calvin or Melanchthon or any of the founders of the Protestant Reformation. Before I get into the first of these issues, the modern state, I need to distinguish. I know the emphasis because this is the 500th anniversary of the 95th Theses. The emphasis at this conference has been very heavily on Martin Luther. But there were, in fact, two important phases to the Protestant Reformation. So the first one begins in 1517 and goes up through the, let's say, 1547, when the Schmalkaldic League is defeated by the emperor Charles V. So this is a period in which Lutheranism spreads. It spreads through preachers and sermons on a grassroots level, but the territorial gains of Lutheranism are really due to princes that decide to take their principalities into Lutheranism. And so you get the entire conversion of a whole society from the top down. The second phase begins when the Catholic Church regains its composure. It had been very disorganized. The empire had been very disorganized in the 1520s, 30s and 40s. But by the 1540s there's a defeat, a military defeat of the Protestant princes in Germany. The Council of Trent begins in 1545. The Catholics at this point decide that they're not going to try to negotiate a resolution of the doctrinal issues with the Protestants, that they will stick to a pure form of their doctrine. The Society of Jesus of St. Ignatius Lyola is founded in the 1550s. It's a very militant wing of crusading Catholicism. And so Catholicism makes a political comeback throughout the emperor, throughout Latin Europe. And this is the moment that John Calvin establishes his Protestant Republic in Geneva. And Calvinism spreads not through the power of princes so much as on a grassroots level through its ability to organize individual congregations. It spreads through France with the Huguenot movement. It spreads to the Netherlands. It goes to England. So it actually leaps territorially into very different and sometimes at that point peripheral parts of Europe. But it meets the resistance of an organized Catholicism. And so Calvinism is not as powerful politically as the early Lutheran states. They organize in opposition and that very much affects the effect that they had on subsequent political development. So let me begin with the first of the topics, which is the impact of the Lutheran phase of the Reformation on the growth of a modern state. A modern state, if you consult my book that Michael referred to, Political Order and Political Decay has several important elements. It is a monopoly of force, of power over territory that is regarded as legitimate. But there's a very important difference between a modern state and a patrimonial state. A modern state seeks to be impersonal. Generally speaking, it is ruled by a centralized bureaucracy that is capable of imposing uniform rules impersonally on citizens simply because they are citizens. A patrimonial state, a pre-modern state, is one in which your personal relationship with the ruler determines your status. You have a lot of inherited privileges and no state in Europe in the year 1500 was a modern state. Sovereignty was divided between a king and various territorial lords. These lords were not even sovereign over their territories because there was sub-infudation. There was a theory of the two crowns and so no European monarch would have said, I am an absolute sovereign because they would have said, God is sovereign. God is sovereign through his representative on earth, which is the Pope and the universal Catholic Church in Rome. And so there was a fundamental transnational, there was a division of sovereignty between territorial lords, a very decentralized and a transnational body, which was the Catholic Church. Territories were not contiguous, so as a result of dynastic marriages, conquest, acquisitions, a particular king could rule over territories like Prussia from Cleves and Mark in western Germany all the way to East Prussia. Now the first way in which the Protestant Reformation led to the growth of modern states was simply a material one. Many princes in Europe grabbed the property of the church and kept it for themselves. This of course happened in the princely states in Germany like the Saxony of Frederick the Wise that we saw portrayed yesterday in the opera, but this was really characteristic of Scandinavia as well, Denmark and Sweden. Professor Kaufmann yesterday went over a lot of that history, so I don't want to rehearse it, this process really begins in the 1520s with Christian II who is not converted to Lutheranism. He simply wants to nationalize the Catholic Church in his territories, and so he does this by beginning to appoint his own appointees to ecclesiastical positions and taking that appointment power away from Rome. Then his nephew Frederick the First, the next king, is kind of neutral on doctrine, but he permits Lutheran preachers to spread through Denmark. This is the moment I think at which Danish society itself at a grassroots level begins to convert to the new religion, and then of course in 1536 at the end of the Count's War Christian III turns the country into the first Lutheran principality in Europe. He had experimented with this in Holstein as Duke creating a princely state, a princely Lutheran state, and he applies those lessons to Denmark as a whole, so it is a very top-down affair. At that point perhaps one-third of the land in Denmark had been owned by the Catholic Church. In Norway apparently about half of the land was the property of the church. Christian III had run up huge debts as a result of the Count's War. He was broke like many early modern monarchs. He needed revenues and there was a clear revenue source that he could grab. Something very similar is done by Gustavus Vassa in Sweden as a result of the Swedish, I don't know how it's referred to in Denmark, but their war of independence from Denmark. He runs up a lot of debts and he again sees these church properties. He doesn't seem