IMPERIAL ADDICTIONS: EXPLAINING THE RIGIDITY OF IDEAS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
This paper focuses on the role of legitimating discourses of political power to explain the variation in the trajectories of the Ottoman and Habsburg dynastic strategies. Theories of imperial overextension invoke a Weberian approach to state formation emphasizing the effects of military and fiscal change. Drawing on institutionalist economics and Jürgen Habermas, this paper argues that state formation requires a change in existing institutions and value systems. The paper selects four writers from the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires to study the change in political argumentation comparatively. The institutional set up of the two empires offered different paths of development for legitimating discourses. While natural law facilitated the emergence of a Habsburg territorial state with higher political capacity, in the Ottoman Empire, legal theory and practice continued to uphold an imperial universalism and maintained a state with lower political capacity. The findings suggest that past institutions and legitimating discourses influence the pace and direction in which a state responds to the survival imperatives in the state system.