War, Survival Units, and Citizenship

A Neo-Eliasian Processual-Relational Perspective

Lars Bo Kaspersen, Lars Kaspersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367560959
• eBook ISBN: 9781317000396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this ground-breaking book, the author proposes a new theory of state formation based upon a rethinking of the nexus war, state, and citizenship. He seeks to move beyond explanations provided by traditional approaches by discussing and presenting alternative state-society and state theories, arguing that a relational-processual understanding of the states has been neglected in existing literature. The book begins with a critical discussion of the concept of the state and society in social and political theory. The author suggests an alternative theoretical-methodological framework based upon German relational theory (such as Hegel, Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, and, in particular Norbert Elias). Drawing upon the concepts of survival unit and figuration the book provides a political, historical and sociological comparative analysis of the relation between war, state, and citizenship in France, England and Germany from the Middle Ages to the mid-17th century, with emphasis on the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition, the book addresses two puzzles in social theory. First, the author addresses the question: why is the world divided into a multiple number of units? Will it remain like this or can we expect one unit – one world state – in the future? Second, the author looks into why and how this divided world is maintained: what makes the demarcation between states and how is this demarcation upheld? The issues discussed in the book are central to political and historical sociology and will be of interest to scholars and students working in both these fields, as well as to those working in political science and IR, social theory and history.

Part 1

War, survival units, and structures of privileges, rights, obligations, and citizenship

Theoretical and methodological considerations

Chapter 1

Historical sociology and research on state formation

The German tradition revisited

This work is a contribution to the research on state formation, state consolidation, and state decline in early modern Western Europe. Over the last thirty years or so, the study of state formation in early modern Europe has become a crowded field.¹ Despite many achievements and an increasing knowledge about this subject area, however, some rather severe theoretical and methodological challenges continue to appear. My ambition in this book is to revisit these challenges by rereading the work of Norbert Elias and drawing from other (mainly German) theoretical sources that will provide the reader with some ideas on how to overcome these problems. It is also my ambition to demonstrate that this Elias-inspired theoretical framework is not only a significant contribution to the study of state formation processes in early modern Western Europe but also a contribution to the interpretation and use of the work of Elias.

Mapping and categorizing theories of state formation

In the field of state formation research, we find a number of competing theories and approaches with different emphases and different explanatory factors, that are embedded in different philosophies of science and, in some cases, operating with different independent or intermediate variables. Some of these theories suggest particular political processes and political institutions as the key variables to be examined (e.g., war, or war combined with local government and state infrastructure), others focus on economic processes (e.g., property relations, exchange relations, or class struggle), and yet other scholars emphasize ideational variables such as religion. Most often, we find attempts to combine the variables, for example, political and economic processes. This can be seen, for example, in the work of Charles Tilly, combining the logic of capital and the logic of violence (see later in this chapter).

Several attempts have been made to systematize and categorize the increasing volume of research within the area of state building. The scholars who emphasize, respectively, either the political, the economic, or the ideological arena as the main explanatory variable are presented, in the literature on state formation literature, as bellocentrists, econocentrists, or ideationalists (Nexon, 2009, p. 71). Gorski finds that the literature on state formation has developed in three waves: first the neo-Marxist wave (see Wallerstein, 1974, 1988; Anderson, 1974b; Kirchmeier-Anderson 1987; Brenner, 1993; Arrighi, 1994), then the wave of neo-Hintzian scholars (see Tilly, 1975, 1985, 1992; Brewer, 1989; Downing, 1992; Bonney, 1991, 1999; Ertman, 1997), and, since the late 1990s, a third wave of scholars challenging the two first waves for being too one-sided and too narrow (Gorski, 2001, 2003). The third wave, in which Gorski situates his own work, draws upon cultural sociology, Foucault, and gender theory, among others (see Corrigan and Sayer, 1985; Ikegami, 1995; Mukerji, 1997; Steinmetz, 1999; Adams, 2007).

Another way to categorize the different theories is related to the direction of the social processes: bottom-up, top-down, or simultaneously top-down and bottom-up.

