Conceptualizing Politics

party power – at the local level, where territorial control relying on patronage 
over a traditional electorate matters. The discovery and exploitation of new territo-
ries in other continents along with the emergence of a new class, the commercial 
and later manufacturing bourgeoisie in the cities, undermined this structure. On 
the other hand, the growing autonomous power of the European territorial states 
(which became only in the nineteenth century the nation states we are familiar 
with) further degraded the emperor’s claim to be entitled to universal authority. 
Though hardly in a fully explicit way, the Treaties of Westphalia acknowledged 
the independence of those states and put an end to the wars of religion between 
Protestant and Catholic powers that had ravaged the continent for some 120 years 
(1524–1648).
This was the background against which the modern state arose, with differing 
speed and forms in different countries. This notwithstanding, we allow ourselves a 

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The state  61
certain degree of generalisation and use for the main stages of this process the fol-
lowing names: state of the estates, absolutist state, constitutional state, administrative 
state.
Before we begin describing this process, let us hold that its initial and more 
powerful motor was neither social (new groups, new claims) nor cultural (in the 
spirit of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment), but rather interstate power 
relationships and war. After the introduction of fire arms, particularly artillery, wars 
between large territorial states required large and costly armies, and more impor-
tantly navies, for whose provision and command the feudal system was inadequate; 
centralisation of the armed forces required a stable and extended taxation largely at 
the expenses of the emerging ‘productive’ classes as long as nobility and clergy, but 
also free cities and local communities remained under the shield of their privileges. 
The management of the tax system was, on the other hand, not possible with-
out extending, rationalising and professionalising administration and bureaucracy, 
in their turn an additional burden for the state budget. The much contested – for 
example by Thomas Jefferson – public debt became unavoidable and increased.
5
 
Economics, particularly the science of finance, soon became an important disci-
pline, mainly in Scotland, England and France.
Over the course of these transformations, the central power of the European 
states asserted itself in the military, judicial
6
 and fiscal realm, as well as in terms of 
culture and customs; thanks to the ‘soft power’ of the profligate royal courts in the 
Baroque period, the representation of royal authority in ceremonies, music, visual 
arts and literature became essential to power itself and its legitimation. The external 
representation of the country was also monopolised by the sovereign and entrusted 
to an increasingly professionalised diplomatic corps. This power first allied itself 
with the emerging third estate, including the new commercial, industrial and pro-
fessional bourgeoisie, the peasants and the urban proletariat, of which only the 
upper layer was able to express representatives. The feudal regime was replaced by 
the ‘state of the estates’.
7
 A layer of ‘intermediate bodies’ filtered the effects of the 
sovereign’s absolute power over individuals, who were as a community represented 
by the estates in an assembly.
8
Later, the new social class and its various parties turned themselves against abso-
lutism, vindicating liberal and equal liberties for the individual, governing accord-
ing to a constitution, division of powers among the legislative, the executive and the 
judiciary branches, as well as the protection of property against interventions of the 
state along with respect for free trade. Legal egalitarianism, liberalism, constitutionalism 
and capitalism
9
 became and still remain the pillars of the modern state in the West 
though they were recast by the unfolding of democracy and social thought. The 
erection of those pillars, supported by the Enlightenment’s effort to bring Reason 
to bear in political and social affairs, culminated in the turn away from the divine 
right of the princes towards the recognition of the people as the only sovereign, 
even if it was a people marginalising women, ethnic strangers, poor and a fortiori 
slaves. Popular sovereignty was later recast in the form we are going to see, but except 
in times of dictatorship or foreign rule those pillars remained as permanent features 

