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14 - The rise of the modern state: IV. The expansion of civilian scope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

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Summary

Chapter 11 identifies two sea changes in the development of the state. The first, lasting through the eighteenth century to 1815, saw great expansion in the state's size, due almost entirely to its geopolitical militarism. Earlier chapters show this greatly politicized social life intensifying the development of classes and nations. The second sea change is the concern of this chapter. Beginning about 1870, it greatly expanded not only size but civilian scope within the state as well. While retaining (a reduced) militarism plus traditional judicial and charitable functions, states acquired three new civilian functions, around which, as Chapter 13 shows, bureaucratization also centered:

  1. All states massively extended infrastructures of material and symbolic communication: roads, canals, railways, postal service, telegraphy, and mass education.

  2. Some states went into direct ownership of material infrastructures and productive industries.

  3. Just before the end of the period, states began to extend their charity into more general welfare programs, embryonic forms of Marshall's “social citizenship.”

Thus states increasingly penetrated social life. Despite a reduction in fiscal pain, civil society was further politicized. People could not return to their normal historical practice of ignoring the state. Class-national caging continued, if more quietly, with less world-historical drama. Social life was becoming more “naturalized,” and states were becoming more “powerful” – but in what sense? Were autonomous states “intervening” more despotically in civil society, aided by greater infrastructural powers, as envisaged by elitist-managerialist state theory?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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