/lit/ - Literature

>>20945851
Again, not that anon, but the book is an elaboration of Tilly's classic chapter/article 'War making and state making as organised crime', which originated the pithy phrase 'war made the state and the state made war' which you will hear repeated to you if you ever read something or talk to someone about Tilly (a warning in advance). Anyway, the book is about state development from early medieval to modern Europe, promulgating the thesis that the rise of the nation-state stemmed from the two-fold forces of warfare and capital/commerce, specifically the bargaining that the state had to do with the latter to prosecute the former. That basic argument is that, developments in warfare (specifically, the movement from feudal levies to condottieri (mercinary) to levée en masse to modern professional armies) affected the fiscal requirements of the state, which had to be extracted from the sector of society that could actually be taxed/borrowed from (in this case, 'new burghs', or commercial cities). The apparatus of that we commonly associate with the state (bureaucracy) evolved out of the infrastructure that monarch needed to develop to effectively tax subjects, pay back loans, and prosecute war. However, this reliance on liquidity to pay for increasing military expenditure also gave the cities increasing bargaining power over the monarch, to stipulate conditions on how funds should be spent (that is, the development of parliaments). Power struggles ensued, the revolutions we all know and love happened, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mass warfare, nationalisation, industrialisation, welfare, etc are also covered, but less extensively.
There is more to the book, but that is the gist. The nation-state developed out of the administrative and fiscal burdens of interstate warfare. There is also a secondary thesis about how the political structure of specific areas (Russian empire, Britain, Germany, etc.) was determined by this ratio between coercive force (military) and accumulative force/capital (commerce), with more authoritarian and imperial structures stemming from coercion-heavy regions, and more democratic and parliamentary structures from commerce-heavy regions (a kind of dove-tail on Barrington Moore's work). It is one of the classics in political sociology and currently the dominant theory in state development, as far as i know. I would guess the anon recommended it because they both deal with state growth and expansion, with an emphasis on taxation.

>>18037299
I don't think it would actually. I didn't mention it because it wasn't relevant, but reputation as a form of behavioural regulation also diminishes as the size of a community increases, simply due to the epistemic problem of meaningfully tracking the growing number of members. It is also dependent on reputation actually having consequences, and the ability to meaningfully enforce any kind of reputation here is limited. Plus, even the limited enforcement that could exist would be rendered meaningless by the fact that it is elective, so you could just drop the trip to avoid all the consequences whenever you want.
And besides, not all forms of behavioural regulation are desirable. I think a lot of people come here precisely to escape regulation by reputation anyway.