SC3144 Vle PDF

Historical sociology
S. Cross
SC3144, 2790144
2011
Undergraduate study in
Economics, Management,
Finance and the Social Sciences
This subject guide is for a 300 course offered as part of the University of London
International Programmes in Economics, Management, Finance and the Social Sciences.
This is equivalent to Level 6 within the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications in
England, Wales and Northern Ireland (FHEQ).
For more information about the University of London International Programmes
undergraduate study in Economics, Management, Finance and the Social Sciences, see:
www.londoninternational.ac.uk
This guide was prepared for the University of London International Programmes by:
Steve Cross, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that due to
pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence relating to, or arising
from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide, favourable or unfavourable,
please use the form at the back of this guide.
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Published by: University of London

© University of London 2007
Reprinted with minor revisions 2011
The University of London asserts copyright over all material in this subject guide except where
otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form,
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Contents
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................... 1

Aims and objectives ....................................................................................................... 1
Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................ 1
How to use this subject guide ........................................................................................ 2
Structure of the guide .................................................................................................... 2
Essential reading ........................................................................................................... 3
Further reading.............................................................................................................. 4
Online study resources ................................................................................................... 7
Reading advice .............................................................................................................. 8
Examination structure and advice................................................................................. 10
Syllabus....................................................................................................................... 10
Chapter 2: Time, history and modernity ............................................................... 13
Aim of the chapter....................................................................................................... 13
Learning outcomes ...................................................................................................... 13
Essential reading ......................................................................................................... 13
Further reading............................................................................................................ 13
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 14
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 14
Historical thinking and ‘modernity’ ............................................................................... 15
A brief history of time .................................................................................................. 16
Modern times ............................................................................................................. 21
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 25
A reminder of your learning outcomes.......................................................................... 25
Sample examination question ...................................................................................... 25
Chapter 3: History and historical sociology ........................................................ 27
Aims of the chapter ..................................................................................................... 27
Further reading ........................................................................................................... 27
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 28
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 28
History and sociology: different disciplines? .................................................................. 29
The (re-)emergence of historical sociology ................................................................... 31
History and sociology: a continuing debate................................................................... 32
Goldthorpe begins the debate...................................................................................... 33
Michael Mann takes up the argument .......................................................................... 38
Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 41
Chapter 4: Power, legitimacy and rule: the emergence of the modern state ...... 43
Further reading............................................................................................................ 43
i
144 Historical sociology
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 44

Preliminary remarks on reading .................................................................................... 44
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 45
The modern state ........................................................................................................ 46
What is the ‘modern’ state? Some preliminary definitions ............................................. 46
What is the state? Classical sociological accounts ........................................................ 48
Historical sociology and the state ................................................................................. 55
Chapter 5: Before the ‘modern’ state: ‘traditional’ systems of rule..................... 61
Further reading............................................................................................................ 61
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 62
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 62
Empires ....................................................................................................................... 63
Empires of domination................................................................................................. 63
Case study: The Roman Empire .................................................................................... 65
Eisenstadt and ‘historical bureaucratic empires’ ............................................................ 69
Feudalism .................................................................................................................... 71
Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 77
Chapter 6: The absolutist state ............................................................................ 79
Further reading............................................................................................................ 79
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 80
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 80
The ‘absolutist’ system of rule ...................................................................................... 81
Interpreting the absolutist state 1: the Neo-Marxist account ......................................... 88
Interpreting the absolutist state 2: discipline, governmentality and ‘bio-power’ ............. 91
Was the absolutist state ‘modern’? .............................................................................. 95
Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 96
Chapter 7: War, capitalism and the emergence of the modern state ................... 97
Further reading............................................................................................................ 97
Works cited ................................................................................................................. 98
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 98
War, finance and the emergence of the modern state ................................................... 99
Capitalism and the modern state ............................................................................... 108
A reminder of your learning outcomes........................................................................ 114
Sample examination questions ................................................................................... 114
Chapter 8: The nation-state and nationalism .................................................... 115
Aim of the chapter..................................................................................................... 115
Learning outcomes .................................................................................................... 115
ii
Contents
Essential reading ....................................................................................................... 115

Further reading.......................................................................................................... 115
Works cited ............................................................................................................... 116
A note on the reading................................................................................................ 116
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 117
What is a nation? ...................................................................................................... 117
What is nationalism? ................................................................................................. 118
A brief history of nationalism ..................................................................................... 121
Approaches to nationalism ........................................................................................ 124
‘Modernism’ and ‘perennialism’ ................................................................................. 126
Imagined communities............................................................................................... 134
Chapter 9: European expansion and the age(s) of empire ................................. 137
Aim of the chapter..................................................................................................... 137
Learning outcomes .................................................................................................... 137
Essential reading ....................................................................................................... 137
Further reading.......................................................................................................... 137
Works cited ............................................................................................................... 138
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 138
‘The West and the Rest’ ............................................................................................. 140
The production of meaning ........................................................................................ 141
European expansion ................................................................................................. 142
Conquest and colonisation ........................................................................................ 143
‘Imperialism’ ............................................................................................................. 145
Explaining European ‘dynamism’ ............................................................................... 145
Discourse and history................................................................................................. 151
Imperialism ............................................................................................................... 152
Another ‘new’ imperialism? ....................................................................................... 155
Appendix 1: Sample examination paper ............................................................ 157
Appendix 2: Guidance on answering the Sample examination paper ............... 159
General remarks ........................................................................................................ 159
Specific comments on questions................................................................................. 159
Appendix 3: Supplementary readings ................................................................ 165
iii
Notes
iv
Chapter 1: Introduction
Historical sociology is a ‘300’ course offered on the Economics, Management,
Finance and the Social Sciences (EMFSS) suite of programmes.
Historical sociology is a wide-ranging subject that explores in depth the
historical ‘roots’ of contemporary social, economic and political conditions.
Sociologists have always been interested in the historical context of
social institutions and political systems. The sociologist Philip Abrams once
famously remarked that ‘sociology is history’. In other words, without a
historical context it is impossible to understand how and why our present
is as it is. This was certainly an idea that the founders of the discipline
of sociology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have
endorsed. Each of them paid considerable attention to the historical
developments that had led to the major changes that they saw affecting the
societies around them. These changes are usually referred to as ‘modernity’
and this subject guide will look in detail at some of the processes that
contributed to the formation of key aspects of the ‘modern’ world.
There are many possible ways of approaching historical sociology. In
this course we will focus on the complex range of factors that were at
work in the rise of the modern state. By focusing in this way, we will be
able to examine a range of sociological ideas about social, political and
institutional change.
What we hope you will take from this course is an understanding of the
complex processes that have been involved in producing the world that we
live in. Through your studies, you will have developed an understanding
of the context of and the background to many of the institutions, ideas
and problems that we encounter today. You will also become aware of the
difficulties that attempts to interpret the past pose for both sociologists
and historians. The course will enrich your understanding of social science
methodologies as well as introducing you to competing ideas about how
and why social change happens and how best to interpret it.
I hope that you enjoy studying this course.
Aims and objectives

This course is designed to:
• examine the historical development of key social and political
formations of the modern world
• enable you to recognise and understand different ways in which
historical change has been conceptualised in different theoretical
traditions.
Learning outcomes
At the end of this course and having completed the Essential reading and
activities you should be able to:
• identify and describe the conditions and processes that have contributed
to the development of key aspects of the contemporary world
• locate contemporary social phenomena in a historical context
• recognise the ways that philosophies and theories of history have shaped
the ways that we understand processes of historical and social change
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• demonstrate critical and reflexive skills in relation to the analysis of

contemporary social phenomena and their historical contexts
• demonstrate a critical understanding of the conditions that have
privileged notions of western ‘modernity’ in comparison to other social
formations, both historical and geographical.
How to use this subject guide

The aim of this subject guide is to help you to interpret the syllabus. It
outlines what you are expected to know for each area of the syllabus and
suggests relevant readings to help you understand the material.
Supplementary readings are provided in Appendix 3 on page 165.
Much of the information you need to learn and understand is contained in
examples and activities within the subject guide itself. You are expected, as
far as possible, to attempt each of the activities.
I would recommend that you work through the guide in chapter order as
to some extent the chapters follow on in chronological order. You should
read the whole of each essential text before you begin the chapter, then re-
read the specific sections that the chapter asks you to look at in detail as it
progresses. In this way, you should develop a sound understanding of the
text and be able to relate it to wider arguments and ideas.
You may wish to supplement your studies by reading further and there are
lists of recommended texts at the start of each chapter. The chapters often
reference these texts extensively.
Having said all this, it is important that you appreciate that different topics
are not self-contained. There is a degree of overlap between them and you
are guided in this respect by cross-referencing between different chapters.
In terms of studying this course, the chapters of this guide are designed
as self-contained units of study, but for examination purposes you need to
have an understanding of the subject as a whole and you will be expected
to demonstrate that you can make links between topics. The syllabus
contains five blocks of general topics. Please note that these do not
correspond directly to specific chapters. Material can be found throughout
the guide across all of the chapters.
At the end of each chapter you will find a checklist of learning outcomes
– a list of the main points that you should understand once you have
covered the material in the guide and the associated readings.
Structure of the guide

The guide is divided into nine chapters, including this short introductory
chapter.
• Chapter 2 explores ideas about history. We often take very much for
granted the idea of history itself, assuming it is simply about ‘what
happened in the past’. In this chapter we will look at how our current
ideas about history were formed.
• Chapter 3 asks what the similarities and differences between the
disciplines of history and sociology might be. It looks in detail at how
sociologists have thought about this difference and at how historical
sociology attempts to bridge the gap between the disciplines. This
chapter asks you to look in detail at a debate between sociologists
about how sociologists should make use of historical evidence.
2
• Chapter 4 is an exploration of different theories and ideas about the

emergence of one of the key aspects of ‘modernity’, the ‘modern’
state. It looks at different approaches to the study of the state and
its emergence. This chapter acts as an introduction to many of the
chapters that follow, each of which is concerned with different
aspects of the social and historical processes that contributed to the
development of modern types of state.
• Chapter 5 introduces systems of rule that operated in ‘traditional’
states. It looks in particular at empires and at feudal systems of rule. In
this chapter we will also explore in some depth an account of imperial
states that draws on structural functionalist approaches and we will ask
how successful this is as a means of explanation.
• Chapter 6 explores the emergence in the seventeenth century of
‘absolutist’ states and looks at how ‘modern’ these state forms were.
We will also look in some depth at a classic ‘neo-Marxist’ account of
absolutism. The chapter also looks at how new ‘disciplinary’ practices
arose during this period, how rulers came to regard their populations
as a ‘resource’, and how this changed the ways that states thought
about practices of governance.
• Chapter 7 considers the roles of war-making, the financing of wars and
the emergence of the capitalist economy in the building of modern states.
• Chapter 8 considers the importance of the twin phenomena of
nationalism and imperialism to the European nation-states of the
nineteenth century and looks at how they continue to shape our own
geo-political realities. In particular, the chapter will explore how
these phenomena can be related to contemporary concerns about
‘globalisation’ and the so-called decline of the nation-state. The chapter
also looks briefly at the divergent forms of the modern state and relates
these to previous discussion about the emergence of modern state forms.
• Chapter 9 looks at the enduring legacy of European imperialism and
Western economic domination of the globe through a close reading of
an influential article that explores how historical notions of ‘the West
and the Rest’ continue to shape attitudes and ideas about the West’s
relationship to the rest of the world.
Essential reading
Each chapter of the subject guide begins by identifying the appropriate
chapter or chapters of your main textbook or from the readings. Some
material that you will be expected to read is available in the University of
London Online Library.
For this course you need to purchase one textbook:
Hall, S. and B. Gieben Formations of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)
[ISBN 9780745609607].
The following essential texts can be found at the back of this
subject guide:
Chapter 3 of Hobsbawm The Age of Empire. (London: Random House, 1989)
[ISBN 9780679721758].
Chapters 5 and 6 of Dean, Mitchell Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern
Society. (London: Sage Publications, 1999) [ISBN 9780803975897].
Chapter 6 of Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey
of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. (London: Routledge, 1998)
[ISBN 9780415063401].
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You need to download the following articles:

Goldthorpe, J.H. ‘The Uses of History in Sociology: Reflections on Some Recent
Tendencies’, The British Journal of Sociology, 42(2) 1991, pp.211–30.
Mann, M. ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: A Reply to Goldthorpe’,
The British Journal of Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.37–54.
For some chapters several items of Further reading are also suggested and
it is highly recommended that you try to get hold of and sample some of
these readings.
Finally, it should be noted that this subject builds on previous knowledge
and understanding that you will have gained through studying 21
Principles of sociology, which is a prerequisite if you are studying this
course as part of a BSc degree.
Detailed reading references in this subject guide refer to the editions of the
set textbooks listed above. New editions of one or more of these textbooks
may have been published by the time you study this course. You can use
a more recent edition of any of the books; use the detailed chapter and
section headings and the index to identify relevant readings. Also check
the virtual learning environment (VLE) regularly for updated guidance on
readings.
Further reading
At the beginning of each chapter there is a list of Further readings
and some of these are highlighted with an asterisk. You will find these
particularly useful if you wish to explore ideas contained in the chapters
further. The remainder of the Further reading may be dipped into if you
wish to explore a particular topic in more depth.
Please note that as long as you read the Essential reading you are then free
to read around the subject area in any text, paper or online resource. You
will need to support your learning by reading as widely as possible and by
thinking about how these principles apply in the real world. To help you
read extensively, you have free access to the VLE and University of London
Online Library (see below).
For ease of reference the following is a full list of all the Further reading in
the guide, including these asterisked titles.
The first five titles below are highly recommended Further reading for the
course:
Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004) [ISBN 9780631236160].
Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. (Cambridge: Polity, 1985)
[ISBN 9780520060395].
Mann, M. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986) [ISBN 9780521313490].
Tilly, C. Coercion, Capital, and the European State. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
[ISBN 9781557863683].
Other useful texts for this course include:
Abrams, P. Historical Sociology. (Shepton Mallet: Open Book Publishing, 1980)
[ISBN 9780801492433].
Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics, History
and Sociology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780822333630]. **
4
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. (London: Verso, 2006) revised edition

[ISBN 9781844670864]. **
Anderson, P. Lineages of the Absolutist State. (London: Verso, 1979)
[ISBN 9780805270259]. **
Anderson, P. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. (London: Verso, 1973)
[ISBN 9781859841075].
Bartlett, R. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change
950–1350. (London: Penguin Books, 1993) [ISBN 9780140154092].
Biel, R. The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations.
(London: Zed Books, 2000) [ISBN 9781856497473].
Billig, M. Banal Nationalism. (London: Sage, 1995) [ISBN 9780803975255].
Braudel, F. ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Duree’ and ‘History
and Sociology’ in Matthews, S. (trans.) On History. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982) [ISBN 9780226071510].
Brewer, A. Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. (London:
Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 9780415044691].
Brown, V. ‘The Emergence of the Economy’ in Hall and Gieben (eds) Formations
of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780745609607].
Burke, P. History and Social Theory. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) second
edition [ISBN 9780801472855].
Calhoun, C. ‘Explanation in Historical Sociology: Narrative, General Theory, and
Historically Specific Theory’, The American Journal of Sociology, 14(3) 1998,
pp.846–71.
Calhoun, C. Nationalism. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997)
[ISBN 9780816631216].
Corrigan, P., and D. Sayer The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural
Revolution. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) [ISBN 9780631140559].
Dean, M. Critical and Effective Histories. (London: Routledge, 1994)
[ISBN 9780415064958].
Delanty and Isin (eds) The Handbook of Historical Sociology. (London: Sage
Publications, 2003) [ISBN 9780761971733].
Dreyfuss, H., and P. Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) second edition
[ISBN 9780226163123] Chapters 6, 7 and 8.
Eisenstadt, S.N. The Political Systems of Empires. (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1993) [ISBN 9781560006411].
Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. (London: Grove, 2005) reprint edition
[ISBN 9780802141323].
Foucault, M. Power: the Essential Works Volume 3. Edited by J.D. Faubion (Allen
Lane: Harmondsworth, 2000) [ISBN 9780140259575].
Foucault, M. ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’ in The Will to Knowledge: The
History of Sexuality Volume 1 (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1998)
[ISBN 9780140268683].
Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002) second
edition [ISBN 9780415287531] Introduction.
Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) second revised
edition [ISBN 9781405134422].
Giddens, A. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. (Houndsmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) second edition [ISBN 9780804725194].
Greenfeld, L. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) reprint edition [ISBN 9780674603196].
Hall, J. (ed.) States in History. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)
[ISBN 9780631171362].
Hall, S. ‘Introduction’ in Hall and Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity.
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780745609607].
Hall, S. ‘The West and the Rest’ in Hall & Gieben (eds.) Formations of Modernity.
5
Hardt, M. and A. Negri Empire. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2000) [ISBN 9780674006713].
Harvey, D. The New Imperialism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780199278084].
Hay, C., M. Lister and D. Marsh The State: Theories and Issues (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006) [ISBN 9781403934260].
Hearn, J. Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. (Houndsmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) [ISBN 9781403918987]. **
Heather, P. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the
Barbarians. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) [ISBN 9780195325416].
Hobsbawm, E. The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. (London: Abacus Books,
1988) [ISBN 9780844669922].
Hobsbawn, E. The Age of Capital. (London: Abacus, 1988)
[ISBN 9781842120156].
Hobson, J.A. Imperialism: A Study (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988 [1905])
[ISBN 9781596059481].
Hoogvelt, A.M.M. Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political
Economy of Development. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
[ISBN 9780333461068].
Hutchinson, J. and A.D. Smith (eds) Nationalism. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994) [ISBN 9780192892607].
Jordanova, L. History in Practice. (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006) second
edition [ISBN 9780340814345].
Kiernan, V.G. America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World
Hegemony. (London: Verso, 2005) [ISBN 9781844675227].
Koselleck, R. ‘The Semantics of Historical Time’ in Futures Past: The Semantics
of Historical Time. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
[ISBN 9780231127714]. **
Koselleck, R. The Practice of Conceptual History. (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002) [ISBN 9780804743051]. Chapter ‘Concepts of
Historical Time and Social History’.
Kumar, K. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004) second edition [ISBN 9781405114295]. pp.66–85. **
Le Goff, J. Medieval Civilisation. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)
[ISBN 9780631175667].
Mann, Michael Incoherent Empire. (London: Verso, 2005)
[ISBN 9781844675289].
McDonald, T.J. ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The
Conversations of History and Sociology’ in McDonald, T.J. (ed.) The Historic
Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
[ISBN 9780472066322].
McLennan, G., D. Held and D. Hall (eds) The Idea of the Modern State. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780335105977].
Mommsen W.J. Theories of Imperialism. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1981) [ISBN 9780226533964].
Moore, B. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1993) reprint edition [ISBN 9780807050736].
Morrison, K. Marx, Durkheim and Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought.
(London: Sage, 2006) second edition [ISBN 9780761970552].
Mouzelis, N. ‘In Defence of “Grand” Historical Sociology’, The British Journal of
Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.31–36.
Poggi, G. ‘The Formation of the Modern State and the Institutionalisation
of Rule’ in Delanty and Isin (eds) The Handbook of Historical Sociology.
(London: Sage Publications, 2003) [ISBN 9780761971733].
Poggi, G. The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978) [ISBN 9780804709590].
Poggi, G. The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects. (Oxford: Polity Press,
1990) [ISBN 9780804718776].
6
Polanyi, K. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our
Time. (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1957) [ISBN 9780807056790].
Rose, N. and P. Miller ‘Political power beyond the state’, British Journal of
Sociology, 43 1991, pp.173–205.
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Vintage, 1994)
[ISBN 9780679750543].
Said, E. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. (London: Penguin
Books, 2003) twenty-fifth anniversary edition [ISBN 9780141187426] **
Scott, J. Social Theory: Central Issues in Sociology. (London: Sage, 2006)
[ISBN 9780761970873] Chapter 7.
Skocpol, T. States and Social Revolutions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) [ISBN 9780521294997].
Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge
Smith, A.D. National Identity. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991)
[ISBN 9780874172041].
Smith, A.D. The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates About Ethnicity and
Nationalism. (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2000)
[ISBN 9781584650409].
Smith, D. The Rise of Historical Sociology. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
[ISBN 9780877229209].
Spillman, L., and R. Faeges ‘Nations’ in Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff
Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology. (Durham, NC: Duke
Tonkiss, F. Contemporary Economic Sociology. (London: Routledge, 2006)
[ISBN 9780415300940]. Chapter 1.
White, H. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973) [ISBN 9780801817618].
Wolf, E. Europe and the People Without History. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997) second edition [ISBN 9780520048980].
Zammito, J. ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of
History’, History and Theory, 43, 2004 pp.124–35.
Online study resources

In addition to the subject guide and the Essential reading, it is crucial that
you take advantage of the study resources that are available online for this
course, including the VLE and the Online Library.
You can access the VLE, the Online Library and your University of London
email account via the Student Portal at:
http://my.londoninternational.ac.uk
You should have received your login details for the Student Portal with
your official offer, which was emailed to the address that you gave
on your application form. You have probably already logged in to the
Student Portal in order to register! As soon as you registered, you will
automatically have been granted access to the VLE, Online Library and
your fully functional University of London email account.
If you forget your login details at any point, please email uolia.support@
london.ac.uk quoting your student number.
The VLE
The VLE, which complements this subject guide, has been designed to
enhance your learning experience, providing additional support and a
sense of community. It forms an important part of your study experience
with the University of London and you should access it regularly.
The VLE provides a range of resources for EMFSS courses:
7
• Self-testing activities: Doing these allows you to test your own

understanding of subject material.
• Electronic study materials: The printed materials that you receive from
the University of London are available to download, including updated
reading lists and references.
• Past examination papers and Examiners’ commentaries: These provide
advice on how each examination question might best be answered.
• A student discussion forum: This is an open space for you to discuss
interests and experiences, seek support from your peers, work
collaboratively to solve problems and discuss subject material.
• Videos: There are recorded academic introductions to the subject,
interviews and debates and, for some courses, audio-visual tutorials
and conclusions.
• Recorded lectures: For some courses, where appropriate, the sessions
from previous years’ Study Weekends have been recorded and made
available.
• Study skills: Expert advice on preparing for examinations and
developing your digital literacy skills.
• Feedback forms.
Some of these resources are available for certain courses only, but we
are expanding our provision all the time and you should check the VLE
regularly for updates.
Making use of the Online Library

The Online Library contains a huge array of journal articles and other
resources to help you read widely and extensively.
To access the majority of resources via the Online Library you will either
need to use your University of London Student Portal login details, or you
will be required to register and use an Athens login:
http://tinyurl.com/ollathens
The easiest way to locate relevant content and journal articles in the
Online Library is to use the Summon search engine.
If you are having trouble finding an article listed in a reading list, try
removing any punctuation from the title, such as single quotation marks,
question marks and colons.
For further advice, please see the online help pages:
www.external.shl.lon.ac.uk/summon/about.php
Reading advice
All of the texts we have chosen are important in advancing your
understanding of key aspects of the course. They might introduce you to
important debates within the field that you are studying or they might
outline a theoretical or a practical problem.
In either case they will be much more detailed than the chapters in the
subject guide and they will treat topics in far more depth. They will almost
certainly introduce you to complex and perhaps unfamiliar material which
might well have a specific and specialist vocabulary of its own. Do
not panic! Getting the most out of reading a text involves following a few
basic steps.
A word of warning, however, before you begin! If you think that the texts
that you have been set to read will be too difficult, too complicated,
8
or even too boring then you will be fighting a losing battle with them.
Writers do not set out to baffle, confuse or bore their readers. If you
approach the task of reading with an open mind and a determination to
discover useful, important and above all interesting information about
a topic, you will find that it is relatively easy to overcome any initial
difficulties. In this sense reading academic articles, chapters and books
successfully depends on developing a positive attitude to the task. It is
worth doing this as quickly as you can as the benefits are clear. Students
who read widely always get better grades than those who do not. And as
an additional benefit, they also tend to get much more out of their studies!
Engaging with your reading

So how is it possible to become more engaged with set reading, and more
confident about approaching it? Generally it helps to have a strategic
approach to any aspect of studying, and reading is no exception. The
following is a list of tips and suggestions based on the experiences and
comments of numerous students over the years. You may find some or all
of it useful. But remember, these are suggestions and not rules!
• Firstly, and as we have already said, don’t worry or panic – distance
yourself from the text you are reading and mentally approach it afresh.
• Any text is invariably an argument made up of several stages – look for
the structure and essence of the argument.
• Consider what the writer is saying, how they are saying it, what steps
they follow, what the turns are in their logic or argument.
• When you come across an unfamiliar word, concept, phrase or detail,
read right through it. Ignore it at first – you can look it up later.
Remember that you are aiming to distil the essence of the
argument. That is why it is important not to get ‘bogged
down’ in detail.
• Each sentence and each paragraph is saying something – break up the
text into manageable components that you can work with.
• Spend 10 minutes thinking about what you have read and jot down the
key points on one piece of paper.
• Now go back and study the extract carefully, adding briefly to your notes.
• Write down questions and areas that are not clear and look them up later.
• Use whatever learning resources you have available to you –
dictionaries, internet access, encyclopedias and so on – to look
up unfamiliar words, ideas, place names, or people that might be
referenced in the text. But bear in mind that your initial
task is to try and read through the text to see if you can
understand the larger argument it makes. Detailed study
can come later, once this has been grasped.
• If you agree with what the writer is saying, can you say precisely what
you agree with? What did you like about the extract?
• What is not being said in the extract? What seems to be left out?
• Is there something that you disagree with? Can you say clearly why
you disagree with it? Is it the writer’s opinion? Is there something
faulty in their logic or the steps they use in their argument? Or is your
disagreement more like an unease that you can’t clearly articulate?
• How have the issues addressed by the writer affected debates in the
area, if at all? Can you see any links between ideas emerging from your
reading and other areas we have covered, or areas you have covered in
other courses?
9
Examination structure and advice

Important: the information and advice given here are based on the
examination structure used at the time this guide was written. Please
note that subject guides may be used for several years. Because of this
we strongly advise you to always check both the current Regulations for
relevant information about the examination, and the VLE where you
should be advised of any forthcoming changes. You should also carefully
check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow
those instructions.
The examination paper for this course is three hours in duration and you
are expected to answer three questions, from a choice of twelve. The
examiner attempts to ensure that all of the topics covered in the syllabus
and subject guide are examined. Some questions could cover more than one
topic from the syllabus since the different topics are not self-contained. A
sample examination paper appears as an appendix to this guide.
You should ensure that all three questions are answered, allowing an
approximately equal amount of time for each question, and attempting all
parts or aspects of a question.
In approaching this examination the most important thing to remember
is that even if you know and fully understand the material, if you cannot
clearly convey this to the Examiners you will not achieve a high mark.
Remember that you must give yourself a sufficient amount of time to
answer each question.
You must at least be familiar with the subject guide material and
essential reading, although it must be stressed that good marks are
awarded only to those candidates who can demonstrate familiarity with
argument and debate to be found in both their essential and further
recommended reading. The best examination answers are those which
contain plenty of references to relevant reading beyond the subject guide
and which engage in critical discussion of this material in the context of
the question that is asked.
Remember, it is important to check the VLE for:
• up-to-date information on examination and assessment arrangements
for this course
• where available, past examination papers and Examiners’ commentaries
for the course which give advice on how each question might best be
answered.
Syllabus
Sociology and history. A critical introduction to theories and ideas
about the nature and meaning of historical change and development
in Enlightenment, Hegelian, Marxist, neo-Marxist, liberal and post-
structuralist and postcolonial thought; an introduction to historical
sociology as a sub-discipline and the relationship between history and
sociology as disciplines; a consideration of the centrality of the state
and its development to historical sociological traditions; the emergence
and development of the state form in different historical/sociological
perspectives.
The emergence of the early modern state. A survey of historical state forms
through ancient empires, the feudal state to the early modern state; a
comparison of ancient ‘imperial’, feudal and early modern state forms;
10
consideration of theoretical models that describe the transition from feudal

to early modern states.
The development of the modern state. Key concerns in the formation
of liberal democratic, welfare and ‘totalitarian’ states; examination of
continuities and discontinuities between absolutist, liberal democratic/
welfare, constitutional and ‘totalitarian’ state forms; consideration of
questions of revolution and social change, governmentality, ‘population’
and the emergence of ‘bio-political’ concerns.
Nationalism and imperialism. An examination of the centrality of
nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a consideration of
European colonial and imperial expansionism in the same period.
Globalisation, the postcolonial situation and neo-imperialism. A
consideration of the emergence of ‘globalisation’; theoretical models
of ‘globalisation’ and their historical context; an examination of
contemporary geo-political formations in a historical context.
11
Notes
12
Chapter 2: Time, history and modernity
Aim of the chapter

The aim of this chapter is to provide a broad outline of the intellectual
origins of historical sociology.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having completed the Essential reading and
activities, you should be able to:
• explain how ideas about history and historical thinking have changed
over time and how these ideas shape the way that we regard the
present and the future as well as the past
• show how ideas about the ‘modernity’ of European societies emerged
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and helped shape historical
and sociological thinking
• construct some preliminary arguments of your own about history and
historical change.
Essential reading
Hall, S. ‘Introduction’ in Hall, S., and B. Gieben Formations of Modernity.
Further reading
KEY **= particularly recommended for this chapter.
and Sociology’ in Matthews, S. (trans.) On History. (Chicago: University of
Publications, 2003) [ISBN 9780761971733] Introduction.
Hall, S. ‘The West and the Rest’ in Hall and Gieben (eds) Formations of
Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780745609607].
**Koselleck, R. ‘The Semantics of Historical Time’ in Futures Past: The Semantics
of Historical Time. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
[ISBN 9780231127714].
Koselleck, R. The Practice of Conceptual History. (Stanford CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002) [ISBN 9780804743051] Chapter ‘Concepts of
Historical Time and Social History’.
**Kumar, K. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004) second edition [ISBN 9781405114295] pp.66–85.
Scott, J. Social Theory: Central Issues in Sociology. (London: Sage, 2006)
[ISBN 9780761970873] Chapter 7.
Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge: Cambridge
[ISBN 9780877229209].
Zammito, J. ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of
History’, History and Theory, 43 2004, pp.124–35.
13
Works cited
Gibbon, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Phoenix Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780753818817].
Hegel, G.W.F. Introductory Lectures on the Philosophy of History. (Cambridge,
MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997) [ISBN 9780872203709].
Koselleck, R. ‘The Semantics of Historical Time’ in Futures Past: the Semantics of
Historical Time. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
[ISBN 9780231127714].
Kumar, K. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004) second edition [ISBN 9781405114295] pp.66–85.
Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto. Various editions.
Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge
Introduction
This chapter explores two specific but interrelated areas. Firstly, it looks at
influential ideas about time, history and historical processes and at how
these developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into notions
of a unique European or Western ‘modernity’. Secondly, it looks briefly at
how these ideas relate to sociology, which itself developed as a separate
academic discipline in the nineteenth century. This chapter is closely
related to the one that follows on from it and in Chapter 3 we will go on to
explore the importance of historical thinking in sociology as it emerged as
a discipline and at the development of historical sociology as an important
and specific area of study in its own right.
Most people tend to think that ‘history’ is a very straightforward concept.
It simply describes things that happened in the past. However, this is by no
means the case! As this chapter will demonstrate, the way that we think
about the past and attempt to describe it is never straightforward. History
is a contested concept. Ideas about what actually happened in the past
and about how we should interpret events that happened in the past
have always been the subject of fierce debates. Indeed, it has famously
been claimed that history is written by the victors of wars or conflicts and
is therefore a celebration of the success of the powerful. We will see how
to some extent this claim can be applied to the early sociologists’ concern
with what they saw as the unique dynamism and success of European
societies in comparison to societies of the past and to other less ‘developed’
or ‘advanced’ contemporary societies. The social, cultural, political and
economic condition of these ‘more successful’ European societies is
usually referred to as ‘modernity’. We will therefore look closely at
the ways in which ideas about history and historical change that became
an integral part of sociological thinking were related to ideas about the
special condition (the ‘modernity’) of European societies, economies and
cultures in contrast to other types of society. We will then go on in Chapter
3 to look at how the idea of historical progress towards ‘modernity’
developed and how it has been challenged.
Although these two chapters will sometimes look critically at the ideas
that have traditionally informed sociological and historical thinking,
they will also make a case for the overwhelming importance of historical
thinking in sociology. It has after all, and quite rightly, been argued
that it is impossible to understand the present without a sound grasp of
the processes that have produced the economic and social structures,
14
institutions and ideologies which surround us and within which we are

embedded. These processes are above all historical processes. They take
place over very long periods of time, often centuries.
The renowned historical sociologist Theda Skocpol distinguishes four
key characteristics of historical sociological studies and she argues
that all ‘truly historical sociological studies’ share some or all of these
characteristics:
• They ask questions about social structures or processes understood to
be concretely situated in time and space.
• They address social, economic, cultural and political processes over
time and take temporal sequences seriously in accounting for
outcomes.
• They attend to the interplay of meaningful actions and structural
contexts, in order to make sense of unintended as well as intended
outcomes in individual lives and social transformations.
Historical sociological studies highlight the particular and
varying features of specific kinds of social structures and patterns
of change. In other words, historical sociologists are also
interested in social and cultural difference and they do not, on
the whole, tend to see the world’s past as a single story of unified
developmental leading toward the present.
(Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, 1984)
During this course we will see how these ideas have been put to use and
how they cast light on the historical dimension of the social, economic and
cultural processes that we are part of. In this sense we will come to see just
how much our attitudes and ideas and our capacity to act is determined by
events and circumstances that occurred in the past.
In this chapter we will look at the background to the development of
the ideas that Skocpol outlines above in the emergence of a specifically
‘modern’ way of thinking about history and historical change. In Chapter
3, we will go on to ask how historical sociologists have argued that it is
possible to develop a sound historical understanding of social processes
and social change. We will also ask how it might be possible to develop
‘histories of the present’ that do not begin from the assumption that
‘modernity’ represents a point at which all societies are ultimately destined
to arrive.
Historical thinking and ‘modernity’

We are going to begin our discussion of historical thinking in sociology
with a look at the key concept of ‘modernity’. As we mentioned in the
previous section, the social, economic and political changes that occurred
over the course of the nineteenth century led many thinkers to assume
that they were living in radically ‘new’ times. The changes that they saw
occurring around them, they argued, distinguished their societies both
from those of the past and from those in other parts of the world where
these changes had not occurred. On the one hand, the concept is used
diachronically to demarcate a certain period in world history as distinct
from a non-modern past (this is usually referred to as periodisation).
On the other hand, the concept is used synchronically to distinguish
qualitatively between modern and ‘traditional’, or non-modern, forms of
life. These usages are often combined to produce general ‘philosophies
of history’ that involve theses about the nature of time and the direction
of world historical change. Yet the notion of ‘modernity’ as a way of
15
understanding one’s location in time, history and space must itself be

regarded as the product of a historically specific culture – despite the
fact that this culture is now so widespread as to appear universal. Ways
of perceiving, thinking and using the notion of ‘time’ and its movement 1
Throughout the course
themselves have a history. Reflecting on this history changes how we relate we will be using the
standard and by now
to ‘modernity’ as a way of describing ourselves, often in relation to others
almost universally
both in the past and in the present. accepted dating system
The concept of ‘modernity’ has been of crucial importance for sociologists that was adopted in the
and historians who have attempted to define and describe the specific Christian West in the
early Middle Ages. In this
features of the contemporary world and how and why they arose in
system all dates are cal-
the ways that they did. Indeed, modernity has been described as a culated in relation to the
‘comprehensive designation of all the changes – intellectual, social and birth of Christ. As the
political – that brought into being the modern world’ (Kumar, 1995: 67). most significant event
In this section, we will look briefly at the meaning of of ‘modernity’ and in history for Christians,
the year of Christ’s birth
assess its importance as both a tool for explanation and an object
is written as 1 AD (Anno
of investigation. As we will see, the idea of the ‘modern’ and of history Domini, which means
itself has a history. We will begin by looking at some of its meanings ‘the year of our Lord’ in
and some of the key ideas about time and history that have shaped Latin). The year 1750 AD,
historical and sociological thought. for example, is therefore
1,750 years after the
Activity birth of Christ. Dates
before the birth of Christ
Look up the word ‘modern’ and write down all of the definitions that you can find. Does are counted backwards
modern just mean ‘up to date’ or ‘new’? What other meanings or associations does the from the year 1 AD. So,
word have? for example, according
to this system, the birth
of the Egyptian Queen
A brief history of time Cleopatra occurred in
69 BC (Before Christ) and
The word modern has its roots in the Latin term modernus (meaning ‘of she died in 30 BC (30
the present time’). It came into usage in around the late fifth century CE years before his birth). In
and was used in opposition to the term antiquuus (‘of past times’). The recent years, AD and BC
have been replaced with
invention of the term is important as it tells us much about a new way of
the designations that
thinking about time and history that had emerged in the first centuries of will be used throughout
the Christian era. this course. This retains
The designation of the present as being ‘modern’, or qualitatively ‘new’, exactly the same dating
system but replaces the
or ‘different’ from the past represented a significant break with previous
explicitly Christian terms
conceptions of time and history. Previously, in what came to be known as AD and BC. These are
the ancient world1 (the world of classical pagan antiquity, particularly changed to CE and BCE,
that of Greece and Rome, before the consolidation of the Christian era), standing for Common
time was seen as cyclical. Time was thought to move in cycles, like the Era and Before Common
Era. This is itself also
seasons, in a regular and repetitive manner and it was generally thought
quite problematic as it
that, although things might change, it was impossible for anything new assumes an explicitly
to happen. Alongside this naturalistic view of time, ideas derived from the ‘Western’ system of dat-
ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 BCE) meant that the ancient ing events, but as this
world saw time as a reflection of eternity. He argued that events and dating system is in such
occurrences in the human world were pale reflections of the timeless world wide usage we will use
it here. However, we
of eternity. This Platonic conception also shares with cyclical notions
might want to think
of time the idea that nothing essentially new or different could emerge. about the assumption
Indeed, the people of the ancient world tended to assume that change was that the world has a
the same as decay. They looked back to a mythical Golden Age and assumed common era (which
that their own times were ‘suffering from the corruptions of old age’ implies a single history)
and that this is synony-
(Kumar, 1995: 72). So in many respects we can see that the ancient view of
mous with the history of
time and history is almost the exact opposite of our view of ‘modern’ time. the Christian West, even
The belief systems of the ancient world were gradually replaced by those if the explicit reference
of Christianity, which has a radically different conception of time and to Christianity has now
been dropped.
history. For Christianity, time is not cyclical but linear and it begins from
16
the premise that the birth of Christ represents an absolutely new and
unprecedented event in history. According to Christian belief, from this
point on, time moves in a ‘straight line’ (in a linear direction) towards
the Second Coming of Christ. This future event, it was believed, would
herald the ‘last judgement’ and the end of the world. In contrast to the
beliefs of the classical, pagan world, Christianity was responsible for
instituting ideas about time that were future oriented. In other words,
in Christian thought, time and history are seen as moving towards a
single, predetermined future event. This idea that history moves toward a
predetermined end is known as teleology. As we will see, teleological
thinking is present in different forms in much of the sociological and
historical thinking that emerged in the nineteenth century.
However, despite its new linear conception of time, the Christian
philosophy of history was similar in many respects to that of the
ancient world. In other words, its assumptions about the secular (as
opposed to the spiritual) world were that change was equivalent to decay
and that the world was growing old. Modern times, modern people and
modern ideas were most often compared unfavourably with those of the
past.
During the course of the fifteenth century, significant changes began
to take place in European societies. These were cultural, economic and
political. The period is usually referred to as the Renaissance (literally the
‘rebirth’). Scientific and technical developments in navigation and ship-
building led to the so-called ‘voyages of discovery’ and the colonisation
of the Americas (the ‘new world’, as it was known to Europeans). In the
visual arts, architecture, literature and philosophy there was a general and
quite widespread ‘rediscovery’ of the ancient or classical past, which was
used as a model. Indeed, the people of the Renaissance first began to use
a distinctively ‘modern’ form of periodisation (the division of history
into specific ages or periods): ancient, medieval and modern. They
looked back to the (ancient) classical world as a period of civilisation and
accomplishment and at their own (modern) age as one of a rebirth in the
arts and sciences. The intervening period (of approximately 1,000 years)
they referred to as the Middle Ages (or the medieval period), which they
regarded as a time of barbarism and backwardness.
However, despite the general belief that the present could be distinguished
from the barbarism and superstition of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance
was nonetheless uncertain about its own status. After all, it saw itself as
primarily involved in a ‘re-discovery’ of the glories of a past civilisation and
as such as a ‘re-birth’ rather than the invention of something new. As such
it tended to regard the present as ‘imitative and uncreative’ rather than
genuinely innovative (Kumar, 1995: 74). Indeed, the revival of interest
in classical antiquity saw a turn away from the spiritual concerns of the
Middle Ages and a new interest in secular history – that is, the history
of empires, nations, cities and peoples. The classical historians of course
provided the model for this. Naturally, the historians of the ancient world
had shared the general belief in the cyclical nature of time and history
and, as a consequence, this idea, along with much else, was revived.
On one hand we can see that during the Renaissance period the present
was considered to be radically different from the immediate past, that it
marked a break with the ‘stagnation’ of the Middle Ages. However, on the
other hand it was also assumed that the present age marked a return to a
more civilised past. History was therefore seen in terms of the movement
of a wheel or a circle ‘that returns to its beginning’ (Kumar, 1995:74). This
is clearly not an idea of progress in any ordinary sense of the word.
17
The Pantheon in Rome was built in about 120 CE by the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE).
Villa Almerica built by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580 CE) in 1566 CE. This is an example of the
classical revival that emerged during the period of the Renaissance.
Source: Stefan Bauer, www.ferras.at
Figure 2.1 The Renaissance rediscovery of classical architecture.
Activity
Read the following short passage by Edward Gibbon, the English historian of the Roman
Empire.
In the second century [CE]…the empire of Rome comprehended the
fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The
frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and
disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners
had gradually cemented the union of provinces. The peaceful inhabitants
enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury…If a man
were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the
condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would
without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian
to the accession of Commodus [Emperors marking the beginning and the
end of this period: 96–180 CE]. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was
governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.
(Gibbon, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
• What is the writer’s attitude to the Roman Empire?
• Which features of Roman life does he appear to most value and respect?
• Does he regard this period as better than the times in which he is writing?
Now think about how we tend to think about the relationship between the past and the
present.
• Is there any time in the past that you think is better than the present?
• If so, when is that? Why do you think that it might have been better?
• Do you think that the present is better than the past?
• If so, why? What specific features of the present make it better than the past?
18
It was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a much more
recognisably ‘modern’ outlook on time and history began to develop.
In the works of scientific and philosophical pioneers such as Montaigne
(1533–1596 CE), Bacon (1561–1626 CE) and Descartes (1596–1650 CE),
the authority and the superiority of ancient or classical authors began to
be challenged. The present began to be seen as quite possibly superior
in terms of its arts, sciences and technologies to the past. However,
‘throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries there
persisted the view that decay and degeneration were as much part of the
human story as growth and progress’ (Kumar: 77). Christian conceptions
of the present as a time of waiting for the inevitable return of Christ and
the end of the world persisted and intensified during periods of religious
revival. Classical conceptions of the historical cycles of birth, decay and
rebirth continued to be influential, as we can see in the passage from
Gibbon quoted above. It is very important to remember that even during
the Enlightenment2 period of the eighteenth century (a period that is 2
The Enlightenment was
generally associated with the development of specifically modern forms a key period in European
intellectual history which
of thinking), important and influential figures such as Voltaire and Adam
spanned the eighteenth
Smith held onto the idea that civilisations, including their own, were century.
capable of degeneration and decay. It is important that we remember
this as we need to be aware of just how radically different the ‘modern’
conception of time and history was when it developed fully.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century this new conception of time
and history had begun to predominate. By the later seventeenth century it
had already become commonplace to compare the history of humanity to
that of a single individual progressing from infancy, through childhood, to
maturity. Accordingly, the present age would be ‘naturally’ wiser than past
ages. There was an important qualification to this comparison, however.
The French mathematician Fontenelle (1657–1757 CE) wrote that, unlike
the individual, humanity itself will ‘have no old age’ and that it ‘will never
degenerate, and there will be no end to the growth and development of
human wisdom’ (quoted in Kumar: 77). In this statement we can see a
new and powerful affirmation of an idea that was to become dominant
throughout the following two centuries; that of a limitless progress in
which the present is seen as an improvement on the past and the future is
seen as open to yet further beneficial development.
Interestingly, it was an older idea that provided the model for this new
way of thinking. It was through the secularisation of the Christian
concept of time and history that the modern attitude to change and
progress was able to develop. We have already seen that Christianity saw
time as moving in a linear direction toward the promised return of Christ.
For Christians, this would mean the final establishment of the kingdom
of heaven. However, once this idea was secularised, that is, once the
spiritual dimension was removed, it developed into a ‘dynamic philosophy
of history’ (Kumar: 78). What this means is that the Christian idea of the
movement of time towards a better future was adopted by writers and
thinkers who retained the essential structure without the spiritual aspects.
This had profound implications for the ways in which time and history
began to be thought about.
The philosophies of history that emerged out of the secularisation of
Christian thought emphasised the radical newness of the present and
saw the past as meaningless except as a preparation for the present.
Instead of the past having meaning and authority, or providing a model
for how things ought to be, as it had for the people of the Renaissance for
example, it was now regarded as less rather than more enlightened or
19
civilised. History was seen as progressing in stages to higher and higher

forms of civilisation, economic development, morals and manners, and the
past became meaningful, therefore, only in terms of how its events and
processes could be read as leading to the formation of the contemporary
world. In other the words, the contemporary (European) world was seen
in almost all ways as more advanced, but also as a staging post along
the way to an even better future. These philosophies of progress will be
discussed in more detail and depth in Chapter 3.
Activity
Read the following short passage. This is taken from an essay on the nature of ‘historical
time’. So far, we have seen how time and history were thought of (a) in the ancient
or classical world, where history was thought of as being like a wheel with all things
returning in a cycle, and (b) in Christian thought, as moving toward the ‘last days’ in
which Christ would return. We have also begun to look at the idea that developed
comparatively recently, that history can be seen in terms of ‘progress’. According to
Reinhart Koselleck, thinking about time and history always takes place within what
he refers to as a ‘horizon of expectation’. The Christians expected a second coming of
Christ, for example, and the ancients expected that all things returned cyclically. Since
the eighteenth century our ‘horizon of expectations’ consists of the idea that the future is
‘open’, that it will almost certainly be ‘better’ than both past and present. In other words,
that history is ‘progressive’.
Reflection [on the idea of historical time] took place through the medium
of the philosophy of history, which is a product of the eighteenth
century…[T]he level of reflection can be deduced from the use of two
central notions of time: that of modern time and that of progress. Modern
time differs from that of earlier ‘age’ theories in that it is experienced not
retrospectively but directly. This is one of the novelties of this particular
new notion. It is less of a retrospective notion because it has arisen from
the present, which is opening out toward the future. The future of modern
time is thought to be open and without boundaries. The vision of last
things or the theory of the return of all things has been pushed aside
by the venture of opening up a new future: a future which…is totally
different from all that has passed before…Modern time was identified
with progress, since it was progress that conceptualised the difference
between the past so far and the coming future…One could also say that
progress is the first genuinely historical definition of time that has not
derived its meaning from other areas of experience such as theology or
mythical foreknowledge. Progress could only be discovered when people
began to reflect on historical time itself. In practice this means that
progress can only occur if people want it and plan for it. That the future
should be a horizon of planning, not only of days, weeks, or even years,
but of the long-term kind is one of the features of a historical time that is
seen as progressive.
(Reinhart Koselleck ‘Historical Time and Social History’)
• What does Koselleck mean by ‘progress’? What do you understand by this term?
• How is this idea different from previous ways of thinking about history?
• We are now so embedded in the idea of ‘progress’ that it has become ‘second
nature’ or common sense to think that the both society and ourselves as
individuals can and should permanently ‘improve’.
• Do you think that the society that you live in can and should ‘develop’ or
‘progress’ further? How do you regard the concept of progress? Is it in economic
terms, social or political terms, cultural terms? Is ‘progress’ in any of these areas
related to progress in another?
20
• Now write down the reasons why you personally have decided to take this course.
In what way is this tied to an idea of personal progression or development?
• Thinking about what you have just written, do you think that there is a link
between your own personal sense of development and ‘progress’ and that of the
society around you?
• Thinking about all of these areas, can you write down what you understand by
Koselleck’s ideas of the ‘horizon of expectation’? Can you imagine what it might
be like to have a very different ‘horizon of expectation’ about the present and the
future? Can you see how this relates to the way that we experience the idea of
history?
Modern times
As we have seen, from about the middle of the eighteenth century, the
present came to be seen as a time of unprecedented novelty. The idea of
the modern as something which is not simply new but also better became
current. Events such as the American (1776 CE) and the French (1789
CE) revolutions, which occurred in the late eighteenth century, were
interpreted not so much as revolutions of a wheel, returning things to how
they might have been before, but as unprecedented events that heralded
the birth of a new (social and political) world and a new beginning.3 3
Although they did of
Indeed, in France a revolutionary calendar was adopted in which the first course in part ‘borrow’
some of the ‘clothes’
year of the revolution (1789 CE) was marked as the year zero (the starting
of the past in order
point of a new historical epoch), with years being counted onwards from to disguise the real
this decisive point. nature of the social
and economic upheaval
that they heralded, as
Marx puts it in The
Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon.
Figure 2.2 French revolutionary calendar: the seated figure wears the ‘liberty
cap’, a symbol of freedom from the tyranny and superstition of the old regime.
What else do you notice about the seated figure and the things she is surround-
ed by? What sort of impression does this give?
However, significant (revolutionary) political change was not the only
way in which the radical difference of the present from the past was
experienced. The coming of industrialisation also had a significant
impact on the development of the ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’.
The ‘industrial revolution’ which gathered pace from the mid-eighteenth
century onwards saw unprecedented technological advances, the massive
expansion of a centralised factory system and rapid urbanisation which
transformed both physical and social landscapes. This had its (non-
material) origins in the sixteenth-century transformation of religious
21
consciousness that led to the adoption of a more ‘rational’ and ‘worldly’

view of work and production4 and the scientific revolution of the 4
See Weber’s
seventeenth century which began to instrumentalise the way the natural The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of
world was seen.5 In this sense, industrialisation was always related
Capitalism. You can find
to other important processes that are associated with the emergence a discussion of this in
of ‘modernity’. However, the rapid development of industrialisation, the chapter on Weber in
to the point at which the speed of development began to be seen as course 21 Principles
a ‘revolution’, gave a ‘material form’ to ‘modernity’ as much as the of sociology.
revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had given it 5
If you have studied
scientific, philosophical and political forms (Kumar, 1995: 82). Certainly 158 Reading social
it gave Europe the financial, technological and military edge during the science, see the chapter
on Descartes.
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that allowed it to dominate the world
(see Chapters 7 and 9).
When the political, scientific and philosophical ideas that had emerged
over the course of several centuries were coupled with the rapid
transformations brought about by industrialisation, it is perhaps
unsurprising that a new historical consciousness emerged based on ideas
of the ‘newness’ of the present and of progress.
During the nineteenth century this new consciousness of time and history
was made explicitly manifest in the development of specific philosophies
of history. Probably the most influential of these philosophies was that
of G.W. Hegel (1770–1831 CE). Hegel saw history in teleological terms
(in other words, that humanity and society were developing in the
direction of an ultimate purpose). This ultimate purpose was, for Hegel,
the achievement of what he called ‘absolute spirit’, which is the realisation
of a fully free and rational humanity. For Hegel, the modern (European)
state represented the end point of this process of development that had
seen the rise and fall of various forms of civilisation, from ancient India
and ancient Greece and Rome through Medieval Christian civilisation to
the present. Each of these civilisations had contributed its specific original
aspects to the ultimate development of the contemporary (European)
civilisation. History, according to Hegel, could therefore be seen as a
process of progression by stages. None of these ‘stages’ would have had
the awareness to realise that they were part of a scheme that was slowly
unfolding over time; their consciousness of themselves was limited to
that of their own epoch. It is only in the present age, the age in which this
purpose is being fulfilled, that it has become possible to see the ‘truth’
about history and historical development.6 6
‘The owl of Minerva’,
Hegel claimed, ‘always
According to Hegel, the present age was therefore one in which the flies at dusk.’ Minerva
ultimate purpose of history had revealed itself and given itself a concrete was the ancient Roman
material form in the ‘superior’ civilisation of Europe. This civilisation now goddess of wisdom and
represented not a particular form of society or culture, but the model for the owl was her symbol.
a universal or world civilisation. In this sense, all other contemporary Hegel meant that we are
only capable of seeing
civilisations must be found wanting compared with Europe.
the real nature of things
when they are already
Activity coming to a close (as
Read the following short passage from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History in the day comes to a close
at dusk).
which Hegel is writing about Africa.
It has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living
in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with
any integral ingredients of culture. From the earliest historical times Africa
has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the
land of gold, for ever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood,
22
removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark
mantle of night… In this main portion of Africa, history is in fact out of
the question. Life there consists of a succession of contingent happenings
and surprises. No aim or state exists whose development could be
followed.
• Hegel is writing about Africa. What is his attitude to ‘Africa’?
• According to Hegel, does Africa have a history?
• In what way is Africa different from Europe? How does this provide a contrast
with the ‘civilisation’ of Europe?
• Does this attitude towards Africa continue into our own present?
Hegel’s philosophy was highly influential and in many ways continues to

be so. But even without the full-blown philosophy of history that Hegel
presents, ideas of progress and of development through or towards
‘modernity’ continue to be of enormous importance. The success of these
ideas can be measured in the ways in which they have significantly
altered how we all now tend to think about history and historical time.
The story of progress and the openness of the future to further and faster
‘improvement’ continue, in spite of more recent environmental concerns,
to predominate. This story of a progression toward modernity, and of a
future that promises further advances, has become almost universal.
‘Modernity’ and the modern

We need to pause for a moment here and make a very important
distinction between two meanings of the word ‘modern’. The first is our
commonsense understanding of the term. In this usage the word means
‘up to date’ or ‘new’. We have seen how the idea of ‘newness’ took hold of
people’s minds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how they
began to characterise their societies as radically different from societies
of the past (or from those in other parts of the world). Nonetheless we
might well laugh if we were to be transported back in time and be told
by a person of the eighteenth century about all the marvellous and ‘up
to date’ inventions, fashions or ideas of 1750 CE. What was ‘up to date’ in
one century (or even decade) will seem hopelessly outdated in another.
However, both sociologists and historians use the word ‘modern’ to
describe quite a long period of history (from about the beginning of the
seventeenth century right up to the present in fact). This is because they
are using the word in a more ‘technical’ and specialist sense.
This second more specialist meaning of the word is used to describe a ‘long
term and more enduring social condition’ (in fact one that has endured
for around 400 years). This was the form of social life that began to
emerge in the seventeenth century. It is a society that is defined by ‘certain
substantive characteristics’ (Scott, 2006: 185).
Activity
In Stuart Hall’s ‘Introduction’ to Formations of Modernity (on page 6) you will find a
good general outline of four defining characteristics of ‘modern’ societies. Read this
carefully. Throughout this course we will be using the term ‘modern’ to describe societies,
economies, political institutions and states as ‘modern’. ‘Modern’ will often be contrasted
with ‘traditional’. Remember, we are using the term ‘modern’ in precisely the sense that
sociologists use the term: that is, as a description of a particular type of society with
specific and well-defined characteristics.
23
The emergence of sociology

Sociology has most often been characterised as the study of specifically
‘modern’ societies. It emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century
as an attempt to describe and explain the changes that were happening
in social, political, economic and cultural life. It was also during the
eighteenth and then more particularly the nineteenth century that
academics began to develop ‘philosophies of history’ and to seriously
debate questions about ‘historical consciousness’ (as a specific way of
thinking), ‘historical method’ (as a distinctive mode of inquiry) and
‘historical knowledge’ (as a distinctive area of thought in the social
sciences) (White, 1973: 1). Sociology emerged as a discipline alongside
these ideas and shared many of their concerns.
As we have also seen, this was a period of unprecedented social and
political change largely brought about by rapid industrialisation and
urbanisation as capitalism consolidated itself as the dominant economic
system. Many of what we now call the social sciences, and especially
sociology, began as attempts to understand the historical causes of
these changes. Sociology has, in this sense, always been a ‘historically
grounded and oriented enterprise’ (Skocpol, 1984: 1). All of the ‘founding
fathers’ of the discipline (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) engaged in serious
and detailed historical studies in attempts to understand the radically new
forms of social and economic organisation that they saw developing in
Europe and North America.
These new forms of social and political organisation are usually referred to
as ‘modernity’ and it has been the special province of sociology to describe
its key features but also to account for its emergence. As we have seen,
however, ‘modernity’ has always characterised itself in terms not only of
its difference from societies of the past, but also from other contemporary
(‘traditional’) forms of society that are considered not to have reached
the same ‘advanced’ levels. This had serious consequences for the way in
which historical and historical sociological thinking developed.
Activity
Read the following short text:
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display
of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found
its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the
first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former
Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition
of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels The Communist Manifesto)
24
Remember (you may have encountered this idea in 21 Principles of sociology) the
bourgeoisie are the dominant class in the capitalist ‘mode of production’.
Answer the following questions:
• What has the bourgeois class (and what Marx and Engels elsewhere term
‘modern industry’) been able to accomplish?
• How does this compare to the achievements of previous civilisations?
• In what way is modern capitalist (‘bourgeois’) society different from previous
societies? How does this society relate to the past?
• Reading through this short passage, can you see any connection between the sort
of rapid change that Marx and Engels describe and contemporary societies today?
Marx and Engels account for these changes and for the dynamism of contemporary
societies in terms of the productive powers unleashed by the capitalist economy.
How might these ideas about the dynamism of capitalism relate to Hegel’s idea about
Africa’s place ‘outside’ history?
Conclusion
The passage from Marx and Engels which you will have read in the activity
box above is in many ways typical of the kind of response that sociologists
have had to modern societies. Sociology seeks to describe and account
for their dynamism and their ‘modernity’ and it has frequently done so
through recourse to forms of historical explanation. In the next chapter
we will see how sociology and history relate to one another and how they
are similar and yet often quite different modes of academic inquiry. The
historical sociologist Philip Abrams claimed that ‘sociology is history’. We
will ask how far and why this statement can be upheld or disputed.
A reminder of your learning outcomes

Having completed this chapter, and the Essential reading and activities,
you should be able to:
• explain how ideas about history and historical thinking have changed
over time and how these ideas shape the way that we regard the
present and the future as well as the past
• show how ideas about the ‘modernity’ of European societies emerged
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and helped shape historical
and sociological thinking
• construct some preliminary arguments of your own about history and
historical change.
Sample examination question

In what sense can it be argued that the modern understanding of history is
itself a historical concept?
25
Notes
26
Chapter 3: History and historical sociology
Chapter 3: History and historical

sociology
Aims of the chapter

This chapter has two broad aims:
• to provide an outline of the relationship between history and sociology
• to look at the specific field of historical sociology and at what makes
this field of research distinctive from sociology in general.
Learning outcomes
• explain how history and sociology relate to one another as fields of
academic study
• explain the differences and similarities between historical research and
sociological research methodologies, and why these differences and
similarities are important
• construct some preliminary arguments of your own about the
relationship between history and sociology as distinctive but related
fields of inquiry.
Essential reading
Tendencies’, British Journal of Sociology, 42(2) 1991, pp.211–30.
Mann, M. ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: A Reply to Goldthorpe’, British Journal
of Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.37–54.
Further reading
[ISBN 9780801492433].
** Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics, History
and Sociology. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780822333630] Chapter 1.
and Sociology’ in Matthews, S. (trans) On History. (Chicago: University of
edition [ISBN 9780801472855].
Calhoun, C. ‘Explanation in Historical Sociology: Narrative, General Theory,
and Historically Specific Theory’, The American Journal of Sociology, 14(3)
1998, pp.846–71.
[ISBN 9780415064958] Chapter 1.
Delanty and Isin (eds.) The Handbook of Historical Sociology. (London: Sage
Publications, 2003) [ISBN 9780761971733] Introduction.
Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002) second
edition [ISBN 9780415287531] Introduction.
27
Hall, S. ‘Introduction’ in Hall and Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity.

edition [ISBN 9780340814345].
McDonald, T.J. ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The
Conversations of History and Sociology’ in McDonald, T.J. (ed.) The Historic
Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
[ISBN 9780472066322].
Mouzelis, N. ‘In Defence of “Grand” Historical Sociology’, The British Journal of
Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.31–36.
Polanyi, K. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our
** Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780521297240] Chapter 1.
[ISBN 9780877229209].
Works cited
[ISBN 9780801492433].
edition [ISBN 9780801472855].
Tendencies’ The British Journal of Sociology, 42(2) 1991, pp.211–30.
edition [ISBN 9780340814345].
Mann, M. ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: a Reply to Goldthorpe’ The British
Journal of Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.37–54.
Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780521297240] Chapter 1.
[ISBN 9780877229209].
Introduction
This chapter builds on the arguments and ideas that were introduced
in Chapter 2. In that chapter we looked at the importance of the idea of
‘modernity’ for sociological thought. We saw how a specific consciousness
of time and of historical change emerged (broadly) during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and at how ‘modern’ times and ‘modern’ societies
came to be seen as radically different from those of the past. We also saw
how, during the nineteenth century, sociology emerged as a discipline with
a particular interest in defining and describing these ‘new’ or ‘modern’
forms of society and in accounting for their emergence.
In this chapter we will look more closely at the relationship between
history and sociology as they developed as disciplines. As we will see, this
has sometimes been a fruitful and productive relationship, but at other
times it has been characterised as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ (Burke, 2005:
3). In other words, the methodological and thematic concerns of the two
disciplines have often been seen to be widely divergent. In this chapter we
will look closely at both the similarities and the differences between the
approaches of historians and sociologists to both the past and the present.
The chapter will also look at the specific and distinctive work that
historical sociologists actually do. In doing so, we will also find out what
is distinctive about historical sociology.
28
History and sociology: different disciplines?

As we have seen, history and sociology as academic disciplines both
emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. As we have also
seen, all of the so-called founding fathers of sociology were interested in
describing and, more importantly, accounting for what they saw as the
‘special dynamism’ (Skocpol, 1984: 1) of European societies. Invariably,
therefore, the work of early sociologists was strongly historical and often
comparative in nature. The early sociologists were all influenced by the
kinds of social and historical analysis that had developed during the
Enlightenment period. There are considerable continuities between the
concerns of the early sociologists and those of Enlightenment writers
such as Montesquieu, Vico and Adam Smith who had sought answers to
questions about the nature of contemporary societies through recourse
to historical explanation. Marx’s Capital, for example, is a ‘path-breaking
contribution to economic history’ which discusses the history of ‘labour
legislation’ and ‘the shift from handicrafts to manufactures’ (Burke, 2005:
7). Weber’s Protestant Ethic explores the historical role of Calvinism and
Puritanism in the emergence of rational capitalism, and Durkheim’s The
Division of Labour considers the historical development and consequences
of increasing individuation in the organisation of social and economic life.
However, as sociology became more established as a discipline during
the first half of the twentieth century, it began to differentiate itself
more sharply from history. This was partly at least due to the belief that
sociology was a discipline capable of ‘formulating a universally applicable
general theory of society’ whereas history was ‘assumed by sociologists
to be a collection of archival researchers devoted to gathering the “facts”
about particular times and places’ (Skocpol, 1984: 362). For example,
in the United States, as sociology was institutionalised in universities,
structural functionalism became the dominant paradigm for sociological
research.
Structural functionalism, according to its critics, is profoundly anti-
historical. Its chief concern, as exemplified in Talcott Parsons’ 1951
book The Social System, is to account for societal equilibrium rather
than processes of social change. When change was envisaged it tended
to be thought of in evolutionary terms, with societies ‘modernising’ or
‘developing’ in the direction of the contemporary United States, which
was regarded as the most modern and the most highly developed of all
social systems.
Societies were therefore classified and ordered according to their relative
levels of ‘development’ away from the traditional and towards the modern
type, exemplified by the United States. Sociology saw itself as providing
theoretical models which could account for how societies functioned and
how they developed. A similar orthodoxy prevailed in the former Soviet
Union where, according to a strictly limited reading of Marx, it was assumed
that economic ‘progress’ caused all societies to pass through particular
‘stages’ on their way to (socialist) modernity. Both of these models of social
change were seen as universal in that they applied to all societies at all
times. In these circumstances, and with few exceptions, sociology ‘retreated
into the present’ and the disciplines of sociology and history began to be
seen as antithetical to one another (Burke, 2005: 13).
Indeed, it became commonplace to characterise the differences between
history and sociology in terms of strict oppositions. The most obvious,
of course, is the opposition between their respective fields of inquiry in
29
which sociology is seen as being concerned primarily with the present

and history with the past. However, this is not the only distinction that
has been made. For example, history has often been characterised as an
ideographic and sociology as a nomothetic discipline. Or sociology
has been seen as synchronic and history as diachronic (see table
below for definitions of each of these technical words). Sociology has
tended to be seen as primarily a discipline that generates generalisable
theory whereas history has been characterised as one that deals with
the particular and the empirical. In other words, whereas history was
seen to deal with specific instances and individual cases, sociology
was thought of as seeking to discover universal laws which could
be generalised to all societies, past and present. These differences
between the disciplines were, however, based on rather arbitrary and
historically specific distinctions as newly emergent specialist academic
disciplines fought to define a territory specifically their own. Indeed, as we
will see, there is nothing especially ‘historical’ or necessarily ‘sociological’
about the forms of knowledge and types of explanation ascribed to each
of the disciplines bearing these names. These rigid disciplinary boundaries
are, we might say, historical phenomena. Nonetheless, the traditional (if
now rather outmoded) way of categorising the differences between history
and sociology is set out below.
HISTORY SOCIOLOGY
Diachronic: this approach is concerned Synchronic: this approach is concerned
with sequences of events that occur over with mapping and accounting for a given
time, and with mapping and accounting system at a given moment and how
for change as it occurs over time. each part fits into the system. It gives a
‘snapshot’ of a specific moment in all its
complexity.
Ideographic: explanation for specific Nomothetic: explanation for classes of
events is sought through detailed events is sought in careful examination of
examination of specific preceding events. general categories or classes of preceding
Typical question: what were the causes of events.
the French Revolution?
Typical question: what are the necessary Empirical: uses detailed and first-hand
preconditions for a bourgeois-democratic archival, textual or archaeological sources
revolution? of information to explain specific cases.
Theoretical: generalises from specific
examples and constructs explanatory
models.
Activity
Read the following two brief extracts:
A. The Ottoman state had a class structure similar to that of all tributary
states. In law and theory, its population was divided into two groups or
estates, representing in effect the economically dominant class and its
dependants – a military class with a monopoly of the right to bear arms
and receive revenues and allocations of lands; and an exploited and
producing class, a hereditary and permanent tenancy of (predominantly)
peasants and farmers…In this respect the Ottoman state clearly rested on
the same fundamental structural principles common to all tributary social
formations.
30
B. Unlike Alexios and John, Manuel was able to maintain his influence in
Antioch after his return to Constantinople in 1159. He achieved this partly
by a marriage alliance. In 1162 after the death of his first wife Bertha of
Sulzbach, he married Maria, one of the daughters of Raymond of Poitiers
and the sister of the young Bohemond III. He also put Bohemond III in his
debt by paying his ransom of 100,000 dinars after the prince had been
captured by Nur ed-Din at the battle of Harim in 1164…There were of
course limits to the influence that Manuel could wield in distant Antioch.
In 1170 an earthquake brought the sanctuary of the cathedral in Antioch
crashing down. The unfortunate Patriarch Athanasius, who happened to be
celebrating the liturgy at the time, was buried under the rubble and killed.
Which of these two texts do you think is from a work of history, and which do you think
is from a work of historical sociology? Can you explain why you think this? What are the
specific features that make one of these extracts ‘sociological’ and one ‘historical’?
The (re-)emergence of historical sociology

Sociology and history began to be characterised (and practised) as
distinctly different disciplines in the early part of the twentieth century.
As we have seen, these disciplines were thought of as having antithetical
approaches to the study of social and political formations. However,
despite being ‘on the verge of extinction’ (Smith, 1991: 1) in the mid-
twentieth century, a strong tradition of historical sociology developed over
the course of the 1960s and 1970s.
There are a number of important reasons for this. Firstly, scepticism about
structural functionalism in both its static synchronic and its developmental
diachronic versions emerged, as social and political conflicts across large
parts of the world unsettled the status quo (Skocpol, 1984: 3; Calhoun,
1996: 306). Indeed, by the 1960s ‘accelerating social change had virtually
forced itself on the attention of sociologists’ (Burke, 2005: 17) and there
‘was much uncertainty about the continuation of existing [social] trends
and relationships into the future’ (Skocpol, 1984: 5). Consequently,
questions about how and why societies had come to be as they were
became much more open questions. Under these circumstances, it
became more apparent that the study of power relations, social, political
and economic systems, forms of governance, and questions of social and
economic justice required a historical dimension. During the 1960s, a
younger generation of sociologists saw the kind of historical work that
was required to understand, for example, the development of capitalism,
or the state, or forms of political protest, as directly contrary to the
modernisation theory and social evolutionism that had predominated in
the mid-twentieth century.
Think back to what we discussed in chapter two of this guide. There
we encountered the idea that ‘modernity’ has often been thought of in
teleological terms. By this we mean that it was assumed that history
is a process leading inevitably towards contemporary (Western) social,
political and economic conditions, which represent the pinnacle of
human development. Such ideas have been (and continue to be) highly
influential.
However, much of the historical sociology that began to be produced from
the 1960s onwards was highly sceptical of such claims, focusing on the
contingency rather than the necessity of present social and political
formations. (In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of facts that
are not logically necessary.)
31
Indeed, it started out from the premise that what needed explaining was
how and why what we refer to as ‘modernity’ had developed in the way
that it had and how and why it developed in the part of the world that it
did. Above all, it wanted to do away with ideas of general social ‘evolution’
(of which ‘modernisation’ theory is a good example). In the next chapters
we will look in more depth at how ideas about social change and social
‘development’ have challenged straightforward ideas about social progress
or social evolution.
History and sociology: a continuing debate

Extended activity
One of the skills that you need to develop in the course of your studies is to be able to
follow a debate between different writers on a specific topic. In this section, we will look
closely at one such debate between sociologists. This debate took place in the British Journal
of Sociology during the early and mid-1990s. The subject of the debate was the use that
sociologists make of history and the status of historical sociology, although it also covered
much more than this. As we have seen, the differences (and similarities) between history
and sociology have been debated since the two disciplines emerged as separate fields of
study. However, this particular debate concerns the increasing use of history that sociologists
(or ‘historical sociologists’) had begun to make in their work. The debate can be found in the
British Journal of Sociology and should be read in the following order:
1. Goldthorpe, J.H. ‘The Uses of History in Sociology: Reflections on Some Recent
Tendencies’, The British Journal of Sociology, 42(2) 1991, pp.211–30.
2. Bryant, J.M. ‘Evidence and Explanation on Historical Sociology: Critical Reflections
on Goldthorpe’s Critique of Historical Sociology’, The British Journal of Sociology,
45(1) 1994, pp.3–19.
3. Hart, N. ‘Goldthorpe and the Relics of Sociology’, The British Journal of Sociology,
45(1) 1994, pp.21–30.
4. Mouzelis, N. ‘In Defence of “Grand” Historical Sociology’ The British Journal of
Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.31–36.
5. Mann, M. ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: A Reply to Goldthorpe’, The British
Journal of Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.37–54.
6. Goldthorpe, J.H. ‘The Uses of History in Sociology: A Reply’, The British Journal of
Sociology, 45(1) 1994, pp.55–77.
You do not need to read all of the articles listed here, but it is certainly worth reading
the Goldthorpe article that initiated the debate and some responses to it. In the next
sections of this chapter we will follow Goldthorpe’s article in some detail and then look
at the response to it by Michael Mann. In the sections on Goldthorpe we will follow his
argument stage by stage. You might wish to relate what we are doing here to the section
in the Study Skills Handbook on ‘How to Read’. We will then outline Mann’s argument,
but in this section you will be expected to do more of the work yourself. Remember, we
are aiming here to familiarise you with how debate between academics operates.
We have already seen that one of the ways that the disciplines of history and
sociology were distinguished from one another was through characterising
history as ideographic and sociology as nomothetic. We have also seen
how these distinctions were to a large extent broken down in historical,
sociological and historical sociological work. However, debates that took
place in the 1990s highlight important differences between sociologists
about key aspects of historical sociology. We will begin this section with a
close look at an article by Goldthorpe that began one such debate.
32
Goldthorpe begins the debate

One debate about history and sociology was begun by the British
sociologist John Goldthorpe in the 1991 issue of the British Journal of
Sociology. Goldthorpe was responding to the recent appearance of a
number of influential and well-received works of historical sociology,
including Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power. He was also
responding to the idea that there is no real difference between the
disciplines of history and sociology. This idea had achieved much wider
acceptance since the publication in 1982 of Philip Abram’s highly
influential book Historical Sociology. As we have seen, Abrams argued
that ‘sociological explanation is necessarily historical. Historical sociology
is thus not some special kind of sociology; rather, it is the essence of the
discipline’ (Abrams, 1982: 2). Focusing on the idea of social process,
Abrams was able to argue that the social, political and even personal
situations in which we as social beings are embedded are necessarily
historical processes. Sociology is therefore, according to Abrams, a
discipline that must be able to describe and explain the way that the
present relates to the past as part of an ongoing process; according to
Abrams, this is what history is. Our capacity to act in the present is to a
large extent dependent on processes that have shaped the societies that
we now live in. Knowledge of these historical processes is thus vitally
important if we are to understand our present and how it came to be
as it is.
However, Goldthorpe strikes a note of caution in his article. He argues
that there are very important differences between the disciplines of history
and sociology. In fact, he states, the ideographic-nomothetic distinction
is still very important if we take this to be not one of principle, ‘but
of emphasis’ (Goldthorpe, 1991: 212). By this he means that we do
not need to make a rigid distinction between the kind of work that
historians and sociologists do, but that we must nonetheless acknowledge
that there are necessarily important differences between them. The
ideographic-nomothetic distinction is therefore important as it helps to
distinguish these disciplines and, as we will see, helps to avoid confusion.
Activity
Read pages 211–15 of the Goldthorpe article and answer the following questions. You do
not to have to write down answers to all of these questions, but it might be helpful if you
jotted down a few notes in order to help you understand the outline and the details of
the argument that Goldthorpe makes.
• What does Goldthorpe mean when he argues (on p.213) that ‘a historical fact is
an inference from the relics’?
• What does Goldthorpe mean by ‘relics’?
• Goldthorpe goes on to argue that ‘we can only know the past on the basis of
what has physically survived from the past’. What does he mean by this?
• What sort of ‘relics’ have survived from the past?
• Why does Goldthorpe argue that ‘limitations on the possibilities of historical
knowledge exist simply because it is knowledge of the past – because it is
knowledge dependent on relics’?
• In what way is this different to the sort of evidence that sociologists can use?
• According to Goldthorpe, what sort of evidence can sociologists use?
33
As we have seen, Goldthorpe argues that the sort of evidence that

is available to them makes the practices of history and sociology
substantially different from one another. This is because whilst historians
must rely inevitably on a finite number of what Goldthorpe calls ‘relics’
of the past, sociologists have an almost infinite number of possible sources
available to them to gather evidence about the contemporary societies
that they inhabit. Indeed, sociologists can go further; they can generate
data about their societies. Sociologists can use a number of techniques –
questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, observation, for example – which
directly create data from existing situations as they arise. Historians, on
the other hand, must deal with a limited selection of material which
can be used as evidence and moreover this evidence is very probably not
representative. In other words, the things that have survived from a
society of the past may not be the most important or relevant things about
that society.
Activity
Imagine that our contemporary societies were wiped out in a global catastrophe and all
that survived for future historians were a handful of popular television programmes, the
Florida Disneyworld, the novels of J.K. Rowling and an i-Pod.
• How representative are these items?
• What sort of impression would future historians have of the societies that we live
in?
• What sort of evidence do you think would be more representative? Why?
We have seen that Goldthorpe argues that there is a difference between

the disciplines of sociology and history and that this is based on the
availability of evidence. According to Goldthorpe ‘evidence that is invented
rather than evidence that is discovered…constitutes the main empirical
foundations of modern sociology’. Goldthorpe believes that sociologists
are at a distinct advantage over historians because they can produce (or
‘invent’) their own evidence – they can, for example, do ‘fieldwork’ from
which data can be generated. Goldthorpe argues that this means that
theories which, for example, ‘intended to apply to all industrial societies’
can be tested and examined by generating relevant data. In other words,
it is much easier to test the validity of a general theory about industrial
societies by generating valid data rather than relying on ‘relics’ from past
societies, which may be unrepresentative and will certainly be scarce. The
further back in time we go, the fewer ‘relics’ we tend to have.
Remember, Goldthorpe has already argued that the ideographic-
nomothetic distinction between history and sociology is a useful one. From
Goldthorpe’s arguments about evidence we can see why he thinks that
this distinction is valid. If sociology is to be able to construct theoretical
models that can be generalised, it needs easily accessible data which can
be tested and re-tested. This means that sociologists need to be able to
continuously generate new data. This is something that historians cannot
do. As Goldthorpe states, it might be possible to discover ‘relics’ from the
past that have remained hidden or have been overlooked, but we cannot
go back to the past to generate relevant data in order to test an existing
theory or construct a new one. This means that sociology is better suited to
the construction of general theory than history. As Goldthorpe states, this
does not mean that sociology is a ‘superior’ discipline, just that is better
suited to generating theoretical models.
34
Extended activity
Read section II of the article, pp.215–19.
Goldthorpe discusses the work of three sociologists who have used historical themes
and sources. He presents specific examples to help to illustrate his argument about the
different types of evidence available to historians and sociologists and the implications
that this has for the sort of work that they can do. You will need to read this section
carefully and to help you do this try focusing on the following questions:
• What does the first of the books (Wayward Puritans) state is the purpose of its
study?
• Which sociological hypotheses (about deviance) does this study aim to examine?
• Why does this study make use of puritan (seventeenth-century) America in order
to examine these hypotheses?
• Why does Goldthorpe argue that this is a ‘necessary failure’?
• How is this failure related to the available evidence? What sort of evidence does
the study use? What sort of evidence is not available? In what ways does the lack
of certain types of evidence mean that the study is not fully able to deal with the
first hypothesis? What is the problem with the crime statistics that the study uses
when discussing hypothesis two?
• Why does the fact that the theory used in this study ‘pretends to a very high level
of generality’ mean that the available evidence is inadequate and unconvincing?
What does Goldthorpe conclude from his examination of this study?
• What does Goldthorpe think would be an area of study in which sociologists
might legitimately use historical sources?
Goldthorpe now discusses two further works of sociology that both aim to test specific
theories: the disruption of kinship patterns by industrialisation and the Weber thesis
about the connection between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. Goldthorpe is
much more positive about these studies, but he nonetheless recognises that they both
have serious limitations relating to the evidence that is available. The type of evidence
that we can draw on determines how successfully (or not) some types of question can be
answered.
Read this section carefully and make a list of the key problems that Goldthorpe notices
with the studies that he discusses here. In particular, look at what Goldthorpe says about
the study by Marshall.
In the last paragraph of section II on p.219, Goldthorpe argues that ‘what is crucially
lacking [in the studies that he has discussed] is material from which inferences might be
made, with some assurance of representativeness, about the patterns of social action
that are of interest within particular collectivities…[T]he data from which historians work
only rarely allows access to the subjective orientations of actors en masse, and inferences
made from actual behaviour tend always to be question-begging.’
Can you try and explain in your own words what Goldthorpe means by this? What
sort of crucial evidence does he argue is in very short supply in the studies that he has
examined? Why does the short supply of this particular type of evidence mean that it will
be difficult to make representative inferences about the reasons for specific types of social
action or behaviour? How would a sociologist in the present tackle deficiencies in his/her
evidence?
Think carefully about the points that Goldthorpe makes about the availability of
EVIDENCE and the possibility of making accurate and representative inferences about
the reasons for particular types of social action and behaviour. Now look at the exercise
below and write a short answer (about 400 words), drawing on what you have learned
so far about evidence.
35
You keep a diary in which you write down your thoughts and feelings about entering onto
your course of study on the University of London External Programme. Your diary is discovered
500 years in the future. At the same time, statistical records showing that increasing numbers
of people in your society were entering higher education are also discovered.
How useful will your diary be for sociologists in the future who wish to account for the
reasons for an increase in the number of students entering higher education in your
society at this point in time?
Now read section III (pp.219–26).
In this section, Goldthorpe turns to the discussion of the sort of historical

sociology that ‘addresses very large themes’ and which traces ‘long-term
“developmental” processes or patterns or the making of comparisons
across a wide range of historical societies or even civilisations.’ Goldthorpe
argues that this ‘genre’ of historical sociology is entirely dependent on what
historians have written. In other words, it makes use of books and articles
written by historians as its evidence. We usually refer to this sort of
evidence as secondary sources. This is usually compared to research
which makes use of primary sources. A primary source would, for
example, be your diary (from the exercise above) and the statistical records
about higher education in your society. Sociologists or historians making use
of these pieces of evidence in the future will be using primary sources in
order to try and make sense of aspects of our present.
However, if our sociologist of the future were to use an account of the
work of a historian who had already interpreted this primary source
material and written a book about the importance of higher education
in your society in the mid-2000s as evidence, this would be considered
to be a secondary source. In other words, the sociologist would not
be making use of the original material and attempting to analyse it and
draw inferences from it. He or she would instead be making use of the
historian’s interpretation of this material.
Goldthorpe argues that large-scale historical sociologies that make
exclusive use of secondary sources (written by historians) are not new
phenomena.1 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the British sociologist, 1
If you have taken
referred to works of history as the ‘building materials’ that sociologists 158 Reading social
science, you will
could make use of in order to construct a ‘comparative sociology’. These
remember that Adam
ideas were commonplace until the end of the nineteenth century, when Smith constructed a
sociologists began to develop their own methods of data collection and large-scale history of
to question whether reliance on secondary sources in this way was valid. the development of
By contrast, contemporary historical sociology has returned to a use of civilisation on a great
secondary sources. mass of secondary
sources.
According to Goldthorpe, this is extremely problematic. He argues that it
is based on a mistaken assumption about the crucial difference between
fact and interpretation. In other words, the secondary sources
that historical sociologists draw upon are not straightforward ‘factual’
accounts about what happened in the past, they are interpretations
(‘inferences’) of evidence (or ‘relics) that have survived from the past.
Remember, Goldthorpe has already argued that all historical writing is
based on inferences from surviving ‘relics’. Historical sociologists who
make exclusive use of secondary sources are therefore guilty of confusing
what actually happened in the past with what has been written
about the past. He therefore goes on to argue that historical sociology
that is based exclusively on secondary sources in this way is ‘dangerously
unsound’ precisely because the links it makes between argument and
36
evidence are ‘tenuous and arbitrary’. By this, Goldthorpe means that

the arguments that historical sociologists make have a problematic
relationship to evidence in two very specific ways.
Firstly the link between an argument and the evidence that supports the
argument might be extremely tenuous.
Activity
Goldthorpe uses an example to illustrate his point about the tenuous link between
evidence and argument. The example he uses is from a classic work of historical sociology,
Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Moore’s work is a
highly important and path-breaking work of comparative sociology. Moore’s concern was
the transformation of pre-industrial agrarian social relations into ‘modern’ ones. One of
the key arguments that Moore makes relates to the social and economic transformation
of elements of the English aristocracy prior to the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth
century and the way that this determined which side they chose in the conflict between
king and Parliament.
• Carefully read from the top of page 222 down to the bottom of the first
paragraph on page 223.
Jot down some notes while you think about how Goldthorpe argues that the evidence
that historical sociologists draw from secondary sources is ‘tenuous’. Keep the notes as
they will help you with the more formal piece of writing that you are asked to do as part
of the next activity.
Goldthorpe goes on to explain that much historical sociology is not based

on an interpretation of primary sources. Rather it is an ‘interpretation of
an interpretation’.
The second charge that Goldthorpe brings against historical sociology is
that of the ‘arbitrary’ relationship between the argument of the sociologist
and the evidence that s/he bases his/her argument on. We have seen that
Goldthorpe’s case is based on his assertion that historians proceed by
making inferences from limited and incomplete evidence from the past
(‘relics’). Historians, he argues, may of course reach radically different
conclusions about the meaning of a piece of evidence. Unfortunately,
because evidence is limited it is unlikely that further evidence will
emerge that could be used to settle a dispute between historians one way
or another. Remember, sociologists working in the present can always go
out and collect (or generate) more data in order to settle a dispute over
the interpretation of findings. Historians do not have this option.
This has important consequences for historical sociologists working with
secondary sources. We have already noted that, according to Goldthorpe,
their work is an ‘interpretation of an interpretation’. However, the point
that Goldthorpe now raises is this. Historians working on the same topic
and using the same evidence as their primary source frequently and
legitimately come to different conclusions. Lack of evidence means that
there is no effective way of judging which of these conclusions might
be correct. How then do historical sociologists using this work as their
evidence judge which historian’s interpretation of the primary evidence
they will use to base their own arguments upon?
Activity
Carefully read from the top of the second full paragraph on page 223 (beginning with the
line’ As regards my second charge…’) down to the bottom of the first paragraph on
p. 224.
37
Jot down some notes while you follow Goldthorpe’s argument about the arbitrary
relationship between the evidence that historical sociologists use and their own arguments.
Now, using the notes that you have made in this and the previous activity, answer the
following question (write about 500 words):
According to Goldthorpe, in what way is the evidence that Moore uses to make his
arguments both tenuous and arbitrary?
Now read to the end of the article.
Goldthorpe has argued in this article that history and sociology are very
different from one another and that attempts by historical sociologists to
claim that they ‘are and always have been the same thing’ are mistaken
and ‘dangerously misleading’. The major source of this difference
lies in the ‘nature of the evidence that the two disciplines use’, with
historians reliant on the limited evidence that has survived for the past
and sociologists able to collect or generate data in the present. This,
Goldthorpe argues, means that sociologists are far better placed to make
and, importantly, to test theoretical generalisations about contemporary
societies. Goldthorpe is particularly critical of what he calls ‘grand
historical sociologists’ who make use of secondary sources and have
therefore failed (for the reasons that we have seen) to ‘provide a coherent
methodology for their work’.
Michael Mann takes up the argument

One of the contributors to the debate about history and sociology in the
British Journal of Sociology is Michael Mann. Mann was singled out as one
of the ‘grand historical sociologists’ doing large-scale comparative work
that Goldthorpe was highly critical of. Indeed Mann’s work is particularly
wide in scope – and we will be seeing examples of it in the chapters that
follow this. His most ambitious work of historical sociology is the two-
volume The Sources of Social Power which describes itself as a ‘history
of power from the beginning’! In this section we will look at Mann’s
argument against Goldthorpe and in defence of ‘grand historical sociology’.
In our exploration of the Goldthorpe piece, we saw how to approach
reading an article in detail and how to follow the stages of its argument.
Here you will be expected to do more of the work yourself!
Activity
Read ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: A Reply to Goldthorpe’, British Journal of Sociology,
45(1) 1994, pp.37–54.
NB: Part (b) of the last section of this article (‘Three warnings for Empiricists’) is
less relevant to the overall argument of the article. It contains a lengthy critique of
Goldthorpe’s arguments about the use of data and some very detailed examples to back
this up! You may choose not to read this.
Mann begins his article by stating that he defines sociology in rather

different terms from Goldthorpe. Goldthorpe, he maintains, regards both
history and sociology as properly empirical disciplines. Remember,
Goldthorpe’s main contention was that sociology and history are
fundamentally different disciplines because of the empirical evidence
each of them has at its disposal.
Mann argues that sociology is a ‘science of society’. He defines ‘science’
as a ‘systematic knowledge’ and as ‘the attempt to use a systematic
methodology to generate a generalised form of knowledge’. In spite of
38
a tradition of disciplinary allegiance to specific methodologies and

practices, there is no necessary connection between the study of the past
and the ‘ideographic’ and between the present and the ‘nomothetic’.
Activity
Mann goes on (in the first paragraph on page 38) to qualify Goldthorpe’s argument about
the ‘better’ and ‘fuller’ evidence available to sociologists in two ways. What are they? Do
you find this convincing?
Mann argues that neither he nor other ‘grand historical sociologists’ are
interested in attempts to create context-free theoretical models. He does
state, however, that sociology can and should make some generalisations
about what he calls ‘macro’ contexts (such as the ‘nation state’, or
the ‘nuclear family’, for example). After all, sociology emerged out of
attempts to understand the ‘appearance and development of capitalism
and industrialism in the west’ (what we have referred to as ‘modernity’).
In this sense, the discipline has always been ‘rooted’ in ‘grand historical
sociology’. Attempts to understand the specific features of ‘modernity’ will
inevitably therefore include a historical dimension. This is particularly
the case if we argue, as Mann does, that historical processes do not follow
general, ‘evolutionary’ or ‘developmental’ logics. Sensitivity to the specific,
context-laden factors in the emergence of ‘modernity’ require sociologists
to develop historical insights.
Mann goes on to argue that what he calls ‘macro-sociologists’ use the past
in three main ways.
Activity
What are the three main ways that macro-sociologists ‘use the past’? Why does Mann
argue that this is important?
Mann goes on to state (at the end of part (b) at the top of page 40) that he has so far
laid out a ‘defensive position’ against the arguments that Goldthorpe makes. What do
you think he means by this?
Can you summarise Mann’s arguments against Goldthorpe in about 200 words?
Having defended ‘grand historical sociology’ against the criticisms made

by Goldthorpe, Mann states that he is now ready to go onto the ‘attack’.
He states that sociologists have a great advantage over historians.
This relates to the relative level of theoretical sophistication that
sociologists possess as a consequence (at least in the UK, which is the
context that Mann is describing) of their training. Sociologists are
expected to pay much more attention to general questions about the
functioning of societies. These questions can only be answered through
detailed comparative work between different social and often historical
contexts.
Mann goes on to argue that sociologists are in fact much more
sophisticated than historians when it comes to interpreting primary
sources (Goldthorpe’s ‘relics’). Their relative theoretical sophistication also
means that they are able to place historians’ interpretations in context.
So rather than naïvely relying on the interpretations of historians and
confusing these for historical ‘facts’, as Goldthorpe suggested, sociologists
are able to recognise the evidence provided by the primary sources and
the historian’s interpretational slant. In this sense they are able to use the
secondary sources in a way that avoids the problem that Goldthorpe noted
about the use of secondary sources as interpretations.
39
Activity
Read part (c) (pages 40–42) carefully. Summarise Mann’s main points about the differences
between historians’ and macro-sociologists’ use of primary and secondary data (remember,
Mann often refers to ‘grand historical sociologists’ as ‘macro-sociologists’). According to
Mann, who has a better grasp of data (both primary and secondary)? Why?
Now read the section ‘Epistemology and Method’.
Here Mann clarifies his position on the difference between the

methodologies of (some) historians and those of macro-sociologists. Mann
states that Goldthorpe’s arguments about data and particularly about the
importance of ‘primary’ data mean that he is essentially an empiricist.
Empiricism assumes that ‘facts are independent from our perceptions’.
Remember, Goldthorpe makes a rigid distinction between ‘primary’ and
‘secondary’ sources and he argues that ‘primary’ sources have greater
relevance. However, as we have already seen, Mann argues that it is
very difficult to see ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’ as separate phenomena.
‘We need theories’, he argues, ‘to make sense of, and to systematically
organise, our data’.
Activity
How exactly does Mann refute Goldthorpe’s arguments about evidence? Briefly describe
in your own words Mann’s outline of sociological methodology.
Now read the section ‘Macro-Sociological Practice’.
In this section, Mann demonstrates how ‘macro-sociologists’ use secondary

sources to construct valid arguments about historical events and processes.
One of the main points that Mann makes here is that it is very difficult to
separate ‘primary’ from ‘secondary’ data in the way that Goldthorpe argues.
Activity
Mann states that it is perfectly possible ‘to derive original data from “secondary
sources”’.
Read this section of the article carefully and find examples of how this is possible and
how historical sociologists have done it. Make some notes.
Why is this sometimes more useful and productive than sticking rigidly to ‘primary’ data?
Mann also argues in this section of the article that:

In macro-sociology evidence is limited yet we know something
about what happened next.
This is an important point. Mann is stating that the sequence of historical
events is already known to us (industrialisation occurred; the nation-state
emerged; the Russian revolution happened). However, how and why
events happened in the way that they did is something that ‘grand historical
sociologists’ attempt to explain. As we have seen, attempts to understand
phenomena that exist in the present may lead sociologists to be ‘tempted
toward teleology’ (seeing events in the past as inevitably leading toward
the present). However, in part (a) of the next section (‘Think Macro-
Sociologically’), Mann argues that one of the major strengths of macro-
sociology has been its ‘emphasis on the contingency of social structures’.
In other words, much of the work of grand historical sociology is concerned
with accounting for the emergence of important aspects of contemporary
societies. It does this without assuming that these were either inevitable or
that they are the most desirable outcomes of processes of historical change.
40
Activity
Read the section ‘Three Warnings for Empiricists’. (You may omit section (b) as this is very
detailed and not as relevant to the overall argument.)
We are now in a position to think about the arguments about history and sociology as
they have been presented by two sociologists who take very different positions.
You should now attempt to outline the major differences between Goldthorpe and Mann
on such questions as:
a. the use of evidence in historical sociology
b. the relative importance of primary and secondary sources
c. the importance of history for sociology.
Conclusion
This chapter has covered a number of key areas in historical sociological
work. In particular, we have focused on a specific debate about the
differences and similarities between history and sociology. In the next
chapters we will look in more detail at how historical sociologists have
approached one highly important aspect of the emergence of the modern
world: the rise of the modern state.

• explain how history and sociology relate to one another as fields of
academic study
• explain the differences and similarities between historical research and
sociological research methodologies, and why these differences and
similarities are important
• construct some preliminary arguments of your own about the
relationship between history and sociology as distinctive but related
fields of inquiry.

‘Sociology is history.’ Discuss.
41
Notes
42
Chapter 4: Power, legitimacy and rule: the emergence of the modern state
Chapter 4: Power, legitimacy and rule:

the emergence of the modern state
Aim of the chapter

The aim of this chapter is to familiarise you with key theoretical traditions
which have accounted for the historical emergence, development and
character of the ‘modern’ state.
Learning outcomes
• describe and critically assess the classic sociological accounts of the
‘modern’ state
• locate the ‘modern’ state in a historical context
• critically assess theories of social and historical change as these relate
to the emergence of the modern state.
Essential reading
Held, D. ‘The Development of the Modern State’ in Hall, S., and B. Gieben
Formations of Modernity.
Further reading
[ISBN 9780801492433].
Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics,
History and Sociology. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780822333630].
[ISBN 9781859841075].
[ISBN 9780805270259].
Corrigan, P. and D. Sayer The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural
Revolution. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) [ISBN 9780631140559].
[ISBN 9780415064958] Chapter on ‘Thematics of State and Power’.
Publications, 2003) [ISBN 9780761971733]. Introduction.
**Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. (Cambridge: Polity, 1985)
[ISBN 9780520060395] Introduction and Chapter 1.
Hall, J. (ed) States in History. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)
[ISBN 9780631171362].
Hay, C . ‘(What’s Marxist about) Marxist State Theory’ in Hay, C., M. Lister
and D. Marsh The State: Theories and Issues. (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006) [ISBN 9781403934260].
43
Hay, C., M. Lister and D. Marsh The State: Theories and Issues. (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)[ISBN 9781403934260].
** Mann, M. ‘Societies as Organised Power Networks’ in The Sources of Social
Power, Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
[ISBN 9780521313490].
McLennan, G., D. Held and D. Hall (ed.) The Idea of the Modern State. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780335105977] Chapters 1 and 2.
Moore, B. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Beacon Press, 1993) reprint edition [ISBN 9780807050736].
(London, Sage, 2006) second edition [ISBN 9780761970552].
1990) [ISBN 9780804718776].
Polanyi, K. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our
Rose, N. and P. Miller ‘Political power beyond the state’, British Journal of
Sociology, 43 1991, pp.173–205.
** Tilly, C. Coercion, Capital, and the European State. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
[ISBN 9781557863683] Chapter 1.
Works cited
[ISBN 9780520060395] Introduction and Chapter 1.
Mann, M. ‘Societies as Organised Power Networks’ in The Sources of Social
Power, Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
[ISBN 9780521313490].
(London: Sage, 2006) second edition [ISBN 9780761970552].
1990) [ISBN 9780804718776].
Spillman and Faeges ‘The state’ in Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff
Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology. (Durham, NC: Duke
[ISBN 9781557863683] Chapter 1.
Preliminary remarks on reading

This chapter and the one that follows it both make use of the same key
reading. It is worth reading David Held’s chapter ‘The Development of the
Modern State’ in its entirety before you begin this chapter. This will give
you a sense of the field that we are about to cover in both chapters. What
follows is written on the assumption that you will have read David Held’s
chapter. Throughout chapters four and five, you will be asked to read
specific pages of Held and to think in more depth about the arguments
that he makes or refers to.
44
Introduction
This chapter looks at what we will call the classical sociological accounts
of the modern state, its emergence and development. In the contemporary
world, almost all of us live in recognisably modern states, sometimes
referred to as ‘nation-states’ or ‘national states’. Indeed, it has often been
said that these political, territorial and social formations can seem as if
they are natural phenomena, so predominant and widespread have they
become in the contemporary world. The states that all of us live in may
not be of exactly the same type, but almost all of them share a broadly
similar set of recognisable features. However, states in the sense that
we understand them emerged relatively recently in historical terms. In
this chapter we will look at some of the important sociological traditions
that have attempted to account for the emergence and development of
specifically modern states.
One of the reasons for focusing on the modern state in this chapter
is to introduce competing accounts of its emergence. As we will
see, accounts of the rise of the modern state can tell us a lot about
broader conceptions of social, political and economic change with which
sociologists work. This chapter is linked closely to Chapters 5, 6 and 7, in
which we will go on to look at different forms that the state has taken over
time and at the specific reasons for the emergence and predominance of
the modern state form in the contemporary world. In Chapters 5, 6 and
7 we will see how some of the theoretical ideas that we encounter in this
chapter have been put to use in analyses of various state forms in history
and of the ultimate emergence of the modern state. We will see how the
historical sociology of the state has made creative use of important aspects
of sociological theory in order to produce ‘macro-sociological’ accounts of
systems of rule and the ways in which they have changed over time.
You will notice that we are using the word ‘modern’ again, this time in
conjunction with the state. There is a good reason for this. As we have
seen in the previous two chapters, ‘modernity’ is a key sociological concept
that is used to describe the specific features of societies that developed
initially in Europe from about the sixteenth and seventeenth century
onwards. One of the most important features of these societies has been
their organisation into recognisably ‘modern’ or ‘nation-states’.
Sociologists and historical sociologists have always been interested in the
historical development of the modern state as they have tended to see
its emergence as an integral part of wider processes of social, economic
and political transformation and as an important marker of ‘modernity’
itself. Remember, in Chapter 2, we saw that for the sociologists and social
theorists of the nineteenth century, ‘modern’ social, political and economic
conditions were contrasted with those of the ‘traditional’ societies from
which they were thought to have emerged, and with less ‘advanced’
societies in less ‘developed’ parts of the world.
In making this contrast, however, sociologists often assumed that
modern societies represented the culmination of particular socio-
economic processes that occurred over time. These processes were usually
thought of in progressive, evolutionary or developmental terms.
Similarly, when approaching the history of the state, an evolutionary
or developmental logic has often been used to describe its emergence
alongside other key aspects of ‘modernity’, notably the rise of capitalism
(Poggi, 1990: 96). However, as we will see, recent historical sociology of
the state challenges such views and attempts to develop different models
45
for thinking about change over time. This chapter will explore classic
approaches to the state developed by the founders of the discipline. It
will go on to look at recent accounts of the state that both develop and
challenge these earlier ideas.
The modern state

The emergence and development of the modern state is a good place
to begin a serious look at some of the issues that have been raised in
the previous two chapters. As has already been said, the sort of states
that we all live in, and the relationships that exist between them in an
international system made up of independent states, appear to be both
natural and inevitable, as does their rise. The historical sociologist Charles
Tilly argues that:
The system of states that now prevails almost everywhere
on earth took shape in Europe after AD 990, and then began
extending its control far outside the continent five centuries
later. It eventually absorbed, eclipsed, or extinguished all of its
rivals.
He goes on to argue that
So natural do the rise of national states, the growth of national
armies, and the long European hegemony appear…that scholars
rarely ask why plausible alternatives to them – such as the
systems of loosely articulated regional empires that thrived in
Asia, Africa, and the Americas well past AD 990 – did not prevail
in Europe. (Tilly, 1992: 5)
We saw in Chapter 2 that one of the general concerns of historical
sociologists has been to demonstrate how and why our present social
arrangements have come into being and how and why they function in the
ways that they do. That is, historical sociologists attempt to demonstrate
that what might appear to be necessary and inevitable is in fact the result
of complex, contingent factors. In the case of the emergence of the
modern state, this means thinking about those processes that allowed
recognisably modern states and systems of states to emerge at a particular
point in time and in a specific place. What is of interest to historical
sociologists is the combination of circumstances that lead to specific forms
of sustained social and institutional change or development. Sociologists
often argue with one another about the precise nature of the causal
factors that lead to change. Different sociologists accord different
degrees of importance to social, economic or political factors at work in
the processes of state formation over time. In this chapter we will examine
important theoretical traditions that have attempted to account for the
emergence of the modern state.
What is the ‘modern’ state? Some preliminary

definitions
It is hard to overestimate the importance of the state in any consideration
of modern social and political development or to ‘modernity’ in general.
Indeed, it has been argued that the ‘statalization’ of rule has been ‘the
most significant political aspect of European modernisation’ (Poggi, 2003:
249). A reasonably concise definition of the modern state and its functions
is provided by Poggi:
46
The modern state is perhaps best seen as a complex set of

institutional arrangements for rule operating through the
continuous and regulated activities of individuals acting as
occupants of offices. The state, as the sum total of such offices,
reserves to itself the business of rule over a territorially bounded
society; it monopolises, in law and as far as possible in fact, all
facilities and faculties pertaining to that business.
(Poggi, 1978: 1)
In modern states, the business of rule is institutionalised in
unprecedented ways (Poggi, 2003: 250). The principal ways that this
occurs are through:
• Institutionalisation: rule becomes attached to offices (the office of
prime minister, for example) rather than individuals (prime ministers
come and go, but the office remains).
• Formalisation: the practice of rule is standardised and regulated
through systems of rules which authorise it and control it. In other
words, it becomes increasingly difficult for rulers or office-holders to
act arbitrarily. Their posts, what can be expected of them and their
duties are subject to scrutiny and legal forms of control.
• Integration: rule increasingly takes into account other aspects
of the social process, recognises their significance and makes some
contribution to their persistence. For example, a key area that ‘modern’
states are involved with is the management (or sometimes the running)
of the economy.
• Differentiation: practices of rule address very specific concerns and
employ special resources (material and symbolic) to attain their ends.
• Organisation: rule is exercised through a numerous agencies and
offices and taken together these form a single unit (which we tend to
refer to as the state).
Activity
Read pages 72–74 of ‘The Development of the Modern State’ by David Held. You will find
the following table there:
Stateless societies State societies

Informal mechanisms of government Political apparatus or governmental
institutions differentiated from other
organisations in the community
No clear boundaries to a society Rule takes place over a specific
population and territory
Rule takes place over a specific Legal system backed by a capacity to use
population and territory force
Institutional divisions within government
(the executive, civil service and army, for
example) are formally coordinated
Looking at the characteristics of ‘state’ societies that Held outlines in the right-hand side
of the table, write down some specific examples of each of these aspects of state power
and organisation, using your own society as an example.
For example, think about the territory that the state covers. How does it mark out this
territory as belonging to the state? How does it maintain or police its borders?
47
As we have seen from looking at Held’s table, states possess particular

organisational features. Historical sociologists are interested in asking
how and why these features developed in the ways that they did and
how the modern state became the dominant form of social and political
organisation in the contemporary world. In this section of the chapter
we will look in more depth at some of the key sociological attempts to
define and describe the modern state, its functions and powers, and at the
specific reasons for its historical emergence. In the next section, we will
look at the work of the so-called ‘founding fathers’ of sociology and see to
what extent their work has shaped contemporary accounts of the modern
state and its emergence.
What is the state? Classical sociological accounts

Marx’s account of the state
Activity
Read page 113 of David Held’s chapter
Firstly, Marx had no fully developed theory of the state. As we know,1 Marx 1
You will have studied
was primarily interested in the way that the economic ‘base’ of society aspects of Marx’s theory
in 21 Principles of
determines the ‘superstructure’ of social, legal and political arrangements.
sociology.
Marx argued that the history of all societies was the history of the
struggles between classes within particular modes of production.
Marx also argued that these modes of production were themselves subject
to dynamic processes of change. In particular, the transition from the
feudal to the capitalist mode of production was responsible not just for
the re-shaping of the economic order, but the entire social and political
landscape. The emergence of the ‘modern’ state was therefore seen
by Marx as linked dynamically to the transformation of the economic
organisation of society and to the emergence of a new, dominant class.
Marx argues that throughout human history all societies have been
fundamentally divided into (small) groups who own the ‘means of
production’ (the means by which essential and other goods are produced)
and a majority who obtain access to these essential means of production
only under the control of the minority of owners, and usually on terms
highly beneficial to this minority. In feudal societies, which are largely
based on agricultural production, for example, the majority of the
population work on the land for the benefit of a few landowners and in
return are allowed to keep a small amount of surplus produce to meet
their own needs.
Marx argues that ‘all of human history is the history of class struggle’, by
which he means that the interests of the classes in society are directly
opposed to one another. Political institutions are therefore ‘devices’ that
allow the minority who control the means of production to retain their
control, and the advantages it brings, by containing potential conflict
and suppressing open revolt. ‘These institutions organise and deploy
the ultimate social resource, organised coercion, in order to secure the
minority’s position, often enshrined into legal right, and as such dependent
on enforcement’ (Poggi, 1990: 94–95).
Political institutions therefore change as the mode of production changes
and as new needs and new interests need to be protected.
48
Activity
Read the following short passage from Marx:
…the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry
and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative
state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie…
political power, properly called, is merely the instrument of one class for
oppressing another…The modern state is nothing more than the form of
organisation which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopt, both for internal and
external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interest’.
(Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto)
Here Marx and Engels sketch out what is usually referred to as an ‘instrumentalist’
position in which the state is seen as serving a specific class interest. In other words, the
state as a system of administration, and the coercive enforcement of the law, is seen
as primarily functioning in order to protect the economic and property interests of the
dominant class.
• How valid do you think this way of looking at the state is?
• Are states ever simply ‘instrumental’ in this way?
Despite the lack of a full and clear theory of the state, some writers
(Hay, 2006; Nash, 2000) have argued that it is possible to classify Marx’s
scattered reflections on the state into two or three distinctive positions or
models. Firstly, in the ‘instrumental model’, the state is seen as primarily
coercive. As Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, ‘the
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of
the whole bourgeoisie’. In other words, the modern state was seen by Marx
as reflecting the dominant economic power of the bourgeoisie and acts as
an instrument of that power. The state is therefore, according to this model,
directly repressive of activity that threatens or challenges the power and
interests of the dominant class. Accordingly, all previous state forms were
also ‘instrumental’ in the same sense. That is, they expressed in political
terms the interests of a dominant class or classes, protecting and enforcing
property rights and so forth. The main point here is that the state itself is
expressive of the economic organisation of society and it is this economic
organisation which forms the most important area of investigation.
In the second model, which was based on more nuanced and empirically
focused work, Marx argued that the modern state had developed powers
and capacities of its own. This meant that it was not strictly or exclusively
an instrument of the power of one class.
Activity
In his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx describes and analyses the
situation whereby in 1851 Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the French Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte (who had ruled France between 1798 and 1815), had seized power. At the
time of his seizure of power France was a republic, having overthrown its monarchy in the
revolution of 1848. Read the following extract, in which Marx describes the character of
the French state at this point in the mid-nineteenth century:
The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military
organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with
a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another
half million — this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the body
of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time of the
absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it had
49
helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns

became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the
feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of conflicting
medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority
whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.
The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local,
territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity
of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun,
centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents
of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The
Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater
division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside
the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new
material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately
severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched
from the activities of society’s members themselves and made an object
of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal
property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the
national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle
against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and
the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All
revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which
alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge
state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.
• What does Marx mean when he argues that the functions of the state have been
‘divided and centralized as in a factory’?
• What happens to the power of the state over the period that Marx writes about
here?
• What does Marx mean when he argues that ‘all revolutions perfected this
machine instead of breaking it’?
• Why would the ‘parties’ which struggle for domination regard possession of the
‘huge state structure’ as such a major prize? Why would they not want to ‘break’
this ‘machine’?
• In what way is Marx’s idea about the state here different from the way that he
described it in the passage from The Communist Manifesto?
As we have seen, Marx argued that the modern state may be relatively
autonomous from simple class interest and might therefore act
independently of the bourgeoisie class. In certain circumstances this might
mean limiting the power of the bourgeoisie or legislating against it (in
Marx’s time a number of Factory Acts in England limited the length of the
working day, for example). Nonetheless, ultimately it is class interest
that is represented at the level of the state (the warring ‘parties’ that
Marx speaks of represent different class interests) and this means that the
dominant class will be able to control state power broadly in line with its
interests. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels
(Marx’s collaborator) argued that:
In order that…classes with conflicting economic interests shall
not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it
became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above
society that would moderate the conflict and keep it within
bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but
placing itself above it and alienating itself more and more from
it, is the state.
50
Thirdly, a more ‘functionalist’ version of the state was proposed in the

later economic works (in Capital, for example). Here it is argued that
the state apparatus, executive and legal systems operate in order to
optimise the conditions for capital accumulation. This is regardless of
how far the bourgeois class actually manage or operate state institutions
and irrespective of the balance of (class) power in a society. It is the
economic logic of the system itself which is most important in determining
the way that the state functions. In this model, the needs of the system
(to reproduce capitalist social relations and class power) determine the
functioning of every social and political institution.
We can see that, for Marx, the state was largely epiphenomenal, that is,
something that could be explained and understood with reference
to processes occurring elsewhere – in this case, the workings
and needs of the economic ‘base’ of society. The historical development
of the modern state is therefore ultimately explicable in terms of the
overall development of the modern capitalist economy and the power
of the dominant bourgeois class. Nonetheless, we have also seen, in the
passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, that Marx characterises the state
as complex and powerful. It also remains unclear how and in what ways
the emergence of the modern state apparatus with the ‘absolute monarchy’
of the seventeenth century is tied to the development of capitalist social
relations during the same period. As we noted at the beginning of this
section, there is no clear or absolutely distinctive theory of the state in
Marx. Nonetheless it is clear that the modern state is regarded as having
developed in line with factors that are ‘internal to society, and above all, in
socio-economic factors’ (Held, 1992: 74).
Activity
Read page 113 of the Held chapter again.
Write about 500 words in answer to the following question:
“According to Marx and Engels, why is not possible for the state in class societies to
become the vehicle for the pursuit of the common good or public interest?”
Durkheim on the state

For Durkheim, the state is ‘the organ of social thought’ and he argues that
the ‘main feature of the state [is] its role as an organ of communication
with the rest of society’ (Giddens, 1985: 17). Whilst most day-to-day
social life is ‘spontaneous, automatic…unconsidered’, the role of the state
is to provide ‘deliberation and reflection’ and organisation. Increasingly,
Durkheim argues, states are organised so as to prevent change occurring
without proper consideration of the consequences. In Durkheim’s
sociology, the state seeks to produce overall agreement and consensus.
Remember, for Durkheim modern societies are characterised by an
enormous increase in the division of labour and by the individualism
that this entails. The state therefore acts as a necessary form of ‘social
intelligence’ that oversees the coordination and development of a highly
differentiated society. In other words, the state provides ‘moral leadership’
(it may act to ‘police’ norms and values) and it thus has an integrative
function in societies which are always threatened by the disintegrative
tendencies of contemporary individualism, which is itself a consequence of
the specialisation of functions resulting from the ever greater development
of the division of labour. In this sense, there is also a ‘functionalist’
dimension to Durkheim’s analysis of the state.
51
Activity
In recent years, scientists have largely reached a consensus about the existence of
‘global warming’ and about the probable consequences of the continuing rise in global
temperatures. It is now widely believed that action is needed in order to curb emissions
of CO2, which is largely held responsible for the problem. However, this would almost
certainly mean that members of many societies around the world would have to make
some sacrifices in order to achieve this.
Is the state the only social institution capable of determining how best to act in this situation?
Can you think of any specific examples from your own society of ways in which the
state sets norms and values? Are these ‘reflections’ of the norms and values that exist in
society itself, or are they imposed by the state?
Durkheim also regarded modern nation-states as existing in the

middle of a continuum between his models of ‘segmented’ and ‘organised’
societies (Sillman and Faeges, 2004: 413). Segmentation produces
bounded groups (clans, tribes, regions, nations) but the characteristics
of these bounded groups is that they have always grown larger and more
complex as the division of labour has cut across the boundaries between
them. Durkheim argued that supra-national organisations were likely
to supersede nations and that ultimately perhaps a ‘global’ social order
would emerge. In his own day he suggested, speaking of his native France,
that regions of that country which had once functioned as independent,
culturally and administratively separate entities were now fully integrated
into a greater whole (the French nation). Durkheim argued (speaking of
people from different French regions) that ‘the Norman is less different
[than had been the case earlier] from the Gascon, and the Gascon from the
Lorainer…all share hardly more than the characteristics of all Frenchmen.
But the diversity that Frenchmen as a whole exhibit is continually
increased’ (Durkheim quoted in Spillman and Faeges, 2004: 413). What
Durkheim means by this is that smaller units (Gascony, Normandy, for
example) had been gradually absorbed into the larger unit of ‘France’.
So, for Durkheim, modern societies showed evidence of two processes
which were happening simultaneously: the ‘division of labour’ was
producing more and more individualism and difference whilst the
absorption of smaller units (segments) into larger ones was producing
more ‘sameness’. Durkheim argued that there was no reason to suppose
that nation-states would escape the fate of the regions which they had
absorbed and he went on to argue that ‘there is tending to form…a
European society that even now has some feeling of its own identity and
the beginnings of an organisation’ (413).
One of the important ways in which Durkheim’s ideas have entered into
historical sociologies of the state is through the more culturally oriented
sociologies that have explored collective representations and symbols in
the mobilisation of, for example, nationalism. In Chapter 8 of this subject
guide we will look in more detail at how rituals and ceremonies and
national ‘traditions’ contribute to the production of nationalist ideologies
and national consciousness.
This work has drawn largely on Durkheim’s work on collective identity,
symbolic representation and ritual in The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life. Durkheim himself asked ‘what basic difference is there between a
Christians celebrating the principal dates of Christ’s life…and a citizen’s
meeting commemorating the advent of a new moral charter or some other
great event of national life?’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1915]: 429).
52
Activity
Read section 3.2 ‘Primitive Classification’ pages 241–46) in Chapter 5 ‘The Cultural
Formations of Modern Society’ in Formations of Modernity. Think about the following
questions:
What do you think Durkheim’s ideas about the structure of ‘primitive myths’ have to tell
us about modern national rituals?
If ‘national’ rituals and symbols now function in similar ways to religious myths in order to
promote national identity, is there any reason to believe that nation-states will disappear
into larger supra-national or even global forms of social order?
There are, of course, great and obvious differences between Marx’s

and Durkheim’s accounts of the modern state. However, there are also
considerable similarities. It is assumed in both accounts, for example,
that the modern state has emerged as a consequence of socio-economic
processes and developments that are internal to and subordinate
to ‘society’ as a whole. In the case of Marx, the modern state emerges
alongside capitalism and is an instrument of the class power of the
bourgeoisie. Marx predicted that the state would ‘wither away’ in the
mature communist society of the future. In Durkheim’s sociology, the state
has developed as a functionally necessary moral regulator in societies that
have become highly diversified and individualistic as a consequence of the
ever increasing division and specialisation of labour.
Both Marx and Durkheim regarded industrialisation and the new
industrial societies that were emerging as being of much more overall
significance than the territorially bounded nation-state. Industrialisation
and the changes it was bringing were seen as more fully representative of
‘modernity’ and its future development. Indeed, it was assumed that the
new ‘industrial order’ would be an inherently peaceful and trans-national
phenomenon even if, according to Marx, it was at present divided along
antagonistic class lines (Giddens, 1985: 23). Beyond the class divisions
of the present, Marx envisaged a world in which, following the French
socialist writer Saint-Simon (1760–1825), the government of men would
give way to the administration of things. Neither Marx nor Durkheim
regarded interactions between states, wars between states, or the
preparation for war, as of any great significance and neither did they
envisage the persistence of these. This perhaps explains why neither the
specific characteristics of the modern nation-state nor its development
were fully analysed. For a more systematic analysis we have to turn to the
work of Weber.
Weber on the state

Activity
Read pages 114–15 of the Held chapter.
Weber’s work on the state is part of a much wider consideration of the

social and political arrangement of modern societies. This includes
research on systems of law, historical comparison of different forms of
domination, the organisation and administration of political communities,
and the development of the modern nation state. This was written
considerably later than the work of Marx, mostly between 1914 and
1920, and Weber is usually regarded as a critic of the Marxist tradition
in sociology. In particular, Weber argues consistently that state forms and
their history cannot be reduced to expressions of class power or other
53
economic processes. In this sense, Weber makes an argument that states

are formed through complex interactions between political and military
power, administrative systems, and forms of legitimation in strictly
territorially bounded spaces and in interaction and competition with other
states. They are not, in other words, part of a ‘superstructure’ that rests
on a more fundamental economic ‘base’ through which they could be
explained. For Weber, the state is not epiphenomenal in the way that it
is for Marx.
Activity
Read pages 114–15 of Held and answer the following questions:
• What are the three distinctive elements in Weber’s definition of the state?
• What is ‘territoriality’? What territory does your own state control? Is any of that
territory disputed? How?
• What exactly is meant by the monopoly over the use of violence?
• In what ways do you think that ‘legitimacy’ and the monopoly over the use of
violence are linked?
Weber regarded the state as the most powerful institution in modern

societies. It controls a specific territory through its monopoly over the
legitimate use of force within that territory.
The state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation
supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered legitimate)
violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the
authority claimed by the powers that be.
(Weber Economy and Society)
Modern states wage war against other states rather than against armed
sections of their own populations. They are administered through centralised
and impersonal bureaucracies and make use of legal and rational forms
of domination. Indeed, Weber believed that the new forms of political
authority that he saw emerging in the later nineteenth and the twentieth
century in the states of the West (based largely on forms of representative
democracy) needed to be understood in a historical context. This required
a comparative analysis of the different forms of ‘legitimate domination’
that had existed during different historical periods (Morrison, 1995: 283).
By domination, Weber means the right of a ruler or a ruling group within
an ‘established order’ to ‘issue commands to others and expect them to
obey’ (Morrison, 1995: 283). Weber was interested in how such structures
of command and authority have been legitimised in various historical
circumstances, that is, how the commands given by rulers are perceived
as being ‘legitimate’ (and therefore obeyed) within specific systems
at different times. For Weber, this forms one of the key elements in any
system of domination. The other key element is the development of
administrative systems with the capacity to enforce these commands.
Weber argues that, historically, each system of domination has varied in
accordance with four basic characteristics:
• its claims to legitimacy
• the type of obedience it can enforce through coercion
• the mechanisms in place for the administration of the system
• the way that the system exercises authority.
54
Historically there have been many different types or forms of authority

(centralised or absolute monarchies, systems of military dominance,
systems of legal enforcement and so on). Each of these systems has been
characterised by differences in the way that the four basic elements of
domination have operated. Many of these systems lasted for centuries,
and Weber was concerned with the means by which they maintained and
reproduced themselves over time. Weber was interested in the social and
historical conditions that led to long-lasting systems of domination. In
this sense, Weber is much closer to what we would describe as a historical
sociologist than either Marx or Durkheim.
According to Weber, there are three broad types of legitimate
domination (that is, systems of domination that members of society
perceive to be valid and to which they broadly conform): these are
charismatic domination, traditional domination and rational-
legal domination. Each of these systems has operated at different times
and in many systems, including those of the present, there is usually a
mixture or all three elements working together. The general pattern
however, involves a movement away from forms of traditional authority
towards rational-legal forms of domination in modernity. However, the
emergence of democratic forms of governance in modernity also increases
the possibility of charismatic domination.
One very important thing to bear in mind when thinking about Weber’s
work on the state is his characterisation of it as a ‘set of institutions with a
dedicated personnel’ (Hay et al., 2006: 8). The state (as we have seen) is
something that is differentiated (that differentiates itself we might say)
from civil society, which it presumes to govern through its claim to be the
only legitimate source of political authority within a territory. This means
that, according to a very lively tradition of neo-Weberian research on the
state (that is, research inspired by Weber’s ideas), the personnel employed
by the state develop ‘an array of distinct interests, preferences and capacities
which cannot be explained by reference to societal factors’ (8).
In other words, once it has come into existence as a highly important social
actor in its own right, the state is effectively autonomous and develops its
own interests and therefore its own ‘reasons’ to act. We cannot therefore (as
for example Marxists attempt to do) explain its operation with reference to
other factors (such as the ‘economy’).
We have seen in the three ‘classical’ sociologists that we have looked
at differing views and ideas about the nature of the state, its role and
function and in their accounts of its historical emergence. These broad
ideas about the state have continued to inform research agendas in
historical sociology, which draw on various forms of social theory, even
when it finds the existing forms of theory seriously lacking. In the next
sections we will go on to explore contemporary historical sociological
accounts of and explanations for the rise of the modern state.
Historical sociology and the state

As we have seen, of the ‘classical’ sociologists only Weber developed a
systematic theory of state power and the ways that states function as
specific social entities (and increasingly as extremely powerful social
actors in their own right). Nonetheless there is also a tradition of thinking
about the development of the state that has drawn on the work of both
Marx and Durkheim, in spite of their relatively underdeveloped ideas on
the specificity of the state and their (erroneous) assumptions about its
continued importance.
55
In this section, we will look at a number of recent theoretical approaches

that have addressed the emergence and development of modern states.
In the chapters that follow you will see examples of many of these
approaches (and others) applied to actual examples of traditional and
modern state formation and development. This will (hopefully) make what
can be rather abstract ideas more accessible and understandable!
Remember, one of the key elements of the development of ‘modernity’
that we are concerned with in this course is the emergence of the
modern state and of modern systems of course. This needs to be seen as
a qualitatively new phenomenon. It’s not that states did not exist before
the emergence of ‘modernity’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
they did. However, they tended to be necessarily limited in terms of their
administrative and organisational capacities and in the scope and reach
of their powers. The important thing that we need to think about is that
the development of the modern state was not inevitable. Its emergence in
Europe over the period roughly covering the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was the result of a number of complex (and contingent) factors.
These factors included economic, political, ideological and military
developments.
Power and the state

One very influential contribution to the historical sociology of the state is
that of Michael Mann. Mann’s focus in his influential book The Sources of
Social Power is power rather than the state as such, although, as we will
see, the state figures significantly. Mann attempts to trace the operation
and outline of social power across several millennia from Mesopotamia
in approximately 5000 BCE to the rise and consolidation of national and
nation-states in Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
Mann focuses on four major ‘sources’ of social power; ideological,
military, economic and political. He argues that none of these is any more
important than another. At different times and in different places each
has assumed a greater role, but none is an ‘ultimate’ form of power (as
economic power is for Marxists, for example).
Mann argues that power can be either distributive (the power of A over
B, for example), or it may be collective (the shared power of A and B
have if they cooperate, although ‘cooperation’ has often been enforced or
compulsory rather than voluntary!). Mann also argues that power can be
either extensive or intensive. By extensive power he means the ability
to organise a large population spread over a wide territory to ‘engage in
minimally stable cooperation’ (Mann, 1986: 7). Most modern states, for
example, wield ‘extensive power’. Intensive power, on the other hand, refers
to the ability to organise at a more intense level and to generate ‘a high
level of mobilisation or commitment from the participants, whether the area
and numbers covered are great or small’ (7).
According to Mann, power may also be either authoritative or
diffused. Authoritative power is ‘actually willed by groups and
institutions’ and it is made up of ‘definite commands and conscious
obedience’ (8). Diffused power, on the other hand, ‘spreads in a more
spontaneous, unconscious, decentred way throughout a population,
resulting in similar social practices that embody power relations but are
not explicitly commanded’ (8). The social practices governed by diffused
power tend to be thought of as ‘natural, proper or inevitable’ (Smith,
1991: 122).
56
As we have seen, the ‘sources’ of power that Mann analyses historically are:
• Ideological: this has two specific and highly important aspects. The
first is transcendent power. This ‘unites human beings by claiming
that they possess ultimately meaningful, often divinely granted, common
qualities’ (Mann, 1986: 519). For example, Christianity, as we will see,
functioned as a transcendent form of ideological power during the
medieval period in Europe. In other words, it provided a concrete social
identity for the mass of the population that transcended their regional
or local affiliations. In doing so, both its values and its production of a
common, shared culture allowed for ‘translocal’ (beyond the immediate
locality) forms of extensive cooperation (through trade and commerce
and so on). The second form of ideological power is immanent. This
operates by ‘the strengthening of the internal morale of some existing
social groups by giving it a sense of ultimate significance and meaning…
by reinforcing its normative solidarity, and by giving it common ritual
and aesthetic practices’ (519). In other words, such groups become
self-conscious of a shared ‘superiority’ or a shared ‘purpose’. As we will
see (in Chapter 5), imperial ruling classes tend to have such a sense of
morale and ‘destiny’.
• Economic: this integrates two important spheres of social activity.
Praxis, or the ‘active intervention of human beings in nature through
labour’ (520), involves the daily activity of work and of production.
Power usually operates here at an intensive level. The second sphere is
that of the circuits of transportation and exchange of raw materials
and manufactured goods. These circuits are extensive (more so than
ever in and between ‘advanced’ societies). Economic power involves
the capacity to act upon the everyday life of the mass of the population
in their daily (necessary) labour and in the communication networks
through which the extensive exchange of goods and materials operates.
It is therefore a key form of power. However, Mann also argues that is
not the primary form of power (‘the motor of history’, as Marxists would
claim). Rather, it is possible to see that at many times throughout history
economic power has been shaped and reshaped by other sources of
power. Indeed, economic power has often been dependent on sources
of power to establish the norms governing the possession of property
and the forms of cooperation. For example, military power has often
been required to pacify extensive territories and to establish regimes of
compulsory cooperation (see Chapter 5). Similarly, ideological power
has (as we will see) provided forms of normative pacification through
the establishment of transcendent value systems within which, for
example, trade and exchange of property can function effectively.
• Military: this is both extensive (aggressive invasion and
administration of conquered territory) and intensive (mainly when
organising defence of existing territory). Both of these aspects of
military power rely on concentrated coercion (the concentration
of force) which operates through compulsory cooperation
(conscripting men into armies, organising the population for the
defence of a city). Mann makes the point that military power is not
always ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’. Military power is often used during
peacetime to reorganise societies and to enforce forms of compulsory
cooperation that can intensify the exploitation of ‘concentrated pockets
of labour’ producing higher economic yields (Mann, 1986: 521). These
‘pockets’ of intensified compulsory cooperation could be linked by
extensive, military-dominated communications infrastructures (see
Chapter 5 on the Roman Empire, for example).
57
• Political: Mann argues that the first means of political power is

territorial centralisation. States emerge and their powers are
intensified when ‘dominant social groups, pursuing their goals, require
social regulation over a confined, bounded territory’ (521). This is
usually achieved by establishing central institutions from which power
radiates out over a defined territory. This requires the establishment
of a permanent ‘state elite’ of bureaucrats and functionaries. Mann
argues that although this state elite might originally be controlled by the
powerful groups that established it, its necessary centralisation (which is
far more concentrated than these groups) ‘gives to it logistical capacities
for exercising autonomous power’ (521). Mann goes on to argue that
these powers are ‘precarious’ and that over history centralised state
powers have tended to emerge intermittently and then to disappear as
the agents of extensive rule ‘disappear’ back into ‘civil society’, having
grown wealthy and powerful in their own right. The second and the
most important aspect of political power is its capacity to create more
‘bounded’ and more ‘unitary’ societies. Mann argues that ‘societies’ are
not inherently bounded entities. They are not ‘unitary systems’. (Think
about this: when sociologists talk about ‘society’ they tend to refer to the
bounded entities that are modern nation-states.) Mann’s point is that
such bounded entities are precisely modern national or nation-states
and that they are relatively recent phenomena. For Mann, societies are
in fact ‘conglomerations of multiple, overlapping , intersecting networks
of power’ and only when states have grown powerful do such societies
become more separated out from one another, more bounded, and more
internally structured and intensively administered within their borders.
As we have seen, ‘states’ in the modern sense of the term are a very recent
phenomenon. We can see therefore that, according to Mann, states are
far from being ‘natural’ phenomena that arise out of any self-evident need
for social or administrative order. Rather, Mann argues, social power has
been exercised in a variety of different ways with different configurations
dominating at different times during the last several thousand years of
human civilisation. The ‘modern’ nation-state emerged at a particular point
in history in a particular location owing to a very specific combination of
circumstances. We will be exploring these circumstances in more detail in
the chapters that follow.
History: continuous or discontinuous?

As we have seen, because we live in a world that is dominated by nation states
and because we are accustomed to states organising and regulating large areas
of social life, it can seem like these are both almost ‘natural’ ways of organising
and doing things. As we have also seen, the idea that social and historical
processes move inevitably in a particular direction to fulfil a particular
destined outcome has been a common one. We call such ideas teleological
(see Chapter 3). One very obvious example of teleological thinking is the
argument that because states have been such an important component of
‘modernity’, they must represent the culmination of developmental historical
processes of which they represent the logical culmination.
However, many sociologists have stressed not the continuities between
‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ systems of rule, but rather the discontinuities
between them. These approaches highlight the radical difference
between traditional and modern forms of state. They also make the point
that recent history cannot be seen as being part of an unfolding process,
but rather as a dramatic rupture or break with the past. The sociologist
Anthony Giddens, who champions this view, argues that:
58
Over a period of, at most, no more than three hundred years,

the rapidity, drama and reach of change have been incomparably
greater than any previous historical transitions. The social order
– increasingly a genuinely global system but not an intrinsically
pacific one – initiated by the advent of modernity is not just an
accentuation of previous trends of development. In a number of
specifiable and quite fundamental respects, it is something new.
(Giddens The Nation State and Violence, p.33)
Giddens argues that all social systems involve an ‘institutional mediation
of power’ and that these institutions ‘represent the most deeply embedded
continuities in social life’ (Giddens, 1985: 9). In other words, power is
exercised through specific institutions which exist over long periods of
time (far longer than individual life spans). The exercise of power involves
the development of particular ‘modes of control’ through which some
members of society seek to ‘achieve and maintain the control of others’.
When these modes of control are relatively stable and long-lasting, we
can refer to them as systems or forms of rule. These forms of rule are
sustained by the routine practices of those in positions of authority (state
functionaries, for example).
These routine practices (designed to influence and control other members
of society in subordinate positions and to therefore ‘make things happen’)
are based on strategies that are devised in relation to the availability
of particular means for making rule effective, and this depends on
the normative context (what is considered to be acceptable or not
acceptable in terms of standards of behaviour) and also on the available
technologies. For example, it would not be possible for managers in a
modern office or factory setting to use the threat of violence to control
the workers there. As a consequence, alternative strategies of control have
been and continue to be routinely developed.
Giddens argues that ‘locale’ (or place) is highly important for the exercise
of power and that certain types of locale act as ‘power containers’. By
‘power container’ Giddens means a place that ‘permits a concentration
of allocative2 and authoritative resources’ (13). In ‘traditional’ societies 2
Allocative resources are
this means, for example, the castles or estates of lords (see Chapter 5) the capacity of a system
to allocate material
and cities. These are all specific ‘containers’ for the generation of power
resources; authoritative
(records are kept here, decisions made and strategies devised, often by resources are the
specially appointed personnel). In ‘modern’ societies, the nation-state is capacity of the system
‘the pre-eminent form of power container as a territorially bounded… to wield power and
administrative unity’ (13). influence.
The pre-eminence of the modern nation-state as a form of power

container can be ascribed to four key ‘institutional clusterings’: heightened
forms of surveillance, capitalistic enterprise, industrial production and
centralisation of the means of violence. For Giddens, any exploration of
these complex institutions involves a recognition of the way that their
particular configuration has produced societies (and more recently
states) that are radically different from anything that has existed before.
In other words, arguments that stress the continuities between past and
present fail to recognise the revolutionary transformation that modernity
represents. You might want to go back at this point and to
re-read the ‘Introduction’ by Stuart Hall to Formations of
Modernity.
59
Activity
Read the following short text:
Let me distinguish several different pictures of human ‘history’…one
is the version of evolutionism that regards history – here understood
as social change – as mainly governed by incremental processes of
development. In this view there are no fundamental discontinuities in
social change. All phases of change that look like ‘revolutions’ of one
kind or another turn out to involve less turbulent, underlying processes
of change. This is the position taken by Durkheim; it has also been held
by many others from Comte through to the present day. Another view
sees history as being driven by processes of struggle, in which substantial
disjunctures occur between different developmental stages. Historical
materialism is one conception of this sort, but social Darwinism can also
be put in this category. Here history is also understood as social change
and has, as it were, a curving upward form, but punctuated by phases
of rapid transmutation. The view I want to defend is quite different from
either of these others. The equation of history with social change must be
resisted, as both logically mistaken and empirically wanting. If history is
temporality – the temporal constitution of social events – it is clearly false
to identify it with change…In speaking of a discontinuist conception of
modern history…I do not want to deny the importance of transitions or
ruptures in previous eras. I do however want to claim that, originating in
the West but becoming more and more global in their impact, there has
occurred a series of changes of extraordinary magnitude when compared
with any other phases of human history. What separates those living
in the modern world from all previous types of society, and all previous
epochs of history, is more profound than the continuities which connect
them to the longer spans of the past.
(Giddens The Nation State and Violence)
What does Giddens mean by a ‘discontinuist’ conception of modern history?
Answer this question, in your own words. Try and write about 500 words. You might find
it helpful to look again at David Held’s chapter, in particular the discussion about the
factors that gave rise to the modern state on page 74.

• describe and critically assess the classic sociological accounts of the
‘modern’ state
• locate the ‘modern’ state in a historical context
• critically assess theories of social and historical change as these relate
to the emergence of the modern state.

