ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the modern division of the public and private emerges and why it is so necessary to the existence of bourgeois society. The split of the public from private that coincides with the rise of the state in Western Europe is examined as a product of the rise of capitalism and the growth of commodity exchange. A brief review of the concept of the polis shows that there are enough differences between it and the concept of the state that it is unjustified to characterize the polis as a 'traditional state', 'city-state', or any other kind of state. Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is a text that is rarely found in contemporary discussions of state theory. There are frequent references to Kantorowicz in scholarship on medieval history and political theory. The abstraction of exchange as a concrete abstraction provides us with the everyday life prefiguration and foundation of the conceptual abstraction of the public/private split.
