Luther's Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of 'State' in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st Edition, 2/4/2016
EAN 9781107111875, ISBN10: 1107111870
Hardcover, 448 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against 'despotism' to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff's Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.
Introduction
Luther's legacy and the 'German' notion of state
1. Meinecke's riddle
reason of state and Reformation prudence
2. Royal rights and princely dynasties in late medieval and early modern Germany, fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries
3. Civil order and princely rights, 1450s to 1580s
the making of the elements
4. The transformation of ideas on order and the rise of the 'fatherland', 1580s to 1630s
the re-ordering of the elements
5. The challenge of 'reason of state', 1600s to 1650s
6. The catastrophe of war and the collapse of relations between princes and vassals
7. The re-establishing of compromise and the new use of the elements
Seckendorff, Pufendorf and the dissemination of the new concept of 'state'
8. Readings of despotism
the attack on 'war-despotism' between Bodin and Montesquieu
Conclusion
Luther's legacy
the 'Germaness' of the modern notion of 'state'
Bibliography
Index.