• Bottom-up perspectives emphasizing social forces such as social movements, class struggles, powerful individual actors (Anderson, 1974a, 1974b; Te Brake, 1998; Moore, 1966), economic efficiency (Spruyt, 1994), or exchange relations (Wallerstein, 1974–1988)
• Top-down perspectives emphasizing, e.g., the political elite (Lachmann, 2000), warfare (caused by endogenous processes) (e.g., Tilly, 1992), or warfare embedded in a relational structure (Elias, 2012 [1939])
• Both top-down and bottom-up, e.g., the state elite intervention and interest groups striking back (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001); exogenous changes combined with endogenous changes (Skocpol, 1979); or the logic of violence/logic of capital (Tilly, 1992)

Nexson’s threefold typology and Gorski’s three waves are useful in many respects, but they both suffer from the weakness that they divide theories according to whether they refer to the social world as orchestrated mainly by warfare, economics, or ideas. This can be a useful observation, but within the field of state formation research, it overlooks important work that can be positioned only with some difficulty within a logic of war, economics, or ideas. The categorization suggested here has certain advantages because it easily includes scholars such as Richard Lachmann, Hendrik Spruyt, and others who are difficult to categorize as being bellocentric, econocentric, neo-Marxist, or neo-Hintzian. Strictly speaking, they could be categorized as econocentric scholars, but this is not entirely appropriate because politics and economics are inseparable in their work.

Any categorization or mapping exercise is, however, always problematic in one way or another. Consequently, instead of proposing another categorization, I shall prefer to confront state formation theory by way of a number of questions and challenges that have grown out of my engagement with this literature over a number of years. The questions and problems that I will raise are significant because, as I shall argue, they challenge almost the whole field of state formation research. In the following, we shall present and discuss four clusters of problems facing state formation theory.

1. 1 The concepts of state and society and their embeddedness in fusion theory—implications and consequences: Most state formation theories are embedded in a particular conceptualization of society, which, again, involves a particular conception of the state. Following from this, we shall discuss:
   • The fusion model and its implications;
   • The problem of demarcation;
   • Fusion theories as substantialist theories;
   • Fusion theories as ignoring the relations between states and societies (external relations);
   • Warfare as a dynamic force for social change, which is neglected by these theories;
   • The affiliation of warfare in these theories, when they do take it seriously, with social Darwinism; and
   • The autonomous power of the state.
2. 2 Key concepts, ideal types, general concepts, conceptual confusion: state, political organization, or polity? Neo-Weberian state formation theories construct an ideal type of the state, which encompasses all different variants of states. Therefore, in some theories, the state functions as a general (transhistorical) concept but, at the same time, also refers to the Weberian European state. This generates an ambiguity. This issue is also related to a methodological choice among Weberian nominalism, process sociology, and conceptual history.
3. 3 The complexity of the state: is the state an actor, a complex set of institutions, a structure?
4. 4 Methodological reflections: the retrospective method and its pitfalls; toward a prospective analysis.

Later, I shall argue that state formation theory needs to overcome these problems but that doing so requires a shift in theory and method. This takes me into my argument that, to solve these problems, one ought to look into parts of German relational theory, in particular the theories of Elias, who emphasizes a process-oriented view as the key to understanding state formation.

This chapter will discuss these four problems in order.

1 The concepts of state and society and their embeddedness in fusion theory—implications and consequences

The first issue I will discuss is a logical and abstract argument. Although such arguments emphasize different explanatory forces or different intermediate variables, many state formation theories finally conceive of state and society in very similar terms. Society is seen as preceding the state because, for example, a group of individuals or classes merges or fuses into a single entity, called a society. After the emergence and formation of this society, the state is installed as a political and administrative superstructure necessary for maintaining law and order and providing protection, administration, and infrastructure. I term this conceptualization of society and state the fusion model because society is conceived as a fusion of its internal elements and as developing prior to the emergence of the state.

A feature of this fusion theory is the nontheorized assumption that the state and its society are demarcated entities. Societies emerge and develop as a result of endogenous processes. When a society is fully developed as an entity, it steps into a system or network of other societies. It is fully fledged and an entity in itself. It is demarcated from other societies. Other demarcated states/societies coexist next to them. Why societies and, later, states are demarcated, however, is rarely addressed or theoretically explained by most state formation theories. This problem can be illustrated with two examples. In the Hobbesian model of society and state, a group of warring individuals enters into a contract, forming a society. In order to maintain a societal order, the individuals transfer power to the state, which “keeps them all in awe” (Hobbes, 1991, p. 117). This contractual understanding of state and society is an obvious example of a fusion model. One significant problem is that Hobbes and his followers never theoretically justified why this particular social contract developed in England. Social contracts were made, apparently at random, in, for example, England, France, and Sweden. Hobbes just assumes that there are as many social contracts as there are countries. But why do not all individuals of the world make one single contract and turn it into one world state? The logical consequence of Hobbes’s model would be a global contract maintained by one Leviathan, but not even Hobbes anticipated this as a possibility. Why has the world, for as far back in history as we have archaeological and anthropological evidence, been divided into separate societies, states, or other forms of political organizations? Neither Hobbes nor other scholars in the late Renaissance and since have ever raised this question. All theories simply presuppose that the globe is covered in a multiplicity of states and societies, separated by borders or frontiers. What determines this division is hardly ever questioned.

