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French politicians became skilled political entrepreneurs much earlier than their European counterparts, but their professionalization was shaped by the fact that it took place within a centralized state bureaucracy characterized by a strong anti-republicanism. As a result of the bureaucracy’s various obstructionist tactics, disciplined political parties developed very slowly, thereby delaying the professionalization of certain aspects of parliamentary and electoral politics. Until today, the cumulation of national with (sometimes several) local mandates is a common way to live off politics in France. The image of a corrupt political class has intensified since the end of the 1980s, but ensuing reforms were for the most part a reaction to public pressure and not so much results of an explicit reformist intention.

This chapter explores the theoretical origins of non-design in the work of Friedrich Hayek, particularly his ideas about spontaneous order and the “undesigned” nature of social institutions. Hayek’s critique of the planned order of socialism, particularly the central planning of the Welfare State in the 1940s, along with Michael Polanyi’s contributions to a theory of spontaneous order, helped usher in a non-planning paradigm based on decentralization and a free market. This chapter explores the various ways planning was increasingly discredited by associating it with fascism and other forms of totalitarian control. Parallel to economic and political debates, design debates also engaged similar issues related to control and spontaneity. Hayek’s embrace of the philosophy of liberalism, individualism, spontaneous order, and a free market economy is contrasted with Nikolaus Pevsner and other modern design theorists who rejected these ideas in support of social reform and centralized state planning.

Large-scale industrialization and the increased reach of the centralized state were not the only dynamics of change, but were arguably the two that most profoundly affected the lives of ordinary French men and women. The periphery, which at first was suspected as the campsite of “professional strangers” became identified with the collective threat of the “new barbarians,” as the political elite of the July Monarchy preferred to think of industrial workers. The extension of the authority of the urban police into the faubourgs and suburbs in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s represented the conquest of the threatening periphery. The process of urbanization was arguably most fundamentally that of organization. In the end, the organization of workers on the urban frontier emerged as a dominant concern of elite uncertainties and fear.

In recent years, scholars have begun focusing on the relationships among the body, space, and the cosmic ideal of spiritual attainment in early China. This chapter adds to these seminal accounts by stressing the historicity of a particular stance on individual agency—that of “bodily conformism.” By analyzing such a stance across a variety of intellectual traditions, it attempts to reveal larger cultural connections that might be missed in discussions of a single tradition or specific cults and practices. It shows that this “bodily turn” was not limited to any single region or intellectual practice but was pervasive throughout many different circles of thought associated with the increasingly centralized courts of the day. The writings examined can be grouped into two main categories: those that supported the exclusive link between a sovereign's conforming body and the cosmos; and those that encouraged the universal bodily conformism of every individual alike, irrespective of one's political position and role. The former group of texts, the topic of this chapter, bears a relationship to the needs of the centralizing state. The chapter begins with those authors that justified a highly centralized state structure, focusing on their characterizations of the ideal relationship between the sovereign and the cosmos.

In the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, whites in South Africa pursued two strategies that distinguished state formation from the path followed in the USA: they constructed a centralized state, and authorized state officials to intervene extensively into the economy. In response to mounting pressure from employers and white workers, successive governments from 1910 onwards embarked on a campaign to modernize and boost the interventionist powers of the state. They did this chiefly by empowering the state to control the turbulent industrial arena and the field known as ‘Native Affairs’, both of which were still ambiguous and uncertain in the decade after 1910. The combined drift of these trends reinforced a state-oriented perspective within the white population generally. In South Africa, all roads led to the central state. Employers turned to the state to administer a labour-allocation system sufficiently flexible to meet their competing labour demands; white workers pressured the state to actively eliminate the ‘poor white problem’; and the segregationist state garnered greater powers for itself to modernize and strengthen the racial order. The early consolidation of a broadly statist ideology and the establishment of an interventionist state are central to the differentiae specificae of racial violence in South Africa: the absence of communal violence amidst high levels of private violence against blacks.

