ABSTRACT
Among the social philosophers, sociologists and social theorists of the nineteenth century, the idea that their century was witnessing a fundamental transformation was almost universally shared. Karl Marx, for instance, regarded the capitalist transformation of Germany and France (though not of Britain) as only just beginning at the time of his writing. Similarly, as Raymond Grew, a leading historian of the period, points out, ‘[u]ntil quite recently, most writing about the modern state took the nineteenth century as its touchstone’ (Grew 1984: 83). Today, by contrast, the origins of the ‘modern state’ tend to be located in the fifteenth century or even the twelfth, while nineteenth-century developments are passed over in the story of ‘state-building’.
