Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe: Memory of the Future

This book compares the social decomposition in late medieval Europe to the societal failure witnessed today in the modern West, arguing that in the case of emergencies, a strong despotic state is the only way to maintain basic order. Shlapentokh asserts that asocial behavior (criminality, promiscuity, and anti-sanitary actions, as well as other aspects of social, political, and communal breakdown) in both medieval France and the contemporary West is not a marginal occurrence but rather a mainstream phenomena, and one that can often be stopped by strong force as the only antidote to social chaos. While the majority of Western (and particularly Anglo-American) scholarship dictates that Jeffersonian democracy will spread over the world, Shlapentokh argues that instead it is the precepts of Hobbes and Carl Schmitt that will shape the world to come.