ABSTRACT
The relationship between young people and the state in the modern period has been filled with paradoxes. As modern liberal polities developed in the West, their histories were inextricably bound up with questions of inclusion and exclusion, what one historian has called “the borders of belonging.” The product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, the modern state originally was an exclusive fraternity of brothers: white, male, and adult. Over the last two centuries, much of the history of the modern West chronicles efforts by excluded groups to win inclusion in the polity. Ironically, the trajectory of young people in that story has been the opposite, ever-increasing exclusion from the daily life of adults with which the polity is concerned. Children, though not youths, have been the objects of the state rather than actors within it. 1
