Rolf Torstendahl

L'etude est concentree sur la periode de consolidation de l'etat en Suede (jusqu'au XVIIe siecle) et sur quatre historiens, Dalin (XVIIIe siecle), Geijer (debut XIXe siecle), Hjarne (fin XIXe) et Sven Nilsson, un historien qui est toujours actif. Dalin fait fort peu reference a une entite etatique, sous quelque forme que ce soit : il n'y fait reference qu'indirectement, lorsqu'il parle de royaume; son histoire est celle des grandes individualites. Pour Geijer, s'il eprouve une grande admiration pour la periode «republicaine» du haut Moyen Âge, celle des Vikings et des communautes pratiquement autonomes de libres fermiers, le debut de l'Etat moderne marque certes un progres sur la fin du Moyen Age, mais Gustave Ier, en depit de son succes, apparait comme un demagogue qui ment trop souvent au peuple et n'est donc pas un «roi republicain» au sens ou un Gustave-Adolphe saura l'etre. Hjarne, quant a lui, distingue deux pouvoirs, celui de l'Eglise, et celui de l'Etat : et l'Etat moderne suedois, quels que soient ses defauts de jeunesse, a une vertu essentielle, celle de realiser, grâce a l'introduction de la Reforme par Gustave Ier, une fusion des deux; il represente donc une etape essentielle non seulement dans l'histoire de l'Etat, mais aussi dans celle de la Suede dans la mesure ou il est la racine de l'Etat futur. Pour Nilsson, un empirique qui met au premier plan la collecte des faits precis, l'Etat est d'abord vu au travers de son attitude a l'egard des nobles; c'est un Etat sans morale. Ni dans les termes, ni dans les concepts, ni meme dans les faits fondamentaux, ces quatre historiens ne sont d'accord entre eux, au point que l'on peut se demander s'ils parlent de la meme chose. Le mot Etat apparait d'abord comme un moyen de masquer des divergences profondes entre les historiens : l'etude des origines de l'Etat moderne en Europe n'a de sens que si elle se borne a la recherche d'une coherence des occurrences et des contenus du terme «Etat» chez les historiens dans le contexte historique de l'Europe moderne.

This survey focuses on the relations between state, society, and individual citizens in Western Europe in the last 200 years. It opposes the idea of "civil society" as a refuge for individuals against the state. Both state and "civil society" have threatened the freedom and autonomy of the individual citizen in different ways, but they have also filled protective functions in other ways.

Bureaucratization as a term is discussed, and its relation to the history of bureaucracies is developed. A main distinction is made between societies that have differentiated the political power from the administrative power and those that have not. Colonial rule has formed an intermediate type, as colonies were almost entirely governed by appointed administrators, while this was not possible in Europe or the United States. Bureaucratization is not just a state phenomenon, and big business in the private sector has become more and more dependent on an efficient administration. The interrelation between welfare and bureaucracies has been observed, and a current debate is going on about the relation between democracy, bureaucracy, and welfare.

In analysing careers one has to make a consistent difference between individual motives and ambitions and collective patterns of behaviour. In this chapter the individual motivation is treated only cursory in the second section—a fuller analytical description is given in Chap. 12. The following three sections analyse the influence of the course taken at the institute determining what sort of engineer each one represented, the occupational character that engineers were qualified for after studies, and the hierarchical position (occupational status) that their education allowed them to reach. The pictures are more variegated than one would think after reading some success stories of individual engineers. The text is based on diagrams of percentage distributions. It should be mentioned that the full actual numbers are presented in the Annex Tables 4 and 5.

Introduction - Rolf Torstendahl State, Society and History PART ONE: THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN STATE THEORY State Theory and State Development - Bo Str[circle over the a]ath and Rolf Torstendahl States as Network Structures in Change in Modern European History Refocusing the Debate on the Role of the State in Capitalist Societies - Robert Hannenman and J Rogers Hollingsworth PART TWO: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE AND ITS POLICY The Right to Vote and the Four World Routes to//through Modernity - G[um]oran Therborn Social Policy, Democratization and State Structure - Johan Jeroen De Deken and Dietrich Rueschemeyer Reflections on Late Nineteenth Century Britain and Germany Restructuring Social Coalitions - T J Pempel State, Policy and Regime The Constitution of Poverty - Douglas E Ashford PART THREE: PARTICULAR INTERESTS AND THEIR RELATION TO THE STATE States as Users of Knowledge - Michael Burrage A Comparison of Lawyers and Engineers in France and Britain Local Collective Choice With...

<p>This chapter looks at Scandinavian historical writing, focusing on how historiography has developed in closely related ways in the three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The main periods are 1945–60, 1960–85, and 1985 until today. In the first period, old struggles were brought to an end. In the second, historical research as an individual undertaking was succeeded by large, collective projects on social history relying on sociological theory. In the third, still another enlargement of the field of history became evident, which created a new strain on the unity of the profession. The chapter then demonstrates that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, despite some national variations, followed remarkably similar post-war trajectories.</p>

The paper examines how conservative thoughts on autocracy and state forms that provided the ideological basis of Late Imperial Russia have continued as an important undercurrent in Russia's later regimes. In the Putin era the conservative tradition has got additions of an eclectic and pragmatic character but these are not selected at random..