HIST362: Modern Revolutions

Max Weber (1864–1920) argued that before the rise of the modern state, the king had to share his legitimate use of violence or force with the church. A defining feature of the modern state is that it alone has the ability to exert legitimate, coercive force. European governments no longer had to cooperate with the church to exert authority because the Catholic Church had lost much of its hegemonic power during the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. This shift, however, would also empower the people to question the legitimacy of governments – they determined that citizens had an innate right to rise in revolt and revolution. Watch this video on modernity and the modern era. Think about our definition of revolution and how political revolution resulted from modernization. What linkages can you make to the ideologies we studied in the previous section: Tocqueville, Marx, Brinton, Johnson, and Anderson?