chapter eighteen

State Formation and State Building in Europe

Thomas Ertman

In political sociology, state building is usually themselves inspired by the older writings of
understood to mean the process by which states Max Weber, Otto Hintze, and Karl Marx.
are created and then establish and consolidate These works of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
their monoply of legitimate violence over a above all pointed to the centrality of war and
given territory by constructing a durable admin- preparations for war as the key factor driving
istrative, financial, judicial, and military appara- forward the expansion and rationalization of
tus. Though the first examples of state building state capacities among European polities. In the
in the widest sense may have occurred more 1990s a younger generation of scholars such as
than four thousand years ago in the ancient Brian Downing and Thomas Ertman refined
Near East and China, it was post-Roman state and modified this key insight. More recently,
building in Western Europe, lasting from about approaches and questions derived from rational
the fifth century a.c.e. until the end of the choice theory and the cultural turn within the
Napoleonic period, that brought forth the mod- social sciences have injected a renewed intellec-
ern state with a modern bureaucratic infrastruc- tual dynamisn into this field and opened up areas
ture at its heart. As the progenitor of a state for future research.
form that has since been adopted or imposed on
the rest of the globe, the case of European state
building is of more than just historical interest. the “founding fathers” of state
It reveals to those nations in Africa, Asia, and building theory: otto hintze
Latin America still grappling with problems of and max weber
state consolidation the tremendous difficulty of
erecting honest, efficient, and legitimate infras- Together with his more famous contemporary
tructures while at the same time suggesting a va- Max Weber (1864–1920), the unorthodox Ger-
riety of ways in which this may yet be achieved. man historian Otto Hintze (1861–1940) laid the
Sociologists and political scientists in the groundwork in his many wide-ranging essays for
English-speaking world took up the task of much recent theorizing about European state
explaining the process of state building in building. Himself the son of a minor Prussian
Western Europe in an intensive way begin- local government official, Hintze learned the
ning in the 1960’s. A new concern to “bring historian’s craft by spending twenty-two years
the state back in” to the social sciences in- editing a voluminous collection of administra-
spired a series of field-defining works by Rein- tive documents from the reigns of Frederick
hard Bendix, Barrington Moore, Stein Rokkan, William I and Frederick the Great before writ-
Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, Perry Anderson, ing the official history of the Hohenzollern
Immanuel Wallerstein, and others that were dynasty (Hintze, 1915). Yet in addition to this
367
368 Thomas Ertman

mainstream academic research, which gained constitutional history. Furthermore, the model
him a chair at Berlin University in 1902, Hintze of European state building found in these works
also wrote a series of articles (1902, 1906, 1910, differs in key respects from the war-centered
1913) that sought to account for variations in theory summarized above. Three reasons seem
outcome to the state-building process found responsible for this shift in Hintze’s interests
across Europe during the eighteenth century. away from Prussia and toward an almost ex-
He groups these outcomes into two main clusive concentration on comparative European
categories: absolutist government with bureau- political development and especially the devel-
cratic administration on the continent and par- opment of representative institutions (Ertman,
liamentary government with nonbureaucratic 1999a): his marriage in 1912 to a young aca-
administration through local notables in Eng- demic and former student whose research area
land. How does Hintze explain these divergent was ancien regime France; health problems that
outcomes? The clearest statement of his answer forced him by 1920 to give up both teaching and
can be found in Hintze (1913:427–8) as follows: his editorship of the most important publica-
What then is the cause of this pronounced institu-
tion series on Prussian history; and the collapse
tional differentiation? . . . The reason lies above all in of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the advent
the fact that on the continent compelling political of democracy to Germany, which altered the
imperatives held sway which led to the development intellectual concerns or Erkenntnisinteresse mo-
of militarism, absolutism and bureaucracy, whereas tivating his work in the direction of a greater
such pressures were not present in England . . . . It was interest in the geneology of parliamentarism as
above all geographic position that had its effects. well as absolutism.
Hintze argues in effect that it was military pre- The fruits of Hintze’s new thinking can be
ssure – war itself – but also the threat of war – see above all in two articles (1924, 1930) in
emanating from neighboring land forces – that which he presents an argument to account for
drove rulers in medieval and early modern variations in medieval and early modern state
Europe to concentrate power in their own hands building that differs in significant ways from that
by eliminating or emasculating representative found in the pre-1914 essays. In those works it
bodies and to construct professional bureaucra- was principally the degree of threat from land
cies to administer standing armies and the in- forces resulting from relative geographic expo-
frastructure needed to pay, equip, and provision sure that determined whether a given European
them. Because England was protected from a di- polity developed in an absolutist or parliamen-
rect land threat by the Channel, pressures toward tary direction. Hintze (1930) presents a far more
absolutism and bureaucratization were less pro- complicated model, however (Ertman, 1999b).
nounced, thereby permitting Parliament to sur- Here he claims that a tendency toward abso-
vive and eventually share executive power with lutism had been present in France, the German
the Crown. Put another way, Hintze’s argument states, Naples and Sicily, and Aragon long be-
can be reduced to the following proposition: the fore the great European conflicts of the six-
greater the degree of geographic exposure to teenth and seventeenth centuries, which in his
which a given medieval or early modern state earlier writings were presented as the princi-
was subjected, the greater the threat of land war- pal reason behind that political outcome. The
fare, and the greater the threat of land warfare, root cause of this tendency, Hintze goes on
the more likely an absolutist and bureaucratic to argue, was that in France, Germany, south-
outcome to state building. ern Italy and northern Spain, the self-governing
After 1918, a marked change in Hintze’s writ- counties of the Carolingian period – which in
ings is clearly visible. Whereas before that date other areas of the continent proved to be an
about two-thirds of his publications were de- effective barrier against absolutism – had been
voted to Prussian history, this figure falls to only broken apart during the middle ages by the
10 percent during the Weimar period, to be re- spread of feudalism. Rulers in these regions won
placed above all by works on state building and back the authority lost during the feudal period
 State Building in Europe 369

