Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation

Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation PDF Author: Patrick Carroll
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520932807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This highly original, groundbreaking study explores the profound relationship between science and government to present a new understanding of modern state formation. Beginning with the experimental science of Robert Boyle in seventeenth-century England, Patrick Carroll develops the concept of engine science to capture the centrality of engineering practices and technologies in the emerging mechanical philosophy. He traces the introduction of engine science into colonial Ireland, showing how that country subsequently became a laboratory for experiments in statecraft. Carroll’s wide-ranging study, spanning institutions, political philosophy, and policy implementation, demonstrates that a number of new technological developments—from cartography, statistics, and natural history to geology, public health, and sanitary engineering—reveal how modern science came to engineer land, people, and the built environment into a material political state in an unprecedented way, creating the "modern" state. Shedding new light on sociology, the history of science and technology, and on the history of British colonial projects in Ireland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, his study has implications for understanding postcolonial occupations and nation-building ventures today and on contemporary dilemmas such as the role of science and government in environmental sustainability.

Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation

Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation PDF Author: Patrick Carroll
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520932807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
This highly original, groundbreaking study explores the profound relationship between science and government to present a new understanding of modern state formation. Beginning with the experimental science of Robert Boyle in seventeenth-century England, Patrick Carroll develops the concept of engine science to capture the centrality of engineering practices and technologies in the emerging mechanical philosophy. He traces the introduction of engine science into colonial Ireland, showing how that country subsequently became a laboratory for experiments in statecraft. Carroll’s wide-ranging study, spanning institutions, political philosophy, and policy implementation, demonstrates that a number of new technological developments—from cartography, statistics, and natural history to geology, public health, and sanitary engineering—reveal how modern science came to engineer land, people, and the built environment into a material political state in an unprecedented way, creating the "modern" state. Shedding new light on sociology, the history of science and technology, and on the history of British colonial projects in Ireland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, his study has implications for understanding postcolonial occupations and nation-building ventures today and on contemporary dilemmas such as the role of science and government in environmental sustainability.

State/Culture

State/Culture PDF Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717782
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.

State Formations

State Formations PDF Author: John L. Brooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108271057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Featuring a sweeping array of essays from scholars of state formation and development, this book presents an overview of approaches to studying the history of the state. Focusing on the question of state formation, this volume takes a particular look at the beginnings, structures, and constant reforming of state power. Not only do the contributors draw upon both modernist and postmodernist theoretical perspectives, they also address the topic from a global standpoint, examining states from all areas of the world. In their diverse and thorough exploration of state building, the authors cross the theoretical, geographic, and chronological boundaries that traditionally shape this field in order to rethink the customary macro and micro approaches to the study of state building and make the case for global histories of both pre-modern and modern state formations.

Latecomer State Formation

Latecomer State Formation PDF Author: Sebastián Mazzuca
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300248954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
A major contribution to the field of comparative state formation and the scholarship on long-term political development of Latin America "Ambitious and rich. . . . A sweeping and general theory of state formation and detailed historical reconstruction of essential events in Latin American political development. It combines structural elements with a novel emphasis on the political incentives and bargaining that shaped the map we have today."--Hillel David Soifer, Governance Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. Sebastián Mazzuca argues that the secret of Latin America's failure is that its states were "born weak," in contrast to states in western Europe, North America, and Japan. State formation in post-Independence Latin America occurred in a period when capitalism, rather than war, was the key driver forging countries. In pursuing the short-term benefits of international trade, Latin American leaders created states with chronic weaknesses, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. Mazzuca analyzes pathways leading to variations in country size and level of pacification: "port-led" state formation in Argentina and Brazil; "party-led" in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay; and "lord-led" in Central America, Venezuela, and Peru.

