ABSTRACT
The history of the nation-state as a basic organizational form for politics in the modern world is a complex one. Although the nation-state and the international 'states system' are nearly four centuries old, it is only in the twentieth century that we have come to associate 'the state' – and the politicians and bureaucrats who populate its institutions – with a systematic expansion of the social and economic tasks, roles and activities undertaken by governments, what Karl Polanyi (1944) called The Great Transformation. In economic terms, only in the Second Industrial Revolution did the modern nation-state develop the range of socio-economic functions we had become accustomed to expecting by the middle of the twentieth century. Mass production, modern industrial enterprises, the bureaucratic revolution in both public and private sectors and mass politics brought together a range of structural elements conducive to the development of the national Industrial Welfare State.