and recentralized power by constructing bu- level of threat from land armies to which those
reaucratic infrastructures that took over the task states with two-chamber assemblies were ex-
of local administration. When these rulers called posed, located as they were far from the Eu-
together representative assemblies during the rope’s principal battlefields in Germany, Italy,
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they could France, and the Low Countries. Though Hel-
no longer be built around the now-dissolved muth Koenigsberger (1977), Thomas Ertman
counties. Instead, delegates were grouped ac- (1997; but see also Ertman, 1999a), and oth-
cording to their legal status into chambers rep- ers have criticized Hintze’s argument concern-
resenting the clergy, nobility, and the burghers ing assembly types in some details, it remains a
of the towns. With the help of their new bureau- brilliant and far-reaching attempt to account in
cracies and the precepts of Roman law they em- a parsimonious way for the distribution of abso-
ployed, rulers were soon to gain the upper hand lutist and nonabsolutist states across early mod-
in relation to assembles deeply divided along sta- ern Europe that too often has been overlooked
tus lines well before large-scale warfare finally in the English-speaking state-building literature.
engulfed the continent. If Otto Hintze concentrated in his later works
In other parts of Western Europe, by con- on uncovering the historical roots of modern
trast – notably England and Scotland, Castile, political regimes, his contemporary Max We-
Scandinavia, and Poland and Hungary – feu- ber devoted much energy to explaining the na-
dalism was either nonexistent or did not af- ture and origins of another product of Euro-
fect the pattern of local government. Hence in pean state building: modern bureaucracy. For
these areas self-governing counties and towns Weber, the most common form of rulership in
survived. Thus, when representative assemblies most times and places, including the medieval
were created there during the central and later and early modern West, is patrimonial rulership
middle ages, rulers felt it politically expedient in which the ruler exercises patriarchal author-
to group delegates from the counties and towns ity over a staff that extends out beyond his or her
into a separate chamber to complement a first private household (Weber, 1978:1013). From
chamber composed of the bishops and mem- this perspective, then, the state-building process
bers of the higher nobility who made up the can be seen above all as a struggle between patri-
monarch’s council. Lacking a bureaucratic ap- monial rulers and their staffs over control of the
paratus, Hintze argues, rulers in these regions “means of administration” such as rights to and
on the periphery of Western Europe were ill- income from offices. In the Near East and Asia,
equipped to subjugate assemblies whose mem- according to Weber, rulers were for the most
bers fought vigorously to defend the autonomy part able to maintain control over the means
of local government from which they derived of administration thanks to private mercenary
their own political and social power. As Hintze armies and theocratic legitimacy and to intro-
summarizes (1930:139): duce an “arbitrary” form of patrimonialism, best
exemplified by sultanism, in which their per-
. . . [I]n the lands with the older, two-chamber type
of assembly, the representative element was able to
sonal will reigned supreme. Such oriental rulers
stand up to and often defeat rulers lacking in strong often built extensive administrative staffs whose
administrative staffs. Here the path of development officials they could remove when they pleased,
clearly favored parliamentarism, just as it had ab- yet such patrimonial infrastructures differed fun-
solutism [in those areas with tricurial, status-based damentally from modern bureaucracies because
assemblies]. The classic case of the former is Eng- they lacked a rational, hierarchical organization
land . . . . Also Poland with its aristocratic parliamen- of offices, professional training for officehold-
tarism, and Hungary as well.
ers, and established administrative procedures
In a point of congruence with his earlier writ- (Weber, 1978:231–2, 1020, 1040–1).
ings, Hintze claims that this tendency toward Western Europe, in Weber’s view, experi-
parliamentarism was further reinforced by the enced a very different pattern of development,
relative geographic isolation and hence lower one in which staffs were able successfully to
370 Thomas Ertman

appropriate the means of administrative from capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of
their sovereigns. First, an extreme form of the independent producers.
“estate-based” (staendische) appropriation, feu-
dalism, engulfed large areas of the West during Weber implies that this transition from patrimo-
the early and central Middle Ages. Although nial administration to modern bureaucracy first
rulers successfully restored central authority took place in the early modern West because
with the help of newly constructed adminis- it was only there that two necessary precondi-
trative staffs, the officials manning these staffs tions of such a transition were met: the pres-
soon won strong rights over their offices, up to ence of centers of professional training in the
and including hereditary ownership. As Weber form of universities and of autonomous cities
writes (1978:1028): “The typification (Stereotyp- whose burghers were willing to place their con-
ierung) and monopolistic appropriation of the siderable financial resources at the disposal of
powers of office [in the West] by the incumbents the crown (Weber, 1978:240–1). Yet even given
as members of such a legally autonomous sodal- these favorable backround conditions, European
ity created the estate-type (staendischen) patrimo- rulers required a very strong incentive to un-
nialism [as opposed to the arbitrary type].” Thus dertake the arduous and politically costly task
although in Europe, unlike Asia, it was the staff of replacing patrimonial with rational adminis-
rather than the ruler that gained control over the trations. Where did this incentive come from?
administration, that administration remained Weber’s answer is very similar to that found
equally patrimonial, characterized by a lack of in the pre-1914 writings of his contemporary,
separation between office and officeholder, a Hintze (1978:972): “In most cases, as mentioned
typified rather than rationalized organizational before, the bureaucratic tendency has been pro-
structure and the tendency to exploit the rev- moted by needs arising from the creation of
enues attached to the office for private gain. standing armies, determined by power politics,
Yet unlike rulers in the East, those in the West and from the related development of public fi-
had by the eve of the French Revolution already nances.” Hence it was geopolitical competition
begun to transform their patrimonial infrastruc- among Europe’s polities that gave rise to the
tures into modern bureaucracies. This decisive modern state.
step in the emergence of the modern state in- Given the similarities that Weber invokes be-
volved the appropriation of an appropriating of- tween the emergence of modern capitalism and
ficialdom by the ruler and its replacement not, of modern bureaucracy, it is surprising that he
as under sultanism, with an equally patrimonial does not explore the possible religious roots of
staff fully beholden to the royal will but rather the latter phenomenon but falls back instead on
with a new corps of university-educated offi- a Hintze-like explanation highlighting the role
cials without rights to their offices organized in a of war and preparations for war. Ironically, such a
functional hierarchy. Weber compares this mon- religious hypothesis was taken up by none other
umental process to the separation of peasants than Otto Hintze himself in an article published
and craftsmen from the means of production in the Historische Zeitschrift (Hintze, 1931). Re-
that ushered in modern capitalism (1946:82) as leased after 1920 from all academic and editorial
follows: obligations, Hintze was free to read more widely
than he had before, and among the fruits of
Everywhere [in the West] the development of the this new freedom were three extended reviews
modern state is initiated through the action of the of works by and about the recently deceased
prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of Max Weber and one on the writings of Weber’s
the autonomous and “private” bearers of executive friend and Heidelberg colleague Ernst Troeltsch
power who stand beside him, and of those who in
their own right possess the means of administration,
(Hintze, 1922, 1926, 1927a, 1927b). At about
warfare, and financial organization, as well as po- the same time, a collection of documents was
litically usable goods of all sorts. The whole pro- published concerning the conversion of the Ho-
cess is a complete parallel to the development of the henzollern dynasty to Calvinism in 1613. This
 State Building in Europe 371

