The analogy of the body politic is the perception and elaboration of correspondences between society or the state and the individual human body. 

These correspondences may then be applied in a variety of ways in political analysis or argument. In their simplest form, these arguments assert that given the organic nature of the state, then certain political structures or actions are necessarily appropriate.

A “natural” society is one which functions in a manner similar to the human body. In the history of political philosophy and polemic, the analogy has been applied to many different forms of government and in support of a variety of particular opinions. In general, however, these states are hierarchical and authoritarian and the ideas being supported are conservative, stressing social order and obedience. 

There are a number of important exceptions. As a strategy of argumentation, moreover, the analogy is used in many different genres — philosophical treatise, political exhortation, sermon, poem, or drama. The analogy may appear as an allusive phrase or it may provide the structure for an extended discussion. Historically speaking, the analogy was used extensively from the time of the Greeks to the seventeenth century, when it was effectively challenged by another analogy, that of the social contract; in the nineteenth century developments in the study of biological evolution gave new impetus and application to the analogy.    Page 68, Volume 1 

The analogy of the body politic rests on two principles which were articulated by the Greeks. First, the doctrine of hylozoism asserts that mind or life permeates the natural world. The individual possesses life or soul or mind which is in some way is identical to the homonoia which animates, unifies, and directs the state. This mind is the source of the regularity in nature which makes possible science, including political science. 

This concept permits discussion of the relative health or sickness of the body politic and the suggesting of cures, perhaps by a ruler acting as a physician. 

The second basic principle asserts that one simple pattern exists at many levels of being; this pattern is most perfectly manifested in the human body (Plato, Timaeus 30c). In a variety of accounts, creation consists of the imposition of this pattern on previously chaotic matter. 

Since the citizen, the microcosm, and the larger world of the state possess an identical life and an identical physical structure, then more specific description and prescription are possible. The earliest, though fragmentary, examples of the analogy come from India. The Rig-Veda (X, 90) contains a hymn describing the creation of four castes — priests, warriors, shepherds, and servants — from the body of Purusa, a sacrificial personification of the world-soul. The Mahabharata (XIV, xxii) gives a debate between the mind and the perceiving organs, the point of which is that human arrogance comes from an ignorance of how the members of society must cooperate. 

More substantial examples appear in Greek political writers, who specifically apply the analogy to the polis. Plato begins the Republic by establishing analogy as a mode of inquiry: if justice in a state can be defined, then justice in an individual can also be determined. He then contrasts a simple, “healthy” society and a “feverish” one corrupted by luxury. By an extension of the analogy, the cure for a “festering” society is not the multiplication of petty laws, but a rigorous transformation of the state and the individual so that both will exhibit a centralized, rational control and an appropriate division of labor. 

In the later Laws (628c ff.) Plato characterizes the highest good as a peaceful, friendly state, like a healthy body that does not require medical attention. 

The organic nature of the state is specifically enunciated by Aristotle: “Thus the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and the individual... for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand...” (Politics 1253a). Society, therefore, is a creation of nature, not of man; man's greatest fulfillment comes from being a part of the polis.  

Other Greek writers also used the analogy. Aristophanes sees one function of the comic poet as the difficult task of curing the diseases of the state (Wasps 650-51). 

Demosthenes regards Philip of Macedon as an attack of fever which Athens must resist. Of particular interest is the Aesopic fable of the belly and the members (Aesopica, ed. B. E. Perry, Urbana, Ill. [1952], No. 130). 

In its simplest form the fable teaches the cooperative structural relationship between the generals and soldiers in an army. The fable is explicitly political in the Roman tradition (Livy, II, 32) in which Menenius Agrippa ends a plebeian secession by explaining the nourishment the belly (Senate) provides for the hands and feet (common people). 

The analogy was also applied occasionally to smaller groups; in Xenophon's Memorabilia (II, iii) Socrates urges reconciliation between quarreling brothers by citing the harmony of pairs of hands, feet, and eyes. 

After the conquests of Alexander, the city-state was a much less relevant political unit; by praying for homonoia between Macedonians and Persians, Alexander indicated that the analogy of the body politic could be applied to the much larger Hellenistic monarchy or even all mankind. 

Philo Judaeus urges acceptance of personal disaster by comparing the actions of divine providence to an amputation performed by a surgeon on a partially diseased body. The writings of the Roman Stoics contain many passages which argue analogically for the necessity of subordinating the desires of the individual to the well-being of the state or humanity. Cicero writes that if each part of the body tries to appropriate the health of the others, then the body will die; such behavior in men would be equally destructive (De officis III, 22).

