Public Welfare and State Legitimation: Early Modern England (1533-1780), Japan(1640-1895), and China (1684-1911)
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Abstract:
Studies of state formation in political science and sociology have often focused upon how and why states developed centralized institutions to extract revenues for fighting wars. But the research on state formation has paid scant attention to the process of legitimating state power. This neglect leaves social scientists few intellectual tools to make sense of the emergence and consolidation of the early modern state. In this project, I argue that the early modern state as an impersonal apparatus of governance was common to Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. The personal charisma of the monarch or the divine source of the ruler’s power could no longer justify the state’s coercive power. Instead, state power was legitimated by public goods provision through various social policies. The public goods were closely connected to the general welfare of the subjects, which included famine relief, financing large-scale public works, as well as state reaction to popular petitions that touched on domestic welfare issues. I demonstrate a similar pattern of state-society negotiation based upon a commonly accepted concept of public welfare across these three cases, as well as the role of non-material public good in the transformation from early modern to modern politics in England and Japan, but not in China.
Studies of state formation in political science and sociology have often focused upon how and why states developed centralized institutions to extract revenues for fighting wars. But the research on state formation has paid scant attention to the process of legitimating state power. This neglect leaves social scientists few intellectual tools to make sense of the emergence and consolidation of the early modern state. In this project, I argue that the early modern state as an impersonal apparatus of governance was common to Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. The personal charisma of the monarch or the divine source of the ruler’s power could no longer justify the state’s coercive power. Instead, state power was legitimated by public goods provision through various social policies. The public goods were closely connected to the general welfare of the subjects, which included famine relief, financing large-scale public works, as well as state reaction to popular petitions that touched on domestic welfare issues. I demonstrate a similar pattern of state-society negotiation based upon a commonly accepted concept of public welfare across these three cases, as well as the role of non-material public good in the transformation from early modern to modern politics in England and Japan, but not in China.