to have any particular interest in Lutheranism as a doctrine, but he sees that it's a convenient excuse to grab the property of the church and he does so. There the resistance is stronger because there hadn't been as much grassroots support for Lutheranism and so you get these conservative peasant rebellions in favor of the old church that recur in Sweden and so it takes a much longer time for Lutheranism to be consolidated there than in Denmark. In England you see really the process of modern state building being directly connected to the creation of a national Protestant English church. I'm sure you're aware, Henry VIII had no interest in Lutheranism. He didn't like all the preachers from Wittenberg particularly, but he wanted to get a divorce and the Pope wouldn't give it to him so he basically took the entire Catholic church property and nationalized it. Again, something like 20% of all the land in England was owned by the church, a lot of the movable wealth, the taxes, the tithe that went from Catholic parishes to Rome. All of a sudden began going to the English exchequer. The process, the historian G.R. Elton has made an argument that actually the modern English state was born under the secretarieship of Thomas Cromwell. Henry VIII's great minister who devised a bureaucratic system for managing all of these ecclesiastical taxes that the church had collected but which were now going to the English exchequer. There had to be an administrative system. It used to be the case that the king would ask for taxes only when he needed to fight a war but from the 1540s on the English state would collect taxes regularly and increasingly the administration of this taxation and revenue system was independent of the king. It was run by a permanent bureaucracy which meant that the king and achieving kingly power was simply less important which had an important effect on the growth of this impersonal state. The other thing that was going on in England and this was really happening in all of the new Protestant principalities in this period was the development of a distinct national identity as a result of the change in the language that was used because vernacular Bibles were being introduced in all of these places and because there was a distinctive Protestant worship service that was very different from the Catholic ritual. I will read you a paragraph from an English historian talking about the impact by the later part of the Tudor dynasty of how English national identity had shifted. The feeling of national identity and uniqueness continued to grow reaching an apogee in the reign of Elizabeth when it was given classic expression in one of the most influential works of the whole English literature. John Fox's Acts and Monuments was a resounding statement of the theory that Protestant England was God's elect nation superior to the enslaved papus of the continent and entirely independent of all authority except from that of the crown. This was a theory of the English and later British nationhood which would prevail from then onwards until the 1970s when membership in the European community once more subjected the country to decisions of an external authority. Of course that period of enslavement to external authority was very brief with the Brexit vote. They're now out of that and they've returned to being an independent happy green island apart from the rest of Europe. This is a simple material sense in which the Lutheran Reformation led to modern states. States are dependent on resources and the size and the administrative capacity of European states simply grew because they took over tax collection functions and simple property from the church. It also involved other social functions and so poor relief had been administered by various church bodies and over the next couple of centuries these increasingly get absorbed into the state itself which then lays the basis for the 20th century welfare state. The second respect in which the Reformation affected state building was during the Calvinist phase. There's a lot of studies led by economists these days about corruption and what are the sources of corruption. This is the essence of getting to Denmark because in all of the international measures of political corruption Denmark is always at the top of the list, Denmark, Norway, Singapore. They trade places but they're always at the top of the list and the question is how do you get up there? The current economy economic theory is so-called principal agent theory which says that corruption happens when a principal delegates power to an agent or a series of agents and then the agents follow their own self-interest rather than the interest of the principal and so according to the economists the way you fight corruption is by aligning the incentives of the agent with that of the principal. This theory works under many conditions except when the principal himself is corrupt. If the principal is corrupt and is stealing from the public treasury and has no concept of public interest but only of self-interest then the whole system breaks down and you have systemic corruption which unfortunately is the situation in very many developing and transitional countries and it means that you have to explain how it is that certain countries end up with principles meaning the king, president, the prime minister who is personally not corrupt and is interested in running the country for the sake of public interest, a common public interest rather than his own or his family and this is where Calvinism I think played an important role. There's a book by Philip Gorski who's a sociologist at Yale called The Disciplinary Revolution where he explores this mechanism in two important countries, the Netherlands and in Prussia. In the Netherlands the disciplinary revolution was a decentralized one. The Dutch as you're well aware fought an 80 year war with the empire with Spain basically the Spanish would use their base in