How have any two sociologists accounted for the emergence of the
‘modern’ state?
60
Chapter 5: Before the ‘modern’ state: ‘traditional’ systems of rule
Chapter 5: Before the ‘modern’ state:

‘traditional’ systems of rule
Aim of the chapter

The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to key aspects of systems
of rule in ‘traditional’ states: empires and systems of divided rule. The
chapter also aims to introduce important debates within historical
sociology about how and why systems of rule developed and operated in
these traditional states.
Learning outcomes
• describe important aspects of the systems of rule that operated in
traditional states
• critically assess different theoretical accounts of the emergence and
development of systems of rule in traditional states
• critically assess theoretical approaches to systems of rule in traditional
states.
Essential reading
Further reading
[ISBN 9780801492433].
Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics, History
and Sociology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
[ISBN 9780822333630].
[ISBN 9780805270259].
[ISBN 9781859841075].
Eisenstadt, S.N. The Political Systems of Empires. (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1993) [ISBN 9781560006411].
Le Goff, J. Medieval Civilisation. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)
[ISBN 9780631175667].
Barbarians. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
[ISBN 9780195325416].
**Mann, M. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986) [ISBN 9780521313490] Chapters 5 and 9.
61
McLennan, G., D. Held and D. Hall (eds.) The Idea of the Modern State. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780335105977] Chapters 1 and 2.
1990) [ISBN 9780804718776].
Polanyi, K. The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of our
[ISBN 9780877229209].
** Tilly, C. Coercion, Capital, and the European State. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
[ISBN 9781557863683].
Works cited
[ISBN 9781859841075].
Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985)
[ISBN 9780520060395].
Barbarians. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
[ISBN 9780195325416].
Potter, D.S. The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180–395. (London: Routledge, 2004)
[ISBN 9780415100588].
Introduction
In the last chapter, we looked at a number of approaches to thinking about
the emergence of modern state forms, and at sociological approaches to
the state and its history. In this chapter and the one that follows it, we look
more closely at some specific examples of state forms and their history. We
will also look at the work of historical sociologists who have attempted to
give theoretical accounts of key aspects of those states.
The chapter will focus on important examples of pre-modern or
‘traditional’ states and at how sociologists have accounted for the systems
of rule that operated there. We will begin with a look at imperial systems
of rule in the ancient empires. These were often very long-lived state
forms. In particular, in a case study of the Roman Empire, which lasted for
many hundreds of years, we will explore how its systems of rule developed
and we will look at how some aspects of the Roman imperial state might
be said to compare with systems of rule that developed in the modern
state. We will then look briefly at the work of an important historical
sociological account of imperial systems of rule and assess its relevance.
The chapter then goes on to consider the feudal state, or the system
of divided rule as it is sometimes referred to. We will then look at the
emergence of the early modern state and, in particular, the rise of
‘absolutist’ states. This leads into a discussion of how the modern state
forms that we are familiar with are closely linked to the development of
systems of rule that were formed in this period.
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how historical sociologies of
the state draw on and utilise aspects of sociological theory to explain and
account for the diversity of state forms over time.
62
Activity
Now read the sections 2 and 2.1 of the Held chapter (pp.74–79).
Empires
Held argues that, over the centuries, the history of states has been
dominated by empires or imperial systems of rule. That is, if we look at
the history of human societies, we see that these systems were in existence
for by far the longest period of time. These imperial states were primarily
based on military power and, financially, on tribute paid by conquered
peoples to an emperor or his officials. Most empires began as smaller
states or even as single cities (Rome is an excellent example of the latter)
and grew through conquest and absorption of territory. As Held notes,
empires required ‘an accumulation and concentration of coercive means
– above all war-making ability – to sustain themselves’. Some of these
systems of rule lasted for very long periods. The Roman imperial system,
for example, lasted for many centuries, as did that of China.
However, no matter how vast and how powerful these empires became
relative to their rivals, Held argues that they could ‘sustain only limited
administrative authority’ over the territory that they ruled. In the next
sections of the chapter, we will explore in more detail what this means.
Remember, one of the most important aspects of the ‘modern’ state is
the fact that it is a ‘territorial’ state. That is, it governs uniformly across a
clearly demarcated territory through complex and unified administrative
systems. However, in the history of states this is ‘highly exceptional’ and
‘not the type-case against which others should be measured’ (Giddens,
1986: 53). The traditional states that will be considered in this chapter are
far more typical of state forms as they have existed historically.
Empires of domination
Held argues that most empires began as much smaller states and grew
(often rapidly) through the military conquest of adjoining territory. The
exercise of power in these states was primarily ‘extensive’ rather than
‘intensive’. That is, in empires of domination, power was exercised over a
wide territorial area (it was ‘extensive’) but it was not able to ‘command
a high level of mobilisation or commitment’ from the population in those
territories (it was not ‘intensive’) (Mann, 1986: 7). The principal problem
faced by such states was that the area that could be practically governed
was much smaller than the area that had been conquered by military
force. Empires of domination could cover very large areas but could not
usually effectively govern those areas. This is because an army conquers by
‘concentrating its forces’ and forcing rulers and populations of territories to
submit. But as Mann states, ‘ruling over those who had submitted involved
dispersing force’ and this would mean losing one’s military advantage
(Mann, 1986: 142).
As we can see, this means that there is a key contradiction between the
ability to conquer and the capacity to rule. Mann outlines four main
strategies which were developed in order to overcome this contradiction
(143). These were:
• rule through clients
• direct military rule
• enforced or compulsory cooperation
• the development of a common elite culture.
63
The first two of these strategies were widely used in imperial systems from
approximately 2000 BCE through to the emergence of the first of the major
‘territorial’ empires during the first century BCE. The latter two, although
present to some extent in ‘empires of domination’, only became possible
with the development of complex infrastructures. These were far more
effective and allowed rulers to develop more intensive forms of rule. In
this section, we will consider the first two of these strategies and outline
key features of the empires of domination. We will then move on to look
at the case of the Roman Empire, in which the latter two strategies that
Mann identifies can be more clearly seen at work.
The first strategy involved ruling through clients. Elite groups in
conquered territories were allowed to continue as rulers in exchange for
formal submission to the conquerors and payment of tribute. Disobedience
or rebellion was usually punished with further military raids and the
replacement of troublesome rulers or ruling groups with ones more willing
to cooperate.
The main problem with this is that military conquest could only be imposed
erratically. One possible solution was to educate the conquered elite into the
culture of the conquerors, thus ensuring greater loyalty through identification
with a common culture. This, however, required resources and an
infrastructure capable of maintaining and extending such a culture. The most
common (and symbolically important) means of demonstrating the power of
the conquerors and the loyalty of the conquered was through the ‘personal
humiliation of rebels and the ritual prostration of client rulers before their
masters’ (143). Many pictorial representations of this process can be found in
engravings and other forms of ceremonial art from the ancient world.
The important thing to bear in mind here is that there was almost no
uniform or continuous form of rule across a clearly defined territory.
Empires of domination were not ‘states’ in the way that we understand
the term (see Chapter 4); they were unstable federations of rulers who
were subordinated (more or less successfully) to a more powerful central
ruler. This was a cheap and relatively easy form of domination, but it was
achieved at the cost of very considerable local or regional autonomy. This
strategy and system of rule was also extremely unstable and could rapidly
break down. The largely autonomous local elites were easily and quickly
able to gather sufficient resources to revolt against the central authority.
They were also able to place their resources at the service of rivals to their
rulers in the hope of gaining advantageous terms in the event of a victory.
The second strategy used to dominate an extended area was that of direct
military rule through armies of conquest. Here commanders and troops
were dispersed across conquered territories in strategically important
fortresses and towns. This was problematic as it required the appropriation
of large amounts of agricultural surplus from the conquered territories
in order to supply the troops. This in turn required an ‘infrastructure of
fortresses, communication routes, and supplies’ (Mann, 1986: 143).
Another key problem that emerged with direct military rule was more
complex. This involved the maintenance of loyalty to the central authority
during periods of pacification following conquest. In the immediate
aftermath of conquest, of course, the ruler could ensure continuing loyalty
by rewarding commanders and troops through the distribution of land and
the right to gather taxes or tribute. However, in the long term this tended to
have the effect of decentralising power. Soldiers and commanders with the
resources of land ownership were no longer reliant on the central authority
of the state for their livelihood. Independent classes of a landowning
64
peasantry and aristocracy were therefore created in conquered territories

and the general tendency was for them to become independent. This
worked against attempts to construct a centralised system of rule (144).
Activity
David Held argues that:
[E]mpires were ruled, but they were not governed; that is to say,
emperors dominated a limited social and geographical space but lacked
the administrative means – the institutions, organisations, information,
personnel and so on – to provide regularised administration over the
territories they claimed as their own.
Think carefully about the following questions. Jot down some of your answers. You will
need to make sure of these later when you will be asked to write a short essay.
What do you think Held means by this? From what you have read so far, what do you think
the difference is between being ‘ruled’ and being ‘governed’? What sort of administrative
means do states require in order to be successfully and effectively governed rather than
simply ‘ruled’? How easy do you think it would have been to successfully govern a state as
large as the Roman Empire – especially without contemporary communications technologies
or transportation. Could this have done by military means alone?
Case study: The Roman Empire
Figure 5.1 Map of the Roman Empire at its height.
The map above shows the Roman Empire at its height in 117 CE. As you
can see, the Empire covers a very large geographical area, including
Britain in the north, Egypt and northern Africa in the south, as well as
most of western and southern Europe, Asia Minor and the Middle East.
Then, as now, this area was populated with diverse peoples and cultures.
In order to look more closely at Held’s argument about imperial states, we
will examine the case of the Roman Empire. In doing so, we will consider
the arguments and ideas of the historical sociologists Michael Mann and
S.N. Eisenstadt.
65
The Roman Empire survived for many centuries. As Michael Mann argues:
The history of Rome is the most fascinating historical laboratory
available to sociologists. It provides a 700-year stretch of written
records and archaeological remains. They show a society with
recognisably the same core identity over that period of time, yet
adapting continuously to the forces created by its own, and its
neighbours’, actions.
(Mann, 1986: 250)
Clearly, a state which lasted for such a long period of time and over such
a large territory must have developed administrative means capable of
perpetuating its rule. According to Mann, Roman power was a refinement
and extension of forms of power that had existed in previous ‘agrarian
empires’. Indeed, Mann argues that the Roman Empire developed into
what he calls a ‘territorial empire’. By this he means that in the Roman
state rule was ‘territorially continuous and resources, economic and other,
diffused evenly across its enormous extent’.
Mann argues that there were two main aspects of Roman power. The first was
based on the military and social power of the legions, which were responsible
for the extensive territorial conquests. The legions were highly professional,
disciplined units with roots deep in Roman society. The legion was, as Mann
argues, the ‘core Roman institution’ (Mann, 1986: 295) and its ‘unparalleled
success’ was based on its economic, political and ideological significance as
well as its military prowess. Legions achieved an unprecedented degree of both
internal and external pacification within the conquered territories and beyond.
This provided a stable and secure environment for ‘rational economic activity’.
The legions were also important sites of economic activity in their own
right, and important market towns and trading centres developed around
the headquarters of the legions across the provinces of the Empire.
Conquering legions brought with them trade and communications
infrastructures (roads, for example) and this led to the development of
economies based on the widespread use of coinage rather than barter.
They also provided access to a massively expanded trade network for local
traders, farmers and manufacturers. Both the institutions of the state and
a powerful and wealthy private economic sector became intertwined in a
‘gigantic common market, penetrating every corner of the empire’ (278).
The necessity of feeding and equipping the soldiers and other military
personnel meant that there were substantial innovations in manufacturing
and agricultural processes with the aim of increasing productivity. This led
to an intensification of the labour process and a forced diffusion of these
innovations across the empire. Above all, the legions were not simply the
agents of conquest; they were also highly productive. The combination of
these factors produced what Mann refers to as a ‘legionary economy’, an
economy based around the powerful and extensive military organisation
that maintained order over conquered provinces and territories.
Mann argues that this legionary economy operated across the entire empire
and brought with it ‘interdependent flows of labour, economic exchange,
coinage, law, literacy’ and other aspects of Roman ‘civilisation’. This was in
many respects a straightforwardly hierarchical or vertical form of power
operating from the top down through the use of military force and highly
disciplined and militarised forms of organisation. Domination therefore became
‘territorialised’, which means that it operated continuously and uniformly
across the whole territory of the state, much as it does in the modern nation-
state. The Roman state, he argues (in an echo of Marx), ‘was little more than a
committee for managing the common affairs of the rulers of the legions’ (279).
66
Activity
The Roman Empire was formed during a lengthy period of military conquest and the
Roman legions were integral to the social and economic order of the Empire. Military
power was central to the success and functioning of the state. Below is a short passage
from the writings of the author Hippolytus (date of birth unknown, date of death 235 CE).
Hippolytus is describing the empire based on his own experience of its power…
No other [empire] will be raised up except that which possesses the
domination in our own day and is solidly established: this is a fact
evident to all. It has teeth of iron, because it kills and tears to pieces the
entire world by its own force, just like iron…It is not one nation, but
an assemblage of all languages and all the races of man, it is a levy of
recruits with a view to war.
(Quoted in Potter, 2004: 3)
• What impression does the author give us of the empire and its power?
• Is this a positive or a negative assessment of it?
• Why do you think that he uses the language that he does in order to describe its
power?
The author, Hippolytus, was a Christian. At the time that he was writing (at the beginning
of the third century CE, at the height of the Empire’s power) Christians were regularly
persecuted. Hippolytus himself was eventually imprisoned and executed by being dragged
to death by wild horses.
• Does this fact change the way that we think about what the author has written?
• How and in what ways might it change this?
• How useful is this as a piece of historical (or sociological) evidence?
• What can it tell us about the subjective experience of some of the people who
lived in the Empire?
• Would everybody have felt like this about it or described it in this way?
The second important aspect of Roman power was based on the extensive
and authorative power of the class culture of the Roman elite. This
culture was adopted by the elite groups of conquered territories and it
formed the basis of a common culture practised across the empire. A fully
‘Romanised’ elite developed in each of the separate provinces and was
largely indistinguishable from other such elites across the empire. So,
despite considerable differences in terms of local languages and cultures
across the empire, there was also a significant degree of social and cultural
homogenisation, at least for the upper classes. Indeed, over the course
of its history rulers of the empire came from almost every province.
Mann therefore claims that what had originally been a reasonably loose
‘federation of allies’ (governed from Rome) ‘became more of a society in
our modern sense’ (Mann, 1986: 296).
This is an interesting point. We have already noted that the Roman Empire
lasted for many hundreds of years and that, over that time, it retained
a ‘core identity’. As in most empires that had existed before it, emperors
ruled by making use of the local native elites of the area that it had
conquered. These were backed up by the Roman governors and the power
of the Roman legionary armies in their permanent garrisons and camps. In
return for sharing in the rule of their native provinces, local elites became
fully ‘Romanised’ in their culture, adopting not just the language of the
Romans (Latin) but also their literature and their value systems. There was
therefore a very high degree of cultural integration and cultural solidarity
amongst the elite groups of the empire.
67
Indeed, so successful had the ‘Romanisation’ of the empire become that

by the fourth century CE the city of Rome itself had become little more
than the symbolic capital. Reigning emperors visited the city only four
or five times (for stays of about a month) during the entire century
(Heather, 2006: 25). During this period, Rome ceased to be a political
or administrative centre of any great importance. This was partly due to
important strategic and military reasons. New centres of power developed
in both the East and the West of the empire which were closer to and
more convenient for the supervision of its extensive frontiers. Rome was
considered to be too distant to function effectively as a key strategic
centre; information could not travel to it swiftly enough and commands
issued from it would have taken too long to be put into effect.
But it was not simply strategic or military reasons that led to Rome losing
its importance. The other important reason for this relates explicitly to the
‘Romanisation’ of the empire and the development of an extensive class
of (largely but not exclusively elite) citizens who identified themselves
primarily with ‘Roman’ values and ideals and who regarded themselves
as ‘Romans’. The Romans who lived in the provinces of the empire were
not migrants from Rome itself or even from Italy, the heart of the empire;
they were locals who had adopted the Roman lifestyle and culture. The
expanded imperial bureaucracy of the later empire and the military
leaders of the strategically important frontier provinces were drawn
from the Romanised provincial elites. The emperors themselves were
increasingly drawn from these groups.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the later empire was much more
culturally cohesive than the earlier empire had been. For this reason, as
well as the more obvious reasons of defensive strategy, Rome itself lost
much of its significance in a state that had become much more thoroughly
and comprehensively ‘Roman’.
Activity
As we have seen, Michael Mann characterises the Roman Empire as having developed
a common (elite) culture. Mann argues that this was one of the reasons that the empire
was able to become a ‘territorial’ state and to become more of a ‘society’ in the modern
sense of the term. The extensive spread of a common culture was achieved through
specific means and had particular effects. One important aspect that was crucial to this
process was the development of literacy and a common literary culture. Below is a short
passage from a recent study of the later empire describing the process of ‘Romanisation’.
The bedrock of the system was the intense study of a small number of
literary texts under the guidance of an expert in language and literary
interpretation, the grammarian. This occupied the individual for seven or
more years from about the age of eight, and concentrated on just four
authors…You then graduated to a rhetor, with whom a wider range
of texts was studied…Texts were read line by line, and every twist of
language dutifully identified and discussed…[This] had the effect of
allowing instant identification. As soon as a member of the Roman elite
opened his mouth, it was obvious that he had learned ‘correct’ Latin.
But talking the talk was only part of the story. Aside from the language of
these texts, [the Roman elite] also claimed that absorbing their content
made them human beings of a calibre unmatched by anyone else.
(Heather, 2006: 17/18)
• What aspects of this system do you think would help to create a sense of ‘cultural
solidarity’ between members of the ruling elite?
68
• Think about the education system in your society. What values and ideals are
promoted through the system? How do these relate to the development of a
common culture between members of the society? Is there a specifically ‘elite’
culture in your society? What are its characteristics?
Eisenstadt and ‘historical bureaucratic empires’

We have seen that Held argues that empires were ruled but not governed. We
have also seen that Michael Mann argues that some imperial systems began
to operate more recognisably as ‘territorial states’ and that some aspects
of their systems of rule approximated to the ‘modern’ type. We looked at
Rome as an example of this. In this section of the chapter we will examine
S.N. Eisenstadt’s model of political rule in what he refers to as ‘historical
bureaucratic’ empires, of which Rome is a good example (Eisenstadt, 1993:
3). We are looking specifically at Eisenstadt here as his work on empires
provides a very good example of how sociological theory has been used to
explain and account for the specific characteristics of state forms over time.
We will also look briefly at how, in the case of Eisenstadt, the theory was
modified. In doing so it also provides us with a way of exploring how and
why states attempted to address the problems that Held and Mann notice.
The theoretical framework that Eisenstadt uses in his examination of empires
is broadly that of structural-functionalism. The central concern of structural-
functionalism was to explain the apparent stability and cohesiveness
of societies. It also attempted to explain how the various institutions
within societies adapt to changing circumstances in order to maintain the
cohesiveness and stability. Structural-functionalism sees societies as coherent,
bounded and as fundamentally relational (all of the constituent parts relate
to one another and are indispensable to the functioning of the whole). For
structural-functionalists, societies function like organisms, with their various
parts (social institutions) working together to maintain and reproduce them.
However, we have already seen (in Chapter 3) that structural-
functionalism was heavily criticised for its ‘evolutionist’ approach to
change. We saw that it regarded social change as following a predictable
pattern, with societies moving inevitably towards complex and highly
differentiated1 – that is, ‘modern’ – systems. It was also an approach that 1
By ‘differentiated’,
could not account for conflict or contradiction within systems. we mean that there is
an increased tendency
Eisenstadt makes use of some of the insights of structural–functionalist to a division of social
approaches to propose a way of analysing the systemic character of imperial labour and increased
systems of rule. That is, he is interested in the ‘most important social specialisation of
processes or mechanisms that develop in these systems, especially of various different areas of social
life. The different aspects
policies undertaken by the rulers aiming to maintain the respective systemic
of political, economic
boundaries of their regimes’ (Eisenstadt, 1993: xvi). However, he is also and social life become
aware of the limitations of this approach in dealing with contradiction and specialised and are
change and argues that his analysis of ‘historical bureaucratic’ empires goes separated from one
‘beyond’ the theoretical model of society that it provides. another.
Eisenstadt argues that ‘historical bureaucratic empires’ developed

…in the Near Eastern civilisations; in Egypt; in the Ancient
American civilisation (among the Incas and Aztecs); in the
Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine worlds; in Persia and India;
among the most important Far Eastern civilisations, especially
in China and India; in the Moslem world, as in the Abbaside,
Fatamite and Ottoman empires; and in modern Europe, in the
Age of Absolutism.
(Eisenstadt, 1993: 4)
69
Their importance, according to Eisenstadt, lies in the fact that they ‘stand
between what may be called the “traditional” and the “modern” political
systems and regimes’ (4). In other words, the political systems of empires
contain some features that resemble those of ‘modern’ states and these
co-exist alongside features that are commonly found in ‘traditional’
states. Eisenstadt argues that these particular imperial systems developed
mechanisms of rule that anticipate some aspects of the modern state. In
particular, some rulers saw the need to develop mechanisms of rule that
could ensure that extensive territorial possessions could be held together
in the present and into the future.
Remember, we noted in Chapter 4 that the main characteristics of the
modern state are its autonomy from other aspects of the social world, its
monopoly over the use of force, and its capacity to mobilise resources and
run complex administrative systems or bureaucracies. In other words, the
state is a power in its own right which can pursue goals. We have seen that
‘traditional’ states in the form of empires of domination did not possess
such powers or the administrative capacities necessary to govern extensive
territories and populations in an intensive way. They ruled through clients
or through military force, either of which was efficient or effective. Even
the Roman Empire, which we used as an example of a state that achieved
relatively intensive forms of administrative control over an entire territory,
had only 6,000 professional bureaucrats by the late fourth century CE
(Heather, 2006: 33).
Eisenstadt argues that the political systems of the empires that he analyses
in his study were characterised by attempts by their rulers to develop what
he calls ‘free resources’. By this he means that rulers attempted to develop
‘resources’ that were independent of any commitment to traditional groups
(the aristocracy, for example) as these tended to stand in the way of any
extension of state power. Thus, rulers were interested in the development
of a free peasantry, for example, that was not tied up in obligations to
a large landowning class. In creating this independent ‘resource’, the
ruler benefited as he was able to use it as a source of military manpower
specifically for the state. Similar strategies were used in order to develop
other social groupings (merchants, professionals and so on) that would be
free of dependence on traditional authority and thus available as resources
for the state to utilise in the pursuit of its specific goals. The overall goal of
rulers was therefore the creation and development of resources that could
be used to fund or staff state institutions loyal solely to the ruler that could
in turn be used to wield power more effectively.
However, in developing these ‘free resources’, conflict and contradictions
arose. Social groupings developed as ‘resources’ to be used by the state
existed alongside substantial sectors of the population that were tied to
alternative, traditional centres of power (the aristocracy, for example)
that used them in pursuit of their own interests. Conflicts therefore arose
between traditional aristocracies and rulers determined to develop ‘free
resources’. Rulers could not, however, go too far in attempting to limit the
traditional powers and rights of the aristocracy precisely because their own
power was similarly based on traditional forms of legitimation (hereditary
rights, for example).
Another problem that Eisenstadt notes is that the pursuit by rulers of their
goals – such as military expansion or large-scale public works – could be
costly in terms of the strain it put on existing resources. This put pressure
on those independent sectors of the population that rulers relied on for
direct taxation or manpower. Such resources could often be seriously
70
depleted as a result. This could lead to rulers having to rely more heavily
on traditional groups who would then demand further rights placing them
and their resources beyond the power of the ruler.
According to Eisenstadt, all of these factors result in ‘internal contradictions’
within societies which generate ‘struggle, change, and the eventual demise –
or transformation – of these systems’ (Eisenstadt, 1993: xvii).
However, Eisenstadt also argues against the idea of a general historical
‘evolution’ of state forms from simple to complex, or ‘traditional’ to
‘modern’. Change does not follow predictable patterns and the emergence
of these systems ‘was not assured by some overall trend’ (xvii).
As we have seen, Eisenstadt argues that the rulers of empires required
independent resources that could be used to create powerful state
institutions through which they could pursue their goals. We have also
seen that this strategy was risky and prone to failure. Indeed, Eisenstadt
argues that:
The ruler of the centralised bureaucratic polity could realise his
political objectives only in so far as there existed in society power
and resources that were neither entirely dependent on other
groups, not committed to their use, nor obtainable only through
their good will. Although the rulers occasionally might have
utilised such embedded and committed resources, continued
reliance on them would necessarily have entailed the loss of
the ruler’s independence, and of their ability to formulate freely
their aims and goals and to pursue their policies. Unlike rulers of
many primitive patrimonial or feudal systems, the rulers of the
bureaucratic polities were not willing to be merely the strongest
and ‘first’ among rulers or owners of similar clan or patrimonial
units. Instead these rulers strove to concentrate, in their own
hands, the main centres of power and control in society.
(Eisenstadt, 1993: 118)
Feudalism
Activity
Now read sections 2.2 and 2.3 of the Held chapter.
We will now look at feudalism as it developed and declined in Europe

during what are usually referred to as the Middle Ages (see Chapter 2). As
Held argues, this is often referred to as a system of ‘overlapping or divided
authority’ and it emerged in Europe following the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the late fifth century CE. It is generally thought of as lasting
in one form or another through to the end of the fourteenth century. It
is important to look in some detail at feudalism and in particular at the
various dynamic factors that operated within it. This is because at the
close of the feudal period recognisably ‘modern’ economic and political
systems had begun to emerge in Western Europe. In other words, the
beginnings of the emergence of some ‘modern’ systems of rule at the close
of the feudal period coincided with the transition from the feudal economy
(based on land ownership and agriculture) to a capitalist economy. In
short, the beginnings of what we now refer to as the ‘modern’ world
emerged with the end of feudalism. Consequently, there are many different
theoretical perspectives that attempt to explain the dynamic process that
led to the emergence of ‘modernity’.
71
Michael Mann argues that ‘it is impossible for the historical sociologist to
contemplate medieval European history “on its own terms” without being
influenced by premonitions of the Leviathan that was to loom up behind it
– industrial capitalism’ (Mann, 1986: 373). Special attention has therefore
been paid to those aspects of feudal societies that predisposed it to the
formation and development of the ‘modern’ world.
Systems of divided rule

We have seen that one of the features of some imperial systems, including
the Roman Empire, was an attempt to develop forms of rule that were
‘territorial’, that is, forms of rule that encompassed the entire territory of a
recognisably bounded state. Feudalism was very different. It emerged out
of the period of turmoil that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire
in Western Europe and, as Held argues, its ‘roots can be traced to leftovers
of the Roman Empire and to the militaristic culture and institutions of
Germanic peoples’. Mann argues that the fusion of the old Western Roman
Empire and the territories of the Germanic ‘barbarians’ created a ‘single
broad sociogeographical area’ which came to possess a ‘social unity’ that it
had not hitherto had. We now refer to this unified sociogeographical area
as ‘Europe’. In the medieval period this was a new phenomenon created
out of the coming together of what had been two very different social,
political and economic areas.
Activity
Read section 2.3 of the Held chapter. Use the following questions to help you work
through the reading. Jot down a few notes. This will help you to grasp the main outline
of feudalism. We will go on to look at how the system worked in more depth in the
next section of the chapter, but this should give you a basic idea of the most important
elements at work in the system.
• How were leaders or kings appointed in the early years of feudalism?
• In what ways was the relationship between a lord and his warriors a reciprocal
one?
• How did these military relationships (of the vassalic bond) stretch into ideas about
governing territory?
• In what way was this system not based on a simple hierarchical relationship
between lord and vassal?
• What does it mean to describe feudal kings as ‘primus inter pares’?
• How did this affect their capacity to rule?
• Why did this make it impossible for kings to rule effectively over a territory?
• In what way was the system inherently unstable?
• What was the most important economic element within the feudal system?
• How was this organised? How did it relate to political power?
• What were the alternative centres of economic activity and political power?
• What gave ‘Europe’ its sense of identity during this period?
• What was the ‘Holy Roman Empire’?
• Why did the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ not become a powerful, unified state?
• In what way was the Catholic Church important in the political affairs of Europe?
• In what ways do you think that the power of the Church acted against the
ambitions of rulers to develop the power of the state?
72
The feudal system of rule

In this section we will look specifically at the political institutions of
feudalism, although, as Poggi argues, ‘each system of rule must be
seen against a broader background of cultural, economic, social and
technological phenomena’ (Poggi, 1978: 17). Poggi argues that it is
impossible to understand the emergence of feudal relations without
linking these to:
1. the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as a centralised system
of government and as an ‘urban’-centred civilisation based around
municipal administration
2. the massive shifts in population during the period of the so-called
barbarian invasions of the Western Empire
3. the shift away from the Mediterranean of main lines of communication
and trade among West European populations and others.
Poggi argues that each of these factors contributed to economic and
cultural collapse, general impoverishment, isolation and anarchy. Urban
centres were abandoned, literacy rates plummeted and reading and
writing became a virtual monopoly of the Christian Church. The Church
continued to exist as virtually the only institution with any form of
extensive reach, that is, that existed beyond the immediate locality.
During the eighth and ninth centuries CE the Carolingian dynasty (a
dynasty of kings whose territory roughly corresponds to that of modern-
day France and Western Germany) attempted to revive a ‘translocal
framework of rule’ (Poggi, 1978: 18), and it sought to revive the idea of
the Roman territorial empire in conjunction with the only other translocal
organisation then in existence, the Catholic Church. This political entity
became known as the Holy Roman Empire. Within this new ‘empire’,
which never covered anything like the same territory as the old Roman
Empire, the Carolingians attempted to establish some forms of vertical
(top-down) rule along with an administrative structure based on the larger
Church centres.
We have already seen that widespread economic collapse (the
abandonment of a money economy and reversion to a barter economy,
for example) had followed the fall of the Roman Empire. This led to
widespread insecurity, a collapse in most forms of communication and
trade, and thus the impossibility of collecting revenue through taxation.
There was thus very little possibility of organising or financing any
meaningful form of centralised administration.
However, this administrative structure, which corresponded approximately
to older Roman imperial systems of rule, was further undermined by the
introduction of new features, which partly originated in the societies of the
Germanic tribes that had invaded the old Roman territories. Poggi argues
that the most important of these was the relationship of Gefolschaft
or ‘followership’. This is a ‘personal bond of mutual loyalty and affection
between a warrior chief and his hand-picked retinue of close associates,
his trusted companions in honour, adventure and leadership’ (19).
This tight-knit bond between warrior elites survived the collapse of the
Carolingian empire and became a major component of systems of rule
across the Western part of Europe for several centuries. It formed the basis
of feudal systems of rule.
73
The historical sociologist Marc Bloch (1886–1944) argues that in the

relative anarchy that characterised the centuries following the collapse of
Roman rule these bonds became necessary. Kinship ties were unable to
provide sufficient protection for people under such conditions. Instead,
the ‘ties of dependence’ of the feudal relationship provided both military
protection and security in the face of the terrible insecurities that social,
economic and cultural breakdown had caused (Smith, 1991: 43/44).
These ties were, according to Bloch, affective (emotional) and intensely
personal, and they helped to cement together a new social cultural
order. As we will see, this was an order that was not state-based in the
way that we are used to.
Most writers argue that the specific characteristics of feudalism involved
a fusion of elements of the late Roman administrative system (which the
Carolingians had attempted to revive) with Gefolschaft. From the Roman
system, the following elements were drawn:
• The commendatio: this was originally a very hierarchical
relationship in which a free individual (or collective body) entrusted
their protection to a more powerful superior and in the process agreed
to perform ‘duties of submission’ which included services (military or
otherwise).
• The beneficium or feudum: this was the grant of rights (mainly to
land but also to the population tied to the land such as peasants and
serfs, for example) in exchange for some form of service (military,
administrative and so on).
• The immunitas: this was the immunity that an individual or a
community had from military service or from taxation.
Taking each of these in turn, Poggi argues that the much more personal
and affective bonds of loyalty associated with Gefolschaft modified the
Roman arrangement in a number of important ways.
Firstly, as a consequence of the powerful influence of Gefolschaft, the
commendatio became less hierarchical (that is, less of a relationship
between two very unequal parties). The party who ‘commended’ himself
(the vassal) and the party who received the commendation (the lord)
were not from very different social classes. Indeed, ‘they belonged in
principle to the same exclusive social world’ (Poggi, 1978:21). The
relationships within the commendatio committed the lord to protect the
vassal and committed the vassal to give aid, advice and service to the lord.
The parties in this relationship were committed to hold one another in
mutual affection and respect. This relationship is one that has emotional
content (for example, loyalty, affection, trust, comradeship and so on).
We can see therefore that the specifically feudal relationship here is unlike
the kind of relationship based on a contract (as relationships between
employees and employers in modern societies tend to be, for example).
Neither is it rigidly hierarchical. It is an ‘intensely personal relation,
envisaging two partners who choose, aid and respect each other as
individuals’ (21).
Activity
Think about the sort of relationships in contemporary societies and compare these to
what you have read about. How ‘emotional’ or ‘personal’ are the relationships between
people in the modern world of work?
74
Secondly, during the feudal period the beneficium or the fief became
tied to the commendatio. Remember, a fief (land and its inhabitants
etc) was granted by a lord to a vassal. In the feudal period, warfare was
expensive and warriors needed to equip themselves with expensive armour
and so on. The vassal used the economic resources made available by
exploiting the land to equip himself with horses, armour and weapons
and so forth to aid his lord in battle. Remember, there was no state to
supply an armed force! Also, as the lord and vassal were often near social
equals, the vassal needed to maintain a household that reflected his status
and which was suitable for his lord to stay in as his guest. The fief was
therefore granted in order to allow the vassal to look after himself and his
dependents and in order for him to have sufficient resources to help the
lord (militarily or otherwise).
Finally, the immunitas was also transformed within feudal relationships.
In the Roman period this meant households or estates that were immune
from the ordinary laws that operated across a territory. However, in the
feudal period, this became a crucial part of the system of rule rather than a
‘gap’ in it. What is meant by this is that the vassal was not simply permitted
but expected to exercise his own rule over his fief. He was expected to
defend and police his lands and (as we have seen) to extract resources from
the land in order to equip himself and his followers for battle with his lord.
In this way, the system of rule was highly decentralised.
Thus, the fief became an essential part of the commendatio. The lord was
obliged (through the immuntas) to allow the vassal ‘to remain undisturbed
in his possession of governance’ over his own lands (his fiefdom) in return
for the vassal’s obligation to aid the lord and to ‘extend and mediate his
[the lord’s] powers at the local level’ (22).
Consequences of feudal relations

The relationships (of lord and vassal) that formed the basis of the
system were established (voluntarily) between members of a warrior
elite enjoying an almost equal social status (in the commendatio). The
military preoccupation and concern for their social standing of both lords
and vassals meant that neither wished to take much of an active part in
the daily management of their possessions. However, this relationship
had enormous effects on those members of society (who comprised the
vast majority) who were outside it. This vast majority (of peasants, serfs,
dependents of all kinds) had to submit to these effects. The chain of
obligation stretched downwards to the peasants and serfs who worked
the vassals’ lands. Here protection from brigands, bandits and the military
incursions of armies controlled by other vassals and lords was granted in
return for labour on the land. Between the vassals and those lower down
the social scale, there was a very sharp degree of inequality. Vassals had
the right to lead, control and often to oppress their dependents. Such
dependents were therefore the passive ‘objects’ of rule and not active
subjects of a political relationship.
The precise relationships between lords and vassals were also widely
different as each relationship was negotiated on different terms. The rule
of the lords over the general population was therefore patchy and uneven.
As we have seen, this was mediated through the vassals’ control of their
fiefdoms, which the lords granted to them, and the extent of their powers
(the immunitas) depended on the specific relationship between lord and
vassal as originally negotiated. There was therefore a wide diversity in the
ways in which fiefs were held and in which they were governed and ruled.
75
Trends in the system

Throughout the feudal period, the main trend at work within the system
was that of fragmentation of larger units of rule into smaller and smaller
ones as vassals granted parts of their fiefs to lower vassals. In this
relationship no direct tie was maintained between the lower vassal and
the lord and one of the main tendencies in the system was towards what
has been referred to as ‘feudal anarchy’. However, there were some highly
dynamic features of the system which meant that it tended towards what
Michael Mann refers to as ‘development’ rather than anarchic collapse.
As we have seen, one of the main characteristics of the feudal period
in Europe was its divided nature. Most of us are used to living in a
segmented world of nation-states with broadly ‘national’ economies
contained within their borders. However, modern nation-states are
usually unified entities controlling specific geographically bounded
territories large enough for a successful market economy to operate
within its borders. As we have seen, some imperial systems of rule
attempted to become something that approximates to the ‘territorial’
state by centralising systems of rule and marshalling resources to set up
administrative systems that were independent of other powerful groups.
By contrast, during the feudal period, ‘no single power agency controlled
a clear-cut territory or the people within it’ (Mann, 1986: 376). Rather,
Mann argues, the Europe of the feudal period was a ‘multiple acephalous
federation’. In other words, it had no ‘head’, but neither was it divided (or
at least only nominally so) on recognisably national lines. It was composed
instead of a number of ‘small, cross-cutting interaction networks’ (376).
Most social relationships were extremely ‘localised’ and tended to be
focused on one or more ‘cell-like communities’. These were communities
that were relatively isolated from one another and formed small, quite
closed orders such as monasteries, villages, manors, castles, towns, guilds,
brotherhoods and so on.
However, Mann also argues that the relationships between these multiple
power networks were to some extent ‘regulated’ by the most extensive
power network then in existence, that of institutionalised Christianity (the
Catholic Church) across large areas of the continent. During this period,
the lands of the Christians were referred to as ‘Christendom’. In Chapter
9 we will explore how this idea gradually became synonymous with
‘Europe’ as a geographical entity. What is important for us to note here is
the capacity of ‘Christendom’ to act as a widespread regulatory agency
and to provide a normative system of values through its provision of a
powerful sense of social identity. Mann argues that this is very important
if we are to understand the development of a specific and peculiar
dynamism at work in Europe from the end of the tenth century onwards.
We have seen that in previous civilisations (we looked in some depth at
the Roman Empire) attempts to create extensive power networks were at
best sporadic. For example, a sense of common identity could usually only
be provided by the intensive education of elite groups into the cultural
norms and values of the imperial power. This was therefore confined to
only a very small segment of the populations within imperial systems,
which remained divided into localities largely run by their own native
ruling classes. ‘Compulsory cooperation’ (see discussion of this in previous
sections of this chapter) provided an inefficient and costly ‘infrastructure’
in the absence of a common identity or sense of common purpose.
The idea of Christendom was therefore important in that it provided
a basic level of ‘normative pacification’ (the widespread acceptance of
76
specific values to set standards of conduct and behaviour), as most of

the population subscribed to its belief systems and values. Property and
market relations were confirmed and maintained by these values both
within and between the cells that made up the social and economic
networks of medieval social formations. Therefore, Mann argues, each
‘local power network’ was relatively ‘outward-looking, feeling itself to
be part of a much larger common whole’ (377). One of the most notable
features of this system of divided rule was therefore the existence of a
powerful form of unifying and regulating social identity without the
existence of anything like a strong state.

• describe important aspects of the systems of rule that operated in
traditional states
• critically assess different theoretical accounts of the emergence and
development of systems of rule in traditional states
• critically assess theoretical approaches to systems of rule in traditional
states.
Sample examination questions

1. ‘Empires were ruled but not governed.’ Discuss.
2. Outline the key features of feudalism as a system of rule. In what ways
were its ‘developmental tendencies’ responsible for the transition to
new forms of rule?
77
Notes
78
Chapter 6: The absolutist state
Aim of the chapter

The aim of this chapter is to provide an outline of the ‘absolutist’ system of
rule and to demonstrate how aspects of absolutism led directly to ‘modern’
forms of rule. The chapter will also introduce you to different ideas about
the development of the modern state that will build on and consolidate the
work we have done in previous chapters.
Learning outcomes
• describe the chief characteristics of ‘absolutist’ states
• explain how and why the institutions and systems of rule of absolutist
states developed in the ways that they did and how they are related to
other dynamic processes of change
• explain the historical relationship between absolutist systems of rule
and different types of modern state
• explain competing interpretations of the historical processes involved
in the development of absolutist and modern systems of rule.
Essential reading
In your course pack:
Dean, M. ‘Bio-Politics and Sovereignty’ from Governmentality: Power and Rule
in Modern Societies. (London: Sage Publications, 1999). Note: this can be
found at the back of this subject guide.
Further reading
**Anderson, P. Lineages of the Absolutist State. (London: Verso, 1979)
[ISBN 9780805270259] Chapters 1 and 2 and Part III: Conclusion.
[ISBN 9780415064958].
Foucault, M. ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’ in The Will to Knowledge:
The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1998)
[ISBN 9780140268683].
Foucault, M. ‘Governmentality’ in Power: the Essential Works Volume 3. Edited by
J.D. Faubion (Allen Lane: Harmondsworth, 2000) [ISBN 9780140259575].
Foucault, M. ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ in Power: the
Essential Works Volume 3. Edited by J.D. Faubion
(Allen Lane: Harmondsworth, 2000) [ISBN 9780140259575].
** Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. (Cambridge: Polity, 1985)
79

** Poggi, G. The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978) [ISBN 9780804709590]
Chapter 4.
[ISBN 9781557863683] Chapter 3.
Works cited
[ISBN 9780805270259].
[ISBN 9780226163123].
Foucault, M. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1.
(Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1998) [ISBN 9780140268683].
[ISBN 9780520060395].
[ISBN 9781557863683].
Activity
Before beginning this chapter, read from section 2.3 of the Held chapter to the end.
Introduction
What were the specific conditions that gave rise to the modern nation-state?
In this chapter we will explore in detail some of the major characteristics of
new systems of rule that emerged in Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. These systems are usually referred to as ‘absolutist’
monarchies and they became particularly powerful in states such as France,
Prussia, Sweden, Austria and Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Other powerful European states of the period (England and Holland,
for example) are sometimes referred to as ‘constitutional states’. ‘Absolutist’
and ‘constitutional’ states are often thought of as being quite different from
one another in the ways that they wielded power and the ways in which the
exercise of power was justified. However, there are also great similarities
between these new types of state. Both types of state are usually thought of
as providing the preconditions for the development of ‘modern’ nation-states.
The difference between absolutist and constitutional states will be explored in
more depth in Chapter 7. The focus in this chapter will be on ‘absolutist’ states.
These systems of rule stand at the threshold of the ‘modern’ period and, as
such, sociologists have been especially interested in the conditions under
which they developed as they did. Remember, sociologists have always been
particularly interested in the processes through which the ‘modern’ world
came into being. Many of the political institutions of the modern state have
their origins in the systems of rule that we will examine in this chapter, as
do expectations about the scope and range of the state’s powers. Equally,
and importantly, expectations about the responsibilities of the state and
about the sort of activity that the state can effectively (and legitimately)
involve itself in were formed during this period.
80
Thinking back to what you have read in the last two chapters, you will
remember that sociologists have had many different and often competing
theories about how and why the modern nation-state developed.
Such theories are generally part of broader theoretical accounts of the
development of ‘modernity’ itself or of the trajectory of social change in
general. In looking at the way in which the modern state emerges out of
and is related to elements of absolutist systems of rule, we will be able to
further explore debates about social and historical processes and accounts
of social change that we have encountered in previous chapters.
In particular, we will look in detail at two accounts of the social, economic,
and political tendencies of absolutism. The first is Perry Anderson’s Lineages of
the Absolutist State, which offers a neo-Marxist account of absolutism. This
is an excellent example of a neo-Marxist account of changes to the form of
the state and methods of governance. In Anderson’s account, as we will see,
the absolutist state operates as an instrument of class power (the power of the
aristocracy, or nobility). Paradoxically, according to Anderson, the specifically
‘modern’ features of the state were developed in order to help maintain the
power of a class that we normally associate with feudal forms of rule.
The second account is that of the French historian and philosopher
Michel Foucault. We will look in some detail at the rise of what he refers
to as disciplinary power and ‘bio-politics’. We will also look at
another important concept developed by Foucault: governmentality.
Governmentality describes the new form of governing that arose
over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the absolutist states
that was closely allied with the creation and growth of the modern
bureaucracies. Quoting the sociologists of law Hunt and Wickham,
Mitchell Dean states that: ‘Governmentality is the dramatic expansion in the
scope of government, featuring an increase in the number and size of the
governmental calculation mechanisms’ (1994: 76). In other words, in giving
this definition, Hunt and Wickham conceive of the term as consisting of two
parts – ‘governmental’ and ‘–ity’: governmental meaning ‘pertaining to the
government of a country’ and the suffix –ity meaning ‘the study of’. They
acknowledge that this definition lacks some of Foucault’s finer nuances and
try to redress this by explaining some more of Foucault’s ideas, including
‘reason of state, the problem of population, modern political economy,
liberal securitisation, and the emergence of the human sciences’ (1994: 77).
Activity
Read sections 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 in Held.
The ‘absolutist’ system of rule

Poggi claims that the absolutist system of rule is ‘the first mature embodiment
of the modern state’ (1978: 62). In this and the next section we will examine
some of the reasons why Poggi was able to make this argument. We will
also look at the differences between absolutist and traditional systems
of rule, bearing in mind that they have been characterised as ‘exotic,
hybrid compositions whose surface “modernity” again and again betrays a
subterranean archaism’ (Anderson, 1974: 29). We will also examine competing
accounts of how and why absolutist states developed in the ways that they did.
As we have seen, the feudal order that prevailed across large parts of
Europe following the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the
fifth century was characterised by a divided system of rule. No system of
centralised administration was possible across territories that nominally
belonged to specific rulers, but who were in most cases unable to exercise
81
uniform authority. They were, as we have also seen, considered to be

primus inter pares (see Chapter 5) and were expected to respect the
very many local and regional customs, laws and centres of power and
authority that prevailed within their territories.
With absolutism, we see for the first time the emergence of ‘government’
in the modern sense (Giddens, 1986: 93). By this we mean the capacity
of states to rule effectively and uniformly across an entire territory or, as
Poggi argues, ‘the ability to initiate collective action, to participate in the
determination of public policy and supervise its execution, to attend to the
needs of the larger society and shape its future’ (Poggi: 68).
Before we go on to explore in detail the organisation of the absolutist
state, we need to look briefly at the political justification for this new
kind of state organisation. This was based largely on an idea that became
known as the ‘Divine Right of Kings’. This was given clear justification in
the writings of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704). Bossuet argued
that the king ruled absolutely by will of God, and that to oppose the king
in effect constituted rebellion against God. Bossuet argued that kings ruled
because they were specifically chosen by God. Kings could not therefore
be questioned or disobeyed; this became known as ‘absolutism’, since
the monarch ruled with ‘absolute’ power, that is, unshared power. God’s
purpose in instituting absolute monarchy was to protect and guide society.
Activity
Now, go back and carefully re-read section 2.4 of the Held chapter. Make notes on what
you read in answer to the following questions:
• What was the absolutist form of the state based upon?
• Make a list of the factors that Held says are important.
Look at the statement by the French monarch Louis XIV which is quoted at the bottom of
page 83.
• What does this tell us about the role of the monarch in the absolutist state? How
does this vision of monarchical power appear to differ from that current during
the feudal period?
Figure 6.1 Louis XIV, King of France (1638–1715)

