Luther's Legacy

The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of 'State' in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s

Robert von Friedeburg

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781107111875
• eBook ISBN: 9781316468852
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against 'despotism' to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff's Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Meinecke’s riddle: ‘reason of state’ and Reformation prudence
• 2 Royal rights and princely dynasties in late medieval and early modern Germany, fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries
• 3 Civil order and princely rights, 1450s to 1580s: the making of the elements
• 4 The transformation of ideas on order and the rise of the ‘fatherland’, 1580s to 1630s: the re-ordering of the elements
• 5 The challenge of ‘reason of state’, 1600s to 1650s
• 6 The catastrophe of war and the partial collapse of relations between princes and vassals
• 7 The re-establishing of compromise and the new use of the elements: Seckendorff, Pufendorf and the dissemination of the new concept of ‘state’
• 8 Readings of despotism: the attack on ‘war-despotism’ between Bodin and Montesquieu
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index