Early Rome, as every state formation before the eighteenth century, was not a modern Nation-State. It is a truism, but the Roman state (during its whole history) has often been grasped as if it had the same configuration of the modern western states (monopoly of violence, territorial sovereignty, internal judicial ...
(Show more)Early Rome, as every state formation before the eighteenth century, was not a modern Nation-State. It is a truism, but the Roman state (during its whole history) has often been grasped as if it had the same configuration of the modern western states (monopoly of violence, territorial sovereignty, internal judicial monism, etc.). However, Early-republican Rome is a very opportune case study to defy this view: Rome had a complex relationship with her neighbours in this period, progressively incorporating them into her hegemonic system but without annexing them to its absolute sovereignty. In this paper, I will propose a model to think Early-republican polities in Roman central Italy as historically specific forms of state. To this end, I will use some concepts and categories of social sciences.
The young Karl Marx realized, through the critique of Hegel’s philosophy, the importance of the analysis of civil society beyond the State per se. It was a crucial development in Marx’s thought, shifting his focus from German political philosophy to English political economy. This movement allowed him to achieve the theoretical formulations that made him so important to the social sciences. However, Marx never explored again the theme of State in his maturity as deeply as he did in his youth, in works like Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of Right and On the Jewish question.
Marx’s core thoughts on these texts were about the separation between the “political constitution” (i.e., the form of the state) and the “material reality” (i.e., the civil society) in modern capitalist societies. This separation would lead to political alienation. Comparing this reality to other historical periods, as Medieval Europe, Ancient Greece and the Ancient Near East, Marx advanced some categories to explain different relationships between state and society. Marx’s definition of Medieval Europe as ‘the democracy of unfreedom’ as well his theoretical distinction between the natures of Monarchy and Democracy sovereignties are especially fertile to think about a State Theory for societies without an ‘Abstract State’, in which the relationship between ‘Political State’ and ‘Material State’ (Marx’s terminology) contrasts with the one that prevail the modern Nation-State.
Early Roman Central Italy was composed by several polities, which were composed mostly by peasants’ communities. Thus, we can improve this young Marx’s dense theoretical framework using some concepts of sociology of community (from Ferdinand Tönnies to Norbert Elias and beyond). Using this conceptual structure, I intend to model the state system developed in these region in two different moments of its history: after the Foedus Cassianum (493 BCE) and after the end of the Second Latin War (338 BCE).
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