occasion provided Hintze with the incentive to 1981; see also Gorski, 2003) has confirmed the
investigate whether ascetic Protestantism might extensive exchange of ideas and personnel be-
not have played the same revolutionary role in tween Calvinist elites in the Netherlands and
the political sphere that Weber had assigned to Brandenburg-Prussia during the reign of the
it in economic life (Ertman, 1999b). Great Elector, he has also pointed to the impor-
In (1931), Hintze argues that reason of state tance of both the neostoicism of Justus Lipsius
is the “spirit of modern politics,” the perfect and of German pietism in shaping the reception
pendant to Weber’s “spirit of modern capital- of reason of state in Germany and in Europe
ism.” Just like the latter, it possessed an elective more generally. The influence of religion and
affinity with the worldview of Calvinists, in this of other secular worldviews on European state
case those in the Netherlands and France rather building is a topic that remains woefully under-
than in the British Isles. The coolly realistic – researched in political sociology, and a revival
and highly successful – power politics of the of interest in this area over the past decade (see
Dutch rebels and of the Huguenot leader Henri below) represents one of the most encouraging
de Bourbon (the future king Henri IV) forced trends in current research in the field.
their competitors, according to Hintze, to adopt
a similar approach to international relations.
The ruthless dynamism of reason of state was the renaissance of state building
alien to the conservative, peaceable Lutheranism theory in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
of many seventeenth century German states.
The new spirit was imported into Brandenburg, As Otto Hintze was composing his late essays in
however, with the conversion of the Elector Jo- the 1920s and early 1930s, interest in the prob-
hann Sigismund to Calvinism. Henceforth the lem of European state building was already on
Netherlands and their anti-Spanish ally, France, the wane. That interest would revive again over
would serve as the models that would fire the four decades later among sociologists and polit-
ambitions of successive Hohenzollern rulers. It ical scientists in the English-speaking world and
was above all, Hintze contends, the ascetic, me- lead to a wave of new state-building literature
thodical approach to work of the Great Elec- that has not yet abated. This renaissance in state-
tor and his grandson, Frederick William I, in building theory can be traced to three sources:
both cases directly inspired by a pietistic vari- first and foremost, a general turn back toward
ant of Calvinism, that would allow them to classical social theory, and especially the works
transform Brandenburg-Prussia from a minor of Marx and Weber, in reaction to the behav-
German state into a great power in less then ioralism, pluralism, and structural-functionalism
a hundred years. dominant across the social sciences during the
Hintze’s presentation of his broader argument 1950s and 1960s; second, the Social Science
is sketchy – most of “Calvinism” is taken up Research Council’s large-scale project on the
with a detailed discussion of the circumstances comparative development of states and nations,
surrounding Johann Sigismund’s conversion in which culminated in 1975 with the publica-
1613 and is of interest primarily to specialists. It tion of the agenda-setting volume The Forma-
was not the author’s intention to provide con- tion of National States in Western Europe edited by
vincing proof of his larger points but rather to Charles Tilly, (Tilly, 1975); and finally, the dis-
revive and deepen, buttressed by the work of covery of the writings of Hintze thanks to the
Weber, a claim about the possible relationship appearance of Felix Gilbert’s collection The His-
between Brandenburg-Prussia’s special path of torical Essays of Otto Hintze, also in 1975 (Hintze,
development and Calvinism that had once been 1975).
put forward, to little effect, by Hintze’s teacher, Significantly, it was a monograph by the
Gustav Droysen. How has more recent schol- Weber scholar and future cotranslator of Econ-
arship judged Hintze’s efforts? Although Ger- omy and Society, Reinhard Bendix, that reintro-
hard Oestreich in a number of articles (1970, duced the study of European state building to
372 Thomas Ertman

the social science agenda. In his book Nation- to rent their land to tenant farmers, thereby lay-
Building and Citizenship, first published in 1964 ing the groundwork for the alliance between
and reprinted in an expanded edition in 1977, commercially oriented noble landlords and the
Bendix rechristens Weber’s modern state as the urban bourgeoisie that, according to the author,
“nation-state” and defines it in contrast to the defeated royal absolutism in the Civil War and
patrimonial state of medieval and early mod- set England down the road to capitalist democ-
ern Europe. He writes (1977:128) the following: racy. Similar demands for taxes across the Chan-
“The modern nation-state presupposes that this nel in turn drove wine-growing French nobles
link between governmental authority and in- to extract ever more revenue, often with the
herited privilege in the hands of families of nota- help of royal officials, from their beleaguered
bles is broken . . . [T]he decisive criterion of the peasants. At the same time, the state’s practice
Western nation-state is the substantial separation of selling offices and granting economic privi-
between the social structure and the exercise leges to insiders alienated a significant portion
of judicial and administrative functions.” Thus of the bourgeoisie that was excluded from the
Bendix in this work employs “nation build- royal bounty. Thus it was the particular (patri-
ing” principally to refer not to a state-initiated monial) state-building strategy pursued by suc-
campaign of cultural centralization and stan- cessive French governments that furthered the
dardization, as would Lipset and Rokkan (1968), alliance between bourgeois outsiders and disad-
Eugen Weber (1976), Eric Hobsbawm (1990), vantaged workers and peasants that was in turn
or Benedict Anderson (1991) but rather to the responsible for the Revolution. Even clearer
extension of a uniform central authority across for Moore is the Prussian/German case, where
the entire national territory through the con- the cooperation between the royal bureaucracy
struction of a modern bureaucratic infrastruc- and a militarized aristocracy to maintain labor-
ture to replace patrimonial practices and per- repressive agriculture made possible the revolu-
sonnel, a process that would be of fundamental tion from above that over the long run created
concern to the subsequent state-building liter- favorable conditions for the triumph of fascism.
ature, just as it had been to Weber and Hintze. In a brilliant 1973 review, Theda Skocpol
Like Weber, Bendix stresses the crucial role (1973) acknowledged that Moore attributes
played by autonomous urban communes and more significance to the state than is usual in
Protestant sects in laying the groundwork for works influenced by Marx, but she claimed that
this breakthrough to the modern state in West- he ultimately “remains within the Marxist the-
ern Europe (1977:194–5). Yet he lends even oretical tradition,” a tradition characterized by
greater weight to the movement from below for an inadequate political sociology that prefers “to
equal citizenship, first in the form of equality explain political struggles and structures as func-
before the law and then in demands for wider tions of class structures and struggles” (Skocpol,
political participation. 1973:36–7). To build on Moore’s achievements
Two years after the appearance of Bendix and to move beyond him, Skocpol argues, it
(1964/1977), Barrington Moore published his is necessary to modify his analytic framework
classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy to include “the independent roles of state or-
(Moore, 1966). Though European state build- ganizations and state elites” (Skocpol, 1973:37)
ing was not the central concern of a book that and to move away from an exclusive focus on
sought to account for what it termed three paths “intrasocietal structures and practices” (Skocpol,
to the modern world, the important role played by 1973:36) toward one that incorporates the in-
absolutist bureaucracies in propelling England fluence of the world economy and international
and France toward democracy and Germany state systems on individual polities.
toward fascism nonetheless stimulated renewed A year later another major historical-
interest in the early modern state. Thus for comparative monograph in the Marxist tradi-
Moore it was the absolutist state’s demand for tion appeared that certainly did not limit itself
taxes that led wool-producing English nobles to intrasocietal structures and practices: the first
 State Building in Europe 373

volume of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern 1974b) were inspired above all by the works of
World System (1974). A central theme of this Marx, but also by those of Weber and of Hintze,
book is the role that states played in the emer- with whose writings Anderson had become ac-
gence and reproduction of what Wallerstein calls quainted in the original. In Lineages Anderson
the “European world economy” beginning in seeks to account for three outcomes to the state-
the late fifteenth century. In a chapter enti- building process in the West: a mild form of
tled “The Absolutist Monarchy and Statism,” absolutism found in Western and Southern Eu-
he argues that “the development of strong states rope (France, Spain), a harsher version of abso-
in the core areas of the European world was lutism further to the east (Brandenburg-Prussia,
an essential component of the development Austria, Russia), and a few exceptional cases
of modern capitalism” (Wallerstein, 1974:134). (England, the Dutch Republic) where abso-
Monarchs in the core were able to strengthen lutism was swept away by a precocious bourgeois
their states, according to Wallerstein, by em- revolution.
ploying four methods (Wallerstein, 1974:136, Anderson traces these divergent outcomes
157): bureaucratization through the sale of of- to what he calls the “uneven development of
fices, the monopolization of force through Europe” (1974a:213) rooted in the fact that
the creation of standing mercenary armies, in- some parts of the continent (latter-day Britain,
creased legitimation through the propagation of France, Iberia, Italy and southern and western
the doctrine of divine right, and the cultural ho- Germany) had been part of the western Ro-
mogenization of the subject population through man Empire prior to the Middle Ages, whereas
the elimination of religious pluralism. others (northern and eastern Germany, eastern
Although all of these mechanisms were un- Europe, Scandinavia) had not. In the former re-
doubtedly employed across the continent from gions, feudalism emerged independently from
the fifteenth century onwards, the true test of a fusion of Roman and Germanic institutions,
any theory of early modern state building is leaving a landscape characterized in the thir-
its ability to account not only for similarities teenth century by parcelized sovereignty, au-
but also for differences in state structure found tonomous towns, and serf-based agriculture. In
within this single economic and cultural area. the “colonial” East, however, royal authority
Wallerstein contends that the strongest (Waller- was stronger, towns were weaker, and peasants
stein, 1974:134) and most centralized (Waller- were generally free.
stein, 1974:162) states were found in the Eu- The great economic and social crisis of the
ropean core. Yet as Theda Skocpol has pointed fourteenth century decisively deepened the di-
out in her 1977 review of his book, this cor- vision between Europe’s two halves, according
relation does not appear to hold water. On to Anderson. In the West, it weakened noble
the one hand, it would be difficult to classify landlords but strengthened the towns and royal
the nonabsolutist core states England and the authority, thereby paving the way for the tri-
Netherlands as either strong or centralized com- umph of royal absolutism that protected the
pared to their absolutist neighbors France and interests of an ailing aristocracy by creating
Spain, and on the other, military powers Prus- standing armies that could be used both for for-
sia and Sweden clearly were both strong and eign conquest and to enforce noble property
centralized although they belonged to Europe’s rights. In England and Holland, however, the
semiperiphery rather than its economic core bourgeoisie proved strong enough to thwart this
(Skocpol, 1977:64). As Skocpol explicitly men- absolutist project. In the East, crisis undermined
tions (Skocpol, 1977:65), the work of another the position of the towns and peasantry rather
theorist, Perry Anderson, does a considerably than the nobility, thereby permitting the latter
better job of accounting for this pattern of state to introduce a “second serfdom.” Meanwhile,
development. rulers in seventeenth century Brandenburg-
Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudal- Prussia, Austria, and Russia were able to take
ism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974a, advantage of the military pressure from Sweden
374 Thomas Ertman