82
Borders
Look at the list of characteristics of absolutist states at the bottom of page
84 of the Held chapter. The first of these is the ‘coincidence of territorial
boundaries with a uniform system of rule’. As we have seen, territorial
boundaries in ‘traditional’ states were very much looser than those which
divide modern states from one another. Thinking back to Chapter 5, you
will remember that traditional states had ‘frontiers’ rather than borders in
the modern sense. This is an important distinction. A ‘frontier’ is an area
in the peripheral regions of a state, usually sparsely populated and where
the political authority of the centre is relatively weak and thinly spread.
‘Frontiers’ do not necessarily mark a boundary between states. Beyond
the frontier there may have been tribal groups or unpopulated lands. A
‘border’ however is ‘a known and geographically drawn line separating
and joining two or more states…[B]orders are nothing other than lines
drawn to demarcate states’ sovereignty. As such, it is irrelevant to their
nature what type of terrain (or sea) that they pass over’ (Giddens, 1985:
50). Within a border, the laws of one state apply; across the border, those
of another are enforced. Borders are often very strictly policed.
This is an important point. Giddens argues that borders only came
into existence with the emergence of nation-states. Attempts by
absolutist states to consolidate and intensify their control over their
territory marked an important step towards the establishment of
meaningful borders between states. You will notice that point five on
Held’s list of developments in the absolutist state is ‘the formalisation
of relations among states through the development of diplomacy and
diplomatic institutions’. In other words, during this period, a system
of states developed. Giddens argues that this state system was, by
the seventeenth century, becoming both ‘integrated’ and that it was
‘reflexively monitored’. This means that states could not act purely
independently of one another as they had to take into consideration
the territorial ambitions of other states and make calculations about what
the consequences of their actions would be in terms of potential military
reprisals. They also had to ‘talk’ to one another through elaborate new
channels of diplomacy.
We will look more closely at the state system, and in particular at the role
of competition and warfare between states in Chapter 7. For now it is
important to bear in mind that the modern state emerged out of a complex
set of interactions between internal and external factors.
Activity
Think about what is inside and what is outside the border of a modern state. If you cross
the border into another state you are immediately subject to a different set of laws.
Membership (or citizenship) of a state usually brings with it certain benefits as well as
certain duties. However, if you are not a citizen of a state you will almost certainly have
few or no rights. Think about the status of refugees.
The remaining points on Held’s list of key developments all relate to the
internal factors involved in reordering the state undertaken by absolutist
monarchs, although, as we will see, several of these relate at least partly
to needs caused by largely external factors (in particular, the necessity to
wage war).
83
Law
Held’s second point relates to the development of new mechanisms of law-
making and law enforcement. Most of us now live in states in which the
law applies equally in all areas within the territory of the state and to all of
the state’s citizens. As we saw with feudalism, laws tended to be based on
custom and tradition, and different geographical regions, different towns
or cities and different classes of people were often governed by quite
separate laws. This clearly made it very difficult for central authorities
to govern in anything like the way that we are now used to, that is,
evenly and uniformly across an entire territory and its entire population.
However, a number of factors began to significantly change this situation.
As Poggi argues, in the hand of absolute monarchs law is changed from a
‘framework for into an instrument of rule’ (1978: 73).
The second is related to the ‘rediscovery’ during the later medieval period
of Roman Law. The Roman legal system was made up of two distinct
areas, the civil law (or jus) which regulated economic transactions
between citizens (contracts, for example) and public law (or lex) which
governed the political relations between the state and its subjects. The
latter had, during the Roman imperial period, provided the legal basis
for the absolute sovereign power of the emperors. The Roman maxim
quod principi placuit legis habet vicem (‘the ruler’s will has force of law’) is
the essence of this form of sovereign power. The theoretical principles of
absolute sovereignty ‘exercised a profound influence and attraction on the
new monarchies’ (Anderson, 1974: 27). In other words, the rediscovery of
Roman Law helped to legitimise the concentration of power in the hands
of the new ‘absolute’ monarchs and was the ‘most powerful intellectual
weapon available for their typical programme of territorial integration and
administrative centralism’ (28).
Activity
In what way does the legal principle that monarchs are free from all legal constraints and
the ‘source’ of law undermine feudal principles of rule?
Roman civil law (or jus) had sanctioned the private ownership of
property. The re-introduction of various aspects of Roman civil law in a
number of states over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided
the means to separate private from public (or communal) property. This
was something that had been impossible during the Feudal period, during
which there was a much less clear distinction between public and private
property (Giddens, 1985: 100). On an economic level, private ownership
of property (of land and goods, for example) is one of the important
preconditions for the development of an economy based on commodity
exchange. The effects of the introduction of principles from Roman Law
therefore had the effect of enhancing the right to private property whilst
simultaneously increasing the public authority of the state, which was
embodied in the absolute ruler.
The adoption of legal principles that sanction both absolute power for
the monarch and the unconditional ownership of private property might
seem paradoxical. However, as we will see, from a Marxist perspective,
securing private property worked for both the nobility (in whose interest
the absolutist state continued to operate) and the rising bourgeois class
also.
84
The second aspect of law that we need to consider is that of the question
of sovereignty itself. We have seen that absolutist monarchs ‘claimed
to be the ultimate source of human law’ and that their legitimacy was
‘understood to derive from the law of God’ (Held, 1992: 83/4). However,
as we have seen, this is an old idea that long predates absolutism itself.
Ancient empires had their God-Emperors and their despots. The difference
between the exercise of absolute power by a monarch in traditional
states and those in the absolutist states of seventeenth and eighteenth
century Europe lies in the way that the monarch became a personalised
expression of a ‘secularised administrative entity’ (Giddens,
1992: 94). In other words, the monarch in the absolutist system represents
not just him or herself but also the power of the state (the ‘secularised
administrative entity’), which begins to be seen as a social actor in its own
right. This is a very important point. As Giddens argues, it marks the point
at which ‘government in the modern sense’ begins to develop because the
state itself begins to be seen as something that the monarch represents
and therefore as having powers and capacities of its own.
Thirdly, and related strongly to the issue of sovereignty and the
development of a more abstract concept of state power, impersonal codes
of law meant to apply to the whole population of the state were drawn
up across many European states. These did not include exclusions
according to ‘rank’ (that is, the nobility were not excluded on the grounds
of custom, for example). They were universal in that they applied
equally to all. The law then became part of a generalised apparatus
of power, rather than the personal ‘tool’ of an individual monarch.
Monarchs may have wielded enormous power but this was done through
administrative channels and legal mechanisms that began to be associated
with the state as an entity in itself which individual monarchs served.
Finally, law enforcement also began to change significantly during this
period. Along with new theories of sovereignty that were developed over
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a new concern with
questions of social order and social discipline. As we have seen,
internal pacification is a vital factor in the development of a state’s
ability to govern its own territory evenly and uniformly. States have highly
developed capacities to ‘monitor, control and monopolise the effective
means of violence’ (Tilly, 1992: 68).
However, this has by no means always been the case. Throughout most of
human history ordinary members of the population were heavily armed
and local and regional power-holders had control of concentrated means
of force which could on occasion overwhelm the power of the centralised
state (see Chapter 5). Duels were fought as a right in order to settle
personal disputes and members of the nobility often had the right to
wage private wars. States by no means had a monopoly over the use of
legitimised violence.
However, since the seventeenth century, states began to decisively act
against the use of violence by individuals within the population and by
rival centres of power. The civilian populations of states were gradually
disarmed: weapons were seized or confiscated, duels prohibited, the
holders of weapons were made to require licences and ownership of
weapons was seriously restricted. At the same time, the state’s own
expansion of its armed forces (both military and police) began to
overshadow those of any rival centre of power within the territory. As
states themselves became more and more warlike, their populations
became more ‘docile’ and more intensively disciplined.
85
The emergence of forms of social discipline and control aimed at

producing docile, disciplined citizens can be related to a number of
important developments within states during this period. Disciplinary
institutions and techniques emerged across societies from the
seventeenth century onwards: prisons, work houses, houses of correction,
asylums and hospitals all formed part of a network of institutions designed
to discipline elements of the population that became labelled as ‘criminal’
and to seek out and eradicate ‘deviancy’. This separation of the ‘deviant’
from the ‘normal’ became a key feature of techniques of social control in
the nation-states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Activity
Read the short extract below:
…the idea that the ruler could, by an act of his sovereign will, produce new
law and have it enforced by his own increasingly pervasive and effective
system of courts was wholly revolutionary. It transformed law from a
framework of into an instrument for rule. Furthermore, since such law was
designed to apply uniformly over the territory, the provincial and regional
[authorities] lost the ability to adapt it to local conditions. Through such new
law, the ruler addressed himself ever more clearly and compellingly to the
whole population of the territory. He disciplined relations in increasingly
general and abstract terms, applicable ‘wherever and whenever’.
(Poggi, 1978: 73)
• In what way is the law in modern states ‘an instrument of rule’?
• Why is it important that the law applies equally to everyone?
Thinking about these questions, write about 500 words on the way that the legal changes
under absolutism made rule more intensive and more effective.
Centralisation
If you now go back to Held’s list of important developments in
the absolutist state, you will notice that the third on the list is the
‘centralisation of administrative power’. This is obviously a highly
important development if we think about the highly diffuse forms of
power that operated in ‘traditional’ states. As we have seen, even in
cases where power was relatively centralised (in some ancient empires,
for example), it was extremely difficult for rulers to exert authority over
widespread geographical areas and across their populations in a uniform
manner. We have said that the absolutist state is ‘transitional’. This means
that in many respects it is closer to the traditional states that we have
looked at in previous chapters than to the modern nation-state. However,
as we have also seen, it also contains a number of dynamic features that
will develop into key institutional features of the modern state. One of the
most important of these is the centralisation of administrative power.
One of the key means by which states were able to strengthen their capacity
to govern their territories was through the development of powerful and
efficient centralised systems of administration. We saw in Chapter 4 how
rulers of what Eisenstadt calls ‘centralised bureaucratic empires’ had
attempted to take power away from social groups within their states. This
was in some cases partly achieved by placing the administration of the state in
the hands of a non-hereditary class of bureaucrats. Within absolutist systems
of rule, especially as these developed over the eighteenth century, monarchs
were able to rule through a ‘large and elaborately constructed and regulated
body of public organs engaged in administrative activities that were…
continuous, systematic, pervasive, visible, and effective’ (Poggi, 1978:74).
86
For example, in Prussia a highly effective administrative system was

developed during the reigns of Frederick William I (1713–1740) and
Frederick the Great (1740–1786). Members of the administrative
system were not under the direct command of the ruler as his personal
functionaries. Rather, they were ‘under the guidance and control of
a body of enacted norms that articulated the state’s power (unitarily
conceived) into a number of functions…’ (75). In other words, authority
was exercised systematically through an impersonal bureaucracy that
served the state itself rather than the person of the monarch. Importantly,
the individuals that worked within this bureaucracy were paid salaries
drawn from a central fund and they did not depend on any of the revenue
that their work might generate (this was especially important in work
involving the taxation of the population). Posts were given on merit
rather than according to ‘rank’, individuals were trained and tested,
and the posts themselves were not hereditary.
Also of great importance was the fact that the day-to-day decision-
making and other business of government was transacted in writing and
recorded in files and archives. All states have kept written records of
their business and this has always been a highly important way in which
they have been able to exercise power. The systematic keeping of records
expanded enormously during this period, as did new forms of recording
facts and data about the population of a state. The expanding army of
state functionaries also took advantage of new techniques of data
collection (from the early nineteenth century statistical records began to
be kept) and new methods of surveillance were used to quantify and
classify everything from economic activity to the health and welfare of the
population.
Think back to Eisenstadt’s arguments (see Chapter 5) about the attempts
by rulers of the centralised bureaucratic empires to intensify their rule over
territories through the creation of ‘independent’ sources of revenue and
personnel that they could draw on in pursuit of their goals. We can see
that the system created under absolutism develops and extends this model.
Activity
Read the following short passage by the sociologist Gianfranco Poggi. The ‘state’ that
Poggi is discussing here is the absolutist state.
the state was intended to operate as the instrument of its own enacted
laws, thereby making its activities systematised, coordinated, predictable,
machinelike, and impersonal…[T]he state was made transcendent
over the physical person of its head through the depersonalisation and
objectification of its power. Public law shaped the state as an artificial,
organisational entity operating through individuals who in principle were
interchangeable and who in their official activities were expected to
employ their certified abilities in…loyalty to the state and commitment to
its interests.
(Poggi, 1978: 76)
• What does Poggi mean when he argues that the state is ‘impersonal’?
• What is meant by: ‘the state was made transcendent over the physical person of
its head’?
• In what way is this different to ‘patrimonial’ state power?
• What do you think Poggi means when he argues that the state was an ‘artificial,
organisational entity operating through individuals who in principle were
interchangeable…’? Describe in your own words what he means by this.
87
Taxation
Returning to Held’s list, the fourth item there is the ‘alteration and
extension of fiscal management’. One of the key features of absolutist
rule involved the introduction of new systems of taxation. As we have
seen, rulers of traditional states relied on forms of tribute or on a strictly
limited capacity to extract money and resources from the territories
and populations that they ruled. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries warfare between European states (see Chapter 7) became
costlier and more widespread. States found it necessary to spend vast sums
of money on maintaining and equipping large armies and navies. In order
to compete successfully for territory or for influence and power against
other states it became necessary to raise larger and larger amounts of
revenue. We will see in Chapter 7 how this necessity led directly to many
radical changes in the ways that states were organised.
We have now considered a number of features of ‘absolutism’ in terms
of the reorganisation of key aspects of the state and the development
of a distinctly ‘modern’ series of institutions and frameworks for rule.
In Chapter 7 we will examine in more detail two remaining features of
absolutist systems of rule (the growth of ‘standing armies’ and diplomatic
relations between states). We will examine these developments (and
consider the developments that we have already discussed) in relation to
the necessities imposed on states by almost continuous warfare.
In the next sections of this chapter, we will look in detail at two accounts
that attempt to explain the emergence of these systems of absolutist rule in
wider context.
Interpreting the absolutist state 1: the Neo-Marxist

account
In chapter three we saw that Marx argues that the state is essentially
an instrument of class rule. On rare occasions when no single class is
dominant, Marx argues, the state might become ‘independent’ of a single
class and its interests. Marx argues that absolutism arose as an alliance
between the monarchy and the bourgeois class against the nobility. He
argued that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rising
bourgeois class (and, in particular, their economic power) was used by
monarchs to build a powerful, centralised state through which they could
rule without reliance on the nobility. In return, the state created conditions
through legal and financial regulation that allowed bourgeois commercial
interests to flourish. This view has been largely discredited by historians
(including, as we will see, Marxist historians) who have emphasised the
continuing ‘feudal’ (or ‘noble’) character of the absolutist state (Giddens,
1985: 97).
The basic premise of Marxist analysis was used by Perry Anderson in his
influential book Lineages of the Absolutist State. Remember, we saw in
Chapter 3 that historical sociology tends to draw on existing sociological
theory as a tool of analysis and to modify it where the circumstances
require. Anderson makes use of Marx’s arguments about the state as an
instrument of class power. In this section we will examine Anderson’s
argument and relate it to Marx’s account of social and historical change.
Anderson argues that the absolutist state was an ‘exotic, hybrid
composition whose surface “modernity” again and again betrays a
subterranean archaism’ (Anderson, 1974: 29). What he means by this is
that absolutist states developed systems of rule that can seem strikingly
88
‘modern’ (centralised, bureaucratic, bound by laws). However, it would

be a mistake to think of these states as ‘modern’ in the ways that we
understand this term. Rather, Anderson argues, absolutist states were
powerful mechanisms that consolidated and strengthened the class rule
of the nobility.
Remember, in feudal societies, the mass of the population worked on
the land. Peasants were tied to the land and were in most respects
the ‘property’ of the landowning class of nobles. For the mass of the
population, there was no system of wage labour (labour was not
considered to be a commodity that could be bought and sold on the
market). Rather, a system of obligations meant that the peasant as the
direct producer of (agricultural) goods had to surrender the bulk of this
produce to the landowner. This was not an employer-employee relation in
the way that we are used to. The peasant was not free to move to another
landowner in order to find more favourable conditions. This system is
referred to as ‘serfdom’.
However, in the late fourteenth century, a number of factors (particularly
in Western Europe) led to a crisis in this system. The growth of towns
and cities that were largely outside feudal relationships provided an
attractive market for labour and many peasants left the land and sought
work there. Equally, a series of economic and demographic crises in the
countryside (the ‘black death’, for example, wiped out almost a third
of the population) meant a partial breakdown of feudal relations and a
widespread recourse to forms of monetary rent for land and wage
labour. This weakened the power of the nobility as a class as it cut off
the major source of their economic strength, which was based on their
capacity to extract labour and produce from the peasantry.
Anderson argues that in order for the nobility to retain their power,
the whole feudal political system (or state) needed to be revised and
reformed:
The class power of the feudal lords was thus directly at stake
with the gradual disappearance of serfdom. The result was a
displacement of politico-legal coercion upwards toward a
centralised militarised summit – the Absolutist State…The result
was a reinforced apparatus of royal power, whose permanent
political function was the repression of the peasant and plebeian
masses at the foot of the social hierarchy.
(Anderson, 1974: 19)
So, although the absolutist state might look at first glance as if it
challenges the power of the nobility (it centralises power, for example,
at the expense of the local sovereignty of feudalism), it nonetheless
reinforces noble power. Although power ‘moves upwards’ from local and
regional centres towards the monarch and the centralised machinery of
the state, it does so in order to rescue the power of the nobility.
Remember, the power of the noble class was under threat as serfdom
broke down at a local level. The absolutist state imposed ‘discipline’ on
the nobility and removed some of their political power. However, at the
same time it also developed a much more concrete legal framework for
the ownership of private property and the coercive means to enforce
rights of ownership against challenges from below. As Anderson argues,
the revival of Roman Law (see previous section on ‘Law’) enabled, for
example, the single and unconditional ownership of land, which clearly
benefited the nobility. Although the ‘re-discovery’ and the development
of notions of absolute private property are often thought of as benefiting
89
above all the bourgeois or capitalist class, this was not necessarily the case.
Rather, the absolutist state enforced rights to property primarily on behalf
of the nobility, and the fact that the rising bourgeois class benefited from
this was peripheral to the state’s intention.
In the activity below you will find a passage from Anderson’s book. Here
he summarises many of the arguments that he makes in the book as a
whole.
Activity
Read the following passage from Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State.
…the apparent paradox of Absolutism in Western Europe was that it
fundamentally represented an apparatus for the protection of aristocratic
property and privileges, yet at the same time the means by which
this protection was promoted could simultaneously ensure the basic
interests of the mercantile and manufacturing classes. The Absolutist
State increasingly centralised political power and worked towards more
uniform legal systems…It did away with a large number of internal
barriers to trade, and sponsored external barriers against foreign
competitors…It provided lucrative if risky investment in public finance for
capital…It mobilised rural property by seizure of ecclesiastical lands…
It ordered rentier sinecures in the bureaucracy. It sponsored colonial
enterprises and trading companies…In other words, it accomplished
certain partial functions in the primitive accumulation necessary for the
eventual triumph of the capitalist mode of production itself. The reasons
why it could perform this ‘dual’ role lie in the specific nature of merchant
or manufacturing capital: since neither rested on the mass production
characteristic of machine industry proper, neither in themselves
demanded a radical rupture with the feudal agrarian order which still
enclosed the vast majority of the population (the future wage-labourer
and consumer market of industrial capitalism). In other words, they could
develop within the limits set by the reorganised feudal framework. This
is not to say that everywhere did so: political, religious or economic
conflicts could well fuse into revolutionary explosions against Absolutism
after a certain period of maturation, in specific conjectures. There was,
however, always a field of compatibility at this stage between the nature
and programme of the Absolutist State and the operations of mercantile
and manufacturing capital. For in the international competition between
noble classes that produced the endemic warfare of the age, the size
of the commodity sector within each ‘national’ patrimony was always
of critical importance to its relative political and military strength.
Every monarchy thus had a stake in gathering treasure and promoting
trade under its own banners, in the struggle against its rivals. Hence
the ‘progressive’ character those subsequent historians have so often
conferred on the official policies of Absolutism. Economic centralisation,
protectionism and overseas expansion aggrandised the late feudal state
while they profited the early bourgeoisie. They increased the taxable
revenues of the one by providing business opportunities of the other. The
circular maxims of mercantilism, proclaimed by the Absolutist State, gave
eloquent expression to this provisional coincidence of interests. It was
appropriately the Duc de Coiseul, in the last decades of the aristocratic
ancien regime in the West who declared: ‘Upon the navy depend the
colonies, upon the colonies commerce, upon commerce the capacity of
the State to maintain numerous armies, to increase its population and to
make possible the most glorious and useful enterprises.’
90
Yet, as the final cadence of ‘glorious and useful’ implied, the irreducible
feudal character of Absolutism remained. It was state founded on the social
supremacy of the aristocracy and confined to the imperatives of landed
property. The nobility could deposit power with the monarchy, and permit
the enrichment of the bourgeoisie: the masses were still at its mercy. No
‘political’ derogation of the noble class ever took place in the Absolutist State.
Its feudal character constantly ended up frustrating and falsifying its promises
for capital…Army, bureaucracy, diplomacy and dynasty remained a hardened
feudal complex which governed the whole State machine and guided its
destinies. The rule of the Absolutist State was that of the feudal nobility in
the epoch of the transition to capitalism. Its end would signal the crisis of the
power of its class: the advent of the bourgeois revolutions, and the emergence
of the capitalist State.
(Anderson, 1974: 40–42)
Think about the following questions:
• In what ways does Anderson argue that the absolutist state was one in which the
power of the nobility was enhanced?
• How did this also partially aid the new bourgeois class?
Now write about 500 words outlining how Anderson argues that the absolutist state was
an instrument of class power.
Interpreting the absolutist state 2: discipline,

governmentality and ‘bio-power’
A quite different way of understanding the historical processes at work in
the developments that shaped the absolutist state and ultimately led to
the emergence of modern states is given by the French historian Michel
Foucault. Foucault argues that, starting in the seventeenth century, new
forms of power emerged that ‘targeted’ the population. By ‘population’
Foucault means the people that live within the territory (at least nominally)
controlled by a state. With the emergence of more territorially bounded
states, the population within the territory began to be seen as a resource
alongside other such resources (mineral wealth, for example). The
transformation of (largely) peasant masses into disciplined, self-regulating
and productive workers was not a project initiated or directed by the
state, however. Rather it was something that (as we will see) emerged
in a number of institutions and institutional settings. As new logics of
governance (see Dean) began to operate, the techniques and practices
that were establishing themselves within different areas of criminal justice
(prisons especially), and in pedagogic, military and medical settings, began
to be utilised in a more widespread and systematic fashion. The state’s
capacities (for surveillance and control) were therefore enhanced.
Foucault’s work
Foucault’s work was concerned with the operation of power within
modern societies. His work attempted to show how the systems of power
and governance at work in contemporary societies has a particular history
that can be traced by looking in what might often be thought of as rather
unlikely places (prisons, asylums, hospitals, for example). He does not
argue that particular groups in society (‘classes’, for example) or states
themselves held power or that power worked downwards from the state
and through institutions. Rather, he suggests that the state was one power
centre amongst others and that its powers were enhanced over time
through the adoption of forms of governance and control that had their
origins in an array of different institutional settings.
91
As we have seen, the emerging European states of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries had become much more concerned with
the management of their resources as competition between them
for dominance in Europe and for control of overseas territories led to
expensive wars. Foucault argues that the population itself began to be seen
as just such a resource. This required a number of important changes in
the ways that states thought about their role and the exercise of power.
Traditionally, the exercise of ‘sovereignty’ involved the ‘right to decide life
and death’ (Foucault, 1998: 135). Remember, one of Weber’s definitions
of the state is that it has a monopoly (or seeks such a monopoly) over
the legitimate means of violence. Ultimately the main sanction that a
sovereign has is the right to take away the life of his/her subjects. In other
words, power is exercised through the sovereign’s ‘right to kill’, which is
the ultimate form of punishment available. Foucault argues that this form
of power (the right to kill) must be seen as part of a historical type of
society in which power was:
…exercised mainly as a means of deduction, a subtraction
mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax
of products, goods and services labour and blood, levied on the
subjects (136).
Activity
What do you think that Foucault means when he refers to power as a ‘means of
deduction, a subtraction mechanism’?
Think about what we have said so far about the state.
Have all the states that we have considered so far exercised power in this way?
Foucault argues that, from the seventeenth century onwards, these

mechanisms of power (based on ‘deduction’) have undergone a ‘very
profound transformation’ (136). ‘Deduction’ is no longer the most
important form of power, but only one element among many. Power now
works to:
…incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise, and organise the
forces under it: [it is] a power bent on generating forces, making
them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to
impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
In other words, the power to take life has been replaced by a power to
foster life.
Discipline
This new power over life, Foucault argues, has two specific dimensions.
The first is as an ‘anatamo-politics’ of the human body. This refers to the
disciplinary control and creation of ‘docile bodies’. This was achieved
through a number of means. We have already seen that one of the features
of the absolutist state was its extension of forms of disciplinary control.
Foucault argues that from the seventeenth century onwards new ‘political
technologies of the body’ have emerged that have produced individuals
who are simultaneously more docile and more productive. These
technologies emerge initially within an array of institutions of confinement
– asylums, hospitals, poorhouses and workhouses, factories and schools
– in which inmates are subject to strict forms of bodily discipline,
surveillance and control.
92
Ultimately, Foucault argues, the model for this form of power is the
Panopticon, a type of prison. It is an ‘exemplary technology’ and the
techniques it employed have since become widespread across social
institutions. Its chief characteristics are:
• its ability to make the spread of power efficient
• its ability to discipline individuals with the least exertion of force
• its ability to increase to a maximum the visibility of those subjected
• the intimate link it creates between bodies, space, power and
knowledge.
The Panopticon allows ‘seeing without being seen’. This asymmetry
between observer and observed, the capacity to see without being seen,
is, in fact, the very essence of power for Foucault because ultimately the
power to dominate rests on the differential possession of knowledge
that is exemplified in this unequal relationship.
Foucault goes on to argue that this is a new form of power that targets
both the body and the mind, and that is designed to ‘train’ and recompose
the body and its forces, to render them docile and productive. This new
form of power is not confined to the prison – it is a form of power that has
become generalised across society. It is a form of power that is ‘capable of
operating everywhere in a continuous way down to the finest grain of the
social body…’ (Foucault, 1975: 79).
Disciplinary power operates through the establishment and policing
of ‘norms’ and through ‘technologies of normalisation’ which seek out
‘abnormalities’ that they must then treat and reform. Foucault argues
that these ‘abnormalities’ are produced by the very systems of power,
knowledge and surveillance that are set up to seek out and ‘cure’ them.
Bio-politics
The second aspect of this new form of power targets the population as
a whole, which now begins to be thought of in more ‘biological’ terms.
For the first time in history, scientific categories such as ‘species’ and
‘population’ became the object of government (Dreyfuss and Rabinow,
1983: 134). In other words, they began to be seen as ‘problematic’
categories that could not be taken for granted but which needed to be
investigated and governed in new ways. The aim of government became
the supervision of the processes that maximised the vitality of the
population. This is referred to as ‘bio-politics’ or ‘bio-power’.
Foucault argues that there are two main aspects of ‘bio-power’ and that
both emerge separately in the seventeenth century and come together in a
single new ‘logic’ of power at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The first pole concerns the ‘human species’ (or at least that portion of it
living in a specific state). For the first time in history, scientific categories
such as ‘species’ and ‘population’ became the objects of political attention
in a serious and consistent manner. They were investigated through
a new array of scientific institutions which were themselves linked to
governmental institutions for the control and administration of the
population through health and welfare services.
The second pole was concerned with the body as an object to be
manipulated. We have already seen how disciplinary power works to
create docile, productive and self-regulated populations ruled by notions
of the ‘norm’. Both of these forms of power work through a diverse range
of institutions which are often not under the direct control of the state.
93
Foucault argues that a new type of political rationality emerges alongside

‘bio-political’ concerns.
Foucault argues that from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards,
the family ceased to be used as a ‘model’ for how government ought to
function. Prior to this, it was ‘impossible to conceive the art of government
except on the model of the family’. Government was ‘conceived as the
management of a family’ (Foucault, 2000: 216). In other words, the
family had served as a model for thinking about how governments should
manage individuals, goods, wealth and so on. The father within the
traditional patriarchal family was responsible for the correct management
of wife, children and servants, and for making the family fortunes prosper.
It was thought that the territories, resources and populations of states
ought to be managed in a similar fashion, through the use of various ‘arts
of government’ (207).
However, Foucault argues that this way of thinking about government
and the state was replaced by one in which the family no longer serves
as a model for how things should be done, but as an ‘instrument’ of
government policy. This transformation in the way of conceiving the role
and responsibility of the state and the ‘art of government’ came about as a
result of the discovery of ‘the problem of population’ (215).
The state was no longer thought of as something that could achieve a state
of ‘harmony’ between classes and groups (as in much classical political
theory). Instead it began to be seen as something that should ‘continuously
oversee a set of ever changing forces that could be strengthened or
weakened by the political choices that a regime makes’. The ‘lives, deaths,
activities, work, miseries, joys of individuals become important because
these everyday concerns are now politically useful to the state’s strength
and vitality’ (Dean, 1994: 78). Clearly, as Giddens argues, this new method
of governance required a massive increase in methods and techniques of
knowledge-gathering and surveillance.
Foucault argues that a new ‘science’ of government emerged in the
eighteenth century which, through the widespread use of statistics,
began to regard the population as something that was subject to ‘laws’
of its own. For example, rates of births and deaths, levels of infant
mortality, and the frequency and severity of epidemics were all subject to
statistical analysis. At the same time, statistics also showed ‘that through
its shifts, customs, activities, and so on, population has specific economic
effects’ (Foucault, 2000: 216). For the first time, these effects began to be
quantified and the population began to be thought of as something that
required ‘governing’ in new ways.
Indeed, Foucault argues that ‘population comes to appear above all else as
the ultimate end of government’ (215). In other words, the state begins to
concern itself with the management of the ‘welfare of the population, the
improvement of its conditions, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health,
and so on’ (217). In this way the power of the state becomes tied up
with its capacity to monitor and to know the population and the trends
(biological and economic) at work within it.
Activity
Read the following short extract form Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge:
Another consequence of this deployment of bio-power was the growing
importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the
juridical system of the law. Law cannot help but be armed and its arm par
excellence is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least at last
94
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to the sword. But
a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory
and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death
into play in the field of sovereignty but of bringing the living into play in
the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchise, rather than display itself in its murderous
splendour…it effects distribution round the norm. I do not mean to say
that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice
tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a
norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into
a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative and so on) whose
functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalising society is the
historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life.
• What does Foucault mean by a ‘norm’?
• What are the implications for the new operation of the law as a norm that
Foucault talks about?
• Can you think of any examples of how contemporary societies are governed
through ‘norms’?
According to Foucault, modern power, developed in the ‘micro-practices’ of

numerous institutional settings, is not situated in a king, sovereign, ruling
class, state or army. It is everywhere. Foucault argues that power is
exercised, not possessed. It is not attached to agents, classes or other
interest groups, but is incorporated in practices. According to Foucault,
it is therefore more important to study practices than belief systems (or
ideology). State-centred analyses are also inadequate to the task, for they
assume that power emanates from a central point in society or that power
can be ‘possessed’ in a straightforward way by a ‘ruling class’.
Was the absolutist state ‘modern’?

We have seen that the absolutist states that emerged in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Europe have been characterised as an ‘exotic,
hybrid composition whose surface “modernity” again and again betrays a
subterranean archaism’ (Anderson, 1974: 29). As we have seen, Anderson
argues that absolutist states only appeared to be ‘modern’ institutions in
certain of their aspects. This ‘appearance’ of modernity is largely illusory
as the absolutist state was in fact a means of strengthening feudal social
relations (aristocratic power, for example).
According to Anderson, the ‘appearance’ of modernity is therefore
superficial. However, as we have seen, various institutional arrangements
emerged in this period that survived the general destruction of the
absolutist monarchies in the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the
eighteenth century. So, although the explicit purpose of absolutist systems
may well have been to rescue and enhance the threatened power of the
aristocracy, the institutional arrangements put in place to do this were
appropriated by other social groups and used for different purposes.
Poggi argues that there were two principal reasons for the continuity
between the absolutist states and key aspects of the modern state. Firstly,
the war-making capacity of the state was enhanced over the period of
absolutism and this required ever greater resources (in men and money).
The increased appeals to patriotism and to ideas of ‘nationhood’ over the
period acted as an ideological means for marshalling populations behind
drives for more tax revenues and greater levels of recruitment into armed
services. As we will see in Chapter 8, patriotism and more specifically
95
nationalism became powerful tools in the creation of the nation-states

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Calls for the representation of
economically influential groups (such as the bourgeois class) followed
on from this. So too did the idea that the state’s legitimation should
come from the representation of opinion from within civil society and that
this should become ‘the constituency of the system of rule rather than
simply its object’ (Poggi, 1978: 84).
Secondly, civil society grew more complex and conflict between the
bourgeoisie and the emergent working classes became more intense as
capitalist economic relations intensified over the eighteenth century. It
was therefore in the interests of the bourgeois class to ‘maintain and
even to strengthen the state’s potential for societal guidance, for the
defence of national boundaries, and for the moderation or repression
of conflict’. Poggi argues that this apparatus, which was already being
established by the absolutist state, had to be made amenable to control by
an ‘institutionalised public realm’, of which the emergent and increasingly
powerful and sophisticated bourgeois class was the leader, rather than
dismantled. Key institutional arrangements of the absolutist state therefore
continued in place into the very different social and political arrangements
that followed the defeat of the aristocratic order that had originally
established them. So, although we can see various continuities between
absolutist and modern systems of rule, this should not lead us to believe
that absolutist states were in themselves ‘modern’. Rather, certain of their
institutional arrangements were ‘borrowed’ and adapted.

• describe the chief characteristics of ‘absolutist’ states
• explain how and why the institutions and systems of rule of absolutist
states developed in the ways that they did and how they are related to
other dynamic processes of change
• explain the historical relationship between absolutist systems of rule
and different types of modern state
• explain competing interpretations of the historical processes involved
in the development of absolutist and modern systems of rule.

1. How ‘modern’ were absolutist states?
2. How and with what consequences did states begin to consider their
populations as a ‘resource’?
96
Chapter 7: War, capitalism and the emergence of the modern state
Chapter 7: War, capitalism and the

emergence of the modern state
Aim of the chapter

This chapter has two main aims:
• to demonstrate how war played a crucial role in the development of the
modern nation state
• to examine the role of capitalism in the emergence of ‘modern’ social
and economic conditions.
The chapter also aims to briefly introduce different forms that ‘modern’
states have taken.
Learning outcomes
• assess the impact of war and foreign relations on the development of
the modern state
• explain how and why specifically capitalist economic and social
relationships were involved in the development of state forms
• explain the historical relationship between capitalism, war and the
modern state
• describe competing interpretations of the historical processes involved
in the emergence of the modern state
• explain some of the similarities and differences between modern states
of different types.
Essential reading
Held, D ‘The Development of the Modern State’ in Hall, S., and B. Gieben
Further reading
[ISBN 9780805270259] Part I: Chapters 1 and 2 and Part III: Conclusion.
Publishing, 2004) [ISBN 9780631236160].
[ISBN 9781842120156].
** Mann, M. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge
Chapter 5.
97
Skocpol, T. States and Social Revolutions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1979) [ISBN 9780521294997].
** Skocpol, T. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780521297240] Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
Works cited
Publishing, 2004) [ISBN 9780631236160].
[ISBN 9780520060395].
[ISBN 9781557863683].
Winter, J.M. ‘Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First
World War’ in Journal of Contemporary History, 15, 1980, pp. 211–44.
Activity
Before beginning this chapter, read from section 2.3 of the Held chapter to the end.
Introduction
This chapter follows on from the discussion of ‘absolutism’ in Chapter 6.
There we saw that absolutist systems significantly changed the ways that
states were organised. We also looked at competing interpretations of the
social, political and economic factors that led to the development of the
absolutist state in neo-Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of class, power and
‘bio-political’ processes. In this chapter we will consider several important
factors that contributed to the emergence of modern states. Remember, the
absolutist state has often been referred to as a ‘transitional’ state, that is, a
state form that bridges the gap between traditional and modern states. The
questions that we need to ask are how and why the modern state form itself
emerged as a consequence of the processes that produced absolutism. In
doing so, we will also consider the types of modern state that have emerged.
This chapter will look in particular at three specific areas that link the state
forms that emerged in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century
(the ‘modern’ state) with other processes that sociologists identified as
giving shape to ‘modernity’. We will therefore look at the role that war and
capitalism have played in the development of modern state forms. We will,
however, bear in mind that it is not possible to locate a single factor at
work in the emergence of modern state forms, or modernity in general.
There is, as David Held argues, no mono-causal explanation for the way
that the modern state developed nor for the way it became the ‘supreme’
state form in the contemporary world. Remember, in Chapter 4 we saw
how Giddens argued that:
The social order…initiated by the advent of modernity is not just
an accentuation of previous trends of development. In a number
of specifiable and quite fundamental respects, it is something new.
We need to understand, therefore, how and why the factors involved in
the development of the modern world came together in the ways that they
did and created something that was new and unprecedented.
98
So far in this course we have focused on the development of the state as

one of the key factors in the ‘formation’ of modernity. However, as we have
seen, the development of the ‘domineering, categorising, Western-style
state’ (Bayley, 2004: 6), which has played such a key role in the modern
world, was itself a complex phenomenon in need of explanation. It is
very difficult, as many sociologists and historians argue, to locate a ‘prime
mover’ or ‘principal cause’ that was responsible for driving the process of
‘modernisation’.
During the later nineteenth and throughout large parts of the twentieth
century, ‘materialist’ explanations for social change predominated. These
forms of explanation regarded capitalism, and especially industrial
capitalism, as the motive force behind change. Of course, as Bayley argues,
it is ‘true that the critical historical change in the nineteenth century was the
shift of the most powerful states and societies towards urban industrialism’
(5) and so it is tempting to see a deep ‘logic’ at work in this process that
directs all other forms of change. However, attributing all the changes
that occurred during the making of the modern world to a single factor is
precisely what is meant by ‘mono-causal’ explanation. Purely ‘material’ or
economic forms of explanation have been described as ‘reductive’, which
means that they reduce all phenomena to the same level of explanation.
Remember, we noted in Chapter 4 that in Marxist accounts the state is an
epiphenomenon, which means that it is an ‘effect of’ (it exists because
of) another more profound process – in this case, the struggles between
economic classes. This is what is meant by ‘reductive’ explanation.
Such forms of reductive ‘materialist’ explanation have fallen out of
favour in recent years. Bayley argues that the ‘prime mover’ in the
social, economic and political transformations that led to ‘modernity’
has, for some historians and sociologists, become the state itself (or
‘governmentality’). However, this is an equally inadequate form of
explanation as it does not take into consideration how the state itself (nor
discourses of ‘governmentality’ and the practices they engendered) came
into being as a result of multiple causal factors.
War, finance and the emergence of the modern state

In Chapter 6, we saw that during the sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in Europe states were very significantly transformed.
Powerful and centralised systems of administration were developed
with responsibility for the collection of revenue, for the standardisation
of law and for the internal pacification of the territory. These changes
did not, however, occur in isolation, nor were they produced solely by
factors internal to societies (see Held, page 74). As we noted in Chapter
6, by the seventeenth century a number of states operated within Europe
independently of one another and in competition with one another. They
regarded each other as rivals for power, influence and territory. This
competition between states became particularly antagonistic as a direct
consequence of European overseas expansion, which began towards
the end of the fifteenth century as the development of shipbuilding and
navigation technologies allowed for lengthy voyages of ‘discovery’ and
conquest. Wars were fought both within Europe itself for territory and
influence on the continent and, significantly, overseas for colonial territory
or trading advantages. Within Europe itself a state system developed that
was both ‘integrated’ and ‘reflexively monitored’. This means that states
could not act purely independently of one another. They were forced to
take into consideration the territorial ambitions of other states and to
make calculations about what the consequences of their actions would be
in terms of potential military reprisals. 99
The ‘system’ to which individual states belonged was based primarily on

mutual recognition of the sovereignty of each of the states in question;
in other words, on a recognition of the right of each state to be considered
the sole and legitimate power over the territory which it commanded.
Eventually, this led to the idea that diplomacy (and in the last resort war)
should attempt to create a ‘balance of power’ in Europe between what
became known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Great
Powers. Following the frequent wars that occurred between the great
European powers over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this idea
of a ‘balance’ was monitored by frequent ‘congresses’ and conventions
that occurred at the end of protracted periods of warfare. This often led to
the map of Europe being substantially redrawn as some states were given
territories and some lost out in attempts to maintain the ‘balance’.
Activity
In the Held chapter, read from the beginning of the last paragraph on page 85 (‘By the
end of the seventeenth century…’) down to the end of section 2.5 on page 87 and
answer the following questions:
• What is the ‘model of Westphalia’?
• Describe the system and how and why it came into being, in about 500 words.
David Held states that the model of ‘Westphalia’ existed from the mid-seventeenth
century until the mid-twentieth century. Look at each of the numbered points he uses to
describe the system. Go through them and think carefully about whether each of them
still describes the world that we live in today. If not, what has changed? How effective
have these changes been?
One of the key factors in shaping the internal transformation of the

absolutist states was their need to raise revenue in order to fight wars.
This provided what Held describes as the ‘impetus to organise and
centralise the means of war’. It was also one of the key factors that led
to the development of the modern nation-state. The role of war in
the forging of modern systems of rule has been increasingly stressed
by sociologists. Remember, in Chapter 4 we noted that the classical
sociologists and the traditions that they founded tended to focus on the
pacific nature of processes of industrialisation that were shaping the
modern world. Even Marx, who foresaw capitalism as inevitably leading
to antagonism between classes, imagined a future socialist society that
would be free of conflict. Nonetheless, as Giddens argues, it is not possible
to think about the development of ‘modernity’ without simultaneously
thinking about the development of nation-states, and in turn it is not
possible to think about the development of the nation-state without
thinking about the crucial role that war and violence has played in its
organisation.
Activity
Now read section 3 (pp.90–103).
War and state-building

Why did wars occur at all? The central, tragic fact is simple:
coercion works; those who apply substantial force to their fellows
get compliance, and from that compliance draw the multiple
advantages of money, goods, deference, access to pleasures
denied to less powerful people.
(Tilly, 1992: 70)
100
The creation and maintenance of armies and navies created lasting state
structures. We often think of war as something that happens during
limited periods of time (the First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918,
for example). However, preparation for war and defence against attack
require permanent and strategic planning and of course permanent
expenditure with which to maintain and develop arms and armies. The
army (and of course the navy too) became a significant organisation
within the state and its construction and maintenance required permanent
organisations to fund it and administer it – treasuries, supply services,
mechanisms for conscription, tax bureaux and much more.
Mann argues that simply from an analysis of state finances, ‘the functions
of the state appear overwhelmingly military and overwhelmingly
geopolitical rather than economic or domestic’. For about 700 years
(and until very recently), somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of the
financial resources of European states were spent on acquiring and using
military resources.
As Mann also argues, ‘for several centuries the state grew only fitfully
and small degrees, though each real growth was the result of war
developments’ (1986: 513). With the arrival of widespread and costly wars
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, states were forced to grow
much more quickly. Those that could do so survived; those that could not,
disappeared.
Equally important were the far-reaching changes in military technology
and organisation that began to occur from about the fifteenth century
onwards.
Giddens notes three important sets of military developments that
transformed the capacity of states to wage war and which also significantly
changed the nature of war itself. Firstly, a series of linked technological
changes in armaments, including the introduction of gunpowder, changed
the way that wars were fought on land:
The gun had some very profound consequences for the shaping
of modern civilisation because, in the shape of modern artillery,
it helped sharply reduce the significance of the castle and the
city as containers of military power.
(Giddens, 1986: 107)
Armies had to be much more mobile and had to engage one another
in open combat. This required better equipment and, perhaps more
importantly, better discipline and better strategic planning. In ‘traditional’
warfare, rulers and their defenders had retreated into heavily fortified
garrisons or walled cities. However, with the introduction of gunpowder
and heavy artillery, walled cities, castles and garrisons no longer provided
protection as their defences could now be easily demolished. A whole
new science of military logistics and strategy had to be developed as well
as new systems of finance and administration to create and maintain the
much larger armies required for open warfare.
The second major development was initiated by the need for greatly
increased administrative power in the armed forces. Armies became larger
and better equipped and they also developed new techniques of discipline.
As we have seen (in Chapter 6), in his book Discipline and Punish Michel
Foucault argues that different institutional techniques were developed over
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the most important of
these specifically related to the deployment of the military:
101
By the late eighteenth century the soldier has become something

that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the
machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually
corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part
of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times,
turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short one has
“got rid of the peasant” and given him “the air of a soldier”.
(Foucault, 1976: 135)
Such a transformation of course required the building and maintenance of
a whole new infrastructure of academies, barracks, training camps and so
forth. The advances in military technology heavily favoured those states
which could, by whatever means, not just mobilise mass armies, but train
and deploy them in a regularised fashion.
The third development was that of naval strength. This was largely a
consequence of the technologies developed during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries by both military and commercial shipyards in the
‘maritime’ countries of North Western Europe with their large stretches of
Atlantic seaboard. The invention of large ocean-going sailing ships that
could be heavily armed made warfare at sea a possibility.
Activity
Carefully read pp.90–98 in Held.
We can see that the growth of the state is directly linked to the necessity
of financing foreign wars. We have already seen that warfare was
significantly changed by technological innovations that made it more
expensive. The territorial ambitions of states outside Europe also played
a significant role as warfare became ‘global’ and was tied to the ability
to plan, communicate and coordinate the activities of armies and navies
over vast distances. The figures on state expenditure in Held show that the
development and maintenance of a coercive capability was central to the
development of the state: if states wished to survive, they had to fund this
capability for war-making and to ensure the continuing effectiveness of
their fund-raising capacities. We have already seen how the administrative
apparatuses of the absolutist states were significantly transformed,
strengthened and made more ‘impersonal’ and bureaucratic. This was
largely in response to the financial burden imposed by warfare.
State-making required the capacity to effectively manage and mobilise
societal resources. This capacity required forms of internal pacification
of opposition within the state (see Chapter 6), but it also required the
capacity to defeat external enemies. The most successful state-makers
were therefore the ones that were capable of mobilising capacities and
resources within states in order to wage war against their competitors. We
have already seen that some states turned increasingly to the ‘bio-political’
management of their populations and that these processes also led to new
ways of conceiving the state’s resources and new ways of managing and
exploiting them.
The state system

War and the funding of the means to make war had a profound affect
on European states from at least the early fourteenth century onwards.
States have always made war (see Chapter 5), but one of the principal
differences that contributed to the radical changes in state form that war-
making in this period caused was the existence of a system of states.
102
As Held notes, competition among states was driven not just by the
ambitions of individual rulers but by ‘the very structure of the state
system’. We have seen that the state system was, in Giddens’ terms,
‘reflexively monitored’. One of the features of the system was an increasing
concern with security. Individual states had to be prepared for war (in
case they were attacked). This generated insecurity in other states, which
responded by building up their own military capacities. Systems of covert
surveillance using networks of spies monitored rival states’ readiness for
war. Through the use of such systems, states attempted to uncover military
secrets, technological advances in military hardware, or developments
in strategic thinking that might give their rivals the edge in any future
conflict. This led to a vicious circle in which states became mutually
suspicious of one another and therefore armed themselves against any
possible threat. This armament itself led to further insecurity in other
states. In short, states were now part of a system in which action by one
had consequences for all of the others. We can see this clearly in arms
races today.
Extraction and representation

Obviously, and as we have already seen, the ability to wage war depends
on a number of important factors, one of the most important of which
is the capacity of the state to extract resources (tax revenues, men, etc)
from its territories. These increased requirements had a direct impact on
the populations within states. A state’s inhabitants (its population) were
required to pay more in taxes (either in money or in kind), or in some
cases were conscripted into the new standing armies. Standing armies
(permanent armies that are maintained even during peacetime) were
created as states came to rely less and less on mercenaries to fight their
wars.
Tilly (1992) argues that rebellions against coercive means for
extracting resources were widespread in the early modern period
and states had to respond by building more effective and efficient
administrative and coercive apparatuses to manage the extraction of
resources. One consequence of the introduction of large standing armies,
as we can see in the quotation from Foucault above, is that the citizens
conscripted into them were instilled with new forms of discipline. This
acted as a mechanism of socialisation and created an extra layer of the
population who were loyal to the state.
Tilly (1992: 85–86) also argues that the different social and economic
structures present in different states also determined the forms that
state-making took in response to the necessity imposed by military
expenditure. For example, he makes an important distinction between
those regions that were ‘coercion intensive’ and those that were
‘capital intensive’. By coercion-intensive regions, he means those
areas with few cities which were largely agricultural (the Russian Empire,
for example). Here coercion played a large part in economic (principally
agricultural) production and the state remained heavily reliant on
the nobility to extract goods and services from the peasantry (feudal
relations remained paramount). By contrast in capital-intensive
regions (England and the Dutch Republic, for example), where there
were many thriving urban centres, trade, commerce and market-oriented
production, merchants, traders and other capitalists formed a wealthy base
from which taxes could be extracted. Tilly argues that, in the former, the
state’s reliance on the nobility as part of the coercive means of resource
extraction meant that more autocratic forms of governance arose. The
103
state actively suppressed any attempts to set up representative bodies

that might have weakened the power of the nobility. In the former, the
merchants and capitalists were often (although by no means always) able
to achieve more representative forms of government as the state sided
with them against the nobility in return for the money they provided.
However, see Anderson’s arguments in Chapter 6 about the class character
of the absolutist state, for example.
One further consequence of the reorganisation of the state was a transition
to what Tilly refers to as direct rule. As we have seen, for most of history
‘traditional states’ ruled by indirect means, allowing other groups to
collect taxes on their behalf, for example. Direct rule emerged once
states had suppressed rival power centres and built up a sufficiently
powerful and far-reaching administrative infrastructure or bureaucracy.
As Tilly argues, this gave rulers ‘access to citizens and the resources they
controlled through household taxation, mass conscription, censuses, police
systems and many other invasions of small-scale social life. But it did so
at the cost of widespread resistance, extensive bargaining, and
the creation of rights for citizens. Both the penetration and the
bargaining laid down new state structures, inflating the government’s
budgets, personnel and organisational diagrams’ (1992: 25).
In many ways, then, the ability of some sectors of the population in
some states to bargain and negotiate with the state led to forms of
representation and even to limited democratic participation in the business
of government.
Finance and war

