The Origin of the Modern State or the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was marked by the decline of feudal forms of rule as personal, arbitrary, and openly coercive relations of domination, and their transformation into institutionalized, accountable, and legalized contractual forms of domination. With its source of surplus largely from agricultural and other rents, the feudal system proved inadequate for the demands of constant wars of expansion, obliging the aspirant monarchs to seek reciprocal relations with the rising merchant classes. Both sides shared in the resulting ‘benefits’ of war, growing territorial jurisdictions, a labour force freed from feudal bonds, a credit system, national debts and matching taxation systems, and the continuous accumulation of capital and centralization of administration. But this reciprocity contained a contradiction: feudal absolutism was above the law and unaccountable, while merchant capital and the market required a state answerable to the interests of capital. The expansion of the market made the feudal state a living anachronism, created the necessity for the bourgeois revolutions, and set the liberal democratic state on its course as the political form for the completion of the development of the capitalist mode of production.