Milan and send troops up the Spanish road to the low countries and the United provinces had to fight over a very prolonged period to retain their independence. They had no modern, what we would identify as a modern state apparatus, no centralized bureaucracy, they had no powerful king, they had a stockholder but one that was relatively weak by European standards. What they did have was extremely powerful grassroots organization in a series of local congregations, consistories that would discipline individual members of the congregation, would raise taxes, would provide fortifications and the like and Gorski gives some really remarkable historical comparative statistics that the low countries had much lower rates of crime than did contemporaneous Paris or London but what's really remarkable is its ability to tax its own people. In Spain and France where taxation fell heavily on the peasantry generally speaking those monarchies couldn't extract more than about 10% of total GDP what we would call GDP today in the form of taxes. In Holland that number was about 30% because the taxation was done on a local level and it was done with a kind of legitimacy where wealthy Dutchmen would give money to build ships for their navy because they understood that there was a direct relationship between taxation and the security of their society and Gorski argues that this was very much shaped by a Calvinist austerity that made public officials understand that they were serving a broader public interest and not simply their own so both in terms of personal morality and in terms of the morality of public officials he argues that Calvinism had a very big impact. The other country where you have Calvinism playing a rather interesting role is in Prussia Prussia of course was the home of the original model of modern bureaucracy when Max Weber wrote about bureaucracy he was really thinking about German bureaucracy which was inherited from the Prussians. This tradition, this bureaucratic tradition begins with a great elector at the end of the Thirty Years War he doesn't demobilize his army he begins to set Prussia on this path of state centralization. What is interesting is that the Hohenzollern family, the dynasty running Brandenburg and later Prussia were Calvinists in a largely Lutheran society. They did not trust the local Lutheran nobility and as a result when they built their bureaucratic machine they imported a lot of French Huguenots and Dutch Calvinists to actually be their administrators. This is a very typical pattern in a modern administrative system. You don't want to let your administrators marry into the local elites because that's the source of corruption. They have to maintain autonomy in a certain distance and Prussia creates the first modern autonomous bureaucracy because it's a bunch of Calvinists operating in a largely Lutheran society. Friedrich Wilhelm I, the first Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia who ruled in the early 18th century was an unbelievable disciplinarian. He once quipped and jailed his son Frederick who would go on to be Frederick the Great, Frederick II. He turned his palace into a parade ground. He cut the salaries of all of his bureaucrats. He fired half of them. If you saw any hint of corruption in the bureaucracy it would be punished by execution and he himself was extremely upright and austere and he set the tone for the entire bureaucracy that then survived the subsequent shifts in Prussian history and I think establishing both a tradition of austerity which I believe we still see among Germans and also the tradition of independent and autonomous public service as a special kind of calling and this was I think very much related to the Calvinism of the Ohenzollern family. This is a set of examples that show that both of the wings of the Protestant Reformation played a role in creating modern states. Now there's lots of other reasons why you have modern states. There's political competition, military competition in particular and so it turned out that the Catholic states in Europe in order to survive also had to modernize and so it's not the case that the only modern states that emerged were Protestant ones. The French of course created a very modern bureaucracy after Napoleon and then this became a generalized pattern but without the Reformation I think the initial impetus to state modernization would not have been there. Now the second issue that I think links the Reformation to modernity is this question of identity. Identity is the belief that there is an authentic self hidden inside me that is not fully revealed which I myself may not actually recognize that is different from the kind of external social role that I am being forced to play by my surrounding society. Professor Kaufman used the term identity when talking about the Christians fighting the Turks in the 16th century. You can use the term identity in that sense but I think in the modern sense if you're simply fighting an external enemy of a different religion over there that's not the same as this belief that I have an identity that is hidden inside me and everybody around me does not share that identity, does not know it, does not recognize it and does not appreciate it and that's the modern sense of identity that I think begins with Martin Luther. It begins with Luther because of his distinction between the inner and the outer man so of course Lutheranism is based on this idea of inner grace in his pamphlet the freedom of a Christian man Luther says the following he says no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom faith alone can rule only in the inner man as Romans 1010 says for man believes with his heart and so is justified and since faith alone justifies it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed or saved by any outer work or action at all and that these works whatever their character have nothing to do with this inner man now this concept of inner