Few large states were able to pay for their military expenditure out
of their ordinary annual revenue. Instead they had to deal with the
difference between wartime expenditure and ordinary income by one
form of borrowing or another: these included borrowing from creditors
and delaying repayment, selling offices, forcing loans from citizens, and
borrowing from bankers who acquired claims on future government
revenues. Borrowing allows a government to separate its expenditure from
its income and to spend ahead of its income. Spending ahead of income
makes expensive wars easier to finance as military expenditure is usually
unpredictable whereas actual state revenues usually fluctuate very little
from one year to the next. A state that borrows quickly can mobilise faster
than its enemies and this obviously increases its chances of victory (Tilly,
1992: 85).
However, the availability of credit depends on the presence of capitalists.
They serve states as lenders and they can also be relied upon to service
loans efficiently and to collect debts on behalf of governments. The
rational calculation of levels of profit became an important feature in the
management of finances. As Tilly argues, their activities promoted the
monetisation of the economy. Again, this was largely due to the
vastly increased levels of borrowing that states had to undertake in order
to build up their military capacities.
As we noticed above, the relative presence or absence of commercial cities
within a state’s territories strongly affected the condition of its finances
and how rapidly it could pay for new military mobilisation during times
of crisis. Tilly argues that loans and taxes flow more readily into the
state’s coffers in regions where there are many commercially
successful cities. The urban militias and commercial fleets that cities
had developed to police themselves and for trading purposes were
104
often utilised and then appropriated by states as they proved useful

for defensive and for other military uses. As we have seen, states were
therefore compelled to take notice of the interests of town-dwellers
and capitalists in general. In other words, the interests of the new
capitalist class needed to be taken into consideration in making financial
calculations and, as a consequence, some limited forms of representative
government tended to grow up in such regions (in England and Holland
for example). Where cities were weak or rare and commercial life less
developed, the state had to rely on foreign loans or on the power of the
traditional nobility to extract resources by force from rural populations.
These nobles could then demand privileges in return, making it less likely
that commercial life could flourish.
Tilly also argues that repayment of the loans that were so important to
the financing of wars was highly important to the development of state
institutions. Repayment was dependent on the state’s capacity to raise
revenue. In traditional states revenue was raised through the exaction of
tribute or rent from conquered peoples or client groups within the state.
However, much more efficient means of extracting revenue emerged with
greater commercial activity and with the monetisation of the economy.
These were payment on flows of goods across borders or within
territories (customs duties and so on), payment on stocks (for example on
property) and, most effective of all, income taxes (Tilly, 1992: 87–88).
The degree of monetisation in a state determines the effectiveness
of the means by which a state can finance its war effort. The most
efficient means of state financing is taxation, either in the form of the
standardised taxation of economic activity or of direct income tax. Each
of these methods is more efficient and effective than more direct means
of coercive extraction (such as the forcible taking of agricultural
produce, livestock or men). Highly commercialised states draw important
advantages from the systems developed to extract taxation from
their populations. Firstly, taxes are based on the measurement and
transparent accounting mechanisms that a commercial economy
applies to property, goods and services. One of the main features of
commercial enterprises from the seventeenth century onwards was their
development of rational and standardised accounting methods.
Participants in commercial markets already do a large amount of the
requisite surveillance that states dependent on taxation require. They
quantify and measure economic activity through the recording of
prices and transfers. One of the consequences of the development
of systems to collect tax is that citizens become socialised (disciplined)
in particular ways as moral value becomes attached to the payment of
taxes, especially if in return the state also provides obvious benefits in
the form of peace and security or other visible services. Citizens begin to
monitor themselves and each other and to condemn tax evaders as anti-
social.
Taxes on flows, stocks and income therefore yield high returns for
relatively little effort. They are also much more adaptable than tributes
or rents. States attempting to collect the same amount of tax in less
commercialised economies face greater resistance, collect less efficiently
and need to build a greater apparatus of direct coercion. In more
commercialised economies there is therefore less need for powerful state
apparatuses of coercion to guarantee the collection of necessary revenues.
There is a much greater reliance on the capacities of citizens to discipline
and regulate their own activities.
105
However, the increased necessity to maintain, train and supply armies (even
during peacetime), the imposition of taxes and the management of debt
always multiplied the number of the state’s civilian servants. A
major war effort generally produced a permanent expansion of the state’s
central apparatus – the number of its full-time personnel, the scope of its
institutions and the scale of its debt. Some historians speak of a ‘ratchet
effect’ in terms of state budgets and apparatuses. What they mean by this is
that after major wars the state’s budget (which has inevitably been inflated
by the war) does not fall back to its pre-war levels. Tilly argues that this
is because ‘wartime increases in state power give officials a new capacity
to extract resources, take on new activities, and defend themselves against
cost-cutting; wars cause or reveal new problems that the state decides it
must attend to’ (1992: 89). For example, during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in Britain the poor health and fitness of men
presenting themselves at army recruitment centres during one of the
colonial wars of the period was noted with alarm. This was felt to be a
serious problem that had developed due to poor housing and sanitation
and due to the bad diets of the populations in the new urban and industrial
cities. Part of the impetus for the state’s increased involvement in the day-to-
day health of the population came from just such ‘discoveries’ and they were
linked initially to general social fears about the decline of the health and
vitality of populations and therefore their fitness for battle and for war.
Activity
Read the following extract from an article in a journal of history about health, fitness and
war during the early twentieth century.
No observer of political debate in early twentieth-century Britain could have
failed to notice the frequency with which the theme of the relationship
between Imperial power and public health was discussed. In the aftermath
of the Boer War, there was an avalanche of speculation and gloomy
prognostication about the causes and likely outcome for the British nation
and Empire of the supposed physical deterioration of the British male
population. What exercised many politicians and military men was the fact
that between forty and sixty percent of the recruits for the British Army
were turned down as physically unfit for service…[A]n interdepartmental
committee was charged with the investigation of the allegations of a
decline in standards of fitness…The best example of the way in which
wartime discussions of public health were intimately related to the problem
of military preparedness is the debate over the results and significance of
the medical examinations of men conscripted for service in the British army
in 1916–1918. Some historians have stated that the report of the Ministry
of National Service Medical Boards’ inspection of the 2,500,000 men called
up in 1917–18 revealed accurately the poor state of health and physical
condition of the population. There is support for this view in a major speech
which Lloyd George [the British Prime Minister] delivered in Manchester
in September 1918. ‘We have done great things in this war’, Lloyd George
told his audience; but he went on…‘We could have accomplished greater
if this country had been in condition; and a war, like sickness, lays bare the
weakness of a constitution. What has been our weakness? Let us talk quite
frankly. We have had a Ministry of National Service and carefully compiled
statistics of the health of the people between the ages of 18 and 42. Now
that is the age of fitness, the age of strength. You have these grades I, II and
III, and all I can tell you is the results of these examinations are startling,
and I do not mind to use the word appalling. I hardly dare tell you the
results. The number of Grade II and Grade III men throughout the country is
prodigious…What does it mean? It means that we have used our human
106
material in this country prodigally, foolishly, cruelly. I asked the Minister of

National Service how many more men we could have put into the fighting
ranks if the health of the country had been properly looked after. I staggered
at the reply. It was a considered reply, and it was ‘at least one million’. If we
had only had that million this war would have been ended triumphantly.
Unless action were taken, he argued, this deficiency would haunt Britain
long after the war had ended. ‘I solemnly warn my countrymen’, he
concluded, ‘that you cannot maintain an A-1 Empire with a C-3 population’.
(Winter: 1980: 211–212)
• What links does Lloyd George make between health and military success?
• Why is the existence of ‘Grade II and Grade III’ men a problem?
• How were these men ‘discovered’ to be ‘Grade II and Grade III’ types? Who
‘discovered’ these deficiencies in the population? How?
• Think carefully about the last question. In particular think about the infrastructure
that was needed in order for the state to ‘discover’ these deficiencies.
• Think about all the institutions that are involved in the ‘discovery’ of this problem.
Write down as many of them as you can. Can you see how much involvement
the state has in the everyday lives of its citizens? Can you think of ways in which
what is happening here can be related to Foucault’s arguments about ‘bio-power’
that we saw outlined in Chapter 6?
• Obviously, the situation that is being described here is a time of war, and therefore
to some extent ‘exceptional’. However, what do you think are the implications for
what Lloyd George says at the end of his speech: ‘I solemnly warn my countrymen
that you cannot maintain an A-1 Empire with a C-3 population’? How do you think
this will affect social and medical services during peacetime? Why?
Empire
There will be much more discussion of the ways that Europe interacted
with the rest of the world in Chapter 8. However, it is worth noting here
that the early expansion of Europe into other parts of the world also had
profound consequences for the development of systems of governance
within European states.
Tilly argues that the connection between the state and overseas trade and,
later, empire building, ‘ran in both directions’ (1992: 94). What he means
by this is that capital-intensive states (typically, city states such as Venice
or the Dutch republic with highly developed commercial and trading
networks and markets) pursued interests overseas in pursuit of trading
monopolies, and they did not typically pursue military conquest or
colonisation. Coercion-intensive states, on the other hand, tended to
devote more energy to settlement and to the enslavement of indigenous
(and imported) populations as labour forces. They were also much more
concerned with the exaction of tribute from conquered territories and
peoples. ‘Mixed states’, which were both capital and coercive intensive,
such as Britain and France, combined both strategies.
The capitalist strategy added little overall size to the central state,
especially when it was conducted through private organisations such
as the Dutch or the British East India Companies (you can find useful
information about the British East India Company at
www.theeastindiacompany.com).1 However, both of these companies 1
Last accessed October
became political organisations in their own right as they expanded. 2011.
The British East India Company had its own fleet, its own army and
its own civil servants who administered the territories that it acquired.
Eventually the state absorbed the Company and ended up taking over its
responsibilities. 107
Even where territories or trading interests had been acquired in piecemeal

fashion by private companies, competition between states over overseas
territory forced states to intervene and take over from companies. They
tended to extend more efficient and effective systems of administration,
but at great cost to themselves. For example, the creation of civil services
to administer overseas territories created new classes of local and
metropolitan civil servants. Armies and navies also needed to be created to
protect colonial and commercial overseas interests, and their maintenance
also added further layers of bureaucracy to states. Thus we can see how
developments overseas directly affected the administrative systems of the
European states.
Where large amounts of riches from overseas arrived in a state (Portugal
and Spain, for example, received a constant flow of gold and silver from
their territories in the Americas), an alternative to domestic taxation was
created. These states did not therefore need to enter into negotiation with
their populations over levels of domestic taxation and thus the development
of citizens rights was impeded as limits to state power were unnecessary.
As Tilly argues, the scope and scale of the state apparatus that emerged in
each state depended on ‘the interaction between a military machine and
the development of markets’ both internally, within Europe, and in the
increasingly global context of European expansion. (1992: 94).
Capitalism and the modern state

Activity
Read Held pp.98–103.
So far in this chapter, we have explored the relationship between war

and the development of modern states. The necessity for states to finance
costly wars against rival states caused significant and lasting changes in
numerous aspects of their organisation and administration. However,
we would be wrong to think of war as the only or even the main cause
for the development of modern state forms. We have discussed the
relationship between the war-making capacity of states and processes of
state-making. In doing so, we have touched on the relationship between
both war-making and state-making and economic considerations such
as the prevalence of commercial activity, and the fiscal and financial
arrangements that states needed to create. We have also seen that
commercial factors determined the type of revenue that states were able
to collect and the methods of collection. We noted that where capitalistic
commercial development flourished, the process of state-making was
significantly different from where this development had not occurred.
In this section, we will consider more fully the relationship between the
growth and development of capitalism as a specific type of economic
system and the modern state.
According to Marx, the ‘capitalistic era dates from the sixteenth century’.
Weber largely concurs with Marx on this date, but Weber was concerned
with how and why capitalism took off in the European context of
developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to become the
dominant economic system. For Weber, capitalism (the manufacture
and sale of goods for a profit) clearly predated the modern form of
capitalism and was in fact an almost universal phenomenon, appearing
in all times and places. For Marx, however, modern capitalism needs
to be distinguished from earlier types of economic activity based on
the profit-motive. For Marx, modern capitalism is an unprecedented
108
phenomenon and, as Giddens argues, ‘it is…with the arrival of capitalism,

particularly industrial capitalism, that the pace of social change becomes
really dramatic’ (1985: 33).
Marx argues that capitalism involves a specific relationship to the
‘commodity’ and in particular he points out that in capitalist society
labour-power ‘becomes a commodity’ (Giddens, 1985: 129); that is, labour
becomes something that can be bought and sold on the market rather than
forcibly ‘extracted’ from the labourer as in slavery or forms of serfdom.
In capitalist social relations, labour is seen as a form of commodity that
is ‘possessed’ by the labourer. According to Marx, capitalism involves a
relationship between two ‘very different types of commodity-possessors’:
…on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production,
means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of
values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on
the other hand, the free labourers, the sellers of their own labour
power, and therefore the seller of labour…With this polarisation
of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of
capitalist production are given.
Having no other means of subsistence, the labourer has no option but to
sell his or her labour. However, although there is of course an element of
‘forced choice’ in this (Marx refer to it as ‘dull economic compulsion’), the
fact remains that the commodification of labour entails a social order that
becomes increasingly based on contractual relations rather than one
of traditional obligation, duty or outright force.
One of the novel features of capitalism is that it is frequently used as a
term to define and describe an entire social order or system. In
other words, the term does not simply relate to a particular and very
distinctive set of economic relationships (commodified labour, production
for profit). It is used to designate a form of society too. Giddens argues
that ‘it is the first and only form of society in history which can claim that
it both ‘has’ and ‘is’ a mode of production’ (1985: 67).
Michael Mann suggests that:
…there is nothing in the capitalist mode of production…that
leads of itself to the emergence of many networks of production,
divided and at war, and of an overall class structure that is
nationally segmental.
(1986: 513)
Nonetheless, Giddens claims that fully ‘capitalist societies’ emerged (in
Western Europe) at approximately the same time that the nation-state
became the dominant state form, that is, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. He goes on to argue that ‘there has been no capitalist
society…which has not also been a nation state’ (1985: 135).
Remember, in Chapter 4 we saw that nineteenth-century social theorists
made the assumption that industrial societies heralded the beginning of
an inherently peaceful social order as the ‘administration of people gave
way to the administration of things’. Giddens argues that the internal
pacification of the state (a process that, as we have seen, began as
states extended and intensified their systems of rule) meant much more
disciplined and orderly populations (see Chapter 6). It also meant the
‘withdrawal of the military from direct participation in the affairs of the
state’ (1985: 192). Widespread political violence and rebellion became
comparatively rare and military force was no longer required in order to
manage social groups internal to the state.
109
As we have seen, complex administrative systems and forms of governance

that did not rely on direct methods of coercion but rather on the self-
discipline and willing obedience of the population developed over the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, this did not mean that
the ‘capitalist systems’ that developed within the national borders of states
were inherently pacific. Quite the contrary, this did not mean a ‘decline of
war but a concentration of military power “pointing outwards” towards
other states in the nation-state system’ (192). So, although states were
more or less peaceful entities internally, they were also inherently
aggressive when it came to their relations with other states.
Activity
Read the following extract from The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and
Engels:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet
of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They
are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and
death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work
up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but
in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by
the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their
satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in
every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material,
so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual
nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-
mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
What sort of assumptions do Marx and Engels make about the ways that capitalism will
develop? Do they imagine that this development will include a division of the world into
separate states? If not, why not?
What is a capitalist society?

According to Giddens (1985: 135–36), capitalist societies share the
following features.
• Firstly, the production of goods and services is wholly or mostly carried
out by capitalist enterprise. These societies are heavily influenced
by ‘the economy’, which is conceived as a ‘separate sphere’. In other
words, the economy is something which the state does not directly
control but which it regulates and manages through numerous means
as its successful operation determines the well-being of its citizens.
• Secondly, the existence of the ‘economic sphere’ means a formal
separation of the economic and the political from one another. The
state actively separates (or ‘insulates’ as Giddens describes it) the
economy from the political and paradoxically this very separation is
dependent on state intervention to achieve it.
• Thirdly, the separation of political and economic spheres presumes
the institutions of private property in the means of production. This
assumes the process of commodification we have already seen as the
foundation of capitalist society. This affects those without property
110
as much as the propertied and the entire system is dependent on the

commodified nature of labour and ownership of private property in the
form of various means of production (factories, businesses, etc). Class
is therefore a dynamic aspect of the system and conflict between classes
(strikes for better pay, etc) is an important aspect of the system.
• Fourthly, ‘the nature of the state as a mode of “government” is strongly
influenced by its institutional alignments with private property’ and its
protection of the ‘private’ sphere of the economy.
• Finally, Giddens argues that the ‘capitalist state’ can be used
synonymously with ‘capitalist society’. This demonstrates that the
boundary-maintaining qualities of the nation-state are integral to
its existence. It might seem (as we have seen) that capitalism as a
form of economic activity has no intrinsic relation to the nation-state.
Capitalism, after all, promotes the development of long-distance
economic activities that stretch well beyond the borders of states.
However, as we have also seen, there has been no capitalist
society…which has not also been a nation state’ (1985: 135).
This requires explanation.
Michael Mann argues that by the time of the industrial revolution
capitalism was already contained within a civilisation of competing geo-
political states (1986: 513). Economic interaction was largely confined
within national boundaries and much of its extra-state activity was
supported by imperial domination. Each leading state, Mann argues,
approximated a self-contained economic network. International economic
relations were controlled by states which regarded their interests and
the interests of their economies as synonymous. ‘Class regulation and
organisation thus developed in each of a series of geographical areas
shaped by existing geo-political units’ (514).
According to Mann, the ‘medieval’ or feudal state (see Chapter 5) had
remained small and had attained a large measure of autonomy by existing
off its own (equally small) financial resources. However, it exercised
very little power over the society that it governed in name only. As we
have seen, however, after the military revolution no state could retain
its independence from financial commitments and arrangements with
wealthy (increasingly capitalist or commercial) classes who were able
to provide funding. Failure of a state to massively increase its available
revenue and resources led automatically to defeat in battle in the new
technologically sophisticated and labour-intensive wars of the eighteenth
century. States required finance in ways that they had not in the past and
this involved collaborating with and actively promoting the interests of
wealthy classes. Mann argues that this collaboration ‘turned gradually
into an organic unity between the state and dominant classes. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it starts to make sense to talk of the
state as the committee for managing the interests of the capitalist class’
(516).
However, Mann goes on to argue that the capitalist ‘mode of production’
and the capitalist class itself ‘cannot constitute themselves without the
intervention of ideological, military and political organisations’ (516). In
other words, the formation and success of capitalism are tied up with its
relation to the state, which in turn relies on it for the funding it requires
to successfully fight wars. We can thus see that there is indeed no single
‘prime mover’ in the development of modern social, economic or political
conditions.
111
Accounting for different state forms

We have seen that specifically ‘modern’ states emerged over the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and we have looked at some of the reasons why
this happened in that way that it did. However, we have not yet attempted
to account for the very obvious differences between the different versions
of the ‘modern’ state that currently exist. Remember, Poggi argues that
the ‘modern’ state is a ‘complex set of institutional arrangements for rule
operating through the continuous and regulated activities of individuals
acting as occupants of offices’. He goes on to specify that the state ‘is
the sum total of such offices’ and that it ‘reserves to itself the business of
rule over a territorially bounded society’ (1978: 1). We might also say
(stating some very obvious facts) that states ‘mobilise their populations
in defence of its realm; regulates, monitors and polices conduct within
civil society; intervenes…in the economy; and regulates (and in some
instances controls) the flow of information within the public sphere’ (Hay
et al., 2006: 1). But if we think about both of these descriptions of states
carefully they actually say very little about what the qualitative differences
between states might be or how and why they may have arisen.
Activity
Read section 2.5 of Held (pp.87–90).
Held outlines a number of different state forms. Make a list of these and write down in
your own words the most important characteristics of each form.
We have noted that specifically ‘modern’ states developed in a number

of different directions over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Not all of the ‘modern’ states that we are used to are or have
been constitutional, liberal or democratic (see Held). Indeed, we might
note that some types of state (notably one-party communist states) have
often made the claim that they are more ‘modern’ than other states and
that they offer their citizens a ‘higher’ form of freedom than their capitalist
counterparts. Remember, Marxism (to which communist states claim
allegiance as a guiding philosophy) claims that history is moving in a
particular direction (see Chapter 3): towards communism.
Communist states (of which few now exist, following the collapse of
the Soviet Union in the early 1990s) have often been characterised as
totalitarian states. Fascism also represents a form of ‘totalitarianism’. It has
been common to draw a strong contrast between democratic, liberal, liberal
democratic (or constitutional states more broadly) and ‘totalitarian’ regimes.
According to Giddens, the concept of totalitarianism is ‘one of the most
fiercely debated in political theory’ (Giddens, 1985: 295). It is common
to regard the concept as primarily political, involving the organisation
of political power that involves its ‘extreme concentration in pursuit of
objectives defined by a narrowly circumscribed leadership’ (296). Giddens
argues that it must be distinguished from older forms of autocracy or
despotism; totalitarianism is thoroughly ‘modern’. Generally, we can say
that it has the following characteristics:
• A ‘totalist’ ideology. We will discuss this point below, but is worth
noting here that by this we mean an ideology that identifies itself with
‘truth’ and which refuses compromise with competing ideologies, which
it seeks to eradicate.
• A single political party committed to this ideology. The party is usually,
but not always, led by a single person (often, although not always,
highly charismatic).
112
• A fully developed ‘secret police’ (a network of police spies and a highly

developed system of surveillance).
• Three kinds of monopolistic control: a monopoly over mass
communications and the media; a monopoly over all operational
weapons; control over all of the organisations and institutions of civil
society – including, importantly, the economy. (From Friedrich quoted
in Giddens, 1985: 296)
Giddens argues that the possibilities of totalitarian rule depend on
the existence of societies in which the state can successfully penetrate
the day-to-day activities of most of its subject population. This in turn
presumes a high level of surveillance, the coding of information about and
the supervision of the conduct of significant numbers of people within
the population. Totalitarian states therefore require extreme focusing of
surveillance and control (often exercised through terror) which is devoted
to securing specific political ends. Such political ends are deemed by the
state authorities to demand urgent political mobilisation. Surveillance of
this sort involves a multiplication of the modes of documenting
the subject population with, for example, identification cards and papers.
This intensification of surveillance and control is used to massively expand
the supervision of even very ordinary activities and represents the state’s
domination of most or all aspects of a previously autonomous civil society.
Giddens goes on to argue that the aims of totalitarian regimes are usually
associated with extreme forms of nationalism (see Chapter 8). As we will
see, nationalist sentiment can easily mobilise populations in the pursuit of
particular aims. He argues that nationalism provides a myth of origins and
a powerful ideology of a common destiny to be striven for. Even Marxism,
which we usually think of as being internationalist in outlook, can be
harnessed for nationalistic ends (Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union from
the early 1930s to his death in 1953, made explicit appeals to nationalism
during times of crisis and war, for example). Of course, fascism is usually
driven by extreme nationalist sentiment. One important characteristic
of totalitarian rule is its link with mass social movements mobilised, for
example, around a belief in national or ‘racial’ destiny. This is usually
connected to extreme hostility to ‘out’ groups.
As a consequence of the mass support that totalitarian regimes can
mobilise, Giddens argues these regimes are easily able to target unpopular
‘deviants’ or other ‘out’ groups. Indeed, ‘totalitarian rule produces
sweeping and comprehensive categories of deviance’ (1985: 310) and a
marked hostility to outsiders. Equally, terror is characteristically used as
a viable tool of state policy (imprisonment without trial, torture and even
mass executions). Policing may also be backed up with the use of para-
military or military force.
However, Giddens goes on to argue that totalitarianism is not an ‘all or
nothing phenomenon’, nor is it something that can be explained through
the analysis of different configurations of class power (something that
Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy attempts
to do, for example). Indeed, Giddens argues that it can be linked to a
range of less cataclysmic potentialities of the modern state’ (305). We
have already seen, for example, that categories of ‘deviance’ emerged
along with the increase in the capacities of states to internally ‘pacify’
their populations. Equally, we have seen in our discussion of Foucault’s
work that modern disciplinary power and ‘bio-power’ have increased
the capacities of states to govern through surveillance and the policing
of norms. Giddens argues that ‘the expansion of surveillance in the
113
modern political order, in combination with the policing of “deviance”,

radically transforms the relation between state authority and the
governed population’ (309). In totalitarian regimes this is taken further
and (usually) has more dreadful consequences, but it nonetheless
remains a potentiality of all ‘modern’ states. Similar arguments are made
by the German philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic
of Enlightenment and by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his book
Modernity and the Holocaust. We might therefore conclude, along with
Giddens, that ‘aspects of totalitarian rule are a threat in all modern states’
and that ‘tendencies toward totalitarian power are a distinctive feature of
our epoch’ (310).

• assess the impact of war and foreign relations on the development of
the modern state
• explain how and why specifically capitalist economic and social
relationships were involved in the development of state forms
• explain the historical relationship between capitalism, war and the
modern state
• describe competing interpretations of the historical processes involved
in the emergence of the modern state
• explain some of the similarities and differences between modern states
of different types.

1. ‘States make war and war makes states.’ Discuss.
2. ‘The capitalist mode of production needed the intervention of
ideological, military and political organisation to establish itself.’
Discuss.
114
Chapter 8: The nation-state and nationalism
Chapter 8: The nation-state and

nationalism
Aim of the chapter

The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to historical and sociological
accounts of nationalism. The chapter will introduce you to competing
explanations of the nature of nationalism, of its relationship to social and
historical processes of ‘modernity’, and different approaches to studying it.
Learning outcomes
• offer explanations of nationalism as a form of collective political
mobilisation and as a social identity
• explain how and why nationalism emerged as a form of social and
political identity in historical modernity
• explain the historical relationship between nationalism and the
nation-state
• describe competing interpretations of the social and historical processes
involved in the emergence of nationalism.
Essential reading
Smith, A.D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of
Nations and Nationalism. (London: Routledge, 1998) [ISBN 9780415063401]
Chapter 6. Note: this can be found at the back of this subject guide.
Further reading
KEY ** = particularly recommended for this chapter
**Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. (London: Verso, 2006) revised edition
[ISBN 9781844670864].
Billig, M. Banal Nationalism. (London: Sage, 1995) [ISBN 9780803975255].
[ISBN 9780816631216].
**Hearn, J. Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. (Houndsmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) [ISBN 9781403918987].
Hobsbawm, E. The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. (London: Abacus Books,
1988) [ISBN 9780844669922].
[ISBN 9781842120156].
edition [ISBN 9781405134422].
[ISBN 9780520060395] Chapter 8.
Hutchinson, J., and A.D. Smith (eds) Nationalism. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994) [ISBN 9780192892607].
115

University Press, 1986) [ISBN 9780521313490] Chapter 15.
Chapter 5.
Smith, A.D. National Identity. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991)
[ISBN 9780874172041].
Smith, A.D. The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates About Ethnicity and
Nationalism. (Brandeis University Press, 2000) [ISBN 9781584650409].
Spillman, L., and R. Faeges ‘Nations’ in Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S.
Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology. (Durham: Duke
[ISBN 9781557863683] Chapter 5.
Works cited
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. (London: Verso, 2006) revised edition
[ISBN 9781844670864].
[ISBN 9780816631216].
edition [ISBN 9781405134422].
[ISBN 9780520060395].
Hearn, J. Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Houndsmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006) [ISBN 9781403918987].
Smith, A.D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical survey of Recent Theories of
Nations and Nationalism. (London: Routledge, 1998) [ISBN 9780415063418].
Spillman, L., and R. Faeges ‘Nations’ in Adams, J., E.S. Clemens and A.S.
Orloff Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology. (Durham: Duke
A note on the reading

There is one Essential reading text for this chapter. This is taken from a
recent book by Anthony Smith and it engages with important debates
about nationalism. Throughout this chapter of the subject guide we will
be referring to these (and other) important debates. Smith’s chapter will
explain the background to some of these debates and the context in which
they took place. You will need to read this chapter of the subject guide
carefully before you read the chapter by Anthony Smith. When you do
read the chapter by Smith, this will be linked to an activity in which you
will be asked a series of questions about this reading in order to help you
to understand the key issues. As you will see, Smith is quite critical of
some of the arguments and ideas that he discusses and we will explore
how and why this is the case. Academics are often critical of each others’
points of view and debate between them about the meaning of particular
phenomena or the reasons why certain events occurred in the way that
they did can be quite fierce! One of our aims in approaching the reading of
Smith’s text in some detail and linking it to activities designed to help you
to read it closely is to allow you to understand the debate and perhaps also
participate in it.
116
Introduction
This chapter looks at a key phenomenon that has had an enormous impact
on the development of the modern world: nationalism. So far we have seen
that recognisably ‘modern’ states developed in Europe over the course of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have seen how military and
economic factors contributed to the development of ‘modern’ state institutions
and systems of rule; in particular, we considered how the emergence of
modern state forms was related in complex ways to economic, military and
‘bio-political’ factors. In this chapter we will look at another important factor
that has been of major historical significance in the emergence of distinctively
‘modern’ states and which sociologists and historians have attempted to
explain in a number of different ways. This is nationalism.
As we noted in Chapter 4, in the contemporary world we tend to take the
idea of the nation (or the nation-state) as a ‘given’. The maps that we use
all give us an image of the world as divided into different ‘peoples’, each of
which has its own cultural identity and state. Spanish people live in Spain,
Thais in Thailand, Australians in Australia. We know, of course, that some
people live outside their native or ‘natural’ countries, either as immigrants
or refugees or just as ‘expatriates’, but these are commonly seen as unusual
or exceptional cases. Most of us, most of the time, live in our ‘native’
country. When we travel, we tend to refer to the prospect of return as
‘going home’. Importantly, this does not simply mean going back to family,
friends, or the immediate place or community in which we live. Rather, it
refers to the idea that the country of our birth itself is ‘home’; it is a place
with which we identify and to which we ‘feel’ instinctively that we belong.
This sense of belonging to a particular nation is very important to what
sociologists refer to as our ‘identity’. In this chapter we will explore ideas and
arguments about how and why this form of identification (most commonly
referred to as ‘nationalism’) has been such an important component of
‘modernity’. In doing so, we will also ask questions about the ways that
nationalism is linked to the emergence of the modern nation-state.
One of the most significant arguments that we will encounter in the chapter
is that nationalism is modern. By this we mean (in line with the meaning
of ‘modern’ that we have been using throughout this subject guide) that
it is not just recent; it is one of the definitive features of the ‘modern’ era.
During this period, nationalist ideas and political projects have become global
phenomena, accepted in almost all parts of the world. They are linked closely
to the practical power and administrative capacities of states. But nationalism
is not simply a political project. Indeed, it is crucial that we recognise that
despite its ‘modernity’, nationalism is (and has been) such a powerful force
because national identities and the ways that we talk and think about and
experience nationalism make it appear to people as though it were a natural
phenomena with a very long history, as if it was ancient rather than ‘modern’.
In this chapter we will be exploring how and why this is the case.
What is a nation?
According to Anthony Giddens, ‘the terms “nation-state”, “nation”’ and
“nationalism” are often, even characteristically, used in the literature of the
social sciences and history as if they were synonymous’. Giddens distinguishes
between these terms, arguing that a ‘nation’ is a ‘collectivity existing within a
clearly demarcated territory’ (Giddens, 1985: 116). Nations have a ‘unitary
administration’, which (as we have seen) is reflexively monitored both
by the internal state apparatus and by those of other states. The nation is
117
a distinctive property of the modern state and without the political and
administrative apparatuses of the modern states, nations as we understand
them would not exist. The two are intimately connected and it is no surprise
that they emerged at approximately the same time.
According to Anthony Smith, theorists of nation-building argue that:
Nations are territorial political communities. They are sovereign,
limited, and cohesive communities of legally equal citizens. They
are ‘conjoined’ with ‘modern states’ to form ‘nation-states’.
Nations constitute the primary political bond and the chief loyalty of
their members. Other ties (gender, family, religion, class and so on) must
be subordinated to the overriding allegiance of the citizen to his or her
nation-state. This is desirable because it gives form and substance to ideals
of democratic civic participation.
Nations are the main political actors in the international arena. They are
the sole legitimating and coordinating principle of interstate relations and
activities.
Nations are the constructs of their citizens – notably their leaders
and elites. They are built up through a variety of processes and
institutions. Key to national success is the balanced and comprehensive
institutionalisation of roles, expectations and values and the creation of
an infrastructure of social communications: transport, education, media,
language, political parties and so on.
Nations are the only framework, vehicle and beneficiary of social and
political development, the only instrument for assuring the needs of all
citizens in the production and distribution of resources and the only means
of assuring sustainable development. This is because only national loyalty
and nationalist ideology can mobilise the masses for the commitment,
dedication and self-sacrifice required by modernisation with all its strains
and dislocations.
What is nationalism?
Defining nationalism is a particularly problematic task. There are many
definitions of nationalism and they tend to reflect profoundly different
assumptions about the nature of identity, communication, community,
forms of social solidarity and the state. In this section of the chapter we
will explore some of these definitions.
Activity
To begin with, here are two definitions of nationalism
Nationalism is the making of combined claims, on behalf of a population,
to identity, to jurisdiction and to territory.
(Hearn, 2006: 11)
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination
of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively
its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the
right organisation of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that
humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by
certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only
legitimate type of government is national self-government.
(Kedourie, 1994: 1)
118
Read both of these definitions carefully. Look up any words that you are unfamiliar with.
Think about what we have learned so far about the emergence of modern states and,
in particular (see the Held chapter in Formations of Modernity), about the ways that the
‘nation-state’ has emerged as the dominant state form in ‘modern’ times.
Now, again thinking carefully, can you distinguish which of these definitions is a rather
neutral description of a phenomenon and which has a strong point of view?
How do we know that one of these pieces has a point of view? What is it about the way
that the piece is written that lets us know about the writer’s attitude to the subject?
The sociologist Jonathan Hearn argues that behind the various definitions
of nationalism there are a key set of assumptions about what the
phenomenon actually is. It is important to explore these assumptions
as they provide a comprehensive list of the different ways in which
nationalism has been characterised by sociologists and historians.
• Nationalism is a feeling: those subscribing to this view regard
nationalism as a combination of ‘passions, emotions and sentiments’
(Hearn, 2006: 6). It is primarily concerned with ‘the subjective
experiences of those who consider themselves to be nationalists and
patterns of sympathy among those with similar feelings’ (6). In this
sense, this is ultimately an irrational or at least a non-rational
phenomenon based on a purely emotional and subjective experience.
The emotional (and often irrational) aspects of nationalism can be
regularly witnessed at national sporting events.
• Nationalism is an identity: those holding this view tend to regard
the possession of an ‘identity’ as a fundamental human ‘need’. So,
whilst the actual content of identities can be regarded as the product
of contingent social and historical circumstances, the ‘need to anchor
oneself in relation to others’ is a necessity.
• Nationalism is an ideology: that is, it is an organised system of
beliefs about the world. Nationalist ideology tends to see the world as
‘naturally’ divided into separate ‘nations’, each of which has a ‘natural’
right to self-determination (that is, to pursue political independence
or autonomy). This ideology ‘can seize the minds of key thinkers’ and
from them spread to entire populations, where it becomes a source of
collective action and political mobilisation.
• Nationalism is a social movement: according to this view all
of the previous definitions or assumptions are too vague. In other
words, nationalist feelings, identities or ideas can only be seen (both
historically and in the present) in actual practices that members of
societies engage in. Therefore the only way to actually understand
nationalism is through the study of social action (for example the
social, political or cultural movements that people form and/or
participate in).
• Nationalism is a historical process: in this view, nationalism is
regarded as a ‘word historical trend’. Whilst the origins of nationalism
can be traced to Europe and (broadly) be linked to the emergence of
‘modern’ states (see the previous chapters of this subject guide), it has
now spread to the rest of the world. Nationalist social identities, social
movements and ideologies are closely linked with historical modernity.
Modern nationalism, these approaches argue, was first established
in Europe (and the Americas). This provided a model which was
subsequently adopted across the world, especially in the post-colonial
context of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa.
119
Activity
When you think about nationalism, what comes to mind? Write down ways in which you
have experienced nationalism yourself as:
• An identity (think about how you describe yourself to others, or about how you
feel in relation to your nationality).
• An ideology (are there any ‘official’ ways in which your nation is talked about and
described? How does it represent itself, its place in the world, its ‘mission’ and so
forth).
• A social movement (are there any movements in your society that are based
on nationalist ideas? These can be official movements supportive of national
governments or breakaway movements of people attempting to set up their own
nation).
• A historical process (when did your nation come into being? How does it
represent its history?).
If we look carefully at the last of these positions, it is obvious that

each of the other positions can also be linked to ‘historical processes’.
Identities, ideologies and social movements are all shaped by historical
circumstances. However, in the discussion of nationalism, history is a
highly disputed concept.
In more recent years, certainly since the 1970s, this is because two major
schools of thought have dominated debate about the subject and they
take opposing views about the relationship of nationalism to history. We
will look at this debate in much greater depth later on in this chapter.
However, briefly, we can say that the debate has centred around two
opposing positions. Firstly, some writers have argued that nationalism is
strongly related to ethnicity and that modern nations have ‘evolved’ in a
continuous process of change out of ‘pre-modern’ ethnic social formations.
It is worth briefly defining ‘ethnicity’ here as the term will come up quite
often throughout the chapter for the very reason that the ‘concept of ethnicity
tends to become unhelpfully blurred with those of culture and nationalism’
(Hearn, 2006: 8). Hearn argues that by ‘ethnicity’ we mean ‘the process
generating relatively bounded, self-identified groups, defined in relation
to similar groups, usually through notions of common descent’ (8). He goes
on to argue, importantly, that there is more to an ethnic group than ‘common
social traits such as language variety, religion, skin colour, customs and so on’.
Ethnic groups can be very diverse in terms of these types of traits, or they can
share most or even all of them with other distinct ethnic groups. The crucial
factor is that ‘the group regards itself as a unique population with a
name for itself, some sense of collective history and ways of symbolically
marking membership in the group’. Of equal importance is the fact that
ethnic groups tend to contrast their own sense of ‘self-identity’ with those of
others. The notion of ‘us’ is thus contrasted with that of ‘them’. In arguments
about ethnicity, nationalism and the nation-state it is often assumed that
‘nations’ are formed out of a pre-existing ethnic group.
Secondly, other writers have argued that nations, far from being ancient,
came into existence with the formation of ‘modern’ states and economies.
They are thus quite recent phenomena; in other words, they have existed
only for the last two or three hundred years at most, often for a far shorter
period of time. In this argument what is stressed are the social and political
processes that create the sort of bonds of belonging and group self-identity.
Group identity and its relation to the formation of nation-states needs to be
explained rather than being taken for granted as a ‘natural’ occurrence.
120
We can see therefore that the question of history is very important to the
way that we think about nations and nationalism. The first of the positions
outlined above stresses the ‘continuities’ that exist between modern
nation-states and their ‘origins’ in much older (but continuously existing)
groups. Identity (between past and present) and an emotional connection
between members of the present (national) group and its past are stressed.
In the second position, the apparent ‘history’ of nations is itself produced
by nationalist discourses and ideologies and these are seen as part of
the same specifically ‘modern’ processes that formed modern states and
economies. In this sense it follows a more ‘discontinuist’ approach to
history1 by stressing its modernity. 1
For a reminder of
this see Chapter 4
and the discussion
A brief history of nationalism about discontinuity
and continuity in
Whether nations are ancient or modern phenomena, nationalism is approaches to the past.
usually thought of as having a specific history that begins in about the Remember, discontinuist
fourteenth century CE in Europe. The emergence of nationalism is usually approaches stress
attributed to two processes. First, the Renaissance (see Chapter 2) which the radical difference
occurred in Europe in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries provided between the social
formations instituted
an intellectual and cultural framework within which nationalist ideas
with modernity and pre-
developed. As we have seen, during the Renaissance there was a revival modern formations.
of classical (Greek and Roman) learning. In particular, there was a turn
towards forms of ‘humanist’ thought which stressed the importance of
human affairs, both cultural and political. Greek and Roman ideas about
republican or democratic forms of government were translated and
discussed in relation to a contemporary context. These ideas informed
new ways of thinking about the organisation of political institutions and
emergent states.
Secondly, there was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century,
in which certain regions of Europe saw a widespread break with the
previously all-powerful Catholic Church. During the Reformation literacy
expanded as the bible was translated into vernacular languages (the
official language of the Catholic Church was Latin, the language of the
old Roman Empire, and very few people could actually understand it).
National churches were also founded and, as in the case of the Church of
England, founded by the monarch Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the
national ruler replaced the Pope as the head of the Church. Importantly,
the Reformation also promoted the idea of a horizontal community
of individuals each having a direct relationship with God. By contrast,
Catholicism, which as you will remember had dominated European
societies throughout the medieval period, was entirely hierarchical.
The more horizontal Protestant communities that emerged out of the
Reformation also helped to establish the ‘ideological groundwork for
the idea of a mass society of equals’, as too did revived ideas of ‘chosen
peoples’ (‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ chosen by God) (Hearn, 2006: 14).
In the hundred or so years following the Reformation there were a series
of devastating wars between Catholic and Protestant forces. The most
widespread and the longest-lasting of these, the Thirty Years War of 1618
to 1648, ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. As we have seen
(Chapter 7), the Treaty of Westphalia is usually seen as marking the point
at which a distinctive ‘state system’ emerged in Europe. Although these
may not have been nation-states in the ways that we understand that term,
the important factor here was that the Treaty formalised a system that
recognised relations between fully independent and autonomous states as
legitimate and state sovereignty as paramount.
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Nationalism and sovereignty

Equally important were new developments in political theory which,
particularly after the sixteenth century, began to stress two key factors.
The first involved the ‘sovereignty’ of the state, that is, its rights and its
capacities to act entirely independently of (for example) the Church, the
nobility and other alternative power centres within its territories. The
sovereignty of the state means its capacity (and its legitimation of itself) to
act as the sole source of political power and authority within the territories
that it claims for itself. The development of sovereignty as concept and
reality is of major significance in what at first sight might look like quite
opposed developments: the authority of monarchs (particularly, as we
saw in Chapter 6, ‘absolute’ monarchs) and the emergence of ‘modern’
democratic nation-states.
As we have seen, the general drive towards sovereignty generates a
centralisation of resources in the hands of the ruler. However, it also
stimulates a ‘generalised awareness that political power depends upon
collective capabilities’. The figure of the monarch came to represent
these capacities of the state but the capacities themselves began to be
seen as quite separate from the traditional trappings of kingly rule, which
began to be seen as having little relevance (Giddens, 1985: 198). As states
became better organised administratively, they began to demand more of
their populations (as we have seen in Chapter 7, this involved increases in
taxation, for example). As Tilly argues, and as we have also seen, in some
places this led directly to demands that the interests and view-points of the
population (or organised groups within it) be taken into consideration in
the formation of policy and in the general administration of the state.
The new administrative arrangements of the modern state and its
increasing penetration into more and more areas of daily life led to the
development of novel notions of citizenship. Citizenship involves
membership of a specific political community. Since the eighteenth
century this has largely meant the nation-state. In most cases the mass
of the population of ‘traditional’ states did not know themselves to be
‘citizens’ of those states, and the states themselves remained distant from
their daily lives. The continuity of power relations was largely unaffected
by this. But the more the administrative scope of the state begins to
penetrate the day-to-day activities of its subjects, the more power becomes
dependent on the compliance of those subjects. The ‘expansion of state
sovereignty means that those subject to it are in some sense – initially
vague, but growing more and more definite and precise – aware of their
membership in a political community and of the rights and obligations
such membership confers’ (Giddens, 1985: 210). Formal citizenship is one
of the consequences of these transformations. As we will see, this has a
direct consequence for the emergence of nationalism.
Nationalism and the popular will

This leads us to the second aspect of political theory as it developed
over the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In key areas
of political theory the idea was developed that ‘political power could be
legitimate only when it reflected the will, or at least served the interests,
of the people subject to it’ (Calhoun, 1997: 69). For example, the French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued that sovereignty
should be in the hands of ‘the people’. He argued that the desires and
interests of a people as a whole creates a general will. The general will is
what the people (or the community of citizens) would unanimously do if
they were selecting general laws and if they were choosing such laws with
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full information, good reasoning, and if they were attempting to discover

the common good. It was assumed therefore that ‘the people’ constituted
a ‘unified force’ capable of granting legitimacy to the institutions of a state
that ‘properly fitted with and served the interests of the people’ (69). As
Calhoun argues, ‘to fit with’ meant that the territorial boundaries of the
state should be the same as those of the ‘nation’ (or the people who define
themselves as such). It also meant that the ‘purposes of the state matched
the interests of its citizens’, who were conceived not just as a group of
individuals, but as a singular ‘nation’ (69/70).
One important consequence of this was that programmes and policies
had to be defined in terms of a ‘general interest’ (or a ‘national interest’)
as opposed to the ‘sectional’ interests of specific groups and classes. The
more that states became administratively unified, the greater the degree to
which their governments needed to appeal to a general interest to sustain
the basis for rule (Giddens, 1985: 199). Increasingly, it was also though
necessary (and ‘natural’) that ‘the people’ and their rulers should have the
same ethnic national origin. Gradually, the idea began to predominate
that ‘nations and states were destined for each other’ (Gellner, 1983: 6).
Leah Greenfeld argues that one core idea distinguishes national
identity from other collective identities; it:
locates the source of individual identity within a ‘people’, which
is seen as the central object of loyalty and the basis of collective
solidarity. The ‘people’ is the mass of a population whose
boundaries and nature are defined in various ways, but which
is usually perceived as larger than any concrete community and
always as fundamentally homogenous, and only superficially
divided along the lines of status, class, or locality.
(Greenfeld quoted in Spillman and Faeges, 2005: 429)
This is a very important point; it means that ‘national’ identity became a
key aspect of individual identity (and it remains so).
Activity
What is a ‘national interest’? How is this different from a ‘class’ or other form of group
interest? Who decides what the ‘national interest’ is? Are ‘national interests’ always
genuinely in the interest of all of the people? If not, why not?
The first major wave of nationalism (and nation-building) occurred during

the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the
nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period there were revolutions
(most famously) in North America (a revolt against British imperial rule in
1776 led to the formation of the United States) and in France, where the
monarchy was overthrown and a Republic declared.
This was the great age of what is usually referred to as civic
nationalism. This form of nationalism tends to stress the novelty of
the political project of nation-building (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of
the ‘modernity’ of the French and American revolutions), the liberation
of the ‘nation’ (or ‘the people’) from the tyranny of dynastic monarchy,
for example. It is also a relatively cosmopolitan form and national
membership is much less tied to exclusive notions of ethnicity. During
the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, for example, the
American Tom Paine (1737–1809) was made a member of the National
Assembly. What was stressed during the revolutionary national upheavals
of this period were common ideas about liberty, and the revolutionary
nationalist movements, up to about the mid-nineteenth century, tended
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to be forward-looking and progressive political movements.