The State

The State PDF Author: Bob Jessop
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669948
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Debates about the role and nature of the state are at the heart of modern politics. However, the state itself remains notoriously difficult to define, and the term is subject to a range of different interpretations. In this book, distinguished state theorist Bob Jessop provides a critical introduction to the state as both a concept and a reality. He lucidly guides readers through all the major accounts of the state, and examines competing efforts to relate the state to other features of social organization. Essential themes in the analysis of the state are explored in full, including state formation, periodization, the re-scaling of the state and the state's future. Throughout, Jessop clearly defines key terms, from hegemony and coercion to government and governance. He also analyses what we mean when we speak about 'normal' and 'exceptional' states, and states that are 'failed' or 'rogue'. Combining an accessible style with expert sensitivity to the complexities of the state, this short introduction will be core reading for students and scholars of politics and sociology, as well as anyone interested in the changing role of the state in contemporary societies.

The Modern State

The Modern State PDF Author: Christopher Pierson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134331355
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The modern state is hugely important in our everyday lives. It takes nearly half our income in taxes. It registers our births, marriages and deaths. It educates our children and pays our pensions. It has a unique power to compel, in some cases exercising the ultimate sanction of preserving life or ordering death. Yet most of us would struggle to say exactly what the state is. The Modern State offers a clear, comprehensive and provoking introduction to one of the most important phenomena of contemporary life. Topics covered include: * the nation state and its historical context * state and economy * state and societies * state and citizens * international relations * the future of the state

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture PDF Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191563919
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development---and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

The State and the Social

The State and the Social PDF Author: Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The development of Tswana 'merafe' (kingdoms) and the arrival of Christianity and colonialism -- Tswana consolidation within the colonial State: development of a postcolonial State embryo -- Cattle, diamonds and the "grand coalition"--The State and indigenous authority structures : ambiguities of co-optation and confrontation -- Tswana domination, minority protests and the discourse of development -- Anti-politics and questions of democracy and domination -- Governmentalization of the State: on State interventions in the population -- Escalating inequality: popular reactions to political leaders.

Structuring the State

Structuring the State PDF Author: Daniel Ziblatt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827248
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Germany's and Italy's belated national unifications continue to loom large in contemporary debates. Often regarded as Europe's paradigmatic instances of failed modernization, the two countries form the basis of many of our most prized theories of social science. Structuring the State undertakes one of the first systematic comparisons of the two cases, putting the origins of these nation-states and the nature of European political development in new light. Daniel Ziblatt begins his analysis with a striking puzzle: Upon national unification, why was Germany formed as a federal nation-state and Italy as a unitary nation-state? He traces the diplomatic maneuverings and high political drama of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy to refute the widely accepted notion that the two states' structure stemmed exclusively from Machiavellian farsightedness on the part of militarily powerful political leaders. Instead, he demonstrates that Germany's and Italy's "founding fathers" were constrained by two very different pre-unification patterns of institutional development. In Germany, a legacy of well-developed sub-national institutions provided the key building blocks of federalism. In Italy, these institutions' absence doomed federalism. This crucial difference in the organization of local power still shapes debates about federalism in Italy and Germany today. By exposing the source of this enduring contrast, Structuring the State offers a broader theory of federalism's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, state-building, international relations, and European political history.

Regulating the Social

Regulating the Social PDF Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Why does the welfare state develop so unevenly across countries, regions, and localities? What accounts for the exclusions and disciplinary features of social programs? How are elite and popular conceptions of social reality related to welfare policies? George Steinmetz approaches these and other issues by exploring the complex origins and development of local and national social policies in nineteenth-century Germany. Generally regarded as the birthplace of the modern welfare state, Germany experimented with a wide variety of social programs before 1914, including the national social insurance legislation of the 1880s, the "Elberfeld" system of poor relief, protocorporatist policies, and modern forms of social work. Imperial Germany offers a particularly useful context in which to compare different programs at various levels of government. Looking at changes in welfare policy over the course of the nineteenth century, differences between state and municipal interventions, and intercity variations in policy, Steinmetz develops an account that focuses on the specific constraints on local and national policymakers and the different ways of imagining the "social question." Whereas certain aspects of the pre-1914 welfare state reinforced social divisions and even foreshadowed aspects of the Nazi regime, other dimensions actually helped to relieve sickness, poverty, and unemployment. Steinmetz explores the conditions that led to both the positive and the objectionable features of social policy. The explanation draws on statist, Marxist, and social democratic perspectives and on theories of gender and culture.