ABSTRACT
This chapter gives pride of place to developmental trends and trend-concepts in the endeavour of understanding both the strengthening of the state and the increase of autonomy. It therefore searches for the mechanisms that underpin these processes as well as their characteristics. The concentration of power initially on some feudal lords and the development of the concept of sovereignty were key for the former process, while disembedding mechanisms played a paramount role in the latter. Once political modernity set in, the processes continued, with the former depending on supply-side and demand-side dynamics (either propelled directly by politicians and bureaucrats or indirectly by citizens’ claims) and the latter with the relentless workings of disembedding mechanism, which were accompanied moreover by the decrease of elements of mediation between societal agents, on the one hand, and the state political systems and the state more generally, on the other. The chapter ends with a systematic consideration of the three phases of modernity as well as with the thesis that we are either in the middle of a strong inflexion of the third phase or of a transition to the fourth.