to establish highly militarized bureaucratic- Rokkan’s chapter was at least his third pub-
absolutist regimes to counter this threat. lished version of his “conceptual map of Eu-
Anderson’s sweeping study is noteworthy for rope.” A fourth was to appear two years af-
two reasons. First, it set a high standard for ter his premature death in 1979 (see Lipset and
future research on European state building by Rokkan, 1968; Rokkan, 1973, 1981). Precisely
choosing as his object of study the political what these “maps” aimed to explain was never
development of the entire continent from the exactly specified: in some versions it was varia-
Roman Empire until the eve of the French tions in Western European party systems and in
Revolution. Second, although Anderson for the others ease of transition to mass politics or the
most part employs variations in socioeconomic success or failure of democratic consolidation
structure (presence/absence of serfdom, relative during the interwar years. In reality, the expli-
strength of bourgeoisie/towns) to account for candum was something like the comparative po-
the contrasting trajectories of Western and East- litical trajectories of the Western European states
ern Europe, he also assigns warfare a greater during the modern period. Although Rokkan
role in his model than one would expect from does not specifically set out in his conceptual
a neo-Marxist scholar. In so doing, he antici- maps to account for variations in the process
pated the centrality of war and preparations for of state building in Europe, the framework he
war in the state-building literature of the 1970s lays out there can equally well be applied to this
and 1980s. For all of its eloquence and ana- problem.
lytic acuity, however, Anderson’s study suffers In his contribution to Tilly (1975), Rokkan
from a number of defects. First and foremost, posits four “dimensions of variations” that can
he cannot explain how the same two factors account for divergent patterns of development
that led to bureaucratic absolutism in Prussia and across the continent: distance northward from
Austria – a serf-based economy and an acute Rome (i.e., from the direct influence of the
security threat from an aggressive neighbor – Catholic Church); distance east or west from
resulted in nonbureaucratic constitutionalism in the “trade-route belt,” an area densely studded
Poland and Hungary. Furthermore, it remains with cities running from the Low Countries in
unclear why England and the Dutch Repub- the northwest to northern Italy in the southeast;
lic should have departed from the dominant degree of concentration of land ownership; and
path of development in Western Europe and degree of ethnic and/or linguistic homogeneity
installed constitutionalist rather than absolutist (1975:575–6). The underlying puzzle Rokkan
regimes. is attempting to explain here is why state build-
One year after the appearance of Anderson’s ing, understood as the consolidation of central
two volume study, The Formation of National state power, appears to have been much eas-
States was published (Tilly, 1975). This work was ier on the periphery of Europe (Britain, Scan-
the penultimate installment in the SSRC’s mon- dinavia) than in the older, more economically
umental “Studies in Political Development” se- developed areas at the heart of the continent
ries, a series that had heretofore primarily fo- that remained highly fragmented until late in the
cused on the dynamics of political change in nineteenth century. His answer is that consoli-
the twentieth century outside of Europe and dation was hindered by the presence of wealthy,
the United States. With this book, attention autonomous cities and of the “rival power” of
shifted toward the European past and the lessons the Catholic Church, both of which had much
it might hold for nations grappling with prob- to lose from successful centralization. At the
lems of state formation and state building today. same time, state consolidation was aided by con-
Its most influential contributions proved to be centrated landholdings and the existence of a
the introduction and a concluding chapter by strong ethnic/linguistic “core.” As Rokkan says,
editor Charles Tilly and a piece by Stein Rokkan “Paradoxically the history of Europe is one of
(Rokkan, 1975). center formation at the periphery of a network
 State Building in Europe 375

of strong and independent cities: this explains city-states – without a strong center or a contin-
the great diversity of configurations and the ex- uation of feudal patterns of rule (1975:26). To
traordinary tangles of shifting alliances and con- understand why the national state won out, we
flicts” (1975:576). must, Tilly stresses, adopt a prospective rather than
The most telling criticism of Rokkan’s “con- a retrospective approach, looking forward from
ceptual map” has come from his fellow con- a landscape crowded with perhaps five hundred
tributor Charles Tilly (1981b:118–23; see also autonomous political entities in 1500 and fol-
1981a). Rokkan, in Tilly’s view, has rendered an lowing their fate rather than beginning with the
accurate understanding of European state build- twenty-five states that survived until 1900 and
ing difficult by taking a retrospective view of tracing their origins. This prospective analysis is
this process, in other words by looking back rendered somewhat easier by the fact that West-
into the past from the vantage point of those ern Europe around 1500 was characterized by a
polities that survived into the late twentieth high degree of cultural homogeneity thanks to
century rather than looking forward from the the presence of a single Church, a widely used
early Middle Ages. Furthermore, although he written language (Latin), common legal, admin-
laudably focuses on the choices among various istrative and agricultural practices, similar family
alternatives made by state-building leaders, he patterns, and a network of trade links spanning
underplays the extent to which such choices the continent (1975:14–19).
were constrained and often resulted in unan- So why then did the national state prove
ticipated consequences. Finally, and most im- victorious? Tilly’s answer is simple and powerful:
portantly, war and preparations for war play al- war. As he states (1975:74): “Preparation for war
most no role within Rokkan’s scheme (Tilly, has been the great state-building activity.” Or,
1981b:123). Charles Tilly’s own writings on in an even more famous formulation (1975:42),
European state building, beginning with his in- “War made the state and the state made war.”
troduction and concluding chapter to The For- A decentralized Europe of competing polities
mation of National States in Western Europe (1975), was a continent filled with armed conflict, and
seek to correct these deficiencies while at the the national state proved better able to mobilize
same time incorporating the unique insights the resources necessary to fight wars effectively
found in Rokkan’s work. than any of its rivals. It did this by building bu-
Tilly’s contributions to the SSRC volume are reaucratic infrastructures capable of recruiting
above all important for the way they frame a and supplying armies and of collecting the taxes
bold new question about state formation and from an often recalcitrant population needed to
state building in Europe and for the preliminary finance those armies. A question that Tilly does
answer they provide. Tilly asks how it was that not seek to answer directly in these pieces but
one particular political form, a centralized, dif- will take up later is how one might account for
ferentiated polity enjoying a monopoly of coer- variations within the dominant form of the na-
cion over a well-defined territory that he calls tional state, though he implies that such varia-
the “national state” (1975:27) and others have tions would be affected by, among other things,
termed the “sovereign, territorial state” (e.g., relative geographic position (isolated or open)
Ertman, 1997; Spruyt, 1994), defeated its com- and the ease with which resources could be ex-
petitors and became the dominant political form tracted from the population (1975:40).
in the West and then in the rest of the world as Tilly’s next major contribution to the state-
well. For, as Tilly stresses, there certainly were building literature (Tilly, 1985) also appeared in
competitors. From the perspective of the central a volume sponsored by the SSRC, the agenda-
Middle Ages, at least three other kinds of poli- setting collection Bringing the State Back In edited
ties could have triumphed in Europe: a single by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and
empire, a “theocratic federation” centered on Theda Skocpol and published in 1985. In her
the Church, a trading network – presumably of introduction to that volume, Skocpol invokes
376 Thomas Ertman

