ABSTRACT
In the opening pages of this book, I made it clear that I should be concerned, above all, with the state in modern times. In Chapter 1, I dealt with some of the most important organizational and institutional features of this modern state. What I offered was less an explanation of the state’s conduct than an attempt to establish the parameters of what have been seen as characteristically states’ activities. In this chapter, I want to try to refine this understanding by investigating the historicity of the state. The state is not an eternal and unchanging element in human affairs. For most of its history, humanity got by (whether more happily or not) without a state. For all its universality in our own times, the state is a contingent (and comparatively recent) historical development. Its predominance may also prove to be quite transitory. Once we have recognized that there were societies before the state, we may also want to consider the possibility that there could be societies after the state. It may be that under new circumstances, the state would simply give way to an alternative form of social organization. (This has always been the aspiration of philosophical anarchists and various schools of supranationalism.)
I also made it clear at the opening of this book that the proper object of our study is not so much the modern state, but rather a number of states within an international system of unequal and competing states operating within a distinctive, if rather fuzzy, ‘modern period’. It is imperative then that we understand these states, their relations with each other and with other social forces, historically. Of course, such a history of modern states is bound to proceed at an extremely abstract and general level. It will obviously do very limited justice to the particularity of individual states. It should, however, allow us to establish clearly the conditionality, contingency and temporality of states. It may also enable us to confront the puzzle of how what was a contingent historical development should have given way to the present
seeming universality of the state. If states are not an eternal and inevitable aspect of the human condition, how and why have they become so ubiquitous in the modern world?
