ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the major kinds of societies which underpin states: they are agricultural, industrial, service-based and information-based societies. It describes idealist and realist responses to the social events which have informed key theoretical understandings of the evolution of the state. The medieval church did its best to construct a system of social control based on the local church, land ownership, the confession and the political passivity of Christ. The sources of the political processes which were to destroy the absolutist state were to be found in the profound social transformation then occurring in the most civilised states of Europe, particularly Britain but later France and the Netherlands. The social base of a society is the recurrent raw reality which rebounds upon our understandings when it is misconstrued. The landscape of mature industrial society is an urban one dominated by a proletarian suburb, privately owned power utilities, mass transport systems and the modern factory.
