The Logical Structure Of Modern Political Civilization And Its Historical Course In Western Europe

In this paper I inspect the logical structure of modern political civilization and the course of political modernization in Western Europe through a perspective viewpoint based on two dimensions of state power. In one aspect, state power concentrates and penetrates the society in modern political civilization, which is also the aim of political modernization and state-building. In the other aspect, state power is controlled effectively through institutions in modern political civilization, which can prevent the destructiveness of state power. There are tensions between political modernization and the constitutional democracy of modern political civilization. So the progress of political modernization is often against constitutional democracy. The special character of Western European (especially in England) political development is that it achieved modern political civilization in its course of political modernization. In Western Europe, the structural needs of the changes in society and economics and the stimulations of internal and external crisis formed the motivations of political modernization. However, plural and decentralized power structures and the traditions of constitutional government under the law in feudal society were elements which were to the advantage of controlling state power and the formation of constitutional democracy. In the course of state-building in England, the coupling and balance between the two progresses stated as above soothed the tensions between political modernization and modern political civilization. Furthermore, the tensions were constructively transformed into institutions of constitutional democracy. At last modern political civilization took shape in England. The political developments in some other Western European countries had some deviations due to many negative factors. The representativeness of the political progress of England in Western Europe and the historical location of absolute state are critical issues in the historical investigation in this paper. In turn, how to understand the relationship between the bourgeois revolution and the modern political civilization is also critical. In this paper I depict how feudal society and absolute state influenced the state-building and the political modernization in Western Europe and how did the structural elements of feudal society mix into absolute state and constitutional polity. The medieval self-government cities and city-states were not representatives of new political order, yet the nation-states which succeed in international competition led the way of political development. It is more reasonable to look through the relations between society, economics, culture and politics in a systematic and evolutional view. The socio-economic changes can not determine the political order in a direct way. Politics and state power have its own independence. The constitutional democracy, as the most important achievements of modern political civilization, is mainly the result of feudal constitutional traditions from the genetic sense. It is not the creation of enlightenment and modernity, nor is it the result of civil society and bourgeois revolution. It is not considerable both in theory and history to overstate the importance of enlightenment and bourgeois revolution in understanding the generation of modern civilization.