Conceptualizing the State: Innovation and Dispute in British Political Thought, 1880-1914

This book is concerned with the way in which the concept of the state was invoked in British political argument between 1880 and 1914. It central claim is that the decades bracketing the turn of the century witnessed a significant change in the prevailing terms of British political discourse - that the concept of the state, hitherto a relative stranger to British debate, emerged as a key component of the idiom in which critical reflection on politics was cast. James Meadowcroft surveys the wa…