Before the state : systemic political change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution / Andreas Osiander.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Osiander, Andreas.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political science--History.

Political science.

History.

State, The.

Physical Description:

xxi, 564 pages ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

The idea that society, or civilisation, is predicated on the "state" is a projection of present-day political ideology into the past. Nothing akin to what we call the "state" existed before the 19th century: it is a recent invention and the assumption that it is timeless, necessary for society, is simply part of its legitimating myth. The development, over the past three millennia, of the political structures of western civilisation is shown here to have been a succession of individual, unrepeatable stages: what links them is not that every period re-enacts the "state" in a different guise-that is, re-enacts the same basic pattern-but that one period-specific pattern evolves into the next in a path-dependent process. Treating western civilisation as a single political system, the book charts systemic structural change from the origins of western civilisation in the pre-Christian Greek world to about 1800, when the onset of industrialisation began to create the conditions in which the state as we know it could function. It explains structural change in terms of both the political ideas of each period and in terms of the material constraints and opportunities (e.g. ecological and technological factors) that impacted on those ideas and which constitute a major cause of change. However, although material factors are important, ultimately it is the ideas that count-and indeed the words with which they were communicated when they were current: since political structures only exist in people's heads, to understand past political structures it is imperative to deal with them literally on their own terms, to take those terms seriously. Relabelling or redefining political units (for example by calling them "states" or equating them with "states") when those who lived (in) them thought of them as something else entirely imposes a false uniformity on the past. The dead will not object because they cannot: this book tries to make their voices heard again, through the texts that they left but whose political terminology, and often whose finer points, are commonly ignored in an unconscious effort to make the past fit our standard state-centric political paradigm.

Contents:

Greek transliteration table xiii

Comments on Greek transliteration xv

The treatment of Greek proper names xvii

Other points regarding spelling and nomenclature xix

1.1 History as popular myth in IR and elsewhere 1

1.2 The 'state' a timeless marker of civilization? 'State' and language 4

1.3 'State' and discourse of eternity in historiography and social science. The notion of 'bounded entities' 10

1.4 The method of this study 17

2 Greeks and Romans 33

2.1 The material base of society and the threats facing it 33

2.1.1 Agriculture 33

2.1.2 Craftsmen, traders, and bankers 35

2.1.3 Limited economic role of warfare: the case of Corinth 39

2.2 Rule and society 42

2.2.1 The Greek world until the conquest of the Persian empire 42

2.2.2 The Greek world in the post-Persian era 84

2.2.3 Imperium Romanum 94

2.3 Political community and supralocal rule in the pre-christian Graeco-Roman world 110

2.3.1 The absence of domestic sovereignty in the polis and in the Roman citizenry 110

2.3.2 Supralocal rule 114

2.3.3 Community and ideology in the Greek and Roman empires 118

2.3.4 Roma aeterna 123

2.4 The relations between autonomous actors and communities in Greek and Roman political thought 127

2.5 Thukydides 139

3 The universal community of christendom 165

3.1 The Roman empire transformed 165

3.1.1 The crisis of the Roman empire after 235 165

3.1.2 The dissolution of the western empire 171

3.1.3 Constantinople and the Germanic world 175

3.1.4 The Roman empire of Constantinople: shrinkage and stabilization 188

3.1.5 The restoration of the imperial dignity in the west 191

3.2 Rule and society in pre-Reformation christendom 200

3.2.1 De-urbanization 200

3.2.2 Particularism and universalism in the west 221

3.3 Discourse of eternity and collective identities in christendom 228

3.3.1 The empire of Constantinople 229

3.3.2 Latin christendom 236

3.4 Political thinking of the respublica christiana 268

3.4.1 The Roman empire lives on, 'albeit as a fiction' 268

3.4.2 The empire in christian theology and eschatology 270

3.4.3 The political organization of christendom in the thinking of the scholastics 282

3.4.4 Henry VII 285

3.4.5 Engelbert of Admont 296

3.4.6 Dante Alighieri 312

3.4.7 Pierre Dubois 324

4 Pre-industrial Europe 341

4.1 A new, more dynamic era 341

4.1.1 Economic renewal: the millennium of mills 342

4.1.2 Monetization 359

4.2 Kingship in Latin christendom 368

4.2.1 The foil: first-millennium warrior kingship 369

4.2.2 The lord's anointed 371

4.2.3 Kingship as a structural factor in the politics of ancien regime Europe: the case of Plantagenet expansionism 378

4.2.4 The fiction of the efficient ruler: Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome 394

4.2.5 The imperial office as an archetype of monarchical rule: Nicholas of Kues and Enea Silvio Piccolomini 403

4.2.6 The crown as an imagined central power 419

4.3 Crown and 'state' in the ancien regime 421

4.3.1 The nature of the period, and what to call it 421

4.3.2 The heightened profile of princely governance in post-Reformation Europe 422

4.3.3 Post-Reformation theorists of princely power: Bodin, Althusius, and Hobbes 431

4.4 The reality of late ancien regime society 450

4.4.1 Germany in the ancien regime 451

4.4.2 France in the ancien regime 467

4.4.3 Ancien regime kingdoms and comparable political units as precursors not prototypes of the modern state 479

4.4.4 Autonomous political actors in the ancien regime 485.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 511-539) and index.

ISBN:

9780198294511

0198294514

OCLC:

132293375