Political Science I / The Formation of the Modern State
Practice question · Put in order

Arrange these steps of Tilly's account in the order the mechanism runs.

Hints
  1. The mechanism starts with competition, not with a plan to build a state.
  2. The apparatus is built because the money is needed, and the bargaining follows.
Show the answer
  1. Rulers compete militarily
  2. War becomes far more expensive
  3. Rulers extract resources from the population at a new scale
  4. An administrative apparatus is built to do the extracting
  5. Bargaining with taxpayers produces representative institutions
Why

The order is the argument. Nobody in the sequence intends to build a state, they intend to win a war and need money, and the machinery assembled for that purpose is what a state turns out to be. This is why the sequence explains an outcome nobody designed.

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