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Secret origins of the state: the structural basis of raison d'état
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 17:38 authored by Justin RosenbergThe Italian city-state system occupies a special place in the canon of orthodox international relations. For, as Martin Wight says, ‘it was among the Italian powers that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic system’. And of course this was not all they invented. In addition to the earliest modern discourse of Realpolitik (‘Machiavelli’, Carr tells us, ‘is the first important political realist’), it is in the Italian city-states that we find the first routine use of double-entry book-keeping, of publicly traded state debt, of marine insurance, of sophisticated instruments of credit (such as the bill of exchange), of commercial and banking firms coordinating branch activity across the continent, and so on. Here, too, the citizen militias gave way earliest to the mercenary armies that would later characterize European Absolutism; and within the town walls, a population given over increasingly to commerce and manufacture elaborated new forms of urban class conflict.
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Review of International StudiesISSN
0260-2105Publisher
Cambridge University PressExternal DOI
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2Volume
18Page range
131-159Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
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2012-02-06First Open Access (FOA) Date
2016-03-22First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2016-11-16Usage metrics
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