Reflections on Charles Maier’s Leviathan 2.0 Inventing Modern Statehood

As a student of the development of modern states, I was naturally intrigued by the title of Charles Maier’s Leviathan 2.0 (available here) when I saw it in bookshop in Cambridge, MA.

In fact Leviathan 2.0 is a much more original and scholarly book than I first supposed upon seeing its intentionally catchy, pop history, title. Let me briefly summarize why I think it is important (it has not attracted much attention thus far). It is nothing less than a global history of the modern state from the 1850s to the 1950s. If this sounds ambitious in scope, it is. But Maier’s command of the material is such that he is able to present the material succinctly, and the end result is highly readable and informative for both specialists and non-specialists alike.

Why another book on the Modern State?

There is plenty to read on the rise of the state in early modern Europe — I survey much of this material in a recent article with Noel Johnson (available here). There is a vast literature on the totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century. And the rise of post-WW2 welfare states in Europe and developmental states in East Asia are also well served topics. What Maier does is provide a history of the state in the crucial century between 1850 and 1950 — a period that is much studied, but usually through the prism of concepts such as imperialism or globalization, rather than that of the formation of the modern state. It knits together material familiar to period and country experts into a coherent reflection on the history of the state in this crucial century.

There is much to be said about the book, but let me draw out just a few lessons for now.

1. Late 19th century state building was a response to global developments. Maier’s history is truly global in scope. He connects state building in Mexico to developments in Japan and China as well in the United States and Europe. By arguing that countries across the periphery face structurally similar problems to European nations in forging modern states, he is able to provide an original narrative that brings together many disparate country-specific historical accounts.
2. The starting point for political (and opposed to economic) modernization was not so much the First Industrial Revolution as the Second. This emphasis on a starting point of the 1850s provides the book with more than an original angle. It was mid-nineteenth century technologies like the railroad and the telegraph that revolutionized the ability of governments to govern. Moreover, much twentieth century history looks back to the nineteenth century as a peaceful period. However, the mid-nineteenth century was convulsed by major conflicts notably the Taiping Rebellion in China and the American Civil War. Maier argues that these wars were of critical importance and modern states were forged in response to the demands and challenges that these conflicts posed. Britain was the exception, as it forged on a modern state in absent of large-scale violence. Elsewhere, in the Americas, in Bismarck’s Germany,, in Risorgimento Italy and in Meiji Japan, modern states were born in war.
3. Maier also stresses an interesting dichotomy between private and public coercion. He argues that the pre-modern world was one of private coercion and constraints, but few public constraints. (Incidentally this is in line with an excellent paper on master and slave laws in mid-nineteenth century England by Noam Yuchtman and Suresh Naidu here) In contrast, the states built after 1850 replaced private constraints with public constraints. The net results was, in many cases, greater positive freedoms at least in the liberal states that emerged in western Europe and North America and for those who were not openly discriminated against by the new states (i.e. blacks or Asians in the United States, colonials in the British Empire).
4. Another useful feature of the Leviathan 2.0 is that Maier is able to place the rise of fascist and communist regimes in the context of the more general rise of state power in this period. These regimes were not simply historical aberrations — though they were distinctive in their brutality — rather they represent one path of development of the state. They appear to us as a dead-end in history. But they did not appear so to contemporaries at the time.
5. Maier’s work suggests that as economic historians we should be spending more attention on political developments in the crucial century that spanned 1850 to 1950. There has been some on work these topics. Melissa Dell has done work on the Mexican Revolution (here). And together with Chiaki Moriguchi and Tuan-Hwee Sng, I have been working on how Qing China and Tokugawa Japan reacted to the threat of the western powers in the later nineteenth century (here). Much more clearly can be done.