64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Medievalists on Temporal Power Mouldering in the dark Middle Ages, the political thinkers who somnambulatcd through the feudal times were more apt to speak of 'temporal power'than of the state. They, extending the Aristotelian view^ conceived the whole of Christendom as one vast community. The difference with Aristotle was that they thought of two kinds of authority established within this Christian community, the spiritual and temporal. Within the temporal power, whether it was conceived of as a single empire or as many separate kingdoms, nobody had absolute power. Not only was the authority of the temporal power, taken as a whole, limited by the authority of tlie church but the authority of every magistrate within it was limited by custom and also—so it was argued—by the 'Law of Nature', the same for all (Christian) men everywhere, though modified by custom to suit the circumstances of particular peoples. Some of the criticism against this view is the same as against that of Aristotle. At the same time, the introduction of the church and'of religion into the politico-economic sphere seems particularly absurd in these, our present, secular times. The imprecise nature of the Medievalists5 characterization of the state, the ambiguity about its functions and the important role given to custom, evolved within the confines Of a community, combined with the notion of an immutable, absolute Law of Nature—the will of God as manifested through the clergy—as a principal factor in the affairs ofmen^ make this conceptualization of the state unacceptable now. However, historically the Medievalists made an advance over Aristotle in as much as they viewed "temporal authority as a kind of private property.591 It was this last aspect of their thought that was retained during the subsequent period of the Commercial Revolution and Renaissance, while much of the other obscure ideas about role of the Law of Nature and the church were summarily rejected. The most clear proponent of the concept of the state during the period of the Renaissance was Machia-velli, though later, others like Bodin and fiobbes built on the foundations he had laid. Absolute Sovereignty of Machiavellian Mercantalism Unlike the Aristotelian polls, Machiavelli's state is morally neutral. Also it is not, for him, co-ordinate with the church; it contains within itself (or, at least it ought to contain) all the authority there is within the territory it embraces. Only the family is prior to the state, and nothing is superior to, or above question by^ it. He visualized the state as an organized mass of power used by those who control it for the pursuit of whatever ends seem good to them. He took it for granted that nearly everyone wants to belong to a powerful and respected political community and herce everyone would accept an absolute authority as long as it keeps satisfying the common ambition of all by providing security at the least