The Constitutional State of the Nineteenth Century: An Elementary Conceptual Portrait

Many sociologists are currently interested in the contemporary impact of state activities upon the social process at large; but in coming to terms with this topic are hampered by decades of neglect of the state as a topic in standard sociological literature. In forming an elementary institutional picture of the modern state, they can gain from some acquaintance with literature in the fields of public law and the history of political institutions. Utilizing some of this literature, the author draws a conceptual protrait of the nineteenth-century state (to be used as a baseline for work on contemporary state/society relations) focused on the following topics: the plurality of states and the meaning of sovereignty; the unitary nature of the state; some of its specifically `modern' institutional traits; its relation to law; some modalities and issues of the political process in the nineteenth-century state.