Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China

by Patricia M. Thornton

What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power.

State-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674025040
• ISBN13: 9780674025042
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.2"