I’m so late to posting this but I’m sure you all understand that life gets busy whether you’re in university or not. I was too tired to post on Friday and I spent the weekend rewriting my psychology notes. My note strategy is I have note book dedicated to rapid fire lecture notes while I have separate books to write down more structured notes with what was on the slides, the textbook, and lecture.

Anyway lets get on with day 5:

History class was nothing. It was good for me but nothing in the class was notable to write here. We learned about how to scrutinize sources when doing research, if anyone is actually interested in what thats like just leave a comment and ill write down what we learned in that regard. One comment that my professor did make was that apparently back in the day during the Great Depression Prime Minister R. B. Bennett would respond to letters from citizen lamenting about the pain the Depression was causing by mailing them dollars which was a lot for that time. He talked about this because politicians now just give the same automated response when people write to them. This could be due to many factors, population growth, the internet, etc. but I know if must’ve been nice to get a response back from a real human being. I thought this was a very cool fact to share.

Day 5 of Political Science we started off where we left off last class, that being learning about Bureaucracy and how it is central to the modern state. With Legitimacy my professor made reference to Benedict Anderson - imagined community, and Eric Hobsbawm - the state being the inventor of history. There are different developmental paths of modern states, like Prussia and the USA, for example, Prussia could no longer rule after WWII and the USA has corruption and scandals galore. With anarchists the believe the state does not provide ____ nor ____; unfortunately I could not keep up with what he was saying here but the gist of it was anarchists don’t believe in the state at all. Maybe during office hours I can ask him to restate that again.

Next we learned the 3 generations of modern social studies of the state:

First Generation is society-centred perspective, where the state is an avenue for multiple social groups and classes to struggle for power; the NRA was used as an example.

Second Generation is state-centred perspective, where the state is independent from society where the focus is on interstate competition. The state is central institutions that plan the economy and rules of law. Redistribution of wealth generated from the markets. This perspective is prevalent in East Asia.

Third Generation is a state-in-society perspective, the state and society compete for dominance. It’s typically seen in state-building in newly emerged independent states. In cases of civil war the state is not the dominant force, it is not independent from race, gender, and class.

The historical origins of the modern state began in Europe during the 15th and 18th century and was universalized via conquest, colonialism, and then decolonization in the 1960s. It went from feudalism to absolutism and then to the modern state. Absolutism helped give modern states their key elements: a standing army, diplomatic service, centralized bureaucracy, systemic taxation and policies for the economy.

“War made the state, and the state made war.”

To mobilize people you must have their consent and active participation.

We learned about the Liberal Social Contract theory which describes the limiting of powers of individual rulers. Voluntarily or not.

When we looked at premodern states outside of Europe we didn’t focus on any state particular but more so how Eurocentric the definition of state-formation is as there were layers of sovereignty outside of Europe before they exported their own version. Speaking of exporting Europe at the time lacked a shared sense of national identity, it also had weak legitimacy and internal sovereignty. So brutal colonization happened which was justified as it was portrayed as an act of “civilizing backward people.” When Europeans were colonizing the world, we specifically looked at a map of Africa in is early colonized days, it was shown how shoddy borders were established with little regard to the pre colonial boundaries that were already set, nor did they bother with pre colonial institutions and traditions. We all know great division was sown which lead to great disparities in wealth and education. It also prevented certain groups from truly gaining any sort of power.

That’s where day 5 ended. It getting late where I am so I’ll be writing about what happened day 6 (which was today) tomorrow. Maybe this wasn’t my most interesting post, but hey they can’t all be winners.

Also, I finally made a dedicated community for these posts! If I should still cross post them to other communities please let me know!