Réflexions sur l'État en Angleterre (XVIe-XVIIe siècles)

Abstract

This article argues that the insights of cultural history and micro-sociology are essential to an understanding of the large-scale processes of state formation. Starting with the well-established historiographical concern in histories of the state with the establishment of effective fiscal and military systems, it argues against a strong distinction between administrative and political matters and draws attention to the importance for all areas of state activity of a compact between local elites and central governments. At the same time that local elites brokered state authority in the locality they were securing their own social position. Processes of elite formation and state formation were, in other words, inter-related and the terms of the compact conditional, that is to say they were negotiated, contestable and political in nature. Analysis of the legitimation of the social and political position of local elites leads the historian into consideration of the representation of social and political power and, hence, into the domain of cultural history and micro-sociology. Similarly, the establish ment of "bureaucracies" has to be located in the context of the legitimation of power and, hence, of a study of political culture. However, cultural history approaches are often seen to be more powerful as tools for the analysis of structures than of dynamic processes. The final part of the article therefore offers some thoughts about how to reconcile this tension between the synchronie analysis of (political) culture and the analysis of change over time commonly associated with histories of the state. It does so through a brief discussion of the author's work in progress on the English revolution.