This chapter outlines the trajectory of the rise and decline of centralized state power and commercial prosperity in the mid-Qing period. It delineates the conservative strain of Confucianism reinstated by the Qing state and how this orthodoxy conceptualized the empire's political hierarchy as a familial one grounded on the principle of filiality from below and paternalist benevolence from above. This orthodoxy not only constrained the empire's subjects but also subjected the emperor to the same rigid moral standard. The chapter shows how the moral legitimacy of mid-Qing emperors changed in a U-shaped trajectory under this self-imposed rigid standard. By taking the rhythms of political, economic, and cultural changes together, the mid-Qing period is divided into three subperiods: c. 1740–1759, when both centralized state power and commercial prosperity were at their peaks and the emperor's moral legitimacy was high; c. 1760–1799, when centralized state power unraveled, commercial prosperity continued, and the emperor's moral legitimacy was low; and c. 1800–1839, when both centralized state power and the market economy were in crisis but the emperor's moral legitimacy revived.

This chapter discusses data and methodological issues, and provides a general overview and classification of all documented protests. These episodes were not distributed evenly over time but were clustered in three waves: 1740–1759, 1776–1795, and 1820–1839. The reasons for establishing 1740 and 1839 as the temporal boundaries of the study are twofold. First, Qing China during this period was at its height of early modernity. Its levels of centralized state power and commercialized economy were comparable to eighteenth-century Europe. Second, studies that deal with unrest in the late Ming–early Qing period (from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century) and the late Qing period (from the end of the first Opium War, in 1842, to the collapse of the Qing empire in 1911) are relatively abundant.

This chapter deals with the application of austerity since 2010 as a political act designed to transform the way in which local authorities in the United Kingdom operate and are funded. It explains how the local authorities have been dependent on government funding as the UK is considered as one of the most centralised states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It also recounts how the UK government in 2010 decided that the Revenue Support Grant (RSG) funding paid to councils would be removed through annual tapering to zero by 2020. The chapter probes the intention of the UK government to replace RSG with each of the council's retention of 75 per cent of the local business rates. It analyses the system of local government funding that operated until local government reorganisation in 1974.

This chapter examines how the reigns of Sultan Selim III and Mahmud II witnessed significant changes in Ottoman political thought and the idea of a modern state. Concepts like republic, liberty, independence, equality, and nation began to appear widely in political writings. This change in political language was affected largely through the efforts of French missionaries, promoting republican ideas in the Ottoman sphere to win the support of the Porte. For the first time in Ottoman political thought, a republic was discussed as a form of a government, but still not as an alternative to the Ottoman monarchy. An extensive reform process changed the traditional ideas of nizam (order) and adalet (justice), improved relations with the West, and generated a modern bureaucratic centralized state.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to provide a systematic analysis of Turkey's media system, its reconfiguration under domestic and international dynamics, the political and cultural tensions it harbors, and the trajectories it shares with other media systems around the world. The book highlights the push-pull forces of a centralized state authority and its democratization demands, the interpenetration of state and capital, and the overlapping of patronage structures with market imperatives. The remainder of the chapter discusses Turkey's media industry, its political system, and its authoritarian neoliberal order. These are followed by descriptions of the scope of the present study, the theoretical framework and methods, and an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic between centralizing states and decentralized chiefly power. Reinforced during the colonial era and partially dismantled as part of an attempt by Ghana's first president to undo the colonial legacy, chiefly influence has re-emerged more recently when debates over the status and future of Asante's shrinking forests intersected with the neoliberal agenda. Plans for sustainable development, including forest recovery, often rest on imaginaries of bygone forests and implicit ideas about the relevance of knowledge about the past for present and future practice. Over the course of the 20th century, the social life of Asante forests reflected not only the power of market forces to remake natural environments, but also the ways in which market transactions, political contests and bureaucratic practices intersect with historical imagination. By raising the stakes in making claims of “original ownership,” recent efforts to rehabilitate Ghana's forests by privatizing them run the risk of increasing opportunities for rent-seeking and social exclusion, at the expense of equitable access and sustainable management.