Has government ever played a truly significant role in historical events, or does it mostly rubberstamp things that nongovernmental entities would do anyway?
After all, Manorialism was a social safety net very similar to the modern welfare state. As an example, was the transition ftom feudalism to liberalism a key event in world history, or were the freedoms serfs won gradual change that mostly had to do with economic and demographic factors unrelated to politics?
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One of the arguments Barbara Tuchman makes in The March of Folly was that England's loss of its North American colonies in the American Revolution was chiefly due to how their Parliamentary system was working at the time. Basically, it was easier for individual members to get re-elected with tough talk than to argue that it might be better to reach some accommodation with the colonists.
Even without that argument, if you read some of the prewar documents on both sides its pretty clear that the base of the disagreement was over government, and if some arrangement like the Dominion system had been offered early enough, it would have almost certainly been found acceptable.
