Table Of ContentWar, Survival Units, and
Citizenship
In this groundbreaking book, the author proposes a new theory of state formation
based upon a rethinking of the nexus war, state, and citizenship. He seeks to
move beyond explanations provided by traditional approaches by discussing and
presenting alternative state–society and state theories, arguing that a processual-
relational understanding of the states has been neglected in existing literature.
The book begins with a critical discussion of the concept of the state and society
in social and political theory. The author suggests an alternative theoretical-
methodological framework based upon German relational theory (such as Hegel,
Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, and, in particular, Norbert Elias). Drawing upon the
concepts of survival unit and figuration, the book provides a political, historical,
and sociological comparative analysis of the relation between war, state, and
citizenship in France, England, and Germany from the Middle Ages to the mid-
seventeenth century, with emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In addition, the book addresses two puzzles in social theory. First, the author
addresses the question: why is the world divided into a multiple number of units?
Will it remain like this, or can we expect one unit—one world state—in the future?
Second, the author looks into why and how this divided world is maintained: what
makes the demarcation between states, and how is this demarcation upheld? The
issues discussed in the book are central to political and historical sociology and
will be of interest to scholars and students working in both these fields, as well
as to those working in political science and international relations, social theory,
and history.
Lars Bo Kaspersen is Professor of Political Sociology at the Copenhagen
Business School, Denmark.
War, Survival Units,
and Citizenship
A Neo-Eliasian Processual-
Relational Perspective
Lars Bo Kaspersen
published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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business
© 2021 Lars Bo Kaspersen
The right of Lars Bo Kaspersen to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaspersen, Lars Bo, author.
Title: War, survival units, and citizenship : a neo-Eliasian
processual-relational perspective / Lars Bo Kaspersen.
Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis
Group, 2020. | Revision of author’s doctoral dissertation. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021239 (print) | LCCN 2020021240 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780754649526 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315547695 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Elias, Norbert, 1897–1990—Influence. | State,
The. | War and society—Europe. | Politics and war—Europe. |
Political sociology—Europe. | Historical sociology. | Europe—
Politics and government. | Europe—Politics and government—
Philosophy. | Europe—Civilization.
Classification: LCC D105 .K37 2020 (print) | LCC D105 (ebook) |
DDC 320.1/1094—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021239
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021240
ISBN: 978-0-754-64952-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-54769-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
PART 1
War, survival units, and structures of privileges,
rights, obligations, and citizenship: theoretical and
methodological considerations 13
1 Historical sociology and research on state formation: the
German tradition revisited 15
2 Toward a theoretical framework: rereading Norbert Elias 47
PART 2
Western Europe: from medieval survival units to the
rise and consolidation of the Ständestaat 75
Introduction 77
3 The decline of the Carolingian Empire and the
disintegration of Europe: the figuration of feudal survival
units, 800–1050 83
4 The resurgence of centripetal forces, 1050–1300 92
5 Centripetal forces: two steps forward, one step back,
1300–1500 105
vi Contents
Summarizing Part 2: war, survival units, and citizenship:
a review of the medieval figurations of survival
units, 800–1500 120
PART 3
France, England, and Germany: new forms of
survival units—new structures of privileges, rights,
and obligations 1500–1660 123
Introduction 125
6 The European figuration of survival units, 1494–1659:
from local to continental wars—the survival units in
France, England, and Germany 129
7 The “military revolution” 135
8 The rise of civil society and a monetary economy 147
9 Sovereignty: from universality to particularity and from
fragmentation to territorialization 154
10 France: from Ständestaat to territorial state 163
11 England: a territorial centralized Ständestaat, 1500–1660 183
12 Germany: the competing survival units 214
13 The struggle for recognition: winners and losers 244
14 Some concluding remarks 256
References 261
Index 272
Preface
This book project goes back to my doctoral work in the Department of Politi-
cal Science at Aarhus University in the mid-1990s. My research proposal looked
into the challenge of national citizenship when the European Union (EU) was
constantly issuing rights at the EU level and, increasingly, constructing an EU
citizenship. This problem took me into a long historical slide back to the decline
of the Roman Empire, the survival of Roman law, and the development of a feudal
political structure in major parts of Western Europe. The emergence and con-
solidation of a complex pattern of overlapping privileges, rights, and obligations
took place during the ninth to sixteenth centuries as part of an intensified process
of “state formation.” An increasing number of scholars with an interest in early
modern Europe were claiming that warfare was an important trigger for and/or
driver of social and political change, including state making. I found this proposed
relationship between warfare, state formation, and citizenship intriguing but also
problematic.
My luck was Paul Q. Hirst. My wife and I decided to move to the United King-
dom in 1994 because she wanted to study fashion at the Winchester School of Art.
I had first met up with Professor Hirst from Birkbeck College at the University of
London, some years before we left Denmark. Paul stressed that I should visit him
in London at some point, and so when we moved, I took him up on his invitation.
It turned out that we shared many interests: in state formation processes, warfare,
military technology, constitutional issues, citizenship, and associative democracy.
Paul was truly a Renaissance man, and he was a constant source of inspiration. He
offered to supervise my work, and from 1994 to 1997, we met regularly, either at
the bar at the Architectural Association, in a restaurant, or at Heathrow Airport.
My thesis was long, but it was coming along. Six months before I submitted the
thesis, Paul suggested that we should write a book together and that we should
take our point of departure in my comparative work on France, England, and
Germany. I would also write chapters on Scandinavia while Paul worked on the
Ottoman Empire, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and maybe Russia. I was, of
course, honored that he asked me, but I also knew that I had to finish the thesis
first or I would not be able to take up one of the assistant professorships that I had
been offered by the political science departments in Aarhus and in Copenhagen.
viii Preface
The book never materialized because three years later, when I was finally ready to
write it, Paul had moved on to something else. Paul was too impatient. I had had
my window of opportunity, but I let it close!
