On the science of the State

Abstract

However considerable the achievements of historical investigations or the work of comparatives that have been carried out, over many years, on the formation and functioning of state bureaucracies, on their legitimation strategies and on their specific conceptual and material instruments, immense problems remain posed in such a way that we cannot really deal with certain historiographical illusions unless we are able to abandon them, at least partially. The first is the teleological interpretation that describes the emergence of the State as an uninterrupted process of “modernization” - that is, to specify the obscure by the most obscure, the vague by the most vague - “rationalization” and “secularization”, obeying the a kind of natural impetus and not to the historically determined choices of specific historical agents.