State and society in Western Europe: A model for comparative analysis

Abstract

This article represents an attempt to analyse the complex historical processes of political change in Western Europe in the context of an explicit frame of enquiry. It is concerned to establish not only that the past illuminates the present but also that conceptual rigour and the purposive use of analysis provided by a framework of general ideas is as much relevant to making sense of the past as of the present. The model is a deliberate simplification and, of course, open to refinement. Its virtue is parsimony; its purpose, to enable indentification of the predominant type of political organisation in a concrete political situation.

Notes

Lecturer in the Department of Political Theory and Institutions, University of Liverpool. This paper is to appear in a somewhat modified form in the author's The West European Idea of the State Martin Robertson (1980).