and outer also corresponded to Luther's own personal struggle because as an Augustinian monk he was trying to come to terms with his own sinfulness his own lack of faith he struggled with this over a number of years and I think did not understand this interiority of faith until a moment of revelation which then led to his revolt against the Catholic Church this is a modern sense of identity because what Luther was saying is that freedom human freedom the dignity of a Christian individual is only something on the inside it is certainly not visible by any external act of that individual it is certainly not visible in the external rituals of an institution like the Catholic Church and furthermore the value the true moral value lies in that inner person and not in the outer ritual so the entire society can be false and corrupt but the inner person can still be saved and so this is the moment at which the inner person achieves a unique value and is the source I think of human freedom so Luther distinguished between inner and outer that's the beginning point of a modern concept of identity it's not however the modern concept because he only understood freedom in one dimension which was the freedom to accept God or not there was a kind of binary decision that one could make and one was free to make it that was the source of human dignity but you couldn't decide well I'm going to become a Hindu or I'm going to come out of the closet as a gay or a lesbian that wasn't an open choice there was really a very distinct moral world or moral universe in which Luther operated but the distinction between inner and outer then lays the groundwork for the subsequent secularization of the concept and its evolution into what we recognize as modern identity politics the next thinker that I think was critical in taking that concept and generalizing it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau as you're probably aware in the discourse on the origins of human inequality argues that man in the state of nature the original human being was actually timid, isolated, fearful but happy because he could feel the sentiment of his own existence was not full of emotions like envy, pride, shame that came from comparing oneself to other people in society and that human unhappiness began to originate when people began living with one another could compare themselves to other people and decide that they were worse off and this was he said the source of human enslavement and so you have the same distinction between inner and outer the inner person is an innocent savage in a certain sense and the outer person is the French aristocrat or whatever that is conforming to the rituals of the court whose social persona is masking and suppressing the inner freedom that every one of us is born with and Rousseau's two solutions to this one was political through the social contract if everybody could join in a single general will then there would be no contradiction between the inside and the outside his private solution was to return as an individual to the state of nature through the experience of his own sentiment of existence but this then sets the groundwork for many subsequent thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries that would take this concept of inner and outer the inner freedom of the individual that was the authentic freedom and the outward ritual that was the false suppression of that inner being in Kant in a certain sense you have another effort to secularize the Lutheran idea where human freedom for Kant is not the freedom to accept God it's the freedom to accept the categorical imperative it's a rule that's derived from reason that exists simply as an artifact of reason alone so in the 19th century these ideas move in two different directions so one is towards a much more expansive view of freedom towards what we would call today expressive individualism that our true freedom is a kind of artistic creativity that is suppressed by the outside society so we're all incipient Beethoven's or Van Gogh's we just don't know it until we are able to realize our true selves but the other important direction that it goes in is towards modern nationalism Johann Gottfried Herder in a way picks up this idea of the inner self but he says that inner self is a collective self he says that every nation, every tribe, every group of people adapts to its circumstances every single nation has its own genius that is the product of climate and geography and its local history and that identity, that collective identity is being suppressed by the outside political world in his case he was thinking about the German states that all were imitating the French court at Versailles adopting all these French manners not regarding their authentic German folk culture and therefore authenticity involved the recovery of that genuine folk culture now it is of course extremely unfair to link Luther to the rise of this aggressive German nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th century but there is a connection, there is without doubt a connection the most obvious connection is simply through language I believe it was said in the discussions yesterday that language was very important, the Luther Bible really standardized a form of vernacular German that really survives up until the present it is through language, a vernacular language that Germans began to realize that even though they were living in separate political units that they still had a cultural unity and obviously the uptake of Lutheranism in the German lands was a kind of proto-nationalism the Germans did not like being ruled by a Burgundian emperor and Italian pope they wanted ruled by German princes over German subjects and so in a sense the idea of a single German nation based on culture rather than dynasty really gets a big start in the Lutheran Reformation and then of course in the 19th and 20th centuries goes in very different directions because