The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint

Abstract

Elias addresses the issue of long-term historical and period-transcending processes showing an accumulative character or directionality over multiple millennia or many centuries such as the increasing socio-political integration of humankind or the increasing demographic size of the largest self-ruling units (political collectivities or ‘states’). He cites McNeill’s thesis of a crucial change in the balance of power between states and nomadic or tribal peoples in favour of the former which McNeill attributed to the rise of modern warfare with standing armies and firearms. Elias traces the earlier roots of this change to the emergence of the city-state as a form of socio-political organisation during the fourth millennium BC. This and the increasing demographic size of the self-ruling units are essentially qualitative changes in the social and political organisation, not only quantitative changes, connected to innovations not only in the economic structure but also in the means of constraint and control, that is in the ‘technology’ of power. Another very important aspect of this long-term change is the shifting balance of power between priests and military leaders (or ‘warriors’) at the top of social hierarchies. This changing balance found expression, for example, in the early wave towards a secularisation of knowledge which was represented and expressed by ancient Greek philosophy and science. The results of this early wave were partially, but never completely reversed during the decline of the Roman empire and the period of dominance of the Christian church. These and other period-transcending processes give examples of very long, structured and unplanned processes of change in society and culture which do not simply bear the character of ‘history’ in the usual, narrow sense, but of long-term developments transcending historical periods.