Research Catalog

Title

Leviathan 2.0 : inventing modern statehood / Charles S. Maier.

Author

Maier, Charles S.

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [2012]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

370 pages : illustrations; 21 cm.

Summary

Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today. Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.--

Uniform Title

World connecting, 1870-1945.

Alternative Title

• Leviathan two-point-o
• Leviathan two-point-zero

Subject

• 1800-1999
• Politische Philosophie
• Weltpolitik
• Staatslehre
• State, The > History > 19th century
• State, The > History > 20th century
• World politics > 19th century
• World politics > 20th century
• State, The
• World politics

Genre/Form

History

Note

• "Originally published as Chapter 1 of A World Connecting: 1870-1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012)"--Title page verso.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-347) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : last stands -- The world is weary of the past -- Reconstruction on a world scale -- The human zoo -- States of exception, exceptional states -- Postscript : toward Leviathan 3.0?

ISBN

• 9780674281325
• 0674281322

LCCN

^^2013031958

OCLC

• 861478329
• SCSB-10960478

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library