It was Christopher Thorne, from Sussex—who gave a number of interesting
lectures about the state when I was a student at Sussex in 1988–1989—who first
inspired me to rethink the relationships among war, states, and societies and how
war changed the state and society. Some of Thorne’s ideas turned out to be simi-
lar to those that emerged from a seminar at the University of Copenhagen led by
Senior Lecturer Anders Boserup in 1989–1990. Boserup was a peace-and-conflict
researcher and was interested in war and state issues. He agreed to supervise me
and my colleague Morten Wiberg. However, shortly after we began our master’s
thesis work, Boserup died unexpectedly at the age of fifty. Morten and I sepa-
rated, and I started to pursue the problem of the state. Since my undergraduate
years, I had realized that the state was hugely important in understanding the key
sociological question: how can we uphold a social order? And if a social order is
changing, how can we explain it?
In order to rethink the concept of the state, Boserup suggested Clausewitz and
Hegel as a point of departure. Thus, Hegel and Clausewitz became a part of my
luggage in my search for a more consistent and adequate concept of the state. My
next stop was historical sociology.
I continued working on my master’s thesis, now supervised by the Swedish
Senior Lecturer Göran Djürfeldt. I wrote a thesis on Tony Giddens’s work, with
a particular focus on his book The Nation-State and Violence. I found some simi-
larities between Boserup’s concept of the state and the recent tradition I called the
historical state sociologists (such as Giddens, Charles Tilly, and Michael Mann).
Djürfeldt encouraged me to read Giovanni Arrighi and Eric Wolf’s book Europe
and the People without History, which became crucial for me later in my aca-
demic life.
As a doctoral student at Aarhus University, I received funding to invite Charles
Tilly and Michael Mann to campus, and I had the privilege of spending a week
with each of them. That was inspiring, and I found their observations interesting,
but they did not provide me with a satisfactory answer to the many problems
I found with conventional conceptions of the state. During my time in Aarhus,
I also met up with Tony Giddens in person and had several conversations with him
about citizenship, Europe, and his book The Nation-State and Violence. I argued
that his analysis of the European processes of state formation completely ignored
the importance of religion.
As I was writing my doctoral thesis, I began to become interested in the works
of Norbert Elias. Professor Gunnar Olofsson, my former teacher at the University
of Copenhagen, mentioned Karl Polanyi and Norbert Elias to me as important
thinkers whom I ought to read. At the same time, Norman Gabriel, a friend from
my Sussex years, had also been pushing me to read Elias. I read On the Process of
Civilization and could see that it was highly relevant for my work, but I also found
it problematic. However, I had to submit my thesis, and so I did in 1997, despite
the fact that I had not been able to think through a more consistent theoretical
Preface ix
framework. In 1997, at Aarhus University, I defended my thesis on “War, State,
Sovereignty, and Citizenship—From the Middle Ages to the Treaty of Westphalia
and the Treaty on the European Union.” I never published the thesis. It was long,
combining an analysis of NATO, the EU, and the European member states with a
comparative historical analysis covering the years 800 to 1660 in the geographic
areas that would later become France, England, and Germany. Maybe one of the
reasons for not publishing it was related to my theoretical framework, which was
less clear than it first appeared.
Over the last twenty years, I have continued to discuss the work of Elias with
Norman Gabriel, now Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. Reading and
rereading Elias brought us to a new understanding of his work. Elias was not a
conventional neo-Kantian sociologist. He was, rather, a particular kind of neo-
Hegelian, uniquely situated in a German processual-relational tradition going
back to Hegel. We also realized that Elias was as much a political sociologist as
he was a sociologist, and in recent years, I have spent a good portion of my time
rethinking Norbert Elias’s sociological theory into a political sociology. We were
taken by surprise when we discovered that the concept of the survival unit is situ-
ated at the center of Elias’s theory. Another important concept is the figuration.
Therefore, Norman Gabriel and I are currently working on a book presenting our
neo-Hegelian reading of Elias, where we argue that most of the Elias-inspired
research so far has overlooked the importance of Elias’s key concepts: the sur-
vival unit and the figuration. Moreover, only a few have connected these key con-
cepts to his figurational processual-relational sociology. Our forthcoming book,
with the working title A World of Survival Units, must be seen as a part of the
same project as the present book. The present book is an attempt to apply the neo-
Eliasian framework (developed together with Dr. Gabriel in A World of Survival
Units) in order to prove that this framework produces a stronger but also more
suitable analysis. Whether it really is more suitable, stronger, and more consistent
must be up to the reader to decide.
It has been a long intellectual journey. I would like to thank the teachers, super-
visors, colleagues, friends, and students who have inspired me for almost thirty
years. In particular, I would like to emphasize Grahame F. Thompson, Jeppe
Strandsbjerg, and Andreas Mulvad who are all strong intellectual minds and who
have provided me with strong intellectual friendships. And, of course, I owe a spe-
cial thank-you to Norman Gabriel, who has been a part of this process since 1988,
when we met at Preston Park Station in Brighton. This chatty intelligent man
from Glasgow has contributed to keeping the intellectual fire going throughout the
whole period—and he has not stopped talking. Never Stop, Norman!
Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Maria Svaneborg. Thank you
for your patience and love.
This book is dedicated to my four sons: William Beier Sommerfeldt Kaspersen,
Vincent Beier Sommerfeldt Kaspersen, Anton Svaneborg Kaspersen, and Isak
Svaneborg Kaspersen. I love you all!
Copenhagen, January 2020
Lars Bo Kaspersen
