From the writing of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan in the seventeenth century, more than a century before the full blooming of capitalism and industrialization, thinkers have grappled with the increasingly powerful state and its role in society. After the industrial revolution, classical social thinkers, such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, devoted themselves to issues surrounding what Karl Polanyi later called the Great Transformation. Their interest, too, was drawn to the state and its relationship to the momentous social and political changes overtaking European societies.

Some writers, such as the Hegelians, put the state – and the idea of the state – at the center of the sweeping social and political changes overtaking Europe. Others, including Marx, rejected the primacy of the state and saw the source of historical change in other forces in society, notably the organization of production. But even Marx and others who saw the motor of change outside the formal political realm felt called upon to address the notion of the transformative state.

The underlying questions in this volume resonate with the themes of the classical debates in social theory about major societal transformations and the relationship of the state to them. When and how have states been able to establish comprehensive political authority? When have they succeeded in defining the prevailing moral order or in determining the parameters of daily social relations, whether in preserving existing patterns or forging new ones?