ABSTRACT
Wallerstein insisted also that the rise of the nation and of nationalism took place at a much later stage; absolutism was the typical ideology of the long sixteenth century and later, and as such it was the ideology of the rise of the state as a social force. In modern and contemporary times the creation of new states has always been the result of the inter-state system and of the balance of power within it, so there is a limit to the idea that nations make states. One of the crucial problems for Otto Hintze was how to account for the transition from the territorial states with Stande to the modern, unitary, national states. Elias has explored this process of long term state formation by focusing on certain behavioural patterns developed by the aristocracy during the late Middle Ages and culminating in the early modern period.
