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Power and Politics: State Formation in Historical Sociology

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The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences

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Abstract

This chapter first outlines the history of questions and research problems predating and constitutive of the historical sociology of state formation as it exists today. It deals with three main stages of state formation and the development of both internal and external power relations, starting with the joint process of the formation of early states and civilizations taking place in Neolithic societies, including the rise of empires. It then shifts focus to the diverse developmental paths toward the early modern European states, from more liberal to more absolutist states. Finally, theories are discussed that attempt to explain the rise of the industrial nation-state entangled in a worldwide web of interstate relations with the tendency to transcend nation-states by supranational associations of states. Since historical sociology assembles various approaches – Marxist, Weberian, structural functionalist, Eliasian, and others – this chapter characterizes them according to five criteria:

What is the theories’ dominant problem or question related to the power aspect of the state? How far back do they follow the processes that are responsible for today’s institutions, patterns, problems, or solutions? Do they predominantly treat the relevant processes in a comparative way, or do they rather study them as historical individuals on their own? What is the place they give to firsthand historical sources and their “emic” interpretations by their contemporaries, or do they put more emphasis on secondary, theoretically modeled “etic” interpretations? Is their historical, processual understanding based on the uniqueness of a specific development with universal relevance, as “universal history”?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elias (2012b [1970]: 63) uses this term in order to grasp a development that “is not identical with the trend towards the development towards ‘institutional democracy’. It refers to a shift in the social distribution of power, and this can manifest itself in various institutional forms, for example in one-party systems as well as in multi-party systems.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Graz, Graz, Österreich

    Helmut Kuzmics

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  1. Helmut Kuzmics
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Correspondence to Helmut Kuzmics .

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  1. Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    David McCallum

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  1. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Marta Bucholc

  2. School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Stephen Mennell

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Kuzmics, H. (2022). Power and Politics: State Formation in Historical Sociology. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_57-1

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