Practice question · True or false
The territorial state was one competitor among several, rather than the inevitable outcome of European development.
Hints
- Consider Venice, the Hanseatic League and the composite monarchies.
- City-states and leagues were viable for centuries.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. City-states, leagues and composite monarchies were live alternatives for centuries and were not obviously doomed in 1400. Treating the territorial state as the destination of history reads the winner backwards into the competition, which is the standard shape of a teleological error.
Practise The Formation of the Modern State
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Political Science I is free to start.
More questions on The Formation of the Modern State
- Arrange these steps of Tilly's account in the order the mechanism runs.
- Why does Tilly say the origin of parliaments is fiscal before it is democratic?
- Which are true of authority in medieval Europe before the modern state?
- Tilly describes the state as an unplanned by-product of warmaking rather than a planned project. What follows…
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to the MEDIEVAL order or to the MODERN state.
- Complete the account of state formation.
- Match each development to what it replaced.
- Arrange these positions on state formation from the most Eurocentric application to the most careful.
- Tilly's comparison of state-making to organised crime is a rhetorical flourish rather than an analytic claim.