 Echoing Plato and Aristotle, Seneca says that as it is unnatural for the hands to destroy the feet, so the need for harmony, love, and mutual protection causes mankind to protect individuals (De ira II, 31). 

Such statements are the source of one of the most influential uses of the analogy, Saint Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians: “For as the body is one, and hath many members... so also is Christ.... And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.... Now ye are the body of Christ and members in particular...” (I Corinthians 12:12-27). Love (agapē) between the members unifies the body (I Corinthians 6:15-16). Though some of Paul's language is traditional, the application of the analogy to the followers of Christ is a significant departure, which contains the radical implication that faith determines the body of which a man is a part. 

In the early Church, Paul's words were frequently quoted in admonitions against dissension and factionalism (e.g., Saint Basil's Letters 66, 203, 222). Saint Augustine occasionally describes the Cities of God and Man as bodies, but his emphasis is on the concept of a mystical body of the faithful, Page 69, Volume 1 united by having sacramentally eaten the body of Christ. 

In the Middle Ages the analogy of the body was developed substantially. Most previous applications had been rather brief; medieval authors extend it in elaborate, sometimes fantastic detail. Though its influence on the West is uncertain, the tenth-century Encyclopedia of the Arabic Brotherhood of Sincerity uses organic analogies at great length: the human body is compared to a city and a kingdom; the senses are to the soul as counsellors to a king, and so on. 

Among Christian writers the analogy is used for a variety of purposes. Most simply, it appears in devotional literature to explain charity, grace, or some other aspect of doctrine. It could supplement the concept of the three estates: clergy-eyes-guidance, nobility-hands defense, peasants-feet-agriculture. 

John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1159) adopts for its structure a substantial comparison of the human body and a kingdom. After identifying the soul and the clergy, John discusses in detail the other members of the body: head-prince, heart-senate, hands-soldiers, stomach-treasury, and feet-farmers. He emphasizes the need for spiritual unity in the state and proposes cures for various political diseases, including tyranny. 

The fable of the belly explains and defends systems of taxation. The Church developed Paul's words about the body of Christ to explain the structure and importance of ecclesiastical institutions. The Church becomes corpus mysticum et politicum of which the Pope is the head, kings and emperors but members. Organic analogies buttress both sides of the period's most profound political controversies. Saint Thomas Aquinas finds four points of identity which unify both natural and mystical bodies, and asserts that the supremacy of the spiritual authority corresponds to the soul's rule of the body. 

There are three responses to such claims: to proclaim the importance of some other organ, such as the heart, with which a king may be equated; to define the state as a body distinct from the body of the Church; or to deny the importance of the papacy by claiming that only Christ is the head of the Church. 

In the late Middle Ages the second alternative, an extension of the idea of a “mystical body,” is a convenient illustration of the growing self-consciousness of the national states. Sir John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angliae (ca. 1470) says that a body politic, specifically England, is a corpus mysticum; the laws are the nerves which unite the body and public spirit is the life-giving blood. An example of the third alternative is Henry VIII's assumption of the title “Supreme Head of the Church in England.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the analogy persisted as part of the period's vigorous medieval heritage, but at the same time other ideas developed which effectively challenged the validity of the analogy. 

The three main questions to which the analogy was applied are the nature of the Church, the nature of the state, and the relationship of the two. Theologians and polemicists had much to say about the effect of the Reformation on the body of the Church. Kings and popes competed for the title “head,” and they denied that each other's institutions could be described by organic analogies. Secular rulers invoked the analogy repeatedly to enforce conformity and at least passive obedience. Even in matters of religion, the word of the prince had to be followed; rebellion in the state was as unnatural as internal conflict in a body. 

The Elizabethan Homily Against Disobedience claims that for a subject to judge a ruler is impiety, “as though the foot must judge of the head....” At a more perceptive level, the analogy became a vehicle for social criticism. 

Thomas Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, early in the sixteenth century, catalogues diseases or imbalances in the four humors as a structure for discussing political and economic abuses and proposing remedies. A few more radical applications appeared, as in John Milton's Of Reformation in England (1641), which transforms the old fable of the belly to attack the episcopacy as a cancerous wen. 