Another example of this problem with the fusion theory is Durkheim’s conceptualization of society and state. Durkheim takes his point of departure in the primitive societies where we find coexisting segments. The evolutionary process will lead to a merger between these small segments into larger units. In the modern world, these larger units are turned into large societies with a high level of differentiation and a complex division of labor. Due to this high level of complexity, the state emerges as an evolutionary outcome to facilitate social cohesion. The small segments are made up of their internal elements (Durkheim’s biological metaphor is a brain that makes the body function). Modern societies also consist of their internal elements—a large number of institutions, each of them with its function in order to sustain homeostasis. Again, like Hobbes, Durkheim conceives of society as a fusion of its internal elements and simply assumes that one society is separated from other societies—that there exists some form of demarcation between them. This example illustrates that the antithesis of contractual thinking can also be seen as a fusion theory.

This conception of state and society, which also dominates state formation theories, carries three major problems. First, state formation theories (and the social theories in which they are embedded) cannot theoretically account for the problem of the separation of societies. Why is the world divided into separate states and societies? Why have state formation processes not led to the formation of one global state? Several state formation theories demonstrate empirically how states and other political organizations configure space into demarcated territory, but these same theories have no theoretical explanation for why this is the case.

Another problem with fusion theories is the unintended implications they have for the concept of the state. It becomes difficult to conceive of the state with some autonomy. In a fusion theory, the state is seen as being derived from society, a continuation of society, or a level or an arena that reflects consensus, conflicts, and struggles in society. Society emerges, first, to maintain material reproduction. When the processes of differentiation create a highly complex society, a political organization (a state) is needed to govern. Society is the material base on which human beings are organized in order to produce and extract resources for a living. In other words, society is in a certain sense an economic concept, while politics and the political become a sort of superstructure. When society develops, the political superstructure becomes a necessary product. Tacitly, most state formation theories endorse Engels’s theory (e.g., in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (2010) [1884]). Engels states that it is the emergence of classes that determines a particular concept of politics and the state. When a society produces a sufficient surplus of goods, a nonproductive class can develop. According to Engels (2010) [1884], all primitive societies are characterized by the necessity that the whole population dedicate its working time to providing the basic means of reproduction. When a society produces a surplus, a class emerges that concentrates on ruling, in other words, politics. Thus, the state is a superstructure that mirrors the conflicts or consensus of the society. The state is subjected to society and therefore does not pursue its own agenda. The state has no autonomous power! And yet, when we confront it with empirical observations, this claim cannot be sustained. A historical sociological analysis suggests that the state might be subjected to society or might be interdependent with society most of the time but that in certain crucial moments or situations, the state will pursue its own agenda. Even Marx (2012) [1852]) discovered situations in which the state was not the instrument of the ruling class but was pursuing its own agenda (e.g., France from 1851 to 1852).

The third problem concerns the conceptualization of the system of states (or other political organizations, e.g., city-states, empires, etc.) and thus the external relations between states. If the state is the result of an internal fusion, then it is conceived as an entity existing prior to the relations between states (“the state system”). The state is taken as a given “substance,” and only at this stage can relations between states or societies be understood. Here Tilly (1992) is an example:

States form systems to the extent that they interact, and to the degree that their interaction significantly affects each party’s fate. Since states always grow out of competition for control of territory and population, they invariably appear in clusters, and usually form systems… . States form a system to the extent that they interact with each other regularly, and to the degree that their interaction affects the behavior of each state.

(p. 162; emphasis in original)

As demonstrated in this quotation, the fusion model of state and society implies that the fundamental features of the state system are a result of interacting states.

The Fusion Model of Society and State

Individuals/segments/groups/classes ➔ fuse into a (larger) group = society ➔ societal differentiation and complexity increase ➔ the state emerges ➔ state/society interacts with other states/societies ➔ a state system emerges

As we shall see later in this chapter, part of the problem with the fusion th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 War, survival units, and structures of privileges, rights, obligations, and citizenship: theoretical and methodological considerations
• Part 2 Western Europe: from medieval survival units to the rise and consolidation of the Ständestaat
• Part 3 France, England, and Germany: new forms of survival units—new structures of privileges, rights, and obligations 1500–1660