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 century: it is a recent invention and the assumption that it
is timeless, necessary for society, is simply part of its
legitimating myth. The development, over the past three millennia,
of the political structures of western civilization is shown here
to have been a succession of individual, unrepeatable stages: what
links them is not that every period re-enacts the "state" in a
different guise--that is, re-enacts the same basic pattern--but
that one period-specific pattern evolves into the next in a
path-dependent process.
Treating western 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 could function. It explains
structural change in terms of both the political ideas of each
period and in terms of the material constraints and opportunities
(e.g. ecological and technological factors) that impacted on those
ideas and which constitute a major cause of change. However,
although material factors are important, ultimately it is the ideas
that count--and indeed the words with which they were communicated
when they were current: since political structures only exist in
people's heads, to understand past political structures it is
imperative to deal with them literally on their own terms, to take
those terms seriously. Relabelling or redefining political units
(forexample by calling them "states" or equating them with
"states") when those who lived (in) them thought of them as
something else entirely imposes a false uniformity on the past. The
dead will not object because they cannot: this book tries to make
their voices heard again, through the texts that they left but
whose political terminology, and often whose finer points, are
commonly ignored in an unconscious effort to make the past fit our
standard state-centric political paradigm.
General
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