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is perhaps the most thoughtful consideration of the applicability of organic analogies in politics. In the first scene, derived from Livy and Plutarch, Menenius recounts the fable of the belly in a partially successful attempt to calm a rioting mob. Organic imagery recurs frequently through the play as the characters attempt to define the suitability of the proud protagonist. The action shows that the Senate is not a generous nourisher of the state, the plebeians are not docile workers; Coriolanus vigorously denies any unity, organic or otherwise, with the lower classes. The distinction of Shakespeare's play is that it dramatizes the gap between the ideal commonwealth suggested by the idea of a body politic, and the political behavior of men. In some instances the familiar analogy appears to be little more than a pious fraud perpetrated by ruthless aristocrats. The doubts Shakespeare raises about the validity of the analogy are part of a larger process of questioning and substitution. 

Some writers differentiated the bodies as politic and natural; Fernando Vasquez observes that in a man a limb cannot change its position, no other part can become the head, authority always resides in the head, and the death of the head always causes the death of the body—but none of these is true of the body politic (Controversarium III). 

Hugo Grotius made a similar distinction by pointing out the contractual    Page 70, Volume 1 origin of the state and the right of a part to protect itself by secession or other means (De jure II). To this increasing general skepticism must be added two very significant factors which essentially destroyed the traditional analogy. 

The first is the new science which undercut the basic premisses. Materialism replaced hylozoism. The pattern which permitted structural correspondences could be dismissed as the vain attempt of men to find order where none in fact existed. The analogy of the body politic exemplifies the Baconian Idols which obstruct scientific inquiry. 

Secondly, the concept of a body politic was effectively replaced by the old, but not widely popular, idea of a social contract. For Calvin and his followers the Church as mystical body was supplemented by a great emphasis on a covenant, modeled on the one between God and Abraham. These theories of covenant and contract view church and state as artificial institutions, created by an act of will of their individual members and subject to change by them. 

The new analogy attempts definition in terms of origin, for which organic analogies seemed deficient. A striking fusion of the two traditions is Hobbes' statement (in Leviathan, Part I, Introduction) that the state is an artificial body, a machine assembled by man. More typical of the transition are these words from the Mayflower Compact (1620): “We... covenant and combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politike....” The main point is the combining; “Body Politike” is simply a synonym for “political entity” with no further analogical meanings intended. 

For the last three centuries extended organic analogies have been generally absent from discussions of political issues. The phrase “body politic” persists, but as a dead metaphor rather than a meaningful concept for analysis or argument. Two types of exceptions may be cited from the nineteenth century. 

First, there was a moderate amount of imagery used to characterize the Industrial Revolution and an ideal alternative which might exist in the future or the medieval past. Thomas Carlyle writes in Sartor Resartus (1833) that government is the “outward Skin of the Body Politic,” binding and protecting its constituent parts; the vivifying nervous system is religion. Mechanism, capitalism, and utilitarianism are symptoms of a “universal Social Gangrene”; England is “writhing powerless on its fever-bed....” To recreate something like the organic interdependency of the Middle Ages, Carlyle advocates hero-worship, “a new body... with a resuscitated soul” (Past and Present, 1843). A new development was the application of biological evolution to the study of political institutions, e.g., in so-called Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer's The Principles of Sociology (3 vols., 1876-96) contains as many comparisons between natural and politic bodies as anything from the past. The significant differences are a much greater variety of bodies and a concern for change from one form to another. A primitive society evolves into an industrial nation just as a small, simple form of life becomes a larger, more complex organism. Though the state may partially resemble a living being, few modern thinkers are willing to extend similarity to identity. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  

There is no comprehensive discussion of the topic. Various aspects are treated in R. Allers, “Microcosmus from Anaximandros to Paracelsus,” Traditio, 2 (1944), 319-407; P. Archambault, “The Analogy of the `Body' in Renaissance Political Literature,” Bibliotèque d'humanisme et renaissance, 29 (1967), 21-53; N. O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966); A.-H. Chroust, “The Corporate Idea and the Body Politic in the Middle Ages,” Review of Politics, 9 (1947), 423-52; F. W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State: Nineteenth-Century Interpretations of the State as Organism or as Person (New York, 1910); G. P. Conger, Theories of Macrocosm and Microcosm in the History of Philosophy (New York, 1922); O. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, trans. E. Barker, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1934); idem, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Maitland (Cambridge, 1900); D. G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague, 1971); E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957); E. Lewis, “Organic Tendencies in Medieval Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, 32 (1938), 849-76; H. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'église au moyen âge (Paris, 1949); W. Nestle, “Die Fabel des Menenius Agrippa,” Klio, 21 (1927), 350-60; J. E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940); E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943; New York, 1961).