Weber and Hintze’s conception of the state as He argues instead that a polity might avoid bu-
an autonomous actor as an alternative to the reaucratization and possibly absolutism as well
society-centered views of politics held by neo- despite intense military pressure if it possessed
Marxists and neopluralists alike. Her call to take abundant resources that could be readily ex-
historical cases and data seriously added further tracted. Thus in this piece Tilly puts forward a
dynamism to the field of historical-comparative more sophisticated argument than that found in
research initially stimulated by the appearance the early Hintze by bringing together geopolit-
of Bendix, Moore, Anderson, and Tilly’s studies, ical and economic factors (size and extractabil-
Gianfranco Poggi’s elegant overviews The Devel- ity of revenue sources, in turn determined by
opment of the Modern State (1978) and The State the relative weight of agriculture and commerce
(1990), and the world systems theory of Im- within a given economy) to explain differences
manuel Wallerstein. in the size and character of early modern states.
In his short but provocative contribution, Tilly expanded these ideas into a general the-
Tilly takes up a number of themes touched ory of European state building in his mono-
upon in Formation. He repeats the dictum that graph Coercion, Capital and European States. AD
“War makes states” (1985:170), but here his 990–1990 (1990). He adopts the same prospec-
main argument centers on explaining differ- tive approach advocated in Tilly (1975), but
ences among national states rather than why is more specific in identifying three diver-
the latter triumphed over other kinds of poli- gent paths of political development in late me-
ties. Tilly states (1985:172): “Variations in the dieval and early modern Europe (1990:30): a
difficulty of collecting taxes, in the expense of “capital-intensive” path followed by the city-
the particular kind of armed forces adopted, in states and city-confederations of northern Italy,
the amount of war making required to hold off Switzerland, southern Germany and the Low
competitors, and so on resulted in the principal Countries; a “coercion-intensive” path found
variations in the forms of European states.” He on the continent’s eastern and northern fringes
later elaborates on what he means by “variations (Poland, Hungary, Russia, Scandinavia); and fi-
in the difficulty of collecting taxes” (1985:182): nally an intermediate path of “capitalized co-
ercion” exemplified by England, France, and
In the case of extraction, the smaller the pool of re-
sources and the less commercialized the economy,
later Brandenburg-Prussia. It was this third path
other things being equal, the more difficult was the that “produced full-fledged national states ear-
work of extracting resources to sustain war and other lier” and beginning in the 1600s “proved more
government activities; hence, the more extensive was effective at war, and therefore provided a com-
the fiscal apparatus, . . . On the whole, taxes on land pelling model for states that had originated in
were expensive to collect as compared with taxes on other combinations of coercion and capital”
trade, especially large flows of trade past easily con- (1990:30–1).
trolled checkpoints.
How can we in turn account for the exis-
Tilly illustrates this point by contrasting the case tence of these three separate paths? Tilly ar-
of Brandenburg-Prussia, a state that, he claims, gues that they come about because of the very
built a large bureaucracy to extract scarce re- uneven distribution of capital across Europe at
sources from a poor country in aid of its military the time during the central middle ages when
efforts, with that of England, whose abundant large-scale warfare began to spread throughout
commercial resources permitted it to get by with the continent. Taking up Rokkan’s idea of a
a much smaller state apparatus. “city belt,” he claims that financial resources
Like Hintze, Tilly sees war and preparations were heavily concentrated in a city-filled cor-
for war as the principal stimulus for “war mak- ridor running from northern Italy to the Low
ing,” yet he questions the tight link posited by Countries. Rulers attempting to centralize co-
the former in his pre-1914 writings between ercive resources in this area were thwarted by
degree of military pressure and the size of the city-states, city-empires, and urban federations
state apparatus built in response to that pressure. jealous of their independence. These polities
 State Building in Europe 377

then employed their superior capital resources to Britain and France, or in Poland and Russia were
purchase coercive means through military con- roughly similar, why did one polity in each pair
tractors and other entrepreneurs, thereby avoid- become absolutist, whereas the other did not?
ing the necessity of building bulky adminis- This was a question to which Michael Mann
trative apparatuses to perform such tasks. By tried to provide an answer in the sections on
contrast, the polities of Eastern and Northern European state building in the first volume of
Europe were poor in cities and hence in capi- his The Sources of Social Power (1986). Here he
tal. In response to military pressures, they first acknowledges (p. 433) the inspiration provided
reacted with imperial expansion (cf. the Pol- by Tilly (1975) and up to a point his argument
ish, Hungarian, Russian, and Swedish empires). parallels that being developed by Tilly at about
To extract the meager resources found among the same time. Thus Mann also sees state build-
the largely peasant populations under their con- ing in the period after 1500 dominated by the
trol, they either constructed bulky bureaucracies demands of warfare, and like Tilly he contends
(Russia) or, in a less effective strategy over the that the varying distribution across the continent
long run, relied on the direct coercive authority of war’s “raw materials” – money and men – led
of powerful landowners (Poland and Hungary). to alternative paths of development. He writes
Because the regions just to the east and es- (1986:456) the following:
pecially the west of the city belt were endowed
with moderate concentrations of capital, states Thus a very rich state could pay for and adminis-
there could pursue a middle course, centralizing ter armed forces that were fairly separate from the
rest of its civil activities . . . . Or a state that had some
coercive power while at the same time encour- wealth but that was rich in manpower could gen-
aging further growth in the urban economies erate large, competitive armed forces with a fiscal-
that they had to tax to pay for standing armies manpower extraction system that was more central
and bureaucracies. This mix of capital and co- to its own overall administration . . . . Over the next
ercion proved to be the most effective at ex- centuries the major Italian republics . . . . Holland,
tracting and organizing resources for war and and England were favored by their wealth, and Aus-
hence polities employing either more capital- tria and Russia by their populations and relatively
uniform state machineries. Spain and France enjoyed
intensive or more coercion-intensive methods both advantages and, indeed, they came closest to
of mobilization were forced to imitate states like military-led political hegemony over Europe.
France or Prussia or to fall back into insignif-
icance and possibly lose their independence as This sounds very much like Tilly’s capital-
a consequence, as happened to Poland, Hun- intensive, coercion-intensive, and capitalized
gary, and, somewhat later, Venice (1990:130–60, coercion patterns of state building, though in
187–91). this schema England is placed in the first cat-
As with Rokkan’s “conceptual maps,” the egory along with the polities of Rokkan and
great strength of Tilly’s approach is that he seeks Tilly’s “city belt” rather than in the third along
to integrate the material development of the with France and Spain. This key shift then
continent into his analysis of European state allows Mann to identify these different “ex-
building in a way that does not simply reduce tractive regimes” with particular political out-
political to economic interests. Furthermore, he comes (1986:456): “. . . we shall see that these
does this in a manner that goes beyond Rokkan “fiscal” and “mobilized” alternatives develop
because his perspective is generally prospective into “constitutional” and “absolutist” regimes.”
and, at least in Tilly (1990), he identifies a set Poland is identified as a state that failed to
of variations in outcome for which he hopes to adopt any effective extractive regime and hence
account. The explanatory power of his model is was crushed, disappearing altogether from the
weakened, however, by its difficulties in explain- map (1986:489–90). These suggestive ideas are
ing variations in the form of government within not developed at any length in Mann’s vol-
each of the three trajectories. Thus, one might ume and hence retain the character of hypothe-
ask, even if the mix of capital and coercion in ses. Attempts to account for divergent political
378 Thomas Ertman

