Political Science 1020E Chapter : State - State and Ideology.docx

• School: Western University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: Political Science 1020E
• Professor: Bruce Morrison

Document Summary

To attempt to understand our modern political consciousness within the context of the modern state. In europe, few thinkers doubted that the horrors of the last century were rooted in a political reality that went much deeper than the ideologies or insanities of a few particular leaders. In europe, the state was formed by absolute monarchs who early on centralized a permanent, and for the subjects quite visible, structure of legal and administrative power. American citizens recognized that they possessed a government or rather governments, but had little sense of the existence of a centralized state. Capitalism came to be seen as the necessary prerequisite for a liberal democratic system, an idea that, however theoretically suspect, remains the cornerstone of american foreign policy to this day. The state is a necessary evil, an unfortunate necessity to insure the sanctity of contract and other legal requirements of a capitalist free market.