everybody in Europe comes to this realization that they've got an authentic nation that is being suppressed by the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish and other empires alright so the last issue that I want to address is the question of modern liberalism and the reformation's impact and here the impact is a completely unintended one I think it's pretty clear that neither Luther nor Calvin were liberals in anything like a modern sense by liberal I mean somebody that believes that individuals are born with natural human rights that governments are instituted to protect those rights that governments gain their legitimacy by the extent to which they guarantee a degree of individual freedom including the freedom to own property Luther was perfectly happy to attach his doctrine to princely power John Calvin and Geneva basically ran a theocratic dictatorship in which there is no tolerance for any kind of doctrinal deviation and in fact that same Calvinist discipline led to a lot of suppression and fighting between protest and sex as time went on the connection to liberalism really comes out of the 150 years of war that was unleashed by the Reformation you had major civil wars in the Netherlands, in France, in England and then of course in Germany culminating in the 30 years war that killed perhaps a third of the population of much of southern Germany if you look at the specific origin of modern liberal theory a lot of it comes out of England and out of the English Civil War as you know England went in and out of Catholicism several times this issue only gets resolved in 1689 in the glorious revolution Thomas Hobbes writes his treatise Leviathan in the early 1650s a few years after the beheading of Charles I and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell's protectorate so England had been consumed by an extremely bloody civil war in the previous years Thomas Hobbes says rights do not come they're not inherited, they're not feudal, they're natural they're natural because the most basic human passion is the fear of violent death we have the right to kill any other human being in the state of nature we give up that right when we enter into civil society and the sovereign, the Leviathan is the individual who guarantees us our right to life that is the basis of legitimacy and that is the reason that a liberal society is basically an aggregation of these individual rights John Locke takes that doctrine and says well the state itself can threaten that right to life and therefore people have a right of rebellion against unjust authority John Locke becomes the chief ideologist of the glorious revolution that unseats the Catholic James II England from that point on has parliamentary sovereignty and is a Protestant nation based on this understanding of a constitutional compact guaranteeing the right to life in 1776 Thomas Jefferson in North America pens the American Declaration of Independence which begins we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that right to life in the Declaration of Independence owes its ancestry directly to Thomas Hobbes who was reacting to the religious strife that was visited on England by the religious wars of the 17th century and so the American democratic system in many ways is the product of the wars of religion in Europe and well the rest is history you know this doctrine becomes very powerful because it's also very good for economic development because the right to property is also guaranteed but this was not an intended consequence of any of the founders of the Protestant Reformation they did not want liberal tolerant societies they wanted societies that pursued the good life the good life being defined by religion there was a deliberate lowering of the horizon of politics so that it strove not for the good life but for life itself you wanted simply a system that would allow people to live in peace because that was what was the most important human value and that's the kind of society in our modern liberal democracies that we have it's not devoted to ends defined by religion it is defined by certain basic rights that we believe are shared by all human beings I'll just conclude with this thought so right now in the Middle East there is an ongoing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites some commentators say that this is a centuries old war this is nonsense Sunnis and Shiites have actually been living pretty peacefully up until the last few years but now this war is spreading it's driven by Saudi Arabia and Iran and their local rivalry and many people will say well there's no precedent in the world of Islam for liberalism there's no doctrine of separating church and state there's no doctrine of tolerance of religious tolerance or religious freedom I think what people need to recognize is that in the Christian West for many years there was also no doctrine of religious tolerance and there was a complete fusion of religious power and princely power and that the reason that we have modern liberalism is that Europe found itself in a bloody series of civil wars over a period of 150 years and at the end of that certain thinkers said okay enough we have to take religion out of politics we need liberal tolerance because that's the only way that people in a de facto sectarian society can simply exist and I think that in the Muslim world they haven't come to that realization yet I hope that in that part of the world it doesn't take 150 years of violence I think actually there's an argument that things will speed up in the modern world because people learn lessons a little bit more quickly than they did in the 16th, 17th centuries but I think that this in a certain sense is a ground for hoping that the European precedent of religious intolerance producing liberal tolerance may play itself out in another critical part of the world so how have I done on time? we've got one minute so thank you very much for your attention