outcomes (absolutist vs. nonabsolutist regimes) summarizes his argument concerning the diver-
would, however, remain a major concern of gent impact of the military revolution as follows
the state-building literature over the coming (1992:239–40):
decade.
Countries faced with heavy protracted warfare that
required substantial domestic resource mobilization
suffered the destruction of medieval constitutional-
recent trends in the literature ism and the rise of a military-bureaucratic form of
on european state building government. Second, where war was light, or where
war needs could be met without mobilizing dras-
Since the early 1990s, three broad theoretical tic proportions of national resources (through for-
eign resources, alliances, geographic advantages or
orientations have dominated the research on
commercial wealth), conflict with the constitution
European state building within political science was much lighter. Constitutional government en-
and sociology. The first of these, represented by dured . . . . Third, where war was heavy and pro-
the work of Brian Downing and Thomas Ert- tracted, where domestic politics prevented military
man, has continued to focus on the way warfare modernization and political centralization, and where
shaped divergent patterns of state development the benefits of foreign resources, alliances, geography
and hence might be called neo-Hintzean. A or economic superiority were not available, the coun-
try lost its sovereignty to strong expansionist states.
second orientation, which has gained in im-
portance over the decade, derives its inspiration Thus the rulers of France and Brandenburg-
from rational choice theory and has been partic- Prussia, their states geographically exposed and
ularly interested in exploring issues of taxation, forced to rely primarily on domestic taxa-
consent, and rent seeking in the state building tion and recruits to feed their military ma-
process. Finally, the most recent trend to emerge chines, swept aside representative institutions
in this field has been a “culture turn” found in and erected absolutist regimes with bureaucratic
the work of Julia Adams and Philip Gorski, who infrastructures, whereas the leaders of England,
have brought a concern with gender, the fam- the Dutch Republic, and Sweden, protected by
ily, and religion to the study of the medieval and geography and enjoying access to substantial fi-
early modern state. nancial resources – in the first two cases due
Accounting for variations in political out- to domestic wealth and in the third thanks to
come to the state-building process in Europe foreign subsidies – could meet their military
stands at the heart of Brian Downing’s mono- needs without eliminating representative insti-
graph The Military Revolution and Political Change tutions or constructing large bureaucracies. Fi-
(1992). The starting point for Downing’s argu- nally, Poland is the best example of a state that,
ment is the fact, frequently noted by Weber and though under severe military threat, was pre-
Hintze, that the medieval West was unique in vented from meeting this challenge because of
possessing a whole array of institutional arrange- domestic politics and was eventually destroyed.
ments that checked royal power – the rule of law, Downing’s model is similar in many respects
a developed conception of rights, autonomous to Mann’s, though it is presented and supported
cities, decentralized military organization and in much greater detail. It represents the most
above all representative institutions – institutional developed version of a “fiscal-military” alterna-
arrangements that Downing collectively terms tive to the more narrowly “geopolitical” theory
medieval constitutionalism. The changes in mili- found in the pre-1914 works of Hintze, one that
tary technology and the resulting explosion in identifies both the (geographically determined)
the size and cost of armies generally known as military threat from surrounding powers and the
the “military revolution” of the sixteenth and type and availability of financial and manpower
seventeenth centuries placed tremendous strain resources as key causal factors in accounting for
on these institutions as rulers sought to find the divergent state-building outcomes. As such, it
money and men necessary to defend themselves can be seen as the culmination of a line of ar-
against – or attack – their neighbors. Downing gument initiated by Tilly (1975).
 State Building in Europe 379

Like Downing, Thomas Ertman in his Birth central causal role played by war and prepa-
of the Leviathan (1997) seeks to explain variations rations for war. Yet what this standard litera-
in both political regime and in the character of ture overlooks, he maintains, is that although
state infrastructures found across Europe at the geopolitical competition may have had a cru-
end of the early modern period. He contends cial impact on the state-building process, the
that this problem is worth examining anew be- onset of such competition was “nonsimultane-
cause research by historian John Brewer (1989) ous” – that is, it did not affect all states or re-
has undermined a central assumption of the gions at the same time. This mattered for the
state-building literature from Hintze and Weber same reasons that the nonsimultaneous onset of
to Downing: namely that eighteenth-century industrialization mattered in the process of Eu-
Britain with its strong Parliament, geographic ropean economic development: because rulers
isolation, small standing army, and abundant who were not forced to expand their infrastruc-
commercial wealth neither needed nor pos- tures until later (after about 1450) could take ad-
sessed a large, fiscal-administrative infrastruc- vantage of new institutions and “technologies of
ture of the kind associated in this literature with rule” not available to early state builders; because
absolutist states like France and Brandenburg- such late state-building rulers could draw from
Prussia. In fact, as Brewer and Geoffrey Holmes a larger pool of trained administrative, finan-
(1982) have shown, Britain possessed a fiscal- cial, and military personnel; and because they
administrative infrastructure larger in both ab- could learn from the mistakes of the early state
solute and per capita terms than that of Freder- builders. For all of these reasons, Ertman ar-
ick the Great’s Prussia and just as bureaucratic gues, late state builders (like Prussia’s monar-
(Ertman, 1997:12). Indeed, as Brewer has writ- chs) were – other things being equal – able to
ten (1989:68), the British Excise “more closely win the battle with their staffs over control of
approximated . . . Max Weber’s ideal of bureau- the means of administration and construct pro-
cracy than any other government agency in tomodern bureaucracies, whereas earlier state
eighteenth-century Europe.” Although consti- builders (such as the kings of France or Spain)
tutionalist Britain and absolutist Prussia both tended to lose the battle with their staffs and
possessed modern bureaucracies, a substantial were saddled with patrimonial infrastructures
literature on absolutist France and Spain as well (1997:25–8).
as on constitutionalist Poland and Hungary has To explain variations in political regime, as
underlined the fact that the infrastructures of all opposed to variations in infrastructure, Ertman
these states most closely approximate Weber’s employs a different argument, one inspired by
category of “stereotyped” or appropriated pat- Hintze’s lesser known work of the post-1918 pe-
rimonial administration. riod. Developing further the claim put forward
Ertman thus claims that, contrary to an as- by Hintze (1930), Ertman contends that because
sumption held by most of the literature on all rulers were interested in freeing themselves
state building, political regime and infrastruc- from the constraints of “medieval constitution-
tural type did not covary in early modern Eu- alism,” especially given the intense geopolitical
rope but instead cross-cut one another, thereby competition of the period after 1450, the key
producing four kinds of outcomes to be ex- factor in determining whether they would suc-
plained – bureaucratic absolutism (German ceed in this was the degree of resistance said
states), bureaucratic constitutionalism (Britain), rulers encountered from their representative as-
patrimonial absolutism (France, Iberian, and semblies. Two chamber assemblies with their
Italian states), and patrimonial constitutional- roots in autonomous units of local government
ism (Poland, Hungary), rather than the tradi- such as those found in England, Poland, and
tional two – bureaucratic absolutism and non- Hungary proved to be most durable, whereas
bureaucratic constitutionalism. In attempting to tripartite estate-based assemblies with no such
account for variations in infrastructure, Ert- links to local government such as those in
man agrees with the standard literature on the France, Iberia, Italy, and Germany invariably
380 Thomas Ertman

succumbed to rulers’ attempts to concentrate 1990) North highlights the centrality of estab-
legislative as well as executive power in their lishing a system of equitable property rights to
own hands. In addition, Ertman points out lower the transaction costs involved in nego-
that if representative assemblies survived and re- tiating and enforcing contracts and hence en-
mained vigorous throughout the early modern courage economic activity. However, he also
period, they could and did influence the char- emphasizes the fact that, given the prevalence
acter of the state infrastructures that collected of inefficient property rights both in the Euro-
and disbursed the taxes they voted and adminis- pean past and in the wider world, such a system
tered the laws they approved. Thus in England, is obviously very difficult to construct and in-
parliamentary support made possible the efforts stitutionalize. A principal reason for this is the
of reformers to replace a patrimonial infrastruc- “predatory” behavior of rulers – whether indi-
ture with a protomodern bureaucracy, whereas viduals or collectivities – who will attempt to
in Poland and Hungary noble-dominated rep- shape property rights to maximize their own
resentative institutions blocked rulers’ attempts income, most often to the detriment of eco-
to build just such bureaucracies in the face of nomic growth more generally (North, 1981:21–
sustained military pressures, fearing that they 31; Levi, 1981, 1988:10–40).
would give rulers the upper hand in their strug- This basic framework has inspired two main
gle with the assemblies. At the same time, be- strands of research on the medieval and early
cause such assemblies had either ceased to meet modern state by those employing a rational
altogether or ceded all influence over legislation choice approach. One of these roughly corre-
in France, Iberia, Italy, and the German states af- sponds to the problem of explaining variations
ter the late 1500s, they could do little to either in political regime in the neo-Hintzean litera-
reform entrenched patrimonial administrations ture, the other to the problem of explaining vari-
in the first three areas (“Latin Europe”) or block ations in infrastructural type. Thus both North
the construction of protomodern bureaucracies and Levi have explored the conditions under
across Germany (Ertman, 1997:19–25, 28–34; which rulers might be willing to enter into
for critical discussions of Ertman, see Gorski, durable bargains with representative institutions,
1998, 2003, and Mahoney, 1999). leading to constraints on their predatory be-
If Downing and Ertman carry forward, in havior and the creation of an efficient property
their contrasting ways, an older, war-centered rights system, by comparing the cases of late me-
tradition of work on European state building, dieval England and France (Levi, 1988:95–121;
over the course of the 1990s research in this area see also Bates and Lien, 1985; North, 1981:147–
has come to be dominated by two other theo- 57; North and Thomas, 1973:82–84, 98–101).
retical orientations with quite different intellec- They argue that the weaker bargaining position
tual roots: rational choice and culture-centered of English monarchs in the absence of a cred-
analysis. Neither has as of yet sought to explain ible invasion threat, combined with the lower
variation across the entire continent in the man- transaction costs associated with central bargain-
ner of Hintze, Rokkan, Tilly, or Ertman, but ing in a smaller and more homogeneous coun-
both have instead concentrated on single-country try led the latter to enter into cooperative ar-
studies or comparisons involving a more lim- rangements with Parliament (see also Kiser and
ited number of cases. The foundations for a Barzel, 1991). The subsequent breakdown in
rational choice approach to the European past trust between the monarch and Parliament, and
were laid in the 1970s and 1980s by the Nobel the establishment of parliamentary supremacy
Prize-winning economist Douglass North and after 1688 have more recently been examined
his political science colleague Margaret Levi. In from a rational choice perspective by Ferejohn
his path-breaking writings on economic history (1993) and North and Weingast (1989). Jean-
beginning with The Rise of the Western World Laurent Rosenthal (1998) has explored the rea-
(North and Thomas, 1973) and Structure and sons why seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Change in Economic History (1981; see also North, French monarchs refused to revive the Estates
 State Building in Europe 381

General despite the revenue gains this would and Joachim Schneider (1994) have also ana-
have brought. He argues, echoing a point made lyzed the tax collection system of early mod-
earlier by Levi (1988:121), that they did not do ern Prussia and claim that certain nonbureau-
so because they correctly perceived that this in- cratic features of this system, including the use
creased revenue would be purchased at the in- of royal spies to monitor tax officials and the
tolerably high price of a loss of autonomy in right of arbitrary dismissal retained by the ruler,
foreign and military affairs. increased the overall efficiency of collection by
A second issue addressed in several ratio- heightening the control capacity of the princi-
nal choice contributions is that of administra- pal.
tive insiderism and inefficiency – patrimonial- Over the past decade, some of the most sig-
ism, in Weber’s terms. The predatory theory nificant new contributions to the literature on
of rule explains this outcome by the tendency European state building have come from sociol-
of rulers to trade rights, including monopoly ogists Julia Adams and Philip Gorski, both of
rights to office, in exchange for revenue gains whom have called into question various fea-
in the absence of constraints imposed by, for tures of the rational choice approach. Adams
example, a permanent representative institu- and Gorski were important contributors to the
tion (North, 1981:149–50). North has subse- 1999 collective volume State/Culture, edited by
quently stressed that dysfunctional institutional George Steinmetz. This volume seeks to revital-
arrangements brought about by the granting ize the study of state formation and state build-
of monopoly rights can reproduce themselves ing by allowing it to partake of the fruits of the
over long periods of time (1990:51–3, 92– “cultural turn” now ongoing in sociology, an-
104). In his monograph Fountains of Privilege thropology, history, and, to a lesser extent, po-
(1994), Hilton Root shows how ancien regime litical science. In its ambitions Steinmetz (1999)
France’s pervasive “cronyism” – the allocation strongly resembles Evans, Rueschemeyer, and
of rights to office and monopoly control over Skocpol (1985). In Adams’ piece (1999), she
key state functions and economic activities to criticizes the rational choice model of wealth
relatives and clients – led to dysfunctionality on and power-maximizing predatory actors for
such a scale that, under conditions of intense neglecting the crucial role played by the pursuit
geopolitical competition, regime collapse was of family honor and prestige among the elites
the inevitable outcome. Conversely, the perva- of the early modern period. In her own work
sive electoral corruption in eighteenth-century on the Netherlands, she has tried to elaborate
England served to redistribute wealth to a wider, an alternative model.
socially mixed electorate without impeding the In two further articles, Adams (1994a, 1994b)
wealth-creating function of a market economy contends that the driving force behind state de-
largely free from state control (see also the cri- velopment in the seventeenth-century Dutch
tique of Root in Rosenthal, 1998:78–79). Republic was the desire of the male heads of re-
Another way to conceive of the problem gent families to secure the future of their lineages
of patrimonialism is from the point of view by acquiring proprietary rights over public po-
of principal-agent theory. Rulers (principals) sitions. Their success in this enterprise led to the
must delegate administrative duties to their kind of “familial” patrimonial state that resisted
staffs (agents), but controlling and monitoring attempts to introduce rational-legal bureaucracy
these agents, especially under conditions of poor and eliminate damaging economic privileges.
communication, is an extremely difficult task Adams implies that this type of patriarchal
(North, 1981:25). Edgar Kiser (1994) has used patrimonialism was not limited to the north-
agency theory to argue that rulers will employ ern Netherlands but was in fact found across
tax farming when the size of the area from early modern Europe. This argument is devel-
which taxes are to be collected is large and oped in much greater detail in Adams (2005).
their existing administrative infrastructure pro- The most original aspect of her work is the
vides poor capacities to control agents. Kiser way it combines a contemporary gender-based
382 Thomas Ertman

perspective with an older analytic framework conclusion

(Weber’s concept of patrimonialism) that has
been underutilized in the state-building liter- What conclusions can we draw from the case of
ature. European state building for the state builders of
One of Philip Gorski’s first published pieces, today? At first glance, the European experience
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Bureau- might seem of only limited relevance because,
cracy” (1995), also involved a critique of rational as theorists from Hintze to Anderson, Tilly, and
choice, in this case of Kiser and Schneider’s arti- Ertman have stressed, war was a decisive fac-
cle “Bureaucracy and Efficiency” (1994). Here tor driving forward the expansion and reform
he maintains that the efficiency of the Prus- of administrative, financial, military, and judicial
sian tax administration can be explained not infrastructures across the continent. Yet over the
by the use of patrimonial control mechanisms, past two centuries, as over a hundred new states
as claimed by Kiser and Schneider, but by the in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Eu-
largely Calvinist makeup of that administration. rope have come into being and sought to con-
Prussian monarchs wisely chose their coreli- solidate themselves, they have only rarely faced
gionists for these sensitive bureaucratic positions the kind of acute geomilitary pressure that was
because Calvinist congregations, with their in- ubiquitous in Western Europe for over seven
trusive examinations of their members, provided centuries, from the central Middle Ages until
an extra check on the honesty and diligence of 1815 or, one might even argue, 1989. Only in
Calvinist officials. Though he echoes him in his the post-1945 Middle East have something like
title, Gorski’s search for the religious roots of European conditions obtained. It seems reason-
modern bureaucracy recalls Hintze (1931) more able to admit, then, that the portion of the state-
than Weber. building literature that explores the differential
Gorski’s larger project is to bring religion effects on state structures of long-term military
back into the study of European state build- pressures might be of only limited significance
ing and he has been especially critical of Ert- for most of today’s developing polities.
man for neglecting this causal factor. Although There is, however, another side of that litera-
Gorski cites Weber and Foucault as his primary ture that is supremely relevant to contemporary
sources of inspiration, his project very much state builders. A theme even more common than
resembles that of the German scholar Gerhard war links the writings of the neo-Weberians
Oestreich, who was also particularly influenced (Bendix), neo-Marxists (Wallerstein and Ander-
by Hintze’s “Calvinism” essay. In several articles son), and neo-Hintzeans (Ertman) with those
(1993, 1995, 1999) as well as in his book The of rational choice and cultural theorists like
Disciplinary Revolution (2003), Gorski, inspired Levi, Root, and Adams: the pervasiveness in
by Weber and Foucault, has sought to show that the European past of patrimonial practices like
religion was at the root of a “disciplinary rev- proprietary officeholding, tax farming, and fi-
olution” during the early modern period that nancial cronyism with their attendant ineffi-
affected religious, social, and political and mili- ciency, arbitrariness, and large-scale diversion
tary behavior. Although Calvinism provided the of public funds into private hands, a perva-
main impetus for this revolution, it also spread siveness of which the endemic corruption and
as a result of imitation and post-Tridentine re- rent seeking in the public administrations of
forms to Lutheran and Catholic areas as well. many developing states today is reminiscent. As
However, this revolution was most intense in the European case clearly illustrates, the cre-
Calvinist-led states like the Dutch Republic and ation and expansion of administrative and fi-
Brandenburg-Prussia and hence religious differ- nancial institutions represents a unique oppor-
ences can go a far way toward explaining vari- tunity for personal and familiar enrichment
ations in social welfare regimes and in politi- and social aggrandizement because it involves
cal and administrative mores across the conti- the extraction of wealth from the tax-paying
nent. population and its concentration – ostensibly
 State Building in Europe 383

for the public good – in the coffers of the state. mises with powerful socioeconomic groups to
Once amassed, such wealth presents an inviting ward off liberalization or democratization, and
target to rent-seeking groups, be they govern- such compromises may prevent the status level-
ment officials, local party bosses, the military, ing that Weber claims is a necessary prerequi-
or employees of state enterprises. Further, such site for any successful bureaucratization. Finally,
groups, whether in medieval and early mod- the work of Hintze and Gorski implies that a
ern Europe, nineteenth-century Latin America, certain ideational component (e.g., Calvinism
or twentieth-century Africa and Asia, will at- or some functional equivalent) might be neces-
tempt to structure the state apparatus in their sary for modern bureaucracy truly to take hold.
own interest with little concern – especially in Nonetheless, some contemporary states in Asia
the absence of geomilitary pressure – for the such as Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong
consequences of their actions for their coun- seem to have been able to build effective modern
try’s long-term defense capabilites or economic bureaucracies under different forms of authori-
competitiveness and will fiercely resist all efforts tarian rule.
at fundamental reform. The alternative solution is the one first devel-
How might it be possible to resist the rent- oped by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
seeking deformation of state institutions during Britain: the monitoring of administrators by an
and after the state-building process? The Euro- autonomous legislature. Such a legislature nor-
pean experience as interpreted by Hintze, Ert- mally brings with it circumstances favorable to
man, Root, Kiser and Schneider, and Gorski the expansion of financial markets, because it
suggests two answers. One of these is an au- provides credible backing for government debt
thoritarian solution pioneered in Brandenburg- issues and to a relatively free press and the dy-
Prussia and, to a lesser extent, in other German namic public sphere associated with it. Both fi-
states in which a monocratic executive closely nancial markets and a vigorous investigative press
monitors the activities of its administrators, us- possess strong incentives to concern themselves
ing powers of arbitrary dismissal to impose hon- with the honesty and efficiency of state offi-
esty and efficiency. Such pressure from above cials – and thereby act to reinforce direct moni-
may, as in Brandenburg-Prussia, induce a strong toring by legislative committees – in the interest
sense of corporate identity among these admin- of taxpayers concerned about how their money
istrators, leading them to campaign for both is being spent. Yet this insight merely begs the
education-based restrictions on entry and for question of what conditions allow for the cre-
basic rights like life tenure to protect themselves ation of a durable, autonomous legislature. Here
from the unbridled will of their employer. How- the classic answer of DeTocqueville, recently re-
ever, the shortcomings of this solution are clear. iterated by Ertman, has lost none of its topicality:
First, the degree of protection from cronyism participatory local government. The manage-
and other forms of rent seeking depends on ment by citizens of their own affairs at the local
the consistency and high quality of the supervi- level and the bonds of solidarity it creates still
sion emanating from the executive, a condition seems the best foundation on which to build
that is in no way assured. Second, monocratic strong legislatures and the honest and efficient
regimes most often must enter into compro- state infrastructures that they can guarantee.