Has anyone here read it? If so, what did you think? And does anyone know whether it is a translation?
I read it a few years ago.
It was interesting. It gives an account of the rise of the modern state, which the author distinguishes from earlier forms of more personal government. It gives a slightly different account than the “Hoppean” account, but it is not totally deviating. I would say reading the book is necessary in any serious scholarship of the growth of government.
An interesting detail in the book is that Pres. Grant successfully packed the SCOTUS in order to ban private money, a story I have seen nowhere else.
An article by Prof. van Creveld on the topic can be found here.
I can recall no information about any other original language than English, e.g., Dutch or Hebrew, which would be likely candidates.
It’s on my shelf - I read it last year. As JK says it’s quite interesting in terms of framing Western history in terms of the growth of the state. Much of the history he discusses can be found in most any book on European history, but the perspective he provides is unique, giving you a fuller understanding of political development in the West. I don’t know that I agree with his conclusion - that the state its on its way out - but the book is a fantastic piece of work on history.
I highly recommend it.
Some of the Amazon reviewers question the accuracy of some of the historical facts. Idk enough to know who is correct though.
I’d have to look at the reviews themselves, but sometimes people get bent out of shape because the author might have the wrong month or get the name of someone’s wife mixed up which, in most cases, doed not affect the main point or historical analysis one bit. If you read enough history and reviews of historical works, you come across this quite often. Some people are just obsessed with factoids; I think they play too much Trivial Pursuit.
For Creveld’s thesis to suffer, he’d have to be making errors on a massive scale. Nothing caught my attention, and I read quite a bit of history.
Read it a month ago. Not particularly impressed, I must say. Just what passes around for common sense. Don’t’ seem convicting at all to me. Otherwise, a nice history.
I found it to be a very readable book and it can also give you an additional, new perspective on certain things like how you view certain historical periods and the organisation of a proto-state.
It does define the state as an institution peculiarly modern, a monarchical bureaucracy transformed into a corporation whose purpose is to serve itself.
There is no equivalent book anywhere else.
It is absolutely essential reading if you want to understand why government grows. Read it alongside Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan and Bruce D. Porter’s War and the Rise of the State.