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Modern public authority takes the form of a ‘legally established impersonal order’ (Max Weber). In pre-modern times, however, public authority was wielded as a personal right. But how could ‘state formation’ as a history of interactions between personal rulers result in a system of impersonal rule? This article shows, firstly, that some necessary preconditions for this transformation were produced by the early modern process of state formation itself and, secondly, that they were not fully intended. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel, this article analyses the admission of nobles to diets, one of Becker and Clark's ‘little tools' that turned state formation into practice. Originally, participation in the diet was dependent on a mixture of factors which were personal (noble status) and impersonal (possession of and/or rule over land). Later on, the estates emphasized the latter in order to minimize the princes’ influence on matters of admission. From the first half of the seventeenth century, jurists and political philosophers drew on this tendency and increasingly imagined political participation as being founded on impersonal qualities like property alone. Political discourse therefore transported the tendencies towards impersonal authority – generated by actual political struggles among personal rulers – to the nineteenth century.
