What explains the rapid growth of state power in early modern Europe? While most scholars have pointed to the impact of military or capitalist revolutions, Philip S. Gorski argues instead for the importance of a disciplinary revolution unleashed by the Reformation. By refining and diffusing a variety of disciplinary techniques and strategies, such as communal surveillance, control through incarceration, and bureaucratic office-holding, Calvin and his followers created an infrastructure of religious governance and social control that served as a model for the rest of Europe—and the world.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Body and Soul: Calvinism, Discipline, and State Power in Early Modern Europe
2. Disciplinary Revolution from below in the Low Countries
3. Disciplinary Revolution from above in Brandenburg-Prussia
4. Social Disciplining in Comparative Perspective
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

In this pathbreaking work, now available in paperback, Charles Tilly challenges all previous formulations of state development in Europe. Specifically, Tilly charges that most available explanations fail because they do not account for the great variety of kinds of states which were viable at different stages of European history, and because they assume a unilinear path of state development resolving in today's national state.

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book takes as its starting point the notion of "biopower," studying the foundations of this new technology of power over populations. Distrinct from punitive disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security. In this volume, though, Foucault begins to turn his attention to the history of "governmentality," from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state--shifting the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government. In light of Foucault's later work, these lectures illustrate a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.