'Man is by nature a political animal', arguing on that Aristolte induced the existence of political communities. Men lived in communities for decades. However, man's living condition has changed with the passage of time. One landmark change was in his environment. Each evolution was a step towards the achievement of our political structure: the modern state. Historical sociology is the necessary tool to study these changes. This discipline was born in the 1970s thanks to the convergence of history and sociology and tries to think social reality. History and sociology are two sides of the same social reality so 'historical sociology is the study of the past to find out how societies work and change'.The historical sociology was developed in two disciplines: first in sociology and then in political science. In the 1970s the behaviorist wave brought about a scientific methodology. According to this approach, the principal mistake of many disciplines is to study one part of a subject. It means to concentrate on one thing. Behaviorism puts emphasize on the whole and the whole becomes more important that the sum of its parts.
[...] A Modern state is connected to the society thanks to administrative links and a strong infrastructural power while the Ancient State was not able to project economic, political and ideological power because of a low level of infrastuctural power and a weak administration. With regard to economy, Ancient states had just an administrative role, they were involved in the exploitation of economic activity and resources but they were not unde inrtake to ecnomic development. Modern Stae do care about economic development and try to have an economic strategy to have competitive firmes. [...]
[...] Secondly, the structure of our modern state is obviously not the last one. Even if Max Weber claimed that the legal rational domination was the highest degree of efficiency states can catch up, many theories do not agree with this perception. He thinks that rationality could produce bad effects and he talks about a 'disenchantment of the state' which comes from an understanding of our administration. When modernity is suposed to be rational, individuals are unable to understand it, when knowledge is only understood by a handful of people, the misunderstanding becomes a reality. [...]
[...] Tilly is not the only theorist who tried to consider state formation through the prism of war. Anthony Giddens also did. As a sociologist who wrote most of his work in the 1980s, he focused on that subect. His work "The nation- state and violence" written in 1985 is the second volume of his thinking around a critique of historical materialism. According to Giddens state formation results from war and violence. Giddens has criticised Marx and Weber's traditions because of their reductionism. [...]
[...] Giddens makes a historical typology of states: traditional state, absolute state and the National - Modern state. This process underlines changes in the report to the war. In other words, Giddens wants to prove that each step brings a transformation, he focuses on weaponary and technical developments which allow state formation. In order to be more precise, it could be intersting to have a look on these different steps. Firstly, the traditional state is not unified and the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force[10]. [...]
[...] Second Part: Theories about state formation through the prism of the war State formation can also be studied through the prism of the war. War was a new tool to understand the feudal, the absolute and finally the Modern State. Many authors tried to focus on war to explain state formation during the 1990s. Charles Tilly is one of them. He is a contemporary sociologist and a former colleague of Stein Rokkan. He continued the work of Rokkan but Tilly's ambition is to wander from a topographical reading of Europe, because this reading creates problems: its focuses only on a specific historical sequence, this theory is too static. [...]
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