The fall of the patrician class – and the rise of the modern nation-state

An important reason for the fall of the patrician class was that Norway became a nation-state much earlier and more clearly than other countries.

The nation-state is a modern organization that regulates the control and surveillance of social relations and individuals much more effectively than previous forms of state.

That is, the function that the patrician class had had locally and through internal networks and unwritten laws was replaced by a superior and regulatory state with abstract systems managed by a small group of experts, the civil servants.

In addition to the nation-state, capitalism was the most important element in the accelerating development of modern institutions. It allowed even small nation-states, such as Norway, to mobilize social and economic resources to a far greater extent than in pre-modern systems. The establishment of the far more efficient civil service state in Norway after 1814 therefore helped to reinforce the decline of the patrician class.

The new idea that it was possible to control and govern society was particularly promoted by one of the three from the Latin school in Skien, Anton Martin Schweigaard. Social development was now to be governed through an actively intervening state power. A capitalist market economy was to be developed with the state in a leading, intervening role. This has been characterized as state-staged capitalism .

That is, the civil servants governed "civil servants" according to established routines, in relation to given rules and within given frameworks. This strengthened both the new bureaucrats and the new bourgeoisie, which now took over the roles and functions of the old patrician class.

Now it was the civil servants who were given the most important role in the development of the state of Norway and it was routine politics and routine politicians who took over the management. In Skien and in Ibsen's immediate family, this means in concrete terms that when the patrician class fell, it was the representatives of the civil servant family Paus who were given leading positions. They represented the classic constitutional state recipe with clear, predictable rules in contrast to the patrician class's "creative" and dynamic way of governing.

This modern breakthrough in Norwegian society occurred from the 1830s onwards. That is to say, the patrician son Henrik Ibsen was born at the transition – in the period when the old aristocracy and the patrician class died out or went bankrupt. In the same way that there was a local role reversal between the patrician class and the children of the civil service class in Skien, specifically between Knud Ibsen and his half-brother Paus, the civil servants moved in as the country's new elite to the displacement of the patrician class.

The old patrician class had been a small elite, but the new civil servant class was a very small elite.

The old patrician class had been a small elite, but the new civil servant class was a very small elite and it represented a steadily decreasing proportion of the people. In total, the number of civil servants in the civil servant state era from 1814 to 1884 was no more than 2000. During the same period, Norway's population doubled from 1 to 2 million.

The reason why the officials were able to establish the role of the state-supporting elite was that they could control an overarching network that connected city with country and center with periphery. That is, the exact opposite principle of what had been the basis of the patrician power, which was locally rooted in dense networks of mutual relationships and obligations.

The governance of the patrician class had been dependent on individuals – and had been based on trust between individuals. The society of civil servants was governed by laws and impersonal relationships and a fundamental distrust of and between individuals. The goal in the new, modern society was to establish administration as an “automatically operating machine”. The characteristic feature of modern society was therefore the trust in abstract arrangements that were managed by various expert groups – and that civil servants governed “civil servants”, that is, according to given rules within given frameworks.

The philosophical and ideological foundation for this new bureaucratic governance was provided by philosophy professor Marcus Jacob Monrad, the third of the outstanding students from the Latin school in Skien.