Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution by Andreas Osiander

by Andreas Osiander

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

Genres: History

Hardcover

First published December 6, 2007

About the author

Andreas Osiander (19 December 1498 – 17 October 1552) was a German Lutheran theologian.

Reviews

[Apollōn · Rating 1 out of 5]

The assertion that "nothing akin to what we call the state existed before the 19th century" is somewhere between an anarchist fantasy, and a unjustifiable narrowing of the semantic range of a term in the service of one's chosen narrative. Similar claims are made in relation to the nation, and a whole range of other phenomena deemed 'undesirable'.

The reality, of course, is that many somethings akin to what we call the state existed in the millennia prior to the 19th century, and that the state did, very much, shape society, which shaped it in turn. To claim otherwise, on basis of a semantic re-tailoring of the term, whereby only that which has existed since the 19th century qualifies as a state, is misguided at best, if not outright sophism.

These states of yesteryears differed between each other, just as they differ from post-19th-century states, which are themselves heterogenous in nature. The suggestion that this makes any of them less states is frankly silly, perhaps even nihilistic (recall Nietzsche's argument about the leaf).