The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow

 

Part 2. Forms of the Modern Territorial State

 

The modern state broke from the traditions of the earlier states out of which it emerged. Unlike earlier forms of the state, the modern state expanded and focused its central power as it developed new institutions to rule over a specific geographical territory. The creation of territorial political space resulted in new modes of governing and new systems of political meaning. In Part 2 we discuss the various forms the modern territorial states have taken in the specific spatiotemporal frame of the European state system between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 4 addresses absolutist states, Chapter 5 discusses liberal states, Chapter 6 presents the idea of antiliberal states, and Chapter 7 examines what we call managerial states. Bear in mind that the state as a general type of territorialized political organization and the various specific forms that it has taken are inseparable from their expansion into a global system through colonialism and imperialism, which we discuss in Part 3.

 

The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics