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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Debates about the role and nature of the state are at the heart of modern politics. However, the state itself remains notoriously difficult to define, and the term is subject to a range of different interpretations.
In this book, distinguished state theorist Bob Jessop provides a critical introduction to the state as both a concept and a reality. He lucidly guides readers through all the major accounts of the state, and examines competing efforts to relate the state to other features of social organization. Essential themes in the analysis of the state are explored in full, including state formation, periodization, the re-scaling of the state and the state's future. Throughout, Jessop clearly defines key terms, from hegemony and coercion to government and governance. He also analyses what we mean when we speak about 'normal'
and 'exceptional' states, and states that are 'failed' or 'rogue'.
Combining an accessible style with expert sensitivity to the complexities of the state, this short introduction will be core reading for students and scholars of politics and sociology, as well as anyone interested in the changing role of the state in contemporary societies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Copyright page
Copyright © Bob Jessop 2016
The right of Bob Jessop to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3304-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3305-3(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jessop, Bob.
The state: past, present, future / Bob Jessop.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-3304-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3305-3 (paperback) 1. State, The. I. Title.
JC11.J47 2015
320.1–dc23
2015013426
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Dedication
In Memoriam, Josef Esser (1943–2010)
Preface
The present book is the latest in an unplanned series on state theory, states, and state power that reflects changing conjunctures and shifting interests. It differs in three main ways from its precursors. First, rather than focusing on postwar capitalist states or states in capitalist societies, it comments on the genealogy of the state, the periodization of state formation, contemporary states, and likely future trends discernible in the present (in other words, present futures). Second, reflecting this broader scope, it offers a conceptual framework for studying the state that can be used in more contexts, integrated with more theoretical approaches, and applied from several standpoints. Third, while it draws on diverse theoretical positions and occasionally provides brief critiques, it is concerned, not to draw sharp dividing lines between them, but to synthesize them – where this is both possible and productive. Thus, even where I focus on one particular approach, I also note possible links, intersections, or parallels with other approaches that are not developed here.
This book draws on many years of intermittent engagement with questions of state theory and critical investigation of actual states, above all in Europe. At other times I have been more preoccupied with the critique of political economy, especially postwar capitalism, the development of the world market, and their crisis tendencies. This explains why my analysis often adopts a capital- or class-theoretical entry point. But, as noted above, this is one of many options, none of which can be privileged on a priori grounds but only in terms of its explanatory power for particular problems in particular contexts (see chapter 3). Many scholars have influenced my understanding of the state through their reflections and historical analyses or through personal discussions with me – and, in several cases, through trenchant criticisms! My personal interlocutors know who they are and their influence is clear in the text and references.
I do want to mention eight sources of continuing inspiration: Nicos Poulantzas, whom I met only once, but to whose work I return regularly, for fresh insights and stimulation; Alex Demirović, who is a tireless and enthusiastic source of critical intelligence and theoretical wisdom; Joachim Hirsch, who has produced some of the best historical materialist analyses of the state and applied them critically to Germany; Jupp Esser, who emphasized the importance of rigorous empirical testing of state-theoretical claims; Martin Jones, who introduced me to economic and political geography, who has been a supportive co-author and interlocutor over many years, and whose influence is evident in chapter 5 and throughout; Ulrich Brand, who reminds me that theoretical engagement can be combined with social and political activism; Michael Brie, who welcomed me at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin and emphasized the importance of an emancipatory unity of theory and practice; and, last but not least, Ngai-Ling Sum, with whom I have been elaborating a cultural turn in political economy with implications for the state as well as for economic analysis.
Special thanks are also due to Louise Knight and Pascal Porcheron at Polity Press for gently nudging and steering this book through the final stages of writing to submission of the final version in 2015. The final version of the text benefited from comments by Colin Hay and three anonymous referees and the knowledgeable and highly professional copy-editing of Manuela Tecusan.
The writing of this book was undertaken in part during a Professorial Research Fellowship funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council, 2011–2014, under grant RES-051-27-0303. Neither the ESRC nor the friends and colleagues named above are responsible, of course, for errors and omissions in this text. Indeed, the usual disclaimers apply with unusual force.
I dedicate this book to the memory of Jupp Esser, an inspiring colleague, critical interlocutor, and dear friend, who died too soon from cancer in 2010.
Den Haag
21 March 2015
Tables
1.1 Six approaches to the analysis of the state
2.1 Cumulative genesis of the modern state
2.2 Aspects of the traditional three-element theory
3.1 Six dimensions of the state and their crisis tendencies
4.1 Some key features of the capitalist type of state
4.2 Capitalist type of state versus state in capitalist society
5.1 Four aspects of sociospatiality
5.2 Towards a multidimensional analysis of sociospatiality
6.1 A typology of imagined political communities linked to nation-states
7.1 Modes of governance
7.2 Second-order governance
8.1 Three trends and counter-trends in state transformation
9.1 Normal states and exceptional regimes
Abbreviations
1Introduction
The ‘modern state’ has been part of the political landscape for several centuries, if sometimes only faintly visible on its horizon. Yet social scientific interest has waxed and waned, its foci have shifted, and approaches vary with fad and fashion. Indeed, here as in other fields, it seems that social scientists do not so much solve problems as get bored with them. Interest revives when another generation of scholars or another epistemic community finds new potential in older theories, encounters new problems and research opportunities, or adopts insights, metaphors, or paradigms from other schools or disciplines. In this spirit, my analysis aims to show the continued relevance of theoretical work on states and state power and the need to renew state theory as its referents change. This is reflected in five related tasks that are pursued in part sequentially and in part iteratively, at different places in this book. Limitations of space meant that not all of these tasks are pursued to the same extent or with the same intensity, but I hope to have written enough about each of them to demonstrate their respective heuristic values and the benefits of combining them.
The first, initially question-begging, task is to outline six strategies for analysing states and state power that, if we combine them to exploit their respective strengths, might offer a powerful heuristic for addressing the complexities of these topics. This does not commit me to developing a general and transhistorical theory of the state – an ambition that I have long rejected for reasons given elsewhere (Jessop 1982: 211–13). It does imply support for (meta)theoretical, epistemological, and methodological pluralism in analysing the state and careful consideration of the most appropriate entry points and standpoints in particular theoretical and practical contexts.
The second, provisionally question-answering, task is to define the state in ways that capture its distinctiveness as a form of political organization and support analyses of its institutional and spatiotemporal variability. Starting from the continental European tradition of state theory, which highlights three core elements of the modern state, I add a fourth one: the sources of its legitimation in state projects. These four elements can be extended and qualified for diverse theoretical and practical purposes. The revised approach also provides a basis for exploring the multiple pasts and presents of the state and for speculating about possible futures.
The third, briefer, task is to consider the historical semantics of the modern state, that is, the emergence and consolidation of a specialized vocabulary to describe the state – and indeed its role in constituting, consolidating, reproducing, and guiding the various institutions, modes of calculation, practices, and imaginaries, whether in high politics or in everyday life, referred to in this semantic framework. This task matters, even if one maintains that the state, regarded as a form of political organization, preceded its own explicit conceptualization in terms of statehood. The task involves more than examining the history of ideas, intellectual history, or the history of political thought: it extends to the links between semantic change and societal transformation and, in this context, to contestation over the nature and purposes of the state. It also invites critical reflection on the language used to describe state-like political authority before the semantics of the state emerged and on the societal changes that have prompted the semantics of governance and meta-governance to describe emergent political institutions and practices that are less territorially focused than their statal counterparts. The historical semantics of the state also poses questions about the Eurocentric nature of state theory and, on this basis, about the relevance of (Eurocentric) state theory to territorially organized forms of political authority beyond the centres of European state formation, especially before the rulers and subjects of these other political regimes encountered the representatives of European states – as plunderers, traders, explorers, missionaries, diplomats, conquerors, or in some other guise. Such reflections can help reveal the historical specificity of different forms of political organization, political regime, and types of state.
The fourth task, building on the first three but influencing their pursuit, is to offer some theoretically informed reflections on key aspects of the state and state power, especially in advanced capitalist regimes in the world market. This focus reflects my interests and expertise and is not meant to prioritize such states ontologically or normatively – especially as they belong to a world of states marked by other forms of domination. This said, profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation is the dominant principle of societal organization in world society, and this does warrant focusing on capitalist features of the modern state without implying that this is the only useful entry point (see Jessop 1990, 2002, 2011, 2015a). The results of the other tasks, together with the illustrative force of this exercise, should offer readers concepts and ideas for studying other kinds of state and state power from a strategic–relational perspective.
The fifth task, pursued in most chapters, is to indicate how to subject the state, state power, state semantics, claims to legitimacy, and indeed state theory itself to critiques of their imbrication in domination and ideology. Rejecting views of the state as a neutral instrument or benevolent agent, this task requires critical engagement with the asymmetries of authority and domination inscribed in the state – seen as a form of political organization – and in its instantiations in political regimes; with its structural and strategic role in reproducing wider patterns of exploitation, oppression, and domination at particular times and in particular places; and with the scope for challenging, modifying, or overturning these asymmetries and their effects. Critique should not be limited to rogue, pariah, predatory, violent, totalitarian, or authoritarian states but extend to those conventionally described as benevolent liberal democratic regimes. There is no domination in general and no general form of domination. Forms of domination vary across social fields (including nature–society relations) and intersect with each other (see chapter 4). So one should clarify which modes of domination are being critiqued.
The histories of states and state systems are closely connected to those of political philosophy, normative political theory, and accounts of geopolitics and geoeconomics, as well as to theoretical inquiries into actual (inter)state systems. Indeed, all five fields of intellection, with their different rationales and rationalities, have figured strongly in state formation and transformation. Conversely, the changing form and functions of (inter)state systems have prompted shifts, gradual or ruptural, in the leading forms and styles of philosophical, normative, and theoretical reflection on the state. So we should approach these five fields as contested terrains that both shape and reflect changes in the state apparatus and state power. Indeed state authorities are rarely, if ever, indifferent to political philosophies, political theories, and state theories. They tend to discriminate among them (and among their organic intellectuals, their other supporters, and their institutional bases), promote those that conflict least with currently preferred state traditions and projects, and refute, marginalize, or oppress the ones they fear. Monitoring and managing dissent matters as much as shaping consent. Thus one approach to a history of the state might study its coevolution with ideational change (whether one or the other is leading or lagging). There are many examples of this approach in the literature – whether idealist, institutionalist, or materialist in approach. The present work is not one of them. But it will engage at times with philosophical positions, normative political theories, and policy paradigms that have shaped the state and state power.
Although this book does not focus on the history of state theory, some brief remarks are in order. The origins of the ‘modern state’ and state system were associated with many competing philosophical reflections on this innovation (think of Jean Bodin, Emmerich de Vattel, Hugo Grotius, Francesco Guicciardini, G. W. F. Hegel, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Samuel Pufendorf, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau)1 – reflections that were also in part performative, that is, contributed to the shaping of the institution on which they were reflecting. Likewise, the consolidation of the state in the nineteenth century was linked with influential work in state theory, law, political science, policy science, and public administration. The 1920s and 1930s saw another round of intense engagement with the changing forms and functions, and indeed crisis, of the liberal state – along with theories, justifications, and critiques of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. A similar revival in state and regime theory occurred in the west in the immediate postwar period (especially in relation to postwar reconstruction in Europe) and, again, in the 1970s and 1980s, being prompted partly by crises in the resulting postwar form of the state, partly by interest in state building in the wake of decolonization, and partly by interest in export-oriented developmental states in East Asia.
After a fallow period in the 1990s, the general form and functions of states returned to the top of the theoretical and political agenda. The crisis of the national state in so-called late modern societies (even as it became more important in state- and nation-building efforts after the Soviet bloc collapsed) led to new state-theoretical concerns and efforts to develop alternative accounts of politics that looked beyond the institutions of the sovereign state. Attention turned from the contrast between capitalism and socialism and their respective state forms to varieties of capitalism and political regimes; from the national state and the nation-state to global–local dialectics and multilevel governance; and from the state's relative autonomy or class character to the micro-physics of power and identity politics. More recently, the North Atlantic and Eurozone financial and economic crises, the state's role in crisis management, and serious fiscal and sovereign debt crises have revived interest in the limits of state power and in the challenges of global governance. Another stimulus has been state failure and so-called rogue states, notably in the Middle East and North Africa, together with interest in the distinctive features of Arab or Islamic states, including recently the Islamic caliphate.
The range of literature relevant to the state is immense and impossible for one scholar to survey, let alone master. This book touches on many issues and draws on many disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. Conceptual history and historical semantics, which differ in terms of their respective concern with (1) the genealogy and pragmatic use of concepts or (2) the historical relation between new or changing concepts and societal transformation, are crucial sources for exploring the state idea or imaginary (e.g., Bartelson 1995; Koselleck 1985; Palonen 2006; Skinner 1989; on these two approaches, see Sum and Jessop 2013). I also draw on insights from critical discourse analysis, which has much to offer for an Ideologiekritik. My analyses of the core questions about statehood as a form of domination draw heavily on the continental European tradition of state theory and its revival in Marxist guise in the 1970s and 1980s. This is supplemented by juridico-political scholarship and work in public administration, political economy, and international relations. For issues of historical constitution, major reference points are archaeology, anthropology, historical institutionalism, and historiography. More recent changes in the state, especially when it is viewed as an ensemble of forms of government and governance, are illuminated by studies of the micro-physics of power, governmentality, and statecraft. The list could be continued; but the full range of sources will become evident in due course.
The range of sources needed to address the state illustrates three key claims advanced below. First, there can be no general, let alone transhistorical, theory of the state – especially if this is understood as a single theory that aspires to comprehend and explain the origins, development, and determinations of the state without reference to other kinds of inquiry. Second, as a complex political association, apparatus, dispositif, ensemble, or assemblage (language varies) linked to a wider set of social relations, the state system can be studied from many theoretical entry points and political standpoints (on standpoints, see Lukács 1971; Althusser 2006; Hartman 1979; Harding 1991, 2003; D. E. Smith 1990; Calhoun 1995). Indeed there is intellectual value in analysing the state idea, the state and interstate system, and state power from different, albeit commensurable, theoretical perspectives – as well as in studying the phenomenology of state power as experienced from different subject positions. Third, despite tendencies to reify the state system as standing outside and above society, this system must be related sooner or later to the world society in which states are embedded. This poses an interesting series of part–whole paradoxes (chapter 3).
In this context I suggest that state formation and the state system can be, and have been, analysed from at least six perspectives (see Table 1.1). Adopting one or more of these as appropriate for specific theoretical or practical purposes reveals the complexity of the state as a polymorphous institutional ensemble, insofar as different viewpoints reveal different facets of the state and state power. In addition, each perspective has its specific blind spot, which prevents us from seeing what we cannot see from it. So combining commensurable perspectives allows a more complex analysis, which may put apparently contradictory statements about the state into a more comprehensive analytical schema that reveals how the truth value of observations and statements depends on the contexts in which they are made (on the significance of the intersecting ‘contextures’ of such observations, see Günther 1973). These themes also bear on the polymorphic or polymorphous nature of the state (see chapter 2).
Table 1.1 Six approaches to the analysis of the state
The first perspective is that of the ‘historical constitution’ of the state, studied in terms of path-dependent histories or genealogies of particular parts of the state. Chapter 5 adopts this approach in exploring the passage from simple and complex chiefdoms to early forms of state and empire. This perspective can also be deployed to study the development and integration of such key components of the modern state as a standing army, a modern tax system, a rational bureaucracy, the rule of law, parliament, universal suffrage, citizenship rights, and recognition by other states.2 And, relatedly, it can be used when considering why the modern state, rather than other forms of political organization, was frequently selected and finally retained as the dominant political form, as feudalism decomposed or was overthrown (Tilly 1975; Spruyt 1993).
Second, another body of work addresses what is sometimes termed the state's ‘formal constitution’, that is, its character as a distinctive form of social relations. Whereas historical constitution requires a diachronic approach, a more synchronic one is needed to address the formal constitution of the state. At stake here is the complementarity – sometimes even isomorphism – among features of a given type of state (on the difference between isomorphism and complementarity, see Amable 2009; Crouch 2005). This approach is more suited to the modern state insofar as the latter is clearly demarcated from other institutional orders and can be studied on its own terms rather than as a socially embedded or intertwined part of a more complex, multifaceted societal order. Thus one might study how the modern state gets formally separated (disembedded) from other spheres of society, acquires its own political rationale (raison d'état) and modus operandi, and claims a distinctive constitutional legitimation that is based on adherence to its own political procedures rather than on values such as divine right or natural law. Chapters 3 and 4 adopt this approach; but all chapters emphasize that states are polymorphic, displaying different forms depending on changing principles of societal organization or on specific challenges and conjunctures – if not on both (for further discussion of polymorphy, see chapter 2).
Third, there are diverse institutionalist approaches to the state, all of which assume that somehow ‘institutions matter’. These approaches are informed by a broad but underspecified view according to which institutions involve complexes of social practices that (1) are regularly repeated; (2) are linked to defined roles and social relations; (3) are associated with specific forms of discourse, symbolic media, or modes of communication; (4) are sanctioned and maintained by social norms; and (5) have major significance for social order. The term ‘institution’ is also used to denote organizations or social bodies that have major significance for the wider society and act in a quasi-corporate manner. In addition to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, other examples are transnational firms, banks, peak organizations of capital and labour, and established religious faiths. While rational choice paradigms are ignored in what follows,3 historical, network, organizational, sociological, and ideational (also known as constructivist or discursive) institutionalisms all provide useful insights into the state and politics. In addition to studying particular institutions or institutional assemblages, institutionalist work has extended to other topics. These include differences in individual institutional forms, interinstitutional configurations, institutional histories, orders or functional systems, institutional isomorphism or complementarity, and the design and governance of institutions and their relations (on types of institutionalism in politics, see Hall and Taylor 1996; for a critical review of institutionalisms, including ideational institutionalism, see Sum and Jessop 2013: 33–71).
Fourth, agent-centred institutionalism studies how social forces make history – their own and that of others – in specific institutional contexts. These studies pursue more detailed analysis of specific institutional arrangements and consider the scope they give for various kinds of individual and collective agent to make a difference. In dealing with actors, agent-centred institutional theorists focus on complex actors rather than on individuals; on actors' interests, identities, action orientations, and resources in specific actor constellations rather than in generic, context-free terms; and on different forms of interaction (e.g., negotiation, multilevel decision-making, or hierarchical command). This approach eschews the methodological individualism that starts from individual actors, their motives and behaviour; and rejects functionalist and structuralist accounts that privilege the alleged functions of institutions or the inevitable constraints imposed by specific structural configurations. It focuses instead on the emergent logics and dynamics of different institutional orders or functional subsystems and on the associated asymmetrical opportunities they grant different actors in specific interaction fields, including multilevel, multisite interactions or multispatial arenas. This approach is similar to the strategic–relational approach (chapter 3) and has influenced my accounts of governance, state failure, and normal and exceptional states (chapters 7 and 9). It differs from (neo)pluralist traditions, which are far more agent-centred and pay less attention to, even if recognizing, institutions as sources of constraints and opportunities. (For critiques of pluralism, see Connolly 1969; for a critical defence of this paradigm, see M. J. Smith 1990; for an account of neopluralism oriented to an emerging world politics rather than national states, see Cerny 2010.)4
Fifth, figurational analyses focus on ‘state-civil society’ relations, broadly interpreted, and aim to locate state formation within wider historical developments. Exemplary here are Shmuel Eisenstadt's (1963) work on the rise and fall of bureaucratic empires, Norbert Elias's (1982) studies on the very longue durée dynamics of state and civilization, including their disintegration and integration phases, Wim Blockmans's (1978) study of medieval systems of representation. Stein Rokkan's (1999) research on European state formation over the last 400–500 years, and Samuel Finer's (1997a, 1997b, 1997c) magisterial 3-volume study of the history of government. Michael Mann's massive and wide-ranging project on the history of social power also belongs here (1986, 1996, 2012a, and 2012b). This approach also has affinities with historical institutionalism. Certain versions of the figurational approach and historical institutionalism inform some of the arguments below.
Sixth, conceptual history and historical semantics have been used to analyse the emergence of the state idea, the consolidation of the state concept (and cognate terminology) in the early modern period, the spread of the state idea from Western Europe, and the diverse political imaginaries, state projects, and hegemonic visions that shape the contest for state power within and beyond the state. Relatedly, critical discourse analysis explores how discourse(s) shape the state and orient action towards it. Broad economic and political visions as well as specific policy paradigms are relevant here. Given the multiplicity of competing visions (at most we find a temporarily dominant or hegemonic discourse) that orient the actions of political forces, this reinforces the view of the state as a polyvalent, polycontextual ensemble. This is especially clear when we consider the many scales and sites on which the state is said to operate; and thereby it highlights once again problems of the institutional integration of the state and of the distribution of state functions and powers.
Following this short introduction, Part I addresses some basic theoretical and methodological issues. It contains three chapters. Chapter 2 explores the concept of the state and opts for a seemingly conventional ‘three-element’ approach oriented to the relationship between a state's territory, apparatus, and population, as this is modified by the introduction of a fourth element, namely the ‘idea of the state’ or the state project, which defines the nature and purposes of state action. Chapter 3 expands on the claim that the state is not a subject or a thing but a social relation. This elliptical statement refocuses attention from the elements of the state to state power. In strategic–relational terms, state power is an institutionally and discursively mediated condensation (a reflection and a refraction) of a changing balance of forces that seek to influence the forms, purposes, and content of polity, politics, and policy. The chapter then provides a heuristic schema for exploring the state and state power and for locating them both in their wider natural and social context. In terms of the four-element theory, this chapter is mainly concerned with the state apparatus and the idea of the state. Chapter 4 provides some general comments on power, interests, and domination and relates them to one important dimension of domination, namely the relation between class power and state power. It challenges the conventional interpretation of this question and offers an alternative, strategic–relational account that also supports a fruitful distinction between the capitalist type of state and the state in capitalist societies and re-emphasizes the polymorphic nature of the state.
Part II comprises three shorter chapters that expand upon and supplement earlier arguments about the four elements of statehood, its formal configuration, and its substantive nature. Chapter 5 examines the sociospatial organization of the state, going beyond the issue of territoriality, narrowly conceived. It addresses two issues. It first considers the genealogy of the state in terms of primary state formation, that is, those widely dispersed cases where a ‘state’ emerged for the first time through the territorialization of political power. Second, it comments, more briefly, on the complexities of secondary state formation. And, third, it looks beyond the obvious link between territoriality and statehood (one of its four elements) to consider statehood in terms of place, scale, and network and sociospatiality more generally. Chapter 6 turns from the territorial aspect to another element of statehood, namely the state's population. It distinguishes the national state and the nation-state, identifies types of nationhood as imagined communities, and explores the relevance of civil society to the state and to state power. Chapter 7 returns to the topic of the state apparatus and state power in the form of a relation between government and governance. This approach has two aims. On the one hand, it provides a less form-centred account of the state by exploring the modalities of the exercise of state power through the prism of its role in moderating and modulating different forms of governance. And, on the other hand, it considers the specific features of different modes of governance, their tendencies to fail, and the role of the state in dealing with problems of governance failure, either on its own initiative or as an addressee of the last resort that is called upon to act by other social forces.
Part III also comprises three chapters, concerned this time with the recent and current history of the state and with alternative (present) futures. Chapter 8 examines the changing relation between the world market and the world of states and considers whether globalization undermines the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states. It argues that this topic is poorly conceived and that, once reformulated, it could be explored with interesting results that would be based on the heuristic theoretical framework developed here. Chapter 9 examines the elective affinities between capitalism and liberal democracy, considers the rise of authoritarian statism, and asks whether the state of exception is becoming the ‘new normal’. Chapter 10 closes the book with some comments on missing links and open questions; it also identifies some broad macro-trends that are likely to shape the future of the state in the next few decades.
Notes
1.
Similar philosophical reflections have accompanied the formation of other kinds of state across time–space, not only in Europe but elsewhere.
2.
Major studies include the classical accounts of Max Weber (1978), Otto Hintze (1975), and Otto Brunner (1992); and, more recently, Perry Anderson (1974a, 1974b), Ernest Barker (1966), Robert Bonney (1995), Samuel Finer (1997b, 1997c), Heidi Gerstenberger (2008), Michael Mann (1986, 1996), Gianfranco Poggi (1978), James Strayer (1970), and Charles Tilly (1992).
3.
Green and Shapiro (1996) provide a useful critique of rational choice approaches.
4.
Pluralism is also a distinctive normative tradition in political theory, which I do not discuss here; but see, for example, Connolly 1983, 2005; and Wissenburg 2009.
Part IThe State as Concept, Relation, and Reality
2The Concept of the State
It is hard – some claim impossible – to give a clear definition of the state when this form of political organization has so long a history, assumes so many forms, and changes so often. These issues call into question the descriptive validity and normative power of the state idea and, especially, invites questions as to whether it obfuscates, fetishizes, or mystifies political power. Even assuming there is an ‘it’ to which state theory refers is problematic. This challenge is not unique to the state and state power. It applies to other social phenomena, such as the family, law, money, capital as a social relation, and religion. Indeed the German nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that ‘[a]ll concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined’ (1994: 53). Nietzsche was discussing punishment (itself linked, of course, to the state), but his remark highlights the wider problem of defining a concept with no fixed referent. This certainly holds for the moving target comprised by states and the interstate system. The problem is compounded when the moving target or shifting referent is essentially contested, in other words raises important theoretical and normative questions. This calls for a comparative historical and dynamic analysis of the state and state power – an analysis that should be sensitive to the contested nature of its subject.
Without engaging directly with Nietzsche's observation, the Romanian existentialist writer Emil Cioran seems to offer another response to this definitional challenge. He remarked that ‘we define only out of despair, we must have a formula…to give a façade to the void’ (Cioran 1975: 48). On this reading, it is our impotent and disempowering incomprehension of the state – even an alleged fundamental inability to establish whether ‘the state’ really exists or not – that forces us to give a definition in order to ‘get on’ with analysing so-called ‘affairs of state’ or, again, to ‘go on’ in a world where political practice is concerned with the exercise of state power.
A different response is indicated by the British historical sociologist Philip Abrams, who, without engaging directly or indirectly with Cioran, seems to turn his claim on its head. He suggests that, if the state is a façade (Abrams calls it a ‘mask’), this does not disguise a void but prevents us from seeing the true and awful reality of political practice. A false belief in the existence of the state as the deep structure of political life masks the actual role of substantive political institutions and practices in securing domination (Abrams 1988; more detail below).
Of these contrasting views on the challenges that face state theory – namely that it would define the indefinable, hide a void, or unmask what actually exists – the last one comes closest to the position developed below. Once we recognize rather than ignore the messy, polymorphic, and polycontextual features of the state as a special kind of social relation, we need not despair about the apparent intractability of the state concept. Indeed, chapter 3 offers a perspective (the ‘strategic–relational approach’) that aims to meet the challenge of analysing the state, its restructuring, its strategic reorientation, and its nature as a stake in social conflicts.
Notes on the Difficulties of Studying the State1
The state has been studied from many entry points and standpoints. This gives its analysis the contested qualities for which it is renowned (or notorious, depending on one's perspective). It is a complex ensemble (or, as some scholars put it, assemblage) of institutions, organizations, and interactions involved in the exercise of political leadership and in the implementation of decisions that are, in principle, collectively binding on its political subjects. These institutions, organizations, and interactions have varying spatiotemporal extensions and horizons of action and mobilize a range of state capacities and other resources in pursuit of state objectives. These complexities have led some analysts to focus on particular cases and ignore general questions about statehood and state power. Indeed, many theorists have rejected the notion of the state as nebulous or vapid and have proposed to replace it by focusing on politics as a functional system, oriented to the authoritative allocation of values or to collective goal attainment (Almond 1960; Easton 1965; Parsons 1969). Others have focused on the micro-foundations of political relations, either in individual orientations and actions (e.g., Coleman 1990; Elster 1982) or in specific microcontexts (Foucault 1980), sidestepping the question of whether political behaviour has any systematic emergent properties that merit inquiry in their own right. Neither approach fully escapes the need to engage with the state. For a consistent interest in politics requires at least some attention to the polity, politics, and policy (see Heidenheimer 1986 and, for global politics, Lipschutz 2005). The ‘polity’ – a word formed on the Greek politeia – is the institutional matrix that establishes a distinctive terrain, realm, domain, field, or region of specifically political actions (Weber 1978, 1994; Palonen 2006). This is equivalent to statehood in its inclusive sense, as explored here and in chapters 3, 7 and 9. Further, while the polity offers a rather static, spatial referent, politics is inherently dynamic, open-ended, and heterogeneous. It refers to the forms, aims, and objects of political practices. It includes contention over the architecture of the state and wider political sphere, together with struggles occurring outside the state that modify political calculation or views on the purposes of state power (or both). Politics in turn constrains the set of feasible policies – that is, policymaking as an art of the possible. Thus, if politics concerns the overall strategic direction of the state and its division of ‘policy labour’, policy denotes specific fields of state intervention and abstention, decisions and nondecisions, and so on. This said, some policies transform politics (witness the depoliticizing role of neoliberal policies, or the repoliticizing effects of the feminist claim that the personal is political) and reshape political practices, for instance by changing the balance of forces and stimulating new political claims and movements (on depoliticization, see Jessop 2014b).
In addressing this conceptual morass, Philip Abrams (1988) argued for another approach. He identified three ways to thematize the state, indicating that one of these is doubly misleading and two are potentially useful in its analysis. These three ways can be summarized as follows:
a reified
account of the state
2
as a substantial unitary entity, agent, function, or relation that is separated from the rest of society and operates as the essential but hidden structuring mechanism of political life;
the
state system
3
as the real, palpable nexus of institutions, agencies, and practices that is more or less extensive, more or less connected with economic and other social relations, and, at best, only ever relatively unified;
the
state idea
as an explicit ideological force (
idée-force
) rooted in the collective misrepresentation – masking – of political and economic domination in capitalist societies in ways that legitimate subjection thereto.
Abrams argues that the phantasmagorical4 notion of the state as a unitary entity obscures the inevitable disunity of the actually existing state system as a fragmentary and fragile arrangement of institutionalized political power. It also blocks many, if not most, people from realizing their ideological captivity to the state idea – which, in quasi-Hegelian terms, presents the state as the disinterested servant of the common interest. So the challenge for social scientists is to demystify the state, to unmask it radically, to prove that the state as a substantial, unitary entity does not ‘always already’ exist. This opens space to study efforts by state personnel and others to impose some provisional, temporary, and unstable unity on the actually existing state system and to create relative coherence across official policies in diverse fields of action. It also opens space, and calls for, a critique of the state idea and its fetishistic hold over the protagonists on the political stage. Indeed, only when we abandon the reified notion of ‘the state’ can we begin serious study of the state system in all its messy complexity and undertake a serious critique of different state ideas (Abrams 1988: 82). Only then can we hope to transcend the misrecognition of the state in the ‘state idea’ and to examine the state as it actually exists and operates, on its own terms and in its wider political and social contexts.
This conclusion indicates the value of case studies that focus on the development of the notion of the state and specific state ideas – ideas not limited to that of the state as a disinterested servant – in specific historical contexts. Such exercises in intellectual genealogy are based on semantic history or, more loosely, the history of political thought. For example, why did one particular word or concept get selected from many, in a particular period, to describe (and perhaps to contribute to constituting) a particular historical apparatus, namely the modern state? Put differently, why did ‘state’ (and etymological equivalents such as estado, état, Staat, or stato) become the accepted term to describe a specific type of government in Western Europe and its subsequent diffusion – why ‘state’ rather than competing terms such as ‘regnum’, ‘body politic’, ‘res publica’, ‘monarchia’, ‘realm’, ‘nation’, ‘civil society’, or ‘commonwealth’? Conversely, why did the historically specific semantics of the ‘state’ lag so many centuries, indeed millennia, behind the historical process of state formation? Some social scientists argue that states or state-like assemblages did not exist before the modern concept or form of the state. For example, Richard Lachmann, a historical sociologist, places its origins about 500 years ago, linking it to the rise of capitalism in Europe (Lachmann 2010: viii). Martin van Creveld, a military historian, dates its rise to the period 1300–1648 and its decline to a period starting in 1975: in the intervening three centuries the state would have operated as a distinct sovereign, a territorial ‘corporation’ with a clear identity, separate from its personnel, and would have sought to protect its frontiers, national interests, and the citizens within its territory, achieving its apotheosis in two world wars and then declining as it ceded power to other organizations or simply collapsed (van Creveld 1999). Both scholars argue that, while tribes, chiefdoms, city-states, empires, and theocracies existed, few consolidated states existed before these scholars' preferred date. Such arguments remove much of human history from the purview of state theory and research, except as prehistory. (For a critique of such claims, based on a 5,200-year perspective on government and state formation but conceding the late rise of modern states in 1776 and of national states with clear frontiers in 1815, see Finer 1997a: 1–15, 31, 99–103, and passim; also, with a wider geographical scope, Breuer 2014: 9–38.)
This problem is also reflected in state theory and political sociology in the common if ill-specified distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ states. An alternative to this often Eurocentric approach is to focus on the modalities of the territorialization of political power and to explore alternative political imaginaries and descriptions of precursors to the modern state. More generally, I argue that what traverses these diverse institutional and organizational forms and reveals their shared state-like qualities are efforts to establish, exercise, and consolidate political power over the population of a specific territory – efforts that began well before the idea of the modern state emerged but that eventually led to the contingent triumph of this state form over others, which were at one time historically feasible (see also chapters 5 and 10).
The analytical approach described in the preceding paragraph is quite different from the study of the historical constitution, modification, and breakdown of states as well as from the study of their formal constitution, that is, of the development of relatively coherent, complementary, and reproducible state forms. The approach requires historical and comparative case studies from particular periods and particular spaces or places; and, insofar as this is empirically and theoretically possible, it requires placing these episodes and sequences in a world-historical perspective oriented to changing state and interstate systems. Such an approach can also encompass a figurational analysis that combines historical constitution, formal constitution, and associated state ideas. In turn, this analysis can provide the basis for well-grounded critiques of ideology and domination.
With these issues in mind, the present chapter introduces some definitions of the state (or its core features) taken from different theoretical traditions. It also argues that the state and the political system are parts of broader sets of social relations and cannot be adequately understood and explained without reference to their embedding in these wider arrangements. Sovereign states do not exist in majestic isolation, overseeing the rest of society, but are closely linked to other institutional orders (notably the economic and the legal systems) and to their respective ‘civil societies’ (the scare quotes signal the analogous difficulties of defining civil society, its equally contested nature, and the utopian expectations often invested in it). This relation varies greatly in and across states. Indeed, whatever the degree of the state's autonomy from other orders, the exercise and impact of state power (or, better, state powers) are activated through changing sets of politicians and state officials located in specific parts of the state apparatus, in specific conjunctures, and reflect the prevailing balance of forces, as it obtains beyond as well as within the state (chapter 3). It follows that the state's structural powers and capacities cannot be fully grasped by focusing on the state alone and, unsurprisingly, different social theories are associated with different accounts of the state and state power.
So What Is the State?
As hinted above, this innocuous-sounding question hides a serious challenge to students of the state. Some theorists deny the state's very existence (or, at least, the possibility and value of studying it), but most still accept that states (or, following Abrams, state systems and, a fortiori, interstate systems) are real and provide a feasible and valid research focus. Beyond this broad agreement, however, we find conceptual anarchy. Key questions include: Is the state best defined by its legal form, coercive capacities, institutional composition and boundaries, internal operations and modes of calculation, declared aims, functions for the broader society, or sovereign place in the international system? Is it a thing, a subject, a social relation, or a construct that helps to orient political action? Is stateness a variable and, if so, what are its central dimensions? What is the relation between the state and law, the state and politics, the state and civil society, the public and the private, state power and micropower relations? Is the state best studied in isolation; as part of the political system; or as one element in a broader social formation, or even in world society? Do states have territorial and temporal sovereignty or institutional, decisional, or operational autonomy and, if so, what are the sources and limits of this sovereignty or autonomy?
Everyday language is of little help here. It sometimes depicts the state as a subject – not in a specific juridical sense, for example as a persona ficta (artificial person), personne morale, enduring ‘corporation sole’, and so forth – but in an interpellative sense, that is, in terms of how the state is ‘hailed’: addressed or discussed as if it were an individual person or a collective subject endowed with consciousness, will, and agency (on interpellation, see Althusser 1971). Thus it is said that the state does, or should do, this or that – or should stop doing it. In similar vein, albeit at great remove from common sense, realist international relations theory treats the state as a unitary actor in world politics, as if it had a mind and interests of its own (e.g., Morgenthau 1954; Waltz 1979). Equally, the state is sometimes discussed as a thing-like instrument, machine, engine, ship (of state), cybernetic or regulatory device – to be used, driven, activated, steered, monitored, or modulated by a given economic class, social stratum, political party, official caste, or other agents, with a view to advancing its own projects, interests, or values. Yet how, if at all, could the state act as if it were a unified subject, and what could constitute its unity as a ‘thing’? Coherent answers are hard to find because the state's referents vary so widely across times, places, and contexