What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.

'[An] acute analysis of the state we're in.' Morning Star
'The State of Freedom is the most sophisticated book yet from Patrick Joyce. It is hard to believe that anyone could write a more brilliant book than The Rule of Freedom, but he has. Joyce reveals with impressive detail the subtle and surprising means by which the liberal state operates and has done so historically.' Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego, and author of Impossible Engineering
'This is vintage Joyce: critical, provocative and theoretically engaged.' Frank Trentmann, Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Free Trade Nation
'Written with great verve and characterized by an original historical imagination, this challenging book offers fresh conceptual tools and rich empirical assessments to grapple with what it calls the social history of the British state. Moving across borders and institutions, The State of Freedom chronicles the state as actor, identifies the means used to fashion the persons who govern the state, and impressively shows how freedom and constraint can be mutually constitutive.' Ira Katznelson, Columbia University, and author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
'Joyce makes a sophisticated and informed argument that the state and its homogenous, elite leadership enshrined commitment to political freedom and institutions of order and authority that over time became systematized with considerable operational continuity … An important and stimulating historical study of governing and governance that should be in good library collections.' M. J. Moore, Choice

Patrick Joyce is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Manchester. He is a leading British social historian and has written and edited numerous books of social and political history, including Visions of the People (Cambridge University Press, 1991), The Oxford Reader on Class (1995), The Rule of Freedom (2003) and Material Powers (2010).