As such, they were much less concerned with drawing inspiration from
ideas of an ‘ancestral homeland’ or a narrow definition of shared ethnic
belonging, and deeply critical of ‘archaic’ and ‘aristocratic’ social orders.
These ideas were connected with the thought of the Enlightenment
(see Chapter 2) and its stress on individual liberty, abstract concepts of
universal citizenship and rational cosmopolitanism. It was essentially a
political form of nationalism connected closely to the institutional and
administrative ordering of a territorial state.
However, if civic nationalism (which became associated with the ideas
of the French Revolution) drew on the Enlightenment for its ideas, later
nineteenth and twentieth century nationalisms were more influenced
by another important intellectual movement, namely Romanticism.
Romanticism was largely a reaction against the rationalism of the
Enlightenment and it stressed the authenticity of strong emotions, a deep
connection to ‘nature’, the aesthetic as opposed to the rational, and the
powers of the imagination. Romanticism also stressed the authenticity
of ‘folk’ customs and culture as against the rootless or ‘inauthentic’
cosmopolitan life of cities and elite classes (especially intellectuals!). This
frequently meant an interest in reviving the languages, cultures and
folk arts of ‘the people’ (especially where these were seen as threatened
by more dominant languages or cultures). These ideas were important in
the next great wave of nationalism that occurred from about the end of
the nineteenth century onwards. This has usually been characterised as
ethnic nationalism. This has been revived significantly from the later
part of the twentieth century onwards, particularly in the explosion of new
nation-states that have emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union in
the late 1980s. It also (at least partly) accounts for the revival of nationalist
movements amongst ethnically self-identified peoples within larger states of
the ‘West’ (Basques, Scots, Quebecois, for example) since the 1970s.
However, probably the most important twentieth-century nationalist
movements have been those that were linked with the anti-colonial
struggles and independence movements in Africa and Asia from about
the early to mid-twentieth century onwards. Such struggles created what
are often very ethnically diverse states out of territories that had been
arbitrarily carved up by colonial powers. Nonetheless, this wave of anti-
colonial nationalism was at least partly responsible for the global spread of
the ‘modern’ nation-state form.
To summarise, we can say that nationalism is a way of constructing collective
identities. It arose alongside transformations in state power, increased
long-distance economic ties, new communications and transport capacities,
and new political projects. This does not mean, however, that everything
about nationalism is new. Specific nationalist identities and projects have
continued to draw on ethnic identities of long standing, on local kinship and
community networks, and on claimed connections to ancestral territories.
This has been a crucial source of cultural content, emotional commitment
and organisational strength for such identities and projects.
Approaches to nationalism
In the remainder of this chapter, we will explore sociological approaches
to nationalism, and in particular we will focus (through the essential 2
Something which
reading) on approaches that stress the ‘modernity’ of nations and is described as
nationalism. Anthony Smith labels these theories ‘modernist’ and he ‘perennial’ is thought
contrasts them with what he describes as ‘perennialist’2 theories. This to be ‘everlasting or
perpetual’.
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is a common distinction. Other theorists make the same distinction but

refer instead to ‘constructivist’ or ‘instrumentalist’ approaches, which they
contrast with ‘primordialist’ ideas. The former emphasise the historical and
social processes by which nations are created (‘constructed’). Many (the
‘instrumentalists’) stress that this ‘invention’ is often a self-conscious and
manipulative project carried out by elites who seek to secure their power
by mobilising followers on the basis of nationalist ideology. Its emphasis
is on the ways that nations are ‘outcomes’ of conditions of political
mobilisation and domination. This approach will be explored in more
depth later in the chapter.
Anthony Giddens (1985) argues that a theory of nationalism needs to
incorporate elements of each of the approaches that we saw outlined
earlier in the chapter. He argues that an account of nationalism needs to
take into consideration each of the following characteristics:
• its political character (chiefly its association with the formation of
nation states)
• its relationship to industrial capitalism (that is, the ideological
characteristics of nationalism that are associated with forms of class
domination)
• its psychological dynamics (that is the range of sentiments and
emotions that are not simply ‘institutional practices’)
• the symbolic content of nationalist ideas, rituals and practice.
Giddens argues that most sociological approaches to nationalism have
stressed one (or sometimes two) of these characteristics at the expense
of others. Thus, Marxist or Marxist-derived explanation has been good
at discussing the first and second of these characteristics and placing
them in the context of class domination. Marxist approaches tend to see
nationalism as an ideology that detracts from the formation of class
identities, which would be more antagonistic to one another within
states. Notions of a ‘national interest’ override ‘sectional’ class interests
and this can therefore be seen as ‘ideological’ as it is essentially masked
expression of the interests of the dominant class.
Similarly, approaches that stress the crucial importance of industrialism
tend to focus on the necessity of the diffusion of common modes of
thought and belief through the population, which, in advanced industrial
societies is the means of their coordination. The sociologist Ernest Gellner
argues that this is achieved through mass education systems and the
development of advanced systems of mass communication through which
‘commonsense’ moral and political identities can be created. Thus the
heightening of the administrative power of states is responsible for the
stimulating of nationalist sentiments. However, Giddens asks why this
is necessarily linked. In other words, why should an industrial society
necessarily be a nation-state? As we have seen (in Chapter 4) the classical
sociologists of the nineteenth century did not foresee such a powerful
connection as essential or even likely.
Giddens argues that Gellner and other sociologists who stress
the institutional character of nationalism and its relationship to
industrialisation do not have much to say about the content of
nationalism or its specifically psychological power. Giddens argues that
nationalist sentiments tend to have a series of common symbols. These
include, ‘attachment to a homeland, associated with the creation and
perpetuation of certain distinctive ideals and values, traceable to certain
historically given features of “‘national” experience’ (1985: 214).
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Psychological explanation associates this with the human need to belong to

a collectivity with which people can identify. Previous groupings that could
fulfil this need (the local community, the kinship group) have disappeared or
are disappearing in ‘modernity’; the symbols of nationalism provide a modern
substitute. So nationalism not only provides a basis for group identity, it
does so in the context of showing this identity to be the result of distinct and
precious ‘achievements’. It appeals to a desire for an identity securely rooted
in the past and provides feelings of ‘continuity’ often through ‘identification’
with an idealised version of the past. This approach offers an account of the
origins of nationalism in the collapse of organic communities. This collapse of
traditional forms of association and belonging produces a search for renewed
forms of group symbolism, ‘of which nationalism is the most potent’ (215).
Durkheim’s work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (see Chapter 4) has
been very influential in explorations of the cultural and symbolic dimensions
of nationalism. However, Giddens argues that the origin and need for identity
remain ‘too vague’ for this type of theory to be entirely satisfactory. It cannot
account for the relationship with ideology or account for why nationalist
sentiments become more intense or decline at different periods.
We will now look in depth at two specific approaches to nationalism.
Activity
Now read the chapter by Anthony Smith, ‘Invention and Imagination’.
‘Modernism’ and ‘perennialism’

Smith argues that debate about nationalism has, since the 1950s and the
1960s, largely taken place within what he refers to as the ‘modernist’
paradigm. A paradigm is a commonly accepted theoretical model that is
used to help explain and define phenomena. The ‘modernist’ paradigm
regards nations as being fundamentally modern; that is, they are
‘modern’ in the sense of being recent phenomena. However, they are also
‘modern’ in the other sense that we explored in Chapter 2: they are the
products of historical ‘modernity’ and have only arisen as a consequence
of processes of ‘modernisation’ in social, political and economic terms.
This means, of course, that nations do not have long histories. According
to this paradigm, they came into being very recently (sociologists and
historians usually date this towards the end of the eighteenth century). In
the modernist paradigm, the nation is essentially a political creation and
nationalism is part of the process through which nations were built.
The modernist paradigm emerged as a reaction against what Smith refers to
as ‘perennialism’. This approach is much closer to the kind of ‘commonsense’
thinking that was described at the beginning of this chapter. ‘Perennialism’
makes a number of important assumptions about nations and nationalism,
for example, and these are all based on the idea of the nation as a more or
less ‘natural’ phenomenon. Equally, ‘perennialist’ arguments assume that
nationalism is a form of sentimental attachment to the nation that arises as
a natural consequence of membership of a specific national community.
For ‘perennialists’, nations are first and foremost ‘politicised ethno-national
communities’ (Smith, 1998: 22). In other words, the forms of political
action necessary for the building of nation-states emerges from the pre-
existing national ‘consciousness’ of members of an ethnic community who
have always regarded themselves as a national community; this is a
politicised community because, perennialists argue, it has always been
aware of itself as a national community and therefore it must have always
had the aspiration to found its own national state.
126
In this model, these communities are also thought of as communities of

‘the people’. This means that national cultures often tend to be thought
of in ‘popular’ terms in which culture is seen as ‘folk’ music and dancing,
traditional crafts and so on. This too is usually linked to ideas about the
specific or special character or ‘genius’ of a nation and its people, which is
expressed in its art, culture and even in its political institutions. The nation
also tends to be thought of as having a ‘will’ (think about how many times
you have heard expressions such as these: ‘the American people think…’;
‘the German people want…’; ‘Indians believe that…’).
According to Smith, these national communities are thought by
perennialists to have very long histories stretching back for many
centuries; nations are thought of as persistent or even as ‘eternal’. Most
often this way of thinking about the nation is also linked to the idea of
a national ‘homeland’ or an ancestral territory which must be defended,
recaptured or ‘returned’ to. The essence of the nation is therefore to be
found in ancestral ties (that provide continuity with the past), an authentic
culture (of all of the ‘people’), a national character and a national ‘will’,
and a specific homeland.
Activity
Think about your own country. What comes to mind when you think about a ‘national
culture’? How does your country advertise itself as a tourist destination? What sort of
souvenirs do tourists take home from your country when they visit? How representative
are these things?
Smith contrasts these ideas with those of the ‘modernists’. As we have

seen, the key idea of the modernists is that, far from being ancient or
‘natural’ phenomena, nations emerged only recently in historical terms
and, more specifically, their emergence is related directly to the coming
of ‘modernity’. Remember, by modernity we mean large-scale and long-
term processes of change that saw the transformation of ‘traditional’
societies by capitalism, industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation and
the emergence of modern states. As we have seen, modern states have
most often been ‘national’ or ‘nation’ states. Perennialists would argue
that this is because there were already pre-existing ‘national’ communities
with aspirations to become autonomous and sovereign nation-states.
Modernists, however, would argue that the idea of the ‘nation’ as a
political community which is organised as a state is a specifically
‘modern’ idea!
Smith argues that each of the ideas about nations held by the perennialists
is opposed by those for whom nations are modern phenomena.
Perennialism Modernism
Cultural community Political community
Ancient Modern
Rooted Created
Organic Mechanical
Unified Divided
Popular Elite construct
Ancestrally-based Communication-based
(Adapted from Smith, 1998: 23)
127
For the modernists, nations are wholly modern. They are one of the
products of the revolutionary changes that have formed the modern world
and are not therefore deeply rooted in history. More importantly, nations
and nationalism are ‘social constructs and cultural creations of modernity’.
They are ‘designed for an age of revolutions and mass mobilisation, and
central to the attempts to control these processes of rapid social change’
(1998: 23).
We have looked at the two approaches to the question of nationalism
and national identity that Smith outlines. As we have seen, the first of
these assumes that nations have always existed, the second is related to
the process of modern state-building and the principal argument in this
approach is that nations are largely ‘constructed’ by elites in the service of
their interests.
One of the key factors in the process of ‘nation-building’ is the capacity to
mobilise populations through the use of nationalism. In the next section,
we will look at how different arguments and ideas about nationalism,
what it is and how it works, have been presented. In particular we will
focus on the idea that nations are ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ and that
nationalism plays a crucial role in this process.
Activity
Re-read pages 117–121 of the chapter by Smith.
In this chapter Smith discusses in detail the arguments of those who

maintain that nations are ‘invented’. In particular, Smith discusses Eric
Hobsbawm’s arguments in his book The Invention of Tradition and Benedict
Anderson’s arguments in Imagined Communities.
According to Smith, Hobsbawm argues that the ‘nature and appeal of
nations’ can best be understood by ‘analysing national traditions, and that
national traditions are one kind of invented tradition’ (117). Hobsbawm
defines an ‘invented tradition’ as:
a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly
accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seeks to
inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition,
which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact,
where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity
with a suitable historic past.
Let us think carefully about what Hobsbawm is arguing here. Firstly, let
us think about what he means by tradition. This is described as ‘practices’
(things that are done) which are ‘governed by overtly or tacitly accepted
rules’ (rules which are obvious or those which are less formal and
which might be ‘unspoken’). These practices are usually of a ‘ritual’ or
a ‘symbolic’ nature (flying the flag, singing an anthem and so on). They
are repeated constantly and, through their repetition, they help to instil
particular values and norms of behaviour (patriotism, standing during
anthems). Hobsbawm argues that these practices imply ‘continuity with
the past’. This is crucial to his argument. Normally when we think about
a tradition we think about something that is has been in continuous
existence for a long period of time (often something that goes
back so far into history that its origins are obscure). When we take part in
traditional rituals (such as the singing of a national anthem) it is assumed
that this connects us to people in the past who did exactly the same thing.
This establishes a sense of common bonds or identity between people
in the past and us; it provides a feeling of continuity that makes us feel
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‘British’ or ‘Russian’ or ‘Indian’ in the important sense that we feel that we

are participating in a continuing national story (or tradition). All of this
implies that not only the ‘traditions’ themselves, but also the sentiments
that they inspire must have been in existence for many centuries.
Now, let us think about what an ‘invented’ tradition is. Hobsbawm argues
that with the (very recent) emergence of national states (which are above
all ‘modern’ phenomena), completely new ‘symbols and devices’ come
into existence. He argues that:
Historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating
an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by
semi-fiction…or by forgery.
National heroes, battles and wars, poets, either real, fictional or semi-
mythical can all be utilised to create the impression of a national past
that stretches back into early history (in the UK, for example, the legend
of King Arthur features in this way). Hobsbawm claims that one of the
ways in which this (fictional) continuity with a (largely imaginary) past is
created is through the invention in the present of ‘traditions’ that appear
to have a long history. He goes on to argue that these modern ‘invented
traditions’ belong to three basic and overlapping types.
The first of these ‘establishes or symbolises social cohesion or membership
of groups’. These groups might be real communities that have existed for
long periods or they might be more ‘artificial’ communities that need to
be created in the present through the creation of an apparently common
‘heritage’.
The second of these types of ‘invented tradition’ establishes or legitimises
institutions, status or relations of authority. Thus, to use another example
for the United Kingdom, many of the ‘traditions’ of the British monarchy
(royal coaches, coronation ceremonies and so on) were ‘invented’ in
the nineteenth century as a means of legitimating and popularising an
institution that was beginning to seem redundant in the face of social and
political changes. This also helped legitimate other relatively undemocratic
aspects of state power.
Thirdly, these ‘invented traditions’ attempt to ‘socialise’ populations in new
and specific ways by creating new forms of social identity based on national
identification. This new form of social identity is created through instilling
new ‘beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour’ into populations.
These are created partly through the repetition of practices that have been
specifically invented for the purpose but which appear to be ‘traditions’.
Hobsbawm claims that the most important of these types of invented tradition
is the first one in which social cohesion and group membership is created.
This produces a powerful form of identification with a community and
its institutions. Hobsbawm goes on to claim that the values that ‘invented
traditions’ attempt to create can seem to be ‘unspecific and vague’ (he cites
patriotism, loyalty, duty and so on). However, the practices that symbolise
these ideals are usually highly specific and are often compulsory. The ‘crucial
element’, he argues, is the ‘invention of emotionally and symbolically
charged signs of group membership such as flags and anthems’ (1998: 121).
Importantly, Hobsbawm argues, these ‘invented traditions’ actually take up
a much smaller part of the social space than older customs and traditions
that make up the activities of daily and domestic life. They became, however,
increasingly prominent in the public life of citizens of the new national
states that emerged over the nineteenth century. In particular, they were
introduced into the lives of citizens through the institutions of mass schooling
and in new forms of national print media such as newspapers.
129
The study of these ‘invented traditions’ is crucial if we are to understand

the ways that the comparatively recent historical phenomenon of the
nation-state has been able to make itself appear to be a ‘natural’ and a
‘timeless’ phenomenon. Indeed, Hobsbawm argues that the ‘nation’, the
‘nation-state’, nationalism, national symbols and national histories all ‘rest
on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always
innovative’ (quoted in Smith, 1998: 120). He goes on to argue that the
way that we experience modern national life is based on the ways that
‘invented traditions’ shape the ways that we think and feel about the
nations that we ‘belong’ to.
The key point to Hobsbawm’s argument is that although nationalists might
claim that nations are ancient institutions that can be traced back to into
the mists of time and are above all natural phenomena, the reality is that
they are very recent and very new ‘constructs’. An important part of their
construction is the way that traditions are invented as a means of making
what is new appear to be ancient. In other words, Hobsbawm argues that
nations are made by nationalists.
Activity
What do you understand by the term ‘invented tradition’? Explain in your own words
what Hobsbawm means by this. Write about 350 words.
In this section of the chapter we are going to look carefully at Anthony

Smith’s arguments about nationalism. Remember, in his chapter Smith
is presenting the arguments of two leading proponents of the idea
that nations are ‘constructed’ or ‘invented’. But he is doing this in order
to assess the validity of their arguments. This is a crucial aspect of
academic work. Writers must learn to present as accurately as possible the
arguments and ideas of another writer and then to analyse and evaluate
these ideas as fairly as possible.
So far we have seen his presentation of the case made by Hobsbawm
about the role of invented traditions in the construction of national
identities. In the section of Smith’s chapter we are now going to read, we
will be presented not just with the arguments of Hobsbawm but also with
those of Smith himself. Smith disagrees with some important aspects of
Hobsbawm’s analysis and interpretation of nationalism; we will find out
how and why as we read on.
Activity
Re-read from the top of page 121 (beginning with the section headed ‘Two stages of
nationalism’) to mid way down page 131 (to the section headed ‘Imagining the nation’).
Why do traditions need to be invented at all and why should nationalists

wish to make nations appear to be natural and ancient phenomena rather
than specifically modern ones? Hobsbawm makes a distinction between
two specific forms of nationalism. The first is that of ‘mass, civic and
democratic political nationalism’ (121). This was often, as in the French
citizen state after 1789, brought into being by revolutionary means in
which the ‘nation’ (or ‘the people’, which began to be thought of as the
same thing as the nation) liberated itself from tyrannical or oppressive
government or from foreign domination. According to Hobsbawm, this
type of nationalism flourished in Europe and the Americas (in both North
and South America) from the end of the eighteenth century to about
the middle of the nineteenth century and again during the periods of
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anti-colonial struggle against European imperialism in Asia and Africa

from the early to mid-twentieth century. Hobsbawm argues that this
type of nationalism operated what he describes as a ‘threshold principle’,
whereby only those nations that were large enough to support a capitalist
market economy (in terms of the size of their territory and population)
were thought to be entitled to ‘self-determination and sovereignty’. What
Hobsbawm means by this is that nationalism of this type was tied explicitly
to projects of viable state-building in an era when state-building was
explicitly tied to the construction of capitalist markets (see Chapter 7).
The second type of nationalism that Hobsbawm identifies is ‘ethno-
linguistic’ nationalism. In this type of nationalism, groups with ‘common
ethnic and linguistic bonds’ asserted their rights to break away from larger
states into which they were incorporated. Hobsbawm argues that this
type of nationalism predominated in Europe during the period 1870 to
1914 and has become dominant again since the 1970s, particularly in the
territories of the former Soviet Union.
According to Hobsbawm, the latter form of nationalism is based on the
idea that:
…any body of people considering themselves a ‘nation’ [could
claim] the right to self-determination, which in the last analysis,
meant the right to a separate sovereign independent state for
their territory. Second, and in consequence of this multiplication
of potential ‘unhistorical’ nations, ethnicity and language became
the central, increasingly the decisive or even the only criteria of
potential nationhood.
This is a very important point and one that we can easily link to some
of the ideas about nations, nationality and nationalism that we saw
made by the perennialists. Linguistic and ethnic forms of nationalism are
based on the assumption that common bonds of language and ‘ethnicity’
are sufficient criteria for a ‘people’ to seek political autonomy and their
‘own’ state. Remember, one of the arguments that Smith attributes to
perennialists is that the political action necessary for the building of
nation-states emerges from the pre-existing national ‘consciousness’ of
members of an ethnic community who have always regarded themselves
as a national community. In this argument, the feeling of commonality
and of community is produced by common linguistic or ethnic bonds. This
has become the dominant form of nationalism in the world today.
However, Hobsbawm does not simply describe this form of nationalism
‘neutrally’. His analysis of it is highly critical. Let us follow his argument
about ‘ethno-linguistic’ nationalism. At the bottom of page 122, three
reasons are given for its spread in the period after 1870. These are:
• An association that began to be made between ‘race’, language and
nationality. In other words, it began to be assumed that different
peoples belonged to different races with different languages and
cultures.
• New classes emerged as part of the processes of industrialisation and
urbanisation and older classes attempted to resist the changes being
brought about by modernisation.
• There was an ‘unprecedented’ migration of people (from the
countryside to towns, from less prosperous to more prosperous regions
and so on) and this was accompanied by massive social, political and
economic upheaval.
131
Each of these factors was, according to Hobsbawm, responsible for the

emergence of ethnic nationalism, which he describes as a ‘politics of fear’.
That is, fear of rapid social change, of democracy, of the ‘masses’, of the
‘debasement’ of culture by the spread of mass forms of entertainment,
and, above all, fear of ‘racial’ or ethnic others found expression in a new
and quite aggressive nationalism that was backward looking (to an
imaginary past) and intent on creating ‘ethnically homogenous states’
(states with only one ethnic group). At its most extreme this sort of
nationalism led to fascism and the extermination of ethnic minorities.
Hobsbawm is highly critical of ethnic nationalism. He describes
nationalist movements as ‘essentially negative, or rather divisive’ as a
direct consequence of their insistence on ethnic, linguistic or religious
difference. Indeed, Hobsbawm argues that:
Time and again they seem to be reactions of weakness and fear,
attempts to erect barriers to keep at bay the forces of the modern
world…
He goes on to argue that:
Wherever we live in urbanised societies, we encounter strangers:
uprooted men and women remind us of the fragility, or the
drying up of our own families’ roots…[But] the call of ethnicity
or language provides no guidance to the future at all. It is merely
a protest against the status quo, or more precisely, against the
‘others’ who threaten the ethnically defined group.
For Hobsbawm, nationalism in the contemporary world is therefore a
backward-looking reaction to large-scale contemporary social and economic
processes that are re-making the world. In the nineteenth century, nationalism
can be credited with helping to build political units (‘nation-states’) that were
also ‘national economies’ (see Chapter 7), and can therefore be regarded as
being at the ‘centre of historical development’. Now, however, it is a rather
redundant phenomenon, incapable of responding positively to the changes in
the world that are increasingly making nations and nation-states redundant
(the international division of labour, globalisation, the revolution in mass
communications and international migration).
Activity
What do you think Hobsbawm means by nationalism being a ‘politics of fear’? Does all
nationalism in the contemporary world involve a fear and hatred of ‘others’?
In the sections of the chapter that we have read so far, Smith has outlined
Hobsbawm’s arguments about the modernity of nations and nationalism,
about the ‘invention of tradition’, and about the ‘backward-looking’ nature
of the ethnic nationalisms that have re-emerged in the contemporary
world. Smith now moves on (beginning with the section ‘Ethnic and
civic nationalisms’ on page 125) to discuss the arguments and ideas that
Hobsbawm has proposed.
Activity
Read from the beginning of the section ‘Ethnic and civic nationalisms’ at the top of page
125 down to the middle of page 131.
Think carefully about what Smith is saying about Hobsbawm’s arguments about the
‘modernity’ of nations and nationalism. Use the questions below to help you through the
reading:
• In what way was the French Revolution (page 126) a ‘nationalist’ revolution?
132
• How important were these nationalist ideas outside of France itself? In what way
does this complicate Hobsbawm’s account of nationalism?
• Which important ‘functions and dimensions of nationalism’ (page 126) does
Smith claim that Hobsbawm has omitted from his account?
• Why does Smith claim (126/127) that it is not possible to distinguish so easily
between the two types of nationalism (civic and ethnic) that Hobsbawm outlines?
What evidence does he give for his assertion?
In the section headed ‘Proto-national bonds’ Smith makes a number of very important
points about the role of the ‘masses’ and the ‘elites’ in the formation of national
consciousness and of nations. Smith argues that the elite modernist or constructionist
argument ignores crucial factors.
• What does Smith mean when he claims that Hobsbawm ‘can accord no role for
the masses…they are passive, acted upon’?
• What evidence does Smith use to show that ‘popular’ ideas were important in
building nations?
• Do you find Smith’s argument convincing?
• What does Smith mean (page 128) when he argues that the most serious
implication of Hobsbawm’s argument about the ‘passivity of the masses’ has its
‘counterpart in the manipulation of the elites’? What implication does this have?
• What does ‘social engineering’ mean in this context?
• Why does Smith think that Hobsbawm’s account is wrong?
• What evidence does he give for this?
• On what basis does Smith claim that ‘ethnicity is such a powerful force in the
modern world, and why so many nations are, or seek to be formed on the basis of
a dominant ethnie’?
• According to Smith, why is Hobsbawm ‘unable to give a convincing account of
the involvement of “the masses” in nation and nationalism’?
Now re-read the section ‘The nation as construct?’ from the top of page 129 down to the
middle of page 131.
• What are Smith’s main objections to the argument that nations are ‘social
constructions’?
• Why does he argue that ‘Hobsbawm provides no clue as to why nationalism has
been so successful’?
• What does Smith mean (page 129) by ‘the complex interweaving of relationships
between old and new cultural traditions’?
• Why does he think that this ‘complex interweaving’ undermines Hobsbawm’s
argument about the relationship between elites and masses and about invented
traditions’?
• What does Smith mean when he argues (page 130) that ‘to see nations as
composed largely of “invented traditions” designed to organise and channel the
energies of the masses, places too much weight on artifice and assigns too large
a role to the fabricators’?
• How does Smith argue against this proposition?
• Do you find these arguments convincing?
• What does Smith mean when he claims that he is arguing against ‘social
constructionism and invention’ as valid categories?
• Why does he think that these are not valid categories? What reasons does he give
for this?
• What evidence does he use to support his argument?
133
Imagined communities
Activity
Now read from the section ‘Imagining the nation’ on page 131 to the end of the chapter
on page 142.
In the remainder of his chapter, Smith discusses the very influential

book by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. We have seen that
in his discussion of Hobsbawm’s work on nationalism, Smith argues that
there are problems with Hobsbawm’s ideas about the ‘construction’ of
nations by elites through the use of ‘invented traditions’. Smith argues
that this approach largely ignores the powerful subjective dimension
of nationalism and national identity (how people feel about and
experience their sense of belonging to a specific nation). The strength
of these feelings and their capacity to make people act in particular ways
(to sacrifice themselves for their country, for example) cannot, he argues,
be explained by ideas about ‘construction’ or ‘invention’. For Smith, this
sounds too ‘mechanistic’ and it also assumes that ordinary people (the
‘masses’) are in effect ‘empty vessels’, capable of being filled by ideas and
therefore manipulated by elites. According to Smith, this argument also
assumes that nationalism is increasingly a spent force in the contemporary
world as the conditions that originally gave rise to it have now changed
significantly. So, nations and nationalism are not only ‘artificial’
constructions, they are also backward-looking and redundant.
Anderson, however, argues that ‘the end of the era of nationalism, so long
prophesied, is not remotely in sight’ (quoted in Smith, 1998: 131). The
persistence of nationalism is therefore something that needs to be properly
explained. In particular, the subjective and cultural factors that Hobsbawm
ignores need to be explored and analysed, otherwise the power and the
persistence of nationalism will not be properly understood.
Anderson also begins from the premise that nations and nationalism are
modern phenomena, but his focus is on the ‘affective’ (the subjective and
the emotional) dimension. Given the passions that nationalism inspires, it
makes more sense, he argues, to treat it ‘as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ or
‘religion’ rather than seeing it as an ideology. Anderson therefore argues
that the nation should be seen as ‘an imagined political community
– and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.
The key word in Anderson’s argument is ‘imagined’. Anderson claims that
all communities larger than the smallest villages in which face-to-face
contact is possible are ‘imagined’. In other words, we will never meet or
know the vast majority of the members of the communities that we belong
to, be they the cities that we might live in, fellow members of a religion or
the countries that we inhabit. Nations are one specific type of ‘imagined’
community. We will clearly never meet or know all of the members of ‘our’
nation. Nonetheless, as Anderson argues, ‘in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion’. This means that in the modern world we all
tend to have a very clear sense of ourselves as belonging to a nation and
as connected through common bonds of affiliation with other members
of the same nation, despite the fact that we have not and never
will know or meet the vast majority of them.
The nation is a particular type of ‘imagined community’ and Anderson
argues that there are three very specific ways in which nations are
‘imagined’. Firstly, they are imagined as limited:
134
Nations are imagined as limited because even the largest of

them…has finite, if elastic, boundaries. No nation imagines itself
as coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists
do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race
will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain
epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.
In other words, nations are never thought of as universal phenomena
(which some religions or some political ideologies often are).
Secondly, nations are imagined as sovereign. Remember, Anderson
argues that nations are modern. They came into existence towards the
end of the eighteenth century during the period of Enlightenment and
revolution. During this period, independent (sovereign) nation-states
began to be regarded as expressions of the legitimate aspirations of
different peoples for political autonomy.
Thirdly, the nation is imagined as a community:
…because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation
that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a
deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity
that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many
millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for
such limited imaginings.
(Anderson, 2006: 7)
For Anderson this is ‘the central problem posed by nationalism’ and it leads
him to an important question: ‘what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent
history…generate such colossal sacrifices?’ The answer, he argues, can be
found in an examination of ‘the cultural roots of nationalism’ (2006: 7).
Anderson argues that in order to understand the powerful hold that
nationalism continues to have we need to think specifically about its
emergence in the eighteenth century. This was an age of increasing
‘rationalist secularism’, in which religious explanations and ideas
were in retreat. Modern ‘progressive’ political ideologies (such as Marxism
and liberalism) emerged during this period but, Anderson argues, they
cannot answer fundamental questions about the nature of human life that
we routinely ask. In particular, the fact of our mortality (the fact that we
will all ultimately die) is something that specifically political ideologies
have little or nothing to say about.
Anderson suggests that amongst the most important symbols of nationhood
are memorials to those killed in wars (cenotaphs, for example). These
have a powerful cultural significance which is linked to the ways in which
‘nations’ are imagined as having ‘immemorial pasts’ and also ‘limitless
futures’. By imagining ourselves as ‘belonging’ to a nation, we are in fact
imagining ways in which ‘we’ also have both a past and a future beyond the
limits of our own lives. It is in this sense that nationalism is different from
‘self-consciously held political ideologies’ and has more in common with the
‘large cultural systems that preceded it’, such as religion (12).
Of equal importance, according to Anderson, are the linguistic differences
between different peoples. Anderson argues that people are fundamentally
divided by the languages that they speak. With the invention of printing,
which coincided roughly with the expansion of capitalism, markets for
print products (newspapers, novels, etc.) in the vernacular languages
of large population groups were created. He goes on to argue that the
development of capitalist markets in printed products created what he
calls ‘print communities’ and ‘reading publics’. It was through these that a
national ‘consciousness emerged.
135
Activity
Re-read from page 135 through to the end of Smith’s chapter.
Once you have read through to the end of the chapter write about 500 words (or more)
in answer to this question:
• What is the relationship between the development of ‘print capitalism’ and
nationalism?
Use the questions below to help you to make sense of what Smith is saying:
• Anderson claims that new ‘national’ communities became ‘imaginable’ because
of:
…a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of
production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of
communications (print) and the fatality of human linguistic diversity…
• What does Anderson mean by this? Can you trace the steps of his argument that
Smith outlines on pages 135–136?
Finally, though Smith agrees with many aspects of Anderson’s argument,

he also finds certain aspects of it less convincing. In particular, he believes
that language communities and the ‘narrative imagination’ of the nation
provide too limited an account. He argues that an analysis of the cultural
production of nationalism through texts and ‘discourses’ (remember,
Anderson analyses the importance of the rise of the novel, for example)
misses the ‘causal explanations of the character and spread of a specific
type of community and movement’ (1998: 138). However, as we will see
in the next chapter, what Smith refers to as causal explanation (which
we explored in Chapter 3) can also apply to the complex operation of
‘discourses’.

• offer explanations of nationalism as a form of collective political
mobilisation and as a social identity
• explain how and why nationalism emerged as a form of social and
political identity in historical modernity
• explain the historical relationship between nationalism and the nation-
state
• describe competing interpretations of the social and historical processes
involved in the emergence of nationalism.

1. ‘Nationalism makes nations.’ Discuss.
2. In what ways has it been argued that nations are ‘modern’?
136
Chapter 9: European expansion and the age(s) of empire
Chapter 9: European expansion and the

age(s) of empire
Aim of the chapter

This chapter has two broad aims:
• to introduce you to historical and sociological accounts of the
expansion of Europe and the emergence of a world system which was
centred on Europe and, more generally, ‘the West’
• to introduce you to the period of European imperial expansion and to
theories of imperialism more generally, and to ask to what extent the
contemporary world is still an ‘age of empire’.
Learning outcomes
• describe differing accounts of European expansion
• explain how and why this expansion took place when it did and what
its consequences were
• demonstrate an understanding of the operation of the ‘discourses’ that
shaped European and Western encounters with others
• explain how and why the European powers were able to divide large
parts of the world between themselves in the late nineteenth century
• describe competing theories of imperialism.
Essential reading
Hall, S. ‘The West and the Rest’ Chapter 6 in Hall, S., and B. Gieben, (eds)
Hobsbawm, E. The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)
[ISBN 9780679721758]. Chapter 3. Note: this can be found at the back of
this subject guide.
Further reading
Biel, R. The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations.
(London: Zed Books, 2000) [ISBN 9781856497473].
Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 9780415044691].
edition [ISBN 9780801472855] Chapter 6.
[ISBN 9780816631216] Chapter 6.
137
Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. (London: Grove, 2005) reprint edition
[ISBN 9780802141323].
Hardt, M., and A. Negri Empire. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000) [ISBN 9780674006713].
[ISBN 9780199278084].
[ISBN 9781842120156].
Hobson, J.A. Imperialism: A Study. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988 [1905])
[ISBN 9781596059481].
Hoogvelt, A.M.M. Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political
Economy of Development. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
[ISBN 9780333461068].
Kiernan, V.G. America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World
Hegemony. (London: Verso, 2005) [ISBN 9781844675227].
University Press, 1993) [ISBN 9780521445856]. Pages 578–583.
Mann, M. Incoherent Empire. (London: Verso, 2005) [ISBN 9781844675289].
Mommsen W.J. Theories of Imperialism. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1981) [ISBN 9780226533964].
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Vintage, 1994)
[ISBN 9780679750543].
** Said, E. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. (London: Penguin
Books, 2003) twenty-fifth anniversary edition [ISBN 9780141187426]
[ISBN 9780415300940] Chapter 1.
Wolf, E. Europe and the People Without History. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997) second edition [ISBN 9780520048980].
Works cited
Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 9780415044691].
Burke, P. History and Social Theory. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
second edition [ISBN 9780801472855] Chapter 6.
[ISBN 9780199278084].
Marx and Engels ‘The Communist Manifesto’ in D. McLellan (ed.)
Karl Marx: Selected Writings. (Oxford: OUP, 1977 [1848]).
Said, E. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. (London: Penguin
Books, 2003) twenty-fifth anniversary edition [ISBN 9780141187426]
[ISBN 9780415300940] Chapter 1.
Wallerstein, I ‘Culture as the ideological battleground of the world system’ in
Featherstone, M. (ed.) Global Culture. (London: Sage, 1990)
[ISBN 9780803983229].
Introduction
So far in this course we have looked at the different factors that gave
rise to key aspects of the modern world. In particular, we have looked
at the emergence of modern states and, in Chapter 8, at the emergence
of nationalism. In this chapter we will look at the expansion of Europe
into the rest of the world. In particular, we will focus on how and why
European expansion occurred and at its consequences. The focus here will
138
be on ‘the age of empire’ in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries. The chapter will look at some of the important sociological
theories of imperialism that have sought to explain and assess the reasons
for European expansion and its impact. In doing so we will assess some
of the ways that sociologists and historians of European expansion and of
imperialism have attempted to explain the apparent dynamism of Europe
during this period in contrast to other parts of the world.
This idea of European (or, more generally, ‘Western’) dominance over the
past 500 or 600 years has been something that sociologists and historians
have puzzled over. Why did Europe gain such predominance economically
and militarily? We have already seen that the reasons for the emergence of
the modern state form were complex and involved a combination of many
different factors working together. Problems faced by attempts to explain
the emergence of ‘Western’ dominance have included both the tendency
toward teleological forms of explanation and the ‘Eurocentrism’ of
these accounts (see Chapter 2). In other words, when sociologists and
historians have attempted to explain Western dominance, they have done
so in terms that assumed that this was inevitable and that have assumed
the superiority of Western culture and of Western institutions. The story
has also been told very much from a ‘Western’ perspective, with the rest of
the world being seen as something that Europeans ‘discovered’, ‘developed’
or ‘modernised’.
The second aim of this chapter, therefore, is to look at the way in which
ideas about ‘the West’ and Western ‘modernity’ were formed in relation
to European encounters with the ‘rest’ of the world. We will explore the
importance of these ideas for colonial and imperial projects, but also for
the development of the social sciences themselves with their teleological
and Eurocentric perspectives that have tended to ‘naturalise’ European
predominance. The approach taken by Hall in the chapter ‘The West and
the Rest’ will also be explained and examined. This is a good example of
a rather different type of historical approach from the ones that we have
encountered so far on the course.
This is an approach that has been much influenced by theoretical
developments in the social and human sciences over the last 30 years
which are often referred to as ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘post-modernist’. The
emphasis in these accounts is on ‘destabilising’ and ‘decentring’ accepted
categories and ideas. In particular, these approaches have insisted on
the socially and culturally ‘constructed’ nature of social categories (such
as nation, class and so on) and they have thus ‘destabilised’ notions of
fixity and of ‘essence’ (the idea that phenomena have an unchanging core
essence). These approaches have simultaneously thrown into question
established ‘grand narratives’ (accepted ways of ordering and of relating
events) about social and historical phenomena. One such ‘grand narrative’
(perhaps the ‘grandest’ narrative of all) is that of the ‘rise of the West’.
Such a narrative is ‘centred’ on the dominant role of Europe in world
affairs since the sixteenth century and of its inevitable rise to dominance
based on factors entirely internal to Europe itself (its special dynamism
in comparison with the ‘stagnation’ of other areas, for example).
Attempts have therefore been made to ‘decentre’ this ‘grand narrative’ by
emphasising the role of other cultures, of cultural interaction and of the
‘constructed’ nature of ideas of Western superiority. Europe and the West
thus lose their central place in the narrative (they are ‘decentred’) and
they are made relative to other processes (Burke, 2005: 181).
139
‘The West and the Rest’

Activity
Read the Introduction and Section1.1 in Hall’s Chapter ‘The West and the Rest’.
Hall argues that ‘“the West” is as much an idea as a fact of geography’ and
that it is ‘a historical, not a geographic construct’. He goes on to argue that
the by ‘Western’ he is referring to ‘developed, industrialised, urbanised,
capitalist, secular’ societies. Such societies exist in all parts of the world
(hence ‘the West’ cannot be confined to a particular geographic space).
Rather, Hall claims, the meaning of the term ‘the West’ is now ‘virtually
identical to that of the word “modern”’. The basis of Hall’s argument in
this chapter is that ‘the West’ functions as an idea or a concept against
which we measure other societies, different ‘stages’ of development and
other value systems.
According to Hall, this idea or concept of ‘the West’ functions in a number
of different ways.
Firstly, it has a classificatory function: if we describe something as
‘Western’ or as ‘non-Western’, this immediately classifies it in a particular
way. Such classifications allow us to see the world in particular ways – as
divided into different categories. As we will see, this division is seldom
neutral and classification usually implies a hierarchy in which one thing
is ‘better’ than another. In the example of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’,
there is an implicit assumption that ‘Western’ is more ‘developed’ and more
‘advanced’.
Secondly, it functions as an ‘image, or set of images’. Specific ideas,
associations and even visual images come to mind when we talk about
‘the West’. It is part of what Hall describes as a ‘system of representation’.
This means that any representation, any image or idea, only has meaning
when it is related to another image or idea. So, for example, ‘West’
is automatically associated with specific characteristics (‘urban’ and
‘developed’ for example). However, these associations are meaningful
in the way that they are only because they are also contrasted with what
are assumed to be their opposite. Thus ‘non-Western’ is automatically
associated with, for example, the ‘rural’ and the ‘under-developed’.
Thirdly, it functions in such a way as to explain difference because it
becomes a standard against which we compare other societies (are they
‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’? is this society more or less ‘Western’ than this
one? and so on).
Finally, as we have said, none of these comparisons is neutral. ‘The West’
is an idea that in its own terms is always associated with positive (and
supposedly desirable) notions of ‘development’, ‘modernity’ and ‘freedom’.
‘Non-Western’, on the other hand, tends (mostly) to have far less positive
connotations, and very often negative ones. Therefore, Hall argues, we
can say that the idea or concept of ‘the West’ functions as an ideology. In
other words, it structures the way that we think about the world, and what
we believe that we ‘know’ about the world.
However, an ideology is not simply a set of ideas about something. It is
‘productive’ (it makes things happen) and it has ‘real effects’. Hall argues
that specifically ‘modern’ societies (which originated, geographically, in the
west of Europe from about the sixteenth century onwards) were produced
by a number of factors working together at a particular point in history.
The idea of ‘the West’ (or of ‘modernity’) as something that is distinctive
140
began to emerge in a similar manner at approximately the same time. Hall

argues that ‘as these societies emerged, so a concept and language of ‘“the
West” crystallised’. He also claims that the idea of ‘the West’ did not simply
‘reflect’ the values and attitudes of a pre-existing Western society; rather,
it was ‘essential to the very formation of that society’. In other words, Hall
argues that the idea of ‘the West’ was at the root of ‘Western’ society’s self-
confident image of itself and that this idea played an important part in its
expansion.
The idea of ‘the West’ was ‘productive’ because, Hall argues, it became
central to a new system of global power through its ability to organise
the way that Europeans regarded themselves and others and through the
way that it organised a ‘whole way of thinking and speaking’. How we
think and speak about something to a large extent determines how we act
towards it. We will see how this works in more detail below.
For example, with some notable exceptions the European Enlightenment
of the eighteenth century tended to assume that European societies
were the most advanced in the world, that they were achieving forms
of enlightenment (in philosophy, the arts and the sciences) that
differentiated them from their own past, which began to be seen as
‘backward’ (see Chapter 2). It assumed that European science, culture
and civilisation represented a peak of sophistication and should act as a
model for other societies to follow. These ideas to a large extent governed
the ways that Europeans treated and dealt with the other societies and
civilisations that they encountered.
The production of meaning

We have seen that one of the characteristics of ‘post-structuralist’
approaches is their ‘destabilisation’ of apparently stable categories of
meaning. The meaning of a specific term is therefore seen to be based on
its relationship with other terms. Let us see how this works.
Hall argues that it was through processes of differentiation that Europe’s
identity was formed as it defined itself against both its own past and the
‘rest’ of the world. This identity can therefore be seen to be relational
in that it comes into being in relation to others that it encounters. Hall
explains this process in terms of linguistic theory. In particular, the French
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that meanings are always purely
relational. What he means by this is that words are only meaningful
as part of a system of differences. In other words, ‘good’ only has
meaning if it can be contrasted with its opposite, ‘evil’. Hall argues that ‘it
is the difference…which enables these words to carry meaning’.
In a similar manner, and equally important for thinking about the way that
all identities exist only in relation to others, psychological (and particularly
psychoanalytic) theory argues that the human infant begins to regard itself
as a separate ‘self’ by differentiating itself from others, by recognising
its separation (initially) from its mother. This is a complex process and
the self is never absolutely autonomous or separate. It gains its sense of
identity from a continuous process of comparison with others.
Both of the processes described above assume that meanings are
established only in relation to another and only by sharply contrasting
one term with another (self and other, for example, or ‘good’ and ‘evil’).
Such contrasts are usually referred to as binary oppositions and they
‘seem to be fundamental to all linguistic and symbolic systems and the
production of meaning itself’ (Hall, 1992: 279).
141
This should give you a clearer idea about the basis for the argument in
the set reading. Hall argues that the ‘idea’ of ‘the West’ and its relationship
to what he calls ‘the Rest’ (the rest of the world, in other words) is an
important factor in determining both the West’s own ‘identity’ and the
way that this means that it deals with other societies and civilisations that
it encounters. Hall calls this relationship the discourse of the West and
the Rest and he argues that this has been fundamental to the way that
the West came to speak of and represent other cultures. In this sense we
can see that one of the historical processes that has shaped the ways that
Western societies operate in relation to others is through this discourse.
We will explore how this emerged and how it works in practice in the next
section. We will also look in more detail at what Hall means by ‘discourse’.
European expansion
Activity
Read Section 2 of the chapter by Hall (pages 280–91).
There have been many theories that have attempted to explain the sudden
and dynamic ‘expansion’ of European conquest and colonisation that began
in the fifteenth century and culminated in the latter part of the nineteenth
century in what Hobsbawm refers to as ‘the age of Empire’. By this point
a handful of European states could claim to rule almost all of Africa, the
Caribbean, large parts of Asia, Australasia, North and South America.
Hall argues that it is never possible to know precisely when a particular
historical process might have begun. However, it is possible broadly to
claim that the period of European expansion began with the end of the
medieval period (see Chapter 4). Hall argues that there were five main
phases of European expansion.
Activity
Look at the maps on pages 284 and 285 and read the accompanying text. This will help
you to get a sense of the global scale of the European explorations and colonial ventures.
The first of these came at the close of the medieval period. Voyages
of exploration and ‘discovery’ (largely from Spain and Portugal) were
launched. Probably the most famous of these was that of Christopher
Columbus to what Europeans came to regard as the ‘New World’ of the
Americas during the period 1492–1502. Prior to this, Portuguese traders
and explorers had begun to make extensive voyages down the western
coast of Africa, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, crossing the Indian
Ocean and reaching India in 1498.
Activity
Read pages 282 and 283 carefully.
There are a number of important historical reasons why these voyages took place and
why they did so at this time in history. However, there is no simple or single explanation
for precisely why they happened when they did. Prior to this, Europeans had not ventured
so far by sea. Hall outlines a number of what he calls ‘complex factors – economic,
political and spiritual’ for the voyages.
Use the following questions to help you think about these factors:
• What were the Portuguese explorers looking for? Why?
• In what ways were the reasons for these voyages economic?
142
• What religious (or ‘spiritual’) influences were there on these voyages?

