Looking Forward

Abstract

The British state, in a historical and ideological sense, evolved out of the need to develop a political language that abstracted sovereign power so that it was not dependent on a particular type of rule. Once established as a discursive category the state was taken to be transcendental. In a practical sense the bureaucratic state developed independence from the Crown, and from Parliament, as successive rulers became dependent upon taxation and public borrowing to finance the increasing scale and scope of warfare. All of this adds up to a much different specification of the ‘evolution of the constitutional arrangements in seventeenth-century England’ both before and after the Glorious Revolution (North and Weingast, 1989, p. 803), and points to a different genesis of ‘credible commitment’.