Rethinking Leviathan

Rethinking Leviathan offers a new approach to the history of the modern state. Concentrating on the eighteenth century and on two cases, those of Britain and Germany, it uses a comparative study of the British and German states, including Prussia, to deconstruct certain clichs about them. The volume is less concerned with the theory of the state or the formal constitutional conditions under which governments operate than with their actual modus operandi.