De la maison du roi à la raison d'État

Abstract

From Royal House to bureaucratic State. The present study of the origins of the State attempts to identify the specific characteristics of reason of State, which a combination of self-evident necessity plus an accord among State-shaped mentalities, a State spirit and State structures tends to dissimulate. The research is concerned less with investigating the factors contributing to the actual emergence of the State than the logic of the historical process governing the emergence of the State as a historical reality, in the form first of a dynasty, then a bureaucracy ; less with describing, in a sort of genealogical account, the process by which an independent bureaucratic field, with its own logic, grew up than with constructing a model of this process, or more precisely with modeling the transition from the dynastie State to the bureaucratic State, from the State reduced to the Royal House to the State as reason of State, as a field occupied by different forces and by struggles for the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public wealth.