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The Study of European Political Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Peter H. Merkl
Peter H. Merkl
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

The evolution of theories of political development has gone full circle with its current “return to Europe” and to history. Scholars are once more examining the early state-building process and especially the extractive and repressive activities of its military, bureaucratic, and taxation systems. A geographical and historical model of the timing of state formation in Europe since 1500 reveals situations and necessities that explain much of the history of various European states. The changing dynamics of collective action and violence since 1830, moreover, reflect the underlying transformation of society and organizational life. But it is still too early to attempt an exhaustive synthesis of the different theories of crisis and political change.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , April 1977 , pp. 462 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1977

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References

1 Lipset, Seymour and Rokkan, Stein, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New-York: Free Press 1967), 6–14Google Scholar; in , Rokkan, “Models and Methods in the Comparative Study of Nation-Building,” Acta Sociologica, xii (No. 2, 1969), 53–73Google Scholar, where the six crises of development suggested by Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, Joseph LaPalombara, Leonard Binder, and others are related to the Parsonian model.

2 Rokkan, Social Science Information, xiii (No. 1, 1974), 27–53.

3 Much of the book's intellectual attraction stems from its relevance to the American experience of emigration from Europe and the internal migrations of individuals and groups who tended to “vote with their feet” rather than to struggle for voice.

4 There are some minor differences between Rokkan's great west-east chart (Tilly, Fig. 8–7) and its equivalent in Social Science Information (fn. 2), 46; the latter is limited to the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

5 Cf. Rokkan's essay (fn. 2), 47–48, where cultural and economic boundary building is more explicitly related to exit and barriers to exit. Rokkan parts company with Barrington Moore regarding the differences between French and British development.

6 , Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, Parties (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, and New York: McKay 1970)Google Scholar, chaps. 3 and 4. See also Social Science Information (fn. 2), 49–51.

7 , Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1964)Google Scholar; , Tilly and Shorter, Edward, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press 1974)Google Scholar.

8 Cf. , Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975)Google Scholar, Parts V and VI.

9 See also the essay on the history of European police organization by David Bayley in Tilly's The Formation of National States in Western Europe.

10 There is no mention, however, of the familiar phenomenon that it is often the letting up of repression and especially of repressive violence that acts as a spur to collective action and to street violence.

11 Milward is the author of The German Economy at War (London: Athlone Press 1965)Google Scholar, The New Order and the French Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970)Google Scholar, and The Fascist Economy in Norway (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972)Google Scholar; Saul is the author of The Myth of the Great Depression in England (London: Macmillan 1969)Google Scholar.

12 See , Almond, Political Development: Essays in Heuristic Theory (Boston: Little, Brown 1970), 282 ffGoogle Scholar.