ABSTRACT
If Louis XIV announced that the state was himself, he was being platitudinous rather than outrageous. What is interesting about this well-known assertion is that it signified that by the mid-seventeenth century the slow transformation of the complex mediaeval system of estates and corporations into closely-knit sovereign powers ruling over subject nationals had been, at least in some parts of Europe, finally accomplished. The nation-state had for the time being become the norm of successful political organization in western Europe. The event preceded for the most part its theoretical justification and analysis. The first three centuries of what we find it convenient, looking back, to call the modern era, that is from the Renaissance to the French revolution, were spent in the prosecution of the work of understanding this transformation of the mediaeval order. Towards the end of that period and up to our own day, political and social theory has been concerned to reinterpret the nation-state itself, not its external form, but by redefining its internal relations. In this and the following chapter we shall investigate the theories predominant before the revolution; and in the last two chapters those which helped also to provoke it, but which have reached fulfilment only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