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62  How politics works
of the modern state along with its being an administrative, legal, financial and 
military engine
10
 whose central authority can be delegated to, but not infringed 
upon by local (states or provinces or Länder of an union or federation) or corporate 
(one-issue authorities) agencies. This is not to deny the centrifugal and disintegrat-
ing effects on the state’s authority that come from the long-term consequences of 
globalisation, the replacement of pyramidal with network-like structures and the 
general weakening of politics.
The recasting of popular sovereignty and the other pillars of the modern state 
resulted from two intertwined novelties, one theoretical and the other economic 
and social. The bourgeois nature of classical liberalism, in a word the de facto limi-
tation of liberties to the male citizens whose social status gave them the cultural 
and financial capability to make use of them was criticised in the time between 
the nineteenth and twentieth century by socialist, social-Christian and left-liberal 
authors as well as the women’s movement. The other phenomenon was the capital-
ist transformation of peasants, farmers, artisans and small shopkeepers into masses of 
industrial workers concentrated in cities and increasingly organised in clubs, unions, 
parties – and armies, an essential side effect of the First World War or Great War 
(1914–1918), which also opened new chances for women’s participation in indus-
trial, cultural and political life. All of this deeply changed the liberal state, bringing, 
through universal franchise, masses into political life, contesting the traded version 
of workers’ rights and economic position in capitalism, making politics no longer 
the occupation of a traditional elite, but rather the profession of leaders capable of 
managing huge party organisations. Liberalism, as conceived of so far, and democ-
racy seemed to be at odds, a view that later seemed to be confirmed by the fact that 
authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes with a corporatist ideology were able to 
introduce in the Thirties social protection policies for workers that liberal states had 
failed to practise, particularly after the Great Depression began in 1929.
11
 A new 
turn came with the New Deal realised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of 
the USA from 1933 through 1945, which made the state an active economic actor 
in an effort aimed at reviving the economy by creating jobs and establishing social 
security (retirement pensions and unemployment insurance).
Elsewhere, primarily in Europe, the Second World War and its aftermath gave a 
final bent to the history of the modern state: in the UK, Lord Beveridge’s Report 
presented to His Majesty’s Government in the middle of the war (1942), identified 
‘the five giant evils’ of society (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness) and 
suggested social security policies that were later implemented by the new Labour 
government between 1945 and 1949. West Germany with its notion of a ‘social 
market economy’ as well as France and Italy went the same path between the Fifties 
and Seventies, against the resistance of conservative, business-friendly liberalism and 
the protest of Communist parties and unions, which aimed at scrapping capitalism 
altogether.
These reforms saved the liberal, constitutional and democratic state from the 
non-participation or open enmity of the layers of population that saw its promise 
of liberté, egalité, fraternité disavowed by Beveridge’s ‘giant evils’, more generally by 

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The state  63
their lacking access to the resources (a decent income and housing, health care and 
education) that could only make allegiance to the liberal-democratic state justi-
fied and meaningful. Let us anticipate that this story – a history of the twentieth 
century – highlights how politics can never be severed from other realms of human 
life in communities, in particular not from the socio-economic condition of the 
governed. This is true, as we shall see, in particular for democracy as a promising 
procedure, and does not disavow the claim of a relative autonomy of politics, raised 
at the outset of our journey in Chapter 1.
It is uncertain whether the success story of the democratic state in the West 
(including Japan after 1945 and with remarkable differences between the several 
countries and continents) will be continued throughout the course of the twenty-
first century, but this will occupy us later on.
What has been briefly told here is the history of the state in Europe and later 
North America. This is not due primarily to the circumstance that this textbook is 
written by an European philosopher with no particular competence in the history 
of the state worldwide. It has rather its grounding in the objective circumstance 
that the state, in its modern understanding, has been an European invention, while 
many institutions connected to the state spilled over to other continents where they 
were either imposed by colonial rule or freely adopted because they were better 
fit to organise communal life in societies becoming more differentiated and less 
traditionalistic, especially after the rise of international trade and capitalism. The 
extra-European spread of the state as the main format of political life was a defining 
feature of modernisation.
Another reason for this European primacy was that no other civilisation or empire 
was able to pursue a similar universal projection because either it did not have the 
cultural and institutional resources to do so, as in the case of the Mongol empire in 
the thirteenth century, or the Europeans made it impossible by rejecting subjugation 
by the Arabs in the battles of the eighth century (Tours, central France, 732)
12
 and the 
Turks in the sixteenth (Lepanto or Turkish 
İnebahtı in the Ionian Sea, 1571) and sev-
enteenth (Vienna 1683) century. The most arguable candidate for such a projection, 
China with its great culture, gave up after Admiral 郑/Zheng He’s seven expeditions 
(1405–33) in the Indian Ocean all the way to Aden, and definitively retreated into the 
isolation that made it later an easier prey for European colonialism.
It is this complex history – and not colonial imposition alone – that explains why 
political and legal forms of organisation born in Europe were adopted worldwide. 
Besides the conquest of new markets and new territories, not to be underestimated 
is the role played by an essential and exclusive component of European cultural 
modernity, curiositas/curiosity, in the push to explorate and experience other coun-
tries and populations – symbolised in medieval Europe by Ulysses’s literary figure 
depicted in Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVI.
13
 Without this drive, modernity, with 
all its evils and (not only technological, but civil) blessings, would not have been 
born, because it would have lacked the intellectual and symbolic motor of innova-
tion. A mix of evils (enhanced destructiveness of warfare, oppression of liberties, 
top-down bureaucratic organisation of the masses) and blessings (containment of 

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64  How politics works
violence, establishment of the rule of law, public safety, social policy) also charac-
terises the European primacy in the invention of the state and the spreading of its 
various forms. In any case, this seems to be an irreversible history: the state as it 
is presently all over the planet cannot be reversed, or attempts to do so end up in 
genocide, as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979); it can only be 
reformed and developed according to new challenges and theories. In countries 
with failed states or underdeveloped statehood, which results in a lower ability to 
organise public life, ordinary citizens live less freely, unless they are criminals, and 
are more needy, unless they are very wealthy or children of the very wealthy and pay 
no taxes since the tax system has collapsed or was never set up in the first place.
14