• In what ways might the voyages also have had ‘political’ motivations?
• What was Columbus looking for? What did he believe that he had ‘discovered’?
• What had held the Portuguese back from making such voyages before?
Now read on from page 284 to the beginning of section 2.4 on page 287
These initial voyages of exploration also had another consequence. The

pope (the head of the Catholic Church), still an enormously powerful
political as well as spiritual leader, divided by treaty the ‘unknown’
world that was being ‘discovered’ by European explorers between the
two kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. As Roberts argues (in the extended
quotation on page 285), this ‘is a landmark of great psychological and
political importance: Europeans, who by then had not even gone round
the globe, had decided to divide between themselves all its undiscovered
and unappropriated lands and peoples.’
As we have seen, one of the main reasons for the European voyages of
exploration during the fifteenth century was the attempt to discover new
and cheaper ways of reaching the ‘East’ in order to bring back luxury
goods (silks and spices, for example) for a growing domestic market. The
Spanish and the Portuguese were soon joined by rivals from Northern
Europe (principally the Dutch, French and English) and attempts to reach
the ‘Indies’ by sailing westward from these countries led to the opening up
of North America, where colonies were also founded.
Conquest and colonisation

The second phase of European expansion involved the conquest of
overseas territory. In the wake of the explorers, the conquistadors
followed. The conquistadors were largely Spanish soldiers, explorers
and adventurers who invaded and conquered much of the Americas
and Asia Pacific, bringing them under Spanish colonial rule between the
fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, starting with the 1492 settlement
by Christopher Columbus. Large, powerful, culturally sophisticated
civilisations such as those of the Aztecs and the Incas were destroyed in
the process, and their people enslaved.
Activity
One argument that attempts to explain the relative ease with which Europeans took to
the business of overseas conquest and colonisation is provided by the historian Robert
Bartlett. Bartlett argues that from the tenth century onwards, ‘Latin’ (that is, Western
European Catholic) Christian societies had been engaged in a protracted period of
expansion through conquest and colonisation within what is now regarded as Europe.
In Eastern Europe, pagan tribes were conquered and their lands settled. In the Iberian
peninsular (what is now Spain and Portugal), the Muslim caliphates which had been
established there were gradually pushed back and a similar process of colonisation of
the conquered land was undertaken. This process of conquest was undertaken from
what was a culturally homogenous core of territories in the West of Europe. It involved
the colonisation and domination of territories that were on the ‘periphery’ of this ‘core’.
Bartlett argues that this ‘fringe’ zone ‘was characterised by a mixture, and often a conflict
between, languages, cultures, and sometimes religions’ as the colonisers dominated the
‘native’ populations. He goes on to argue that out of this experience of conquest and
domination ‘the mental habits of European racism and colonialism were born’ (Bartlett,
1993: 313)
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Read this extract from Bartlett’s book The Making of Europe:

There is no doubt that the Catholic societies of Europe had deep
experience of colonialist enterprise prior to 1492. They were familiar with
the problems and the promise involved in new territorial settlement and
had confronted the issues raised by contact with peoples of very different
culture. Of course there was nothing in their experience as dramatically
‘out of the blue’ as the contact established in 1492. Both ecologically and
historically the Medieval Latin world was contiguous and often continuous
with the neighbouring cultures and societies. Nevertheless, from the
Iberian peninsular in a wide arc east across the Mediterranean and north
to the Arctic Circle, Catholic Europe did have a frontier and, from the
tenth century, a frontier that was moving outwards.
Conquest, colonisation, Christianisation: the techniques of settling in a
new land, the ability to maintain cultural identity through legal forms…
the institutions and outlook required to confront the strange or the
abhorrent, to repress it and live with it, the law and religion as well as the
guns and ships. The European Christians who sailed to the coasts of the
Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came
from a society that was already a colonising society. Europe, the initiator
of one of the worlds’ major processes of conquest, colonisation and
cultural transformation, was also the product of one.
(Bartlett, 1993: 313)
In your own words write about 400 words explaining Bartlett’s argument about how and
why ‘mental habits of colonisation’ were already established amongst Europeans before
the conquest and settlement of overseas territories. Do you think that this helps to explain
European expansion? Give reasons for your answer.
Similarly, in North America the English and the French established

colonies and fought wars against native populations. Hall argues that by
the eighteenth century:
the main European world players – Portugal, Spain, England,
France and Holland – were all in place. The serious business
of bringing the far-flung civilisations they had discovered into
the orbit of western trade and commerce, and exploiting their
wealth, labour and natural resources for European development
had become a major enterprise.
As we have seen (in Chapters 5 and 6), the European ‘system of states’
that developed from the sixteenth century onwards meant that there were
serious rivalries between states. This competition led to frequent warfare,
and the colonial territories and trading interests of the European powers
were drawn into these conflicts. Overseas trading interests, colonies and
strategically important territorial possessions became part of the overall
calculation that states made when assessing the worth or power of their
rivals and wars fought between European states became global in scale
from the early eighteenth century onwards.
This led to a third phase of European expansion which was in a sense
a continuation, consolidation and intensification of the earlier phase of
exploration and colonisation. This involved the development of settler
societies in the Americas organised around plantations which produced
raw materials (cotton and sugar, for example) for the European market,
the organisation of large-scale mining and ranching in Central and South
America and the founding of plantations in South East Asia. During this
phase of expansion, a global market developed in raw materials,
manufactured goods and slaves to work the plantations and mines.
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‘Imperialism’
One of the consequences of increasing rivalry between the newly
centralised states of Europe was an intensification of the rivalry for
overseas territories. This led to a fourth phase of expansion. Later in this
chapter we will explore in more detail how the capitalist nation-states
(see Chapters 7 and 8) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
increasingly fought one another for control of overseas territory, colonies,
raw materials and markets. States became more aggressively ‘imperial’
in their ambitions and ‘private’ trading organisations such as the Dutch
and the English East India companies were taken over directly by the
state (see Tilly, 1992: 95) and the territories that they had administered
became ‘imperial’ possessions (particularly in British India). This phase of
European expansion lasted up to and beyond the Second World War in the
middle of the twentieth century.
Activity
In section 2.4 ‘Breaking the frame’, Hall outlines a number of reasons for the sudden
expansion of Europe. These are political, economic and cultural.
What were the key ‘physical barriers’ that Hall outlines? What important factors
contributed to the breaking down of these barriers?
What were the key ‘barriers in the mind’ that Hall notes? Why do you think that these
mental barriers were also important?
Explaining European ‘dynamism’

As we have said, the expansion of Europe into the rest of the world is
something that occurred at very much the same time that sociologists
and historians have referred to as the beginning of ‘modernity’. We
saw in Chapter 2 that this is a contested concept, with sociologists and
historians disagreeing over exactly when and how ‘modernity’ emerged.
We also saw that people at the time would almost certainly not have
thought of themselves as ‘modern’ in the contemporary sense of the
term. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly true that a combination of several
important factors meant that European societies developed important
‘dynamic’ tendencies that contributed to their expansion. We have
already seen one argument put forward by the historian Robert Bartlett.
Remember, this is a military/political argument about expansion based on
the fact that certain core areas of Christian Europe had effectively been
engaged in an ongoing process of conquest and colonisation within Europe
for centuries prior to the fifteenth-century ‘voyages of discovery’.
Activity
Now read the extract from Michael Mann’s article ‘European development: approaching a
historical explanation’. This is Reading A on page 321.
In this article Mann begins by arguing against what he describes as a

very ‘conventional’ account of European development. This account is
provided by ‘neo-classical economics’; an economic model based largely on
the ideas of Adam Smith1 (1723–1790). In this approach, the ‘European 1
If you have studied
miracle’ is explained by the variety of goods produced within Europe 158 Reading social
science, you can refer
and the ease and cheapness of transport networks (thanks to the many
to the chapter on Adam
navigable rivers and the abundance of coastline). The fact that European Smith.
states relied on systems of relatively light taxation rather than directly
‘looting’ goods from their producers also meant that conditions for
145
economic development were highly favourable. According to this model,

these are the most favourable conditions for economic growth. Their
presence in Europe in the early modern period gave it an edge over its
competitors and allowed it to expand.
However, Mann argues that the ‘neo-classical economics’ model he has
discussed in the first paragraph of his article ‘has essential preconditions
whose emergence we must explain’. In other words, he is arguing that this
model takes too much for granted rather than properly explaining how or
why particular conditions arose. The first of these is ‘Europe’. Mann asks
why ‘Europe’ has been regarded as a ‘continent’ in the first place. It is,
he argues, ‘not an ecological but a social fact’, that is, it is a product of
particular social, economic and cultural conditions, not a fact of ‘nature’.
Mann argues that what we regard as ‘Europe’ was created by ‘the fusion
of the Germanic barbarians and the north western parts of the Roman
Empire’. Its ‘identity’ was primarily Christian. To the South and East, from
the mid-seventh century onwards, ‘Europe’ was surrounded and blocked
in by Islam in the south and east and the Atlantic Ocean in the west. It
referred to itself not so much as ‘Europe’ but as ‘Christendom’ (the lands
of the Christians) and for many centuries its identity was fundamentally
a religious one. Mann’s point is that Europe cannot (any more than
anywhere else can) be regarded simply as a natural geographical or
ecological fact.
Mann also claims that the other part of the economic argument (about
how competition ‘flourished’ in Europe as opposed to other parts of the
world) is also problematic. He argues that ‘competition’ presupposes two
specific forms of social organisation. Firstly, ‘autonomous actors’ must be
allowed to ‘dispose of privately owned resources’ with little or no direct
interference. The ‘actors’ need not be individuals; they could be collective
bodies, such as the village community. In other words, there needs to be a
social and economic system in place that recognises private property.
Secondly, Mann argues, market competition requires a system of
‘normative regulation’ (see Chapter 7). These regulations must apply ‘right
across continental chains of production, distribution and exchange’. Mann
argues that complex social and historical factors meant that both of these
conditions emerged in Europe from about the end of the tenth century
onwards.
This was a result of what Mann describes as Europe’s ‘multiple acephalous
federation…composed of a number of small, cross-cutting interaction
networks’. In other words, no single ‘power agency’ controlled any
clearly defined territory or all of the people in it. Modern states, you
will remember, did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth century.
Mann argues that this particular social structure, which was made up of
a ‘balance’ of ‘organised collectivities’, meant that no single power ‘ruled’
Europe. This dynamic interplay of different power networks and collective
actors (guilds, monasteries, village communes, manors and so on) created
a dynamic and essentially restless set of interconnected networks.
Activity
Try and write about 200 words in answer to each of the following questions:
• What does Mann mean when he argues that the ‘essence of medieval culture’
was its restlessness?
• What does Mann mean when he argues that this restlessness might have led not
to ‘social development’ but to ‘anarchy’ or ‘anomie’?
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Rationality and normative regulation

Mann argues that the insights of two of the ‘classical’ sociologists give us
an indication of how and why European ‘restlessness’ (the dynamism of its
social structures) led to development and not ‘anarchy’ or ‘anomie’.
Firstly, Weber’s account of Protestant Christianity, and especially
Puritanism (a widespread religious movement that was enormously
influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), emphasised
the rationality of its dealings with the world around it. In particular,
he emphasised the way in which Puritanism encouraged a particular
psychological approach to the world which was essentially ‘restless’.
Puritans, Weber argued, were motivated by an idea of ‘the calling’. In
other words they had a sense of being ‘called’ by God to a particular task.
This usually involved working towards worldly improvement of the
self (through hard work) or others (through extensive charity and public
works). However, the Puritans were not unique in this and they drew on
Christian traditions which had always been present and, Mann argues,
‘Christianity encouraged a drive for moral and social improvement, even
against worldly authority.’ Thus, drawing on the work of Weber, Mann
argues that Christianity has always been a religion (at least partly) of
‘rational restlessness’.
Secondly, in order to understand how this ‘rational restlessness’ was able
to work towards ‘social improvement’ rather than anarchy or anomie,
Mann argues that we need to think about the mechanism of ‘normative
regulation’ identified by Durkheim. The dynamic and ‘restless’ nature
of European social structures was reliant on the ‘general recognition of
norms regarding property rights and free exchange’. Remember, for most
of European history since the tenth century, states had been either very
weak or almost non-existent in the modern sense. Judicial regulation
was therefore hardly possible at all. Mann argues that the common
social identity provided by ‘Christendom’ acted as a means of ‘normative
regulation’.
So far we have seen that Mann has argued that the ‘dynamism’ of Europe
that was one of the factors in its expansion, and the ‘export’ of its social
and economic systems across the world needs to be explained rather
than simply taken for granted. Mann explains European dynamism by
referring to the interaction of specific networks and ‘collective actors’ that
emerged within a particular social structure as a consequence of a number
of historical factors. This contributed to the production of a peculiarly
‘restless’ form of social organisation which did not, nonetheless, collapse
into either anarchy or anomie, also for specific historically identifiable
reasons.
Activity
Read to the end of the Mann article.
Mann argues (page 324) that ‘the most powerful and extensive sense of social identity
was Christian, though this was both a unifying transcendent identity and an identity
divided by the overlapping barriers of class and literacy’.
What do you think Mann means by this? In order to answer this question, read carefully
from the paragraph in the middle of page 323 that begins ‘Let us try a little hypothetical
reconstruction…’ to the end of the article on page 325.
Mann also states that ‘European development was a possible consequence of [the]
creative interchange’ of the Mediterranean lands and those of north-western Europe.
What do you think he means by this?
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The idea of Europe

We have seen that Stuart Hall argues that the ‘idea of Europe’ was as
important for the development of European power and self-confidence
as more conventional forms of ‘power’, such as military and economic
strength. In other words, specifically cultural factors play an important role
in the operation of power. Mann makes a similar argument in the article we
have read. European ‘development’ was made possible by a combination of
the specific social structures that developed there and by particular cultural
factors. As we have seen, certain aspects of Christianity contributed to
but also ‘rationalised’ the restlessness that characterised European social
formations. The collective, ‘transcendent’ identity provided by the idea of
‘Christendom’ also provided a ‘normative’ framework that regulated private
property and exchange across the continent.
Activity
Now read the extract from the book The Triumph of the West by John Roberts on pages
325–28.
In this extract, Roberts discusses what he describes as a ‘crucial mental

change’ which was the ‘final emergence of the notion of Europe from
the idea of Christendom’. As we have seen, if ‘Europeans’ had an identity
during the medieval period that was wider than that centred on their
status in a complex social hierarchy or their immediate locality, it was
provided by membership of ‘Christendom’. Roberts notes that this was
gradually replaced by a notion of European identity. This new form of
identity was very much related not only to how Europeans began to see
themselves, but also to how they regarded other peoples of the world.
Activity
In the first three paragraphs of the Roberts extract (pages 325 and 326), he discusses the
‘new view’ that Europeans began to have of themselves in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. According to Roberts, this significant change can be noted in the way that maps
depict Europe. Read these three paragraphs.
Roberts argues that maps are ‘always more than mere factual statements’ and that they
are ‘translations of reality into forms we can master’.
Roberts goes on to suggest that ‘the world is not only what exists “out there”; it is
also the picture we have of it in our minds which enables us to take a grip on material
actuality.’
Try and describe in your own words exactly what Roberts means by this. Use the examples
that Roberts gives of the relationship between maps and the ideas that Europeans had of
themselves in order to illustrate your answer. Can you see any connections here between
the processes that Roberts is describing and Hall’s arguments about the role of the ‘idea’
of Europe?
Write about 400 words.
Roberts goes on to argue that the ‘change’ in European attitudes related to

important historical changes. In particular, the Ottoman conquest of the
last remnants of the Christian Byzantine Empire in 1453 and the loss of
contact with Christian communities across what is now referred to as the
Middle East and North Africa meant that Europe came to regard itself
as a bastion of Christianity. In the process, Europeans began to think of
themselves as possessing a common Christian culture and of Europe itself
as being the exclusive home of such a culture.
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According to Roberts this had profound consequences. He argues that with

‘growing self-consciousness’ (the self-consciousness of having a European
identity) there also emerged a ‘growing sense of superiority’. This sense
of superiority was initially related to its specifically Christian culture and
to the sense that European Christians had of being a ‘chosen’ people (see
Chapter 2 for a discussion of Christian views of time and history). But
this was also related to other cultural influences. Europeans also came
to regard themselves at the heirs to the civilisations of Greece and Rome
(again, see Chapter 2).
Activity
Roberts uses two examples to illustrate his arguments about this growing sense of self-
consciousness and superiority. The first is short quotation from a seventeenth-century
English writer, the second a discussion of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History, also
from the seventeenth century.
What do these writers say about the relationship between Europe and Christianity? How
are other cultures and civilisations regarded by these writers?
Write some notes in answer to these questions summarising Roberts’ arguments.
Finally, Roberts claims that the word ‘Eurocentrism’, which means the
placing of Europe at the centre of the world, is an accurate description
of much of the history of the last 500 years. Europe, and then more
generally ‘the West’, has indeed been at the centre of modern history as
conquest and colonisation moved outward from there and, more recently,
economic and political power and influence have been centred there.
However, Roberts argues that ‘Eurocentrism’ is not simply the factual
acknowledgement of European and Western power and influence. It also
usually refers to the fact that both Europe and ‘the West’ more generally
have tended to think of themselves as ‘qualitatively superior’, which means
that they have thought of themselves as possessing qualities that are
inherently superior to those possessed by other civilisations and cultures.
Activity
Now read section 3 of Hall’s chapter, from page 291 to the end of page 295.
Discourses of the West and the rest

So far Hall’s chapter has considered the emergence of a particular idea of
European and then Western difference. As we have seen, this was usually
thought of in terms of superiority in which Europe and the West were
compared with other civilisations and cultures, which were found to be
less ‘advanced’ or less ‘civilised’.
Hall describes the elements that came together to form ideas about
‘the West’, the rest of the world and the relations between them as ‘the
discourse of the West and the Rest’. This is an important idea. One of
the aims of Hall’s chapter is to highlight the way that certain assumptions
about the European and Western ‘difference’ have been naturalised
(by which we mean that they have been made to appear to be natural
phenomena). Hall goes on in this section of his chapter to outline a
theory of discourse that helps to explain the power of the West/Rest
idea. This idea has been enormously important for historical sociology. Its
importance will become more apparent as we work through the chapter.
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Activity
On pages 291–92 Hall provides a definition of ‘discourse’. This concept has become
increasingly important in social scientific thought. It is worth looking carefully at Hall’s
definition, which he bases on the work of the historian and social theorist Michel Foucault
(see Chapter 6).
Read these pages carefully and use the following questions to help you get a clear sense
of Hall’s argument:
• In paragraph one of section 3.1 how does Hall describe a discourse?
• What is a ‘discursive formation’? (paragraph two)
• In what way is the idea of discourse not based on ‘the distinction between
thought and language’?
Now read sections 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 carefully (pages 292–95). You should, in particular,
look carefully at the summary (section 3.4). Do you understand the points that Hall makes
here? If not, read over the preceding sections again and see if they begin to make more
sense. We will look now at the examples that Hall uses of the discourse of ‘the West and
the Rest’ in practice. This should help you to see how discourses work both as forms of
representation, ways of organising knowledge and as practices (remember, discourses
make things happen!).
Now read section 4.1 of Hall’s chapter (page 296) and Reading C (‘”Orientalism”:
Representing the Other’).
One highly influential book that illustrates very well the concept of
‘discourse’ is the Palestinian academic Edward Said’s Orientalism:
Western Conceptions of the Orient. In this book Said examines a particular
‘discourse’ which he refers to as ‘Orientalism’. Said argues that the way
that Europeans think about, write about and represent the Orient (by
which he means what we would now usually think of as the Middle East)
is governed by a particular kind of discourse.
Said argues that ‘Orientalism’ as a discourse is ‘never far from…the idea
of Europe.’ We have already seen that the idea of Europe involved the
construction of a particular notion of European identity that regarded it
as superior in comparison with ‘non-European peoples and cultures’. He
goes on to argue that the discourse of Orientalism ‘depends for its strategy’
on ‘a positional superiority’ that always maintained Western ‘superiority’.
Remember, we have seen that discourses are not simply passive or neutral
forms of representation; they make things happen (hence the reference to
‘strategy’).
Said argues that this automatic position of superiority was achieved by
the production of a particular kind of ‘intellectual power’. This involved
the construction of various ‘knowledges’ (or ‘discourses’) of the Orient
that were ‘suitable for study in academy, for display in the museum,
for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in
anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about
mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological
theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or
religious character.’ This is an important point. If you think back to
the beginning of the course, we saw in Chapter 2 that conceptions of
‘modernity’ have usually involved the assumption of the superiority
of ‘modern’, ‘advanced’ societies. This was achieved by the ‘positioning’
of other parts of the world (and societies of the past) as less advanced
(remember the passage we looked from Hegel’s Philosophy of History on
Africa).
150
This positioning involved the production of a range of ‘knowledges’ that

were designed to explain the relative ‘backwardness’ of non-European or
Western societies. Such knowledges inform many of the new social science
disciplines of the nineteenth century. For example, sociological concerns
with the dynamism of Europe relative to the rest of the world can often
assume a ‘Eurocentric’ position in precisely the sense used by Roberts
in the extract on page 328. Said argues that the idea of the ‘Orient’ as a
place of ‘backward’, static, despotic, underdevelopment was utilised in all
kinds of academic, cultural and policy settings as a means of permanently
emphasising a fundamental ‘difference’ between ‘the familiar (Europe, the
West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). Ultimately what
this means is that the way the Orient was conceived was not based on
‘empirical reality’ (what was actually there), but was instead a ‘political
vision of reality’ based on ‘a battery of desires, repressions, investments,
and projections’. This is a difficult concept. It can be explained better if we
look at the remainder of the Hall chapter.
Activity
Read section 4 (pages 296–308).
Here, Hall uses Said’s ideas about the ‘discourse’ of Orientalism and applies them to
another context: the European encounter with the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
Answer the following questions. Try and write short and concise answers that sum up the
key argument in response to each question.
• What does Hall mean by the ‘archive’? What was this ‘archive’ composed of?
(Section 4.2)
• What does Hall mean by a ‘regime of truth’? (Section 4.3)
• What is idealisation? (Section 4.4)
• What is the role of ‘sexual fantasy’ in the discourse of ‘the West and the Rest’?
(Section 4.5)
Look closely at the engraving by van der Straet on page 303. Answer the questions set by
Hall in Activity 4 on page 302.
• In what ways did Europeans ‘misrecognise’ the different cultures and civilisations
that they encountered in the Americas? (Section 4.6)
• What does Hall mean when he argues that the New World was seen as both
‘paradise’ and also as a ‘barbaric’ place? (Section 4.7)
• What is a ‘stereotype’? In what way was ‘splitting’ a feature of the discourse of
‘the West and the Rest’? (Section 4.8)
Activity part 2
Now read section 5 (pages 309–16).
Here Hall discusses the enduring legacy and continued operation of the discourse of ‘the
West and the Rest’ in contemporary social science.
Summarise Hall’s argument in about 500 of your own words.
Discourse and history

We have seen throughout this section of the chapter how Hall analyses a
number of phenomena related to European expansion and colonialism,
‘Western’ domination of the globe and the academic projects of Western
social scientific disciplines. This is done by using the idea of ‘discourse’. As
we have seen, this approach has been highly influential in many areas of
151
the social sciences. In this case, it allows us to think about the ways that
particular forms of social and cultural superiority were constructed over
time using a number of different resources. It demonstrates how these
ideas had direct and profound impacts on how ‘the West’ has acted.
Remember, Hall argues that discourses (or ‘discursive practices’) are not
merely forms of ‘representation’ or descriptions of an ‘empirical’ world;
they organise knowledge into specific fields and determine how we act in
relation to that knowledge. In this sense, the idea of ‘discourse’ presents
an interesting problem for historical sociologists. If we think about the
ways that knowledge is organised discursively, we can see that all
claims to the truthfulness of particular knowledges can automatically
be discounted. For example, we have seen that the discourse of ‘the West
and the Rest’ is based on a number of claims that it represents a form of
universal knowledge about the direction of historical development and
about relative levels of ‘development’ (amongst other things). However,
Hall demonstrates that this ‘discourse’ has its own history and a particular
relationship with regimes of power.
In the next section of the chapter we will look briefly at various theories
of imperialism that attempt to account for the enormous expansion of
imperial and colonial domination in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and at the persistence of imperialism (or ‘neo-imperialism’) in
the contemporary world.
Imperialism
Activity
Read the chapter ‘The Age of Empire’ by Hobsbawm in Appendix 3.
As we have seen, in the fifteenth century Europeans began to explore,

trade with and ultimately conquer, colonise and dominate large areas of
the world. During the nineteenth century, imperial expansion accelerated
as rivalries between European powers intensified. This process became
particularly intense from about 1870 CE onwards. During a period of
approximately 40 years the European powers (in particular, Britain,
France, Germany and Italy) took over almost all of the remaining
independent territories in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Japan, which had
embarked on a period of rapid ‘westernisation’ from the 1860s onwards,
and the United States also participated in the ‘scramble’ for overseas
territories. This period has often been referred to as ‘the new imperialism’
and it certainly marked an intensification of the extension of direct
imperial control of overseas territory.
There are many competing explanations amongst sociologists and
historians for this intensified period of expansion. As you will have
seen from the Hobsbawm reading, political, strategic and economic
explanations have all been offered in order to understand the rapidity with
which territories were annexed. Explanations for the upsurge in European
(and, increasingly after 1900, ‘Western’ rather than strictly European)
imperialism also bring us into the present. Many of the (particularly
economic) arguments about imperial expansion touch directly on more
contemporary concerns with processes of ‘globalisation’.
For that reason we will turn first to economic arguments for the ‘new
imperialism’. The majority of such arguments are Marxist in orientation.
The basis of these arguments is that ‘imperialism (in any of several
different senses of the word) must be seen in the context of the whole
152
history of capitalism’ (Brewer, 1990: 3). Remember, for Marx capitalism

was an inherently expansive system. It always requires new resources
and new markets. ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its
products’ means that ‘capital’ expands ‘over the whole surface of the
globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
everywhere’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 224). Thus, the development of
capitalism in Europe (see Chapter 7) as the predominant economic system
from approximately the fifteenth century onwards meant that European
traders and settlers rapidly expanded outwards into other parts of the
world. From about the eighteenth century onwards, European commerce
began to dominate much of the world.
Some theorists, notably Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank,
claim that a capitalist world system developed during this period. By
world system, Wallerstein means a ‘unit with a single division of labour
and multiple cultural systems’ (a single economic system defined by
its division of labour but without a unified cultural or political system).
Indeed, the unit of analysis is this economic ‘system’ rather than aspects of
it such as nation-states or specific societies. The empires of the nineteenth
century were therefore not ‘world empires’ but nation-states with colonial
appendages.
According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world system is divided into three
‘tiers’; the ‘core’ (originally north-west Europe where capitalism developed
first), the ‘semi-periphery’ and the ‘periphery’. The essential difference
between these areas is the ‘strength of the state machine in different areas’.
A powerful state machine in the core states (as we saw developing in some
parts of Europe over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) allowed for
‘the maximum transfer of resources from the periphery to the core’ (Brewer,
1990: 176). As we have seen, (Chapter 7), this transfer of resources was
one of the factors that strengthened European (core) state machines.
Wallerstein argues that state power is a ‘central mechanism’ in the
operation of the core-periphery system. He argues that participants in
markets will always attempt to avoid the normal operation of the market
whenever this does not maximise their profit. They therefore use the state
to alter the terms of trade in their favour through the active domination of
other states or territories; hence the need for specifically imperial forms
of domination within the ‘world system’.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, according to most Marxist
theorists, the period of imperialism proper began. Previous periods had
seen expansion by European trading interests and the establishment of
settler colonies across the world, most notably in the Americas. However,
the economic conditions of the late nineteenth century began to give rise to
a new form of domination and, as we have seen, to a competitive scramble
for new territories. Lenin (1870–1924) described this as the ‘imperialist
stage’ of capitalism in his 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism drew heavily on the work of the British
economist and critic of imperialism J.A. Hobson (1858–1940). Hobson
was not a Marxist, but his work was highly influential in setting out an
economic explanation for the aggressive period of imperial expansion
that occurred in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hobson argued that one of the increasing tendencies of capitalism was
the formation of large monopolies. This increases the share of profit
in fewer hands. Large amounts of monopoly profit is saved rather than
re-invested as investment opportunities within ‘core’ states become scarcer.
This excess saving leads in turn to a lack of demand and this leads to a
153
need for capital to be ‘exported’ (for investment in areas where labour and
resources are cheaper and where large profits can be made). This in turn
leads to a demand for the protection or stabilisation of market conditions
within the territories where capital has been invested. This ultimately
leads to the annexation of these territories and the division of the world’s
resources by armed force, particularly under conditions in which various
national economies were competing for market opportunities and for these
resources.
All of the ‘classical’ Marxist theorists of imperialism (and particularly
Lenin) draw on Hobson’s work. In particular, the growing importance of
finance capital as a motor for imperial expansion was stressed. However,
a key problem with unlimited expansion was noted by Rosa Luxemburg
(1870–1919). She argued that capitalism exists and must exist alongside
other non-capitalist modes of production as its profitability requires it to
absorb these non-capitalist regions (for their markets, resources, labour and
so on). However, without their continued existence (as spaces of hyper-
exploitation) capitalism’s profitability would exhaust itself. Remember,
Marx had predicted that capitalism would reach a point of crisis and
collapse as profitability declined and wages were forced down. The theory
of imperialism advanced by Luxemburg and other Marxists suggested that
this collapse had not occurred because capitalism was able to retain its
profitability by the exploitation of pre-capitalist social formations.
All of these theories tend to regard imperialism as a ‘stage’ of capitalist
development and therefore as something entirely endogenous to that
process. In other words, the political relations within capitalist states or
the relations between states were seen as far less important (or irrelevant)
to a process driven by the necessary laws of capitalist development.
However, if we go back and look at the chapter by Hobsbawm, we can see
that there were clearly other factors at work in the aggressive acceleration
of imperial competition. Hobsbawm is critical of approaches other than the
economic one, but he nonetheless outlines various alternatives.
Firstly, a much more strident European nationalism can be linked to the
scramble for territories. More virulent strains of nationalism and increased
conflict in Europe made states much more aware of the actions of their
competitors abroad (remember, all of the European states were locked
into a ‘state system’ and obsessively monitored each other’s activities).
The rapid division of Africa between European powers at the end of the
nineteenth century can be argued to be a ‘pre-emptive’ exercise in which
national governments attempted to gain advantage over their rivals ‘by
claiming tracts of territory which might at some time in the future become
economically or strategically important’ (Bayly, 2004: 230). This type
of argument locates the dynamic for imperialism in the political rivalry
between states.
Secondly, all of the key states engaged in the scramble for territory
had new internal political considerations to take into account. The
introduction of democracy (albeit on a limited scale in some states) meant
that elites within states were inclined to use imperial expansion as a
means of stifling domestic discontent through the promotion of imperial
power. As we have seen, nationalist sentiment increased across the
nineteenth century and competition for territory abroad with major rivals
was seen as a way of increasing national ‘glory’. Nonetheless, Hobsbawm
argues that in spite of considerable effort spent in promoting imperial
projects and their benefits, this remained popular only amongst limited
classes within national populations.
154
Activity
Read pages 69 (from the paragraph beginning ‘In fact, the rise of labour movements…’)
to the end of Section I on page 73, in Hobsbawm.
What explanations for the ‘new imperialism’ does Hobsbawm give? How far were
nationalism and other political factors responsible for imperial expansion?
Write about 500 words in answer to these questions.
Another ‘new’ imperialism?

A recent and compelling argument by David Harvey (2003; 2005) suggests
that contemporary global conditions can be described as a form of ‘new
imperialism’. Harvey, following Luxemburg (see above), argues that
capitalism continues to require expansion into new economic territories
to remain profitable. One of the logics of capitalist expansion therefore
requires what Harvey describes as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This
idea reworks Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, in which it was
argued that the conditions for the ‘take-off’ of capitalism involved the
wholesale appropriation of feudal and ‘common’ property (property
held in common) as private property by the new bourgeois class of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Harvey argues that this process was not confined to the early period of
capitalist development; rather, it is an ongoing feature of capitalism’s
necessary expansion and therefore he refers to it not as ‘primitive
accumulation’ but as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This can be seen
today in the drive to open ‘new markets’ and in the ‘spatial restructuring
of production’ in which cheap labour is accessed through the relocation
of manufacturing industries to what was once the ‘periphery’. It is also
encountered in new processes of ‘marketisation’ and privatisation and in
the conversion of ‘alternative’ property rights (again, property formerly
held in common) into private property.
For Harvey the process of accumulation by dispossession is evidence of a
new form of imperialism. However, this is not politically organised, as it
was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around a ‘competitive
system of nation states which possess and control foreign territories’
(Tonkiss, 2006: 26). Rather, Harvey argues, ‘contemporary imperialist
practice’ requires a different political form and new state projects which
are now focused around ‘an internationalist politics of neo-liberalism and
privatisation’ and formalised in the institutions of global governance (the
World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, for example). These institutions are dominated by the advanced
capitalist states (and in particular the United States). As we have seen
(Chapter 7), capitalism did not unfold according to an abstract economic
logic but was always dependent to a large extent on military and political
pressure and mobilisation (largely by states). These forms of coercion
have been ‘very marked in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’
(Tonkiss, 2006: 27). During the same period, as Wallerstein argues, ‘an
increasingly coherent cultural and ideological project has developed’ which
he sees as evidence of ‘the historical [world capitalist] system’ becoming
‘conscious of itself’ and beginning to develop an ‘intellectual and/or
ideological framework’ which can ‘justify it, impel its forward movement
and sustain its reproduction’ (Wallerstein, 1990: 35). We can thus see a
complex interaction between state, economy and emergent political forms
in the processes that making the contemporary world. These are processes
that have long histories – as I hope I have shown throughout this course.
155

• describe differing accounts of European expansion
• explain how and why this expansion took place when it did and what
its consequences were
• demonstrate an understanding of the operation of the ‘discourses’ that
shaped European and Western encounters with others
• explain how and why the European powers were able to divide large
parts of the world between themselves in the late nineteenth century
• describe competing theories of imperialism.

1. To what extent has the discourse of ‘the West and the Rest’ shaped
Western approaches to non-western societies?
2. To what extent was imperialism the result of transformations within
capitalism?
156
Appendix 1: Sample examination paper
Appendix 1: Sample examination paper

Important note: This Sample examination paper reflects the
examination and assessment arrangements for this course in the academic
year 2010−2011. The format and structure of the examination may have
changed since the publication of this subject guide. You can find the most
recent examination papers on the VLE where all changes to the format of
the examination are posted.
Time allowed: three hours

Candidate should answer THREE of the following TWELVE questions.
All questions carry equal marks.
1. ‘The understanding of history is itself a historical concept.’ Explain

and discuss.
2. ‘Sociologists and historians differ in their approach and in their
subject matter.’ Explain and discuss.
3. How have any two sociologists accounted for the emergence of the
‘modern’ state?
4. ‘Ancient empires were ruled but not governed.’ Discuss.
5. Outline and discuss key features and developmental tendencies in
feudal systems of rule.
6. Assess the claim that ‘absolutist’ states were only superficially
‘modern’.
7. How and with what consequences did states begin to consider their
populations as a ‘resource’?
8. ‘States make war and war makes states.’ Discuss.
9. ‘The capitalist mode of production needed the intervention of
ideological, military and political organisations to establish itself.’
Discuss.
10. What does it mean to say that nations are ‘invented’ by nationalism?
11. ‘Imperialist practices between 1870 and 1914 can best be explained as
a by-product of nationalist politics.’ Discuss.
12. Critically assess the claim that the discourse of ‘the West and the Rest’
continues to shape the ways that ‘the West’ relates to ‘others’.
END OF PAPER
157
Notes
158
Appendix 2: Guidance on answering the Sample examination paper
Appendix 2: Guidance on answering the

Sample examination paper
General remarks
This course explores in depth some of the important historical processes
that led to the emergence of contemporary social, economic and political
conditions. The course looks in depth at the historical context of social
institutions and political systems. In particular, it focuses on the complex
range of factors that were at work in the rise of the modern state. At its
core this course looks at these sociological problems theoretically and you
will be examined on the sociological literature relating to the differences
(if any) between sociology and history as well as other methodological
concerns. The examination will test your knowledge of specific topics and
also your ability to relate topics and ideas to one another.
The examination paper for this course is three hours in duration and you
are expected to answer three questions from a choice of 12. The Examiners
will attempt to ensure that all of the topics covered in the syllabus and
subject guide are examined. Some questions could cover more than one
topic from the syllabus since the different topics are not self-contained.
In this section we demonstrate how you should approach the questions
in the Sample examination paper. We do not provide sample or model
answers to the questions, but instead point out what each question would
require.
Specific comments on questions

Question 1
‘The understanding of history is itself a historical concept.’
Explain and discuss.
This question asks you to address the issue of historical understanding and
how this has changed over time. In other words, the question asks about
the way that the past, present and future have been conceived in different
societies over time. You should demonstrate an awareness of some of the
important differences in ways of understanding history that have existed
over time. A good answer to this question will give examples of differing
conceptions of history and its ‘meaning’. For example, it might focus on
the differing conceptions of history in ‘classical’, Christian and ‘modern’
thought.
An excellent answer will go on to demonstrate how ‘modern’ attitudes to
history (a belief in ‘progress’, for example) are related to other important
social and economic processes in ‘modernity’. An excellent answer will be
able to demonstrate how this attitude is as much a product of its specific
society as were other conceptions of history and historical time.
159
Question 2
‘Sociologists and historians differ in their approach and in
their subject matter.’ Explain and discuss.
This question asks you to both explain and discuss the assertion
that sociologists and historians study different things using different
approaches – in other words that the two disciplines are very different
from one another. A good answer will outline important differences
between the work of historians and sociologists and their similarities. It
will address the issue of the apparently ‘nomothetic’ and ‘ideographic’
nature of sociology and history respectively. A good answer will
demonstrate the meaning of these terms and how they have related to
different approaches adopted by historians and sociologists. It should also
be able to look in detail at how some sociologists have affirmed this
disciplinary division and how and why others have challenged it. In
particular, it should be able to explain how historical sociologists have
defined their work and to discuss in more depth whether it is possible to
have a sociology that is ‘historical’.
An excellent answer will be able to discuss the epistemological basis
of disputes between sociologists and historians about their respective
approaches and the objects that they study. It will be able to demonstrate
how and why sociologists make use of history and how and why historians
make use of sociology. The answer will thereby be able to discuss whether
the division between these two disciplines is an artificial one.
Question 3
How have any two sociologists accounted for the emergence
of the ‘modern’ state?
You should briefly define the key characteristics of a ‘modern’ state and
demonstrate that you are aware of when and where specifically ‘modern’
states first arose. You should demonstrate an awareness of differing
theories of how and why ‘modern’ states emerged and focus on the work
of two sociologists. A good answer will outline concisely and accurately
the specific theories of the two chosen sociologists. Your answer should
demonstrate an awareness of important similarities in and differences
between their accounts. An excellent answer will be able to demonstrate
how these different accounts highlight important differences in their
approaches to social and historical processes more generally. For example,
should you choose to discuss Marx and Weber, you should be able to
demonstrate how Marx’s account is related to ideas about the primacy
of economic development. You should be able to discuss the strengths
and weaknesses of this approach and their implications. When discussing
Weber, you should be able to outline his theoretical contribution to debates
about the emergence of the state, but also to show how this relates to
broader concerns about the historical process of ‘rationalisation’. Again,
the strengths and weaknesses of this approach should be highlighted.
Remember, you may choose any two relevant sociologists who have
considered the emergence of the ‘modern’ state!
Question 4
‘Ancient empires were ruled but not governed.’ Discuss.
This question asks you to consider the systems of rule specific to ‘ancient
empires’. You should be able to outline key features of these systems and
the emphasis given to certain features by various sociologists. You should
demonstrate that you understand the difference between being ‘governed’
160
and being ‘ruled’. Good answers will provide detailed and accurate
accounts of these systems of rule and use actual historical examples as
illustration. You should be able to demonstrate that you understand how
and why these systems of rule operated in the ways that they did and
to demonstrate an awareness of how such systems differ from ‘modern’
systems of rule. In particular, issues such as the extension of military and
coercive power, ‘coercive cooperation’ and ideological cooption of elites
should be considered. Excellent answers will be able to demonstrate
differing theoretical ideas about how these systems operated and highlight
complex tendencies at work within these systems.
Question 5
Outline and discuss key features and developmental
tendencies in feudal systems of rule.
This question asks you to provide an outline and discuss key features of
‘feudal’ systems of rule. Answers should set out in detail the basis of these
systems and how they operated. A good answer will consider the historical
emergence of the system out of Roman and Germanic social and political
arrangements. It will demonstrate an understanding of the key features of
the system and how the system developed over time. In particular, it will
demonstrate an understanding of the key feudal relationship of vassalage
and how this relationship determined forms of rule within societies. An
excellent answer will demonstrate an awareness of arguments about how
and why feudalism ‘developed’ rather than ‘collapsed’ in spite of its overall
tendency toward fragmentation. In particular, consideration should be given
to ‘ideological’ aspects of social power and the role that Christianity played in
providing an ethical framework and a social identity. An excellent answer will
also explain how and why feudal states remained weak and underdeveloped.
Question 6
Assess the claim that ‘absolutist’ states were only superficially
‘modern’.
This question asks you to consider the specific features of the ‘absolutist state’
and asks to what extent these states were ‘modern’. A good answer will be
able to outline the key features of ‘absolutist’ systems of rule and demonstrate
an understanding of how and under what circumstances they emerged. It will
discuss how these features relate to ‘modern’ systems of rule. Your answer
should compare and contrast absolutist with modern systems of rule and
highlight those aspects of absolutist systems that are ‘modern’ and those that
are ‘traditional’. A good answer will also be able to outline and demonstrate
an understanding of key historical sociological accounts of the absolutist
state. An excellent answer will additionally be able to highlight the basis on
which arguments about the ‘modernity’ (or not) of the absolutist are made.
For example, they will point out how Anderson’s neo-Marxism is based on
an analysis of the class basis of absolutist rule. Excellent answers will also be
able to highlight the developmental tendencies at work in the system and in
societies at large and what their consequences were.
Question 7
How and with what consequences did states begin to consider
their populations as a ‘resource’?
This question asks you to consider arguments about important developments
in the way states thought about and managed their populations from the
period of ‘absolutism’ onwards. The question asks you in particular to
consider the arguments about ‘bio-politics’ and the ‘disciplinary society’ made
161
by Foucault. A good answer will be able to outline what these concepts are
and to demonstrate an understanding of how and under what circumstances
they emerged. A good answer will also show how these processes were
related to the development of state power and new forms of governance. It
will be able to demonstrate an understanding of the complex relationship
between the development of ‘bio-political’ practices and power relationships
within societies. An excellent answer will, additionally, link these processes
(of bio-politics and discipline) to broader processes of ‘internal pacification’,
monopolisation of violence and the intensification of state power in numerous
domains within societies. It will also discuss the consequences of the
emergence of these new forms of governance.
Question 8
‘States make war and war makes states.’ Discuss.
This question asks you to consider to what extent war between states and
the military preparation necessary to fight wars was responsible for the
development of states. A good answer will outline how the early modern
state in Europe was part of a system of states that monitored each other’s
activities and competed for territories in Europe itself and, increasingly
from the sixteenth century, overseas. It will be able to demonstrate how
the ‘Westphalian’ model of state sovereignty contributed to competition
amongst states and how the cost of fighting wars expanded dramatically as
a consequence of specific developments in military technologies. It will also
outline how the need to finance wars led states to adopt new strategies and
tactics to raise revenues and how this impacted on alliances between the
state and the emergent capitalist class in some regions, and how it cemented
relations between state and nobility in others. It will also demonstrate an
awareness of how state demands for revenue and other resources (including
men) impacted on the political governance of the state and the demand
for ‘representative’ government. An excellent answer will consider whether
the statement in the question implies a mono-causal approach to state
development, and will discuss the complex interaction between military,
political and economic factors in the development of states.
Question 9
‘The capitalist mode of production needed the intervention of
ideological, military and political organisations to establish
itself.’ Discuss.
This question asks you to consider the circumstances under which
capitalism developed as the dominant mode of production alongside the
emergence of the military and political power of the modern state. A good
answer will outline the key factors that were involved in the emergence of
capitalism as the dominant economic system. It will demonstrate how this
process was linked to military, ideological and political factors. It will also
demonstrate an awareness of the role that state formation played in the
structuring and policing of markets and in the development of classes.
An outline of key features of a ‘capitalist state’ would be useful. An
excellent answer will be able to discuss competing accounts of capitalist
development and its relationship to the state. For example, Marxist and
neo-Marxist accounts of the ‘primacy’ of economic relationships and
accounts which emphasise the complex and dynamic relations between
different power ‘sources’ should be discussed. Consideration of whether
a single factor can be said to hold ‘primacy’ should be considered. An
excellent answer will also ask how and why nation-states and capitalism
have been historically linked to the extent that they have.
162
Question 10
What does it mean to say that nations are ‘invented’ by
nationalism?
This question asks you to consider the extent to which nations are
‘invented’ by nationalism. Your answer should include definitions of
‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ and indicate the different approaches to an
understanding of their emergence. Good answers will distinguish between
those thinkers who argue that nations are ‘primordial’ or ‘perennial’ social
and political arrangements which have long histories and those who argue
that nations are products of ‘modernity’ and are therefore very recent
phenomena. An account of the different ‘waves’ of nation formation
should be given. The role of nationalism in fostering national awareness
should be discussed. In particular, the question of how and under what
circumstances nationalism emerged in the ‘modern’ period needs to be
discussed in relation to one or more theorist. Different types of nationalism
should be addressed (both civic and ethnic-linguistic, in particular). The
question of ‘invention’ should be addressed and you should outline at least
one theory of how nationalism emerged and how it has been used. You
should also account for its power in the contemporary world. An excellent
answer will ask how far the notion of ‘invention’ can account for the
persistence and the power of nationalism and will compare and contrast
theories of ‘invention’.
Question 11
‘Imperialist practices between 1870 and 1914 can best be
explained as a by-product of nationalist politics.’ Discuss.
This question asks you to consider competing explanations for the
European ‘age of Empire’. You should demonstrate an understanding of
the key developments during this period and show how the intensification
of competition for imperial possessions led to a ‘scramble’ for territory
in Africa and Asia. A definition of imperialism, in this context, and
a demonstration of how it differed from other periods of European
expansion is necessary. A good answer will recognise that the question
asks you to consider one possible explanation for this intensification for
colonial and imperial territory (the rise of nationalism) and to compare
its adequacy with other competing explanations. An outline of this and
competing explanations should therefore be given. In particular, you
should focus on economic arguments for the intensification of imperialist
competition between European powers and ask how adequate these are
as forms of explanation. These should be contrasted with the political
explanation that highlights nationalism as the most important factor. An
excellent answer will also ask how far domestic political considerations
such as the rise of democracy and labour militancy were contributory
factors in states’ increasing emphasis on nationalism and imperialism
during the period in question.
Question 12
Critically assess the claim that the discourse of ‘the West and
the Rest’ continues to shape the ways that ‘the West’ relates to
‘others’.
This question asks you to consider whether the discourse of ‘the West and
the rest’ continues to operate as an important aspect of global relations of
power. You should outline precisely the key elements of this ‘discourse’ and
explain how the term ‘discourse’ is being used within this specific context.
You should also demonstrate an awareness of how and under what
163
circumstances it emerged and link this to other important developments

of the same period. A good answer will be able to demonstrate how the
idea of ‘discourse’ is linked to the operation of power and how this is in
turn linked to the production of ‘knowledges’ about ‘others’. The example
of Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ would be useful in this context, as would
an outline of what this is and how it operates. Contemporary examples
of how this discourse continues to operate (or not) would also be very
useful for the argument of the essay. An excellent answer would be able
to demonstrate precisely how knowledge is related to power and to give
examples of how the specific discourse of ‘the West and the rest’ operated
in colonial and imperial contexts and operates in the contemporary world.
An excellent answer would also ask how useful the notion of ‘discourse’ is
to sociologists and historians and what implications this might have for the
practice of historical sociology.
164
Appendix 3: Supplementary readings
Appendix 3: Supplementary readings

The following Essential texts are included in the hard-copy subject guide
only due to copyright restrictions:
Dean, M. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. (London: Sage
Publications, 1999) [ISBN 9780803975897] Chapters 5 and 6. Reproduced
by permission of Sage Publications, copyright © M. Dean 1999.
Hobsbawm E.J. The Age of Empire. (London: Random House, 1989)
[ISBN 9780679721758] Chapter 3. Reproduced by permission of Pantheon
Books, a division of Random House, copyright © 1987.
Smith, A.D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories
of Nations and Nationalism. (London: Routledge, 1998)
[ISBN 9780415063401] Chapter 6. Reproduced by permission of Taylor &
Francis Books, copyright © 1998.
165
Notes
166

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Historical sociology

University of London International Programmes

Published by: University of London

Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................... 1

Works cited ................................................................................................................. 44

Essential reading ....................................................................................................... 115

Aims and objectives

• demonstrate critical and reflexive skills in relation to the analysis of

How to use this subject guide

Structure of the guide

• Chapter 4 is an exploration of different theories and ideas about the

You need to download the following articles:

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. (London: Verso, 2006) revised edition

Hardt, M. and A. Negri Empire. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

Online study resources

• Self-testing activities: Doing these allows you to test your own

Making use of the Online Library

Engaging with your reading

Examination structure and advice

consideration of theoretical models that describe the transition from feudal

Chapter 2: Time, history and modernity

Aim of the chapter

institutions and ideologies which surround us and within which we are

Historical thinking and ‘modernity’

understanding one’s location in time, history and space must itself be

Source: Stefan Bauer, www.ferras.at

Figure 2.1 The Renaissance rediscovery of classical architecture.

civilised. History was seen as progressing in stages to higher and higher

consciousness that led to the adoption of a more ‘rational’ and ‘worldly’

Hegel’s philosophy was highly influential and in many ways continues to

‘Modernity’ and the modern

The emergence of sociology

A reminder of your learning outcomes

Sample examination question

Chapter 3: History and historical

Aims of the chapter

Hall, S. ‘Introduction’ in Hall and Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity.

History and sociology: different disciplines?

which sociology is seen as being concerned primarily with the present

The (re-)emergence of historical sociology

History and sociology: a continuing debate

Goldthorpe begins the debate

As we have seen, Goldthorpe argues that the sort of evidence that

We have seen that Goldthorpe argues that there is a difference between

In this section, Goldthorpe turns to the discussion of the sort of historical

evidence are ‘tenuous and arbitrary’. By this, Goldthorpe means that

Goldthorpe goes on to explain that much historical sociology is not based

Michael Mann takes up the argument

Mann begins his article by stating that he defines sociology in rather

a tradition of disciplinary allegiance to specific methodologies and

Having defended ‘grand historical sociology’ against the criticisms made

Here Mann clarifies his position on the difference between the

In this section, Mann demonstrates how ‘macro-sociologists’ use secondary

Mann also argues in this section of the article that:

A reminder of your learning outcomes

Sample examination question

Chapter 4: Power, legitimacy and rule:

Aim of the chapter

Preliminary remarks on reading

The modern state

What is the ‘modern’ state? Some preliminary

The modern state is perhaps best seen as a complex set of

Stateless societies State societies