Rethinking Leviathan The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany

This book offers a new approach to the history of the modern state. It concentrates on the eighteenth century and on the cases of Britain and Germany. By using a comparative study of these two states, including Prussia, it deconstructs certain cliches about them and forces us to rethink how to study states in the early modern era.

Rethinking Leviathan offers a new approach to the history of the modern state. It concentrates on the eighteenth century and on two cases, those of Britain and Germany. These two countries have always been test-cases for historians and social scientists looking at the development of the modern state because they have been seen as presenting the two main alternatives in the state-building process. Using a comparative study of the British and German states, including Prussia, it deconstructs certain clichés about them and forces us to rethink how to study states in the early modern era. The volume is less concerned with the theory of the state or the formal constitutional conditions under which governments operate than with their actual modus operandi. The subjects covered in this volume include some which have so far been ignored in reconstructing the history of the modern state.

John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth: Introduction: Rethinking Leviathan; Thomas Ertman: Explaining Variation in Early Modern State Structure: The Cases of England the German Territorial States; John Childs: The Army and the State in Britain and Germany during the Eighteenth Century; Diethelm Klippel: Reasonable Aims of Civil Society: Concerns of the State in German Political Theory in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries; J. A. W. Gunn: Eighteenth-Century Britain: In Search of the State and Finding the Quarter Sessions; John Brewer: Servants of the Public-Servants of the Crown: Officialdom of Eighteenth-Century English Central Government; Rudolf Vierhaus: The Prussian Bureaucracy Reconsidered; Sheilagh Ogilvie: The State in Germany: A Non-Prussian View; Christof Dipper: Government and Administration: Everyday Politics in the Holy Roman Empire; Joanna Innes: The State and the Poor: Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective; Paul Langford: Manners and the Eighteenth-Century State: The Case of the Unsociable Englishman; Eckhart Hellmuth: A Monument to Frederick the Great: Architecture, Politics, and the State in Late Eighteenth-Century Prussia; Gunter Birtsch: Reform Absolutism and the Codification of Law: The Genesis and Nature of the Prussian General Code (1794); David Lieberman: Codification, Consolidation, and Parliamentary Statute