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

by Andreas Osiander

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

Genres: History

587 pages, Kindle Edition

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).