Contract. Moreover, Haller's "Digression on Slavery" in the third volume made a deep impact on the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and surfaced again in his polemical "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question". The book in its entirety was translated into Italian, part of it into French, and an abridged version into Latin and Spanish. All his later writings are influenced by the ideas here set forth, and oppose vigorously the revolutionary tendencies of the times and the champions of liberalism in Church and State. Haller's political views were heavily influenced by his long tenure as a Bernese public official, a city-state with dependent territorial possessions that did not officially call itself a "republic" until 1716, and which was governed by a patriciate of 236 families who were eligible for election in the grand council, known as 'regimentsfähigen Geschlechter der Stadt Bern.' Direct taxation, public debt, and military conscription were virtually absent in 18th century Bern. Repudiating the abstract juridical conceptions of sovereignty and civil society, Haller based political authority instead on a combination of personal power and acquired rights deriving from possession of property. Unlike most theoreticians who posited the formation of a civil state which partially or completely negated the state of nature, Haller posited an uninterrupted state of nature. In the Handbuch of 1808, he defined the state as "nothing more than a natural sociable relationship between free and servant, which differs from other similar relationships only in the independence of its head." He used the term "sovereignty" interchangeably with "independence" and "perfect freedom," defining it as a perfection or elevation of already existing private social relationships among extended households, one that increased the means for these social bonds to exercise their already existing rights, but which did not inherently confer any new ones. Depending on whether the source of personal power was in a natural person or fictive person (corporation), the state would either be a monarchy or a republic. In turn, monarchies were subdivided into three principal ways of exercising personal power: from land ownership (patrimonial states), from authority over a retinue of troops (military states), or from doctrinal and teaching authority over disciples and followers (spiritual states, a.k.a. theocracies). He was strongly critical of the influence of Roman law on European jurisprudence for what he saw as obscuring the social relationships that had emerged following the dissolution of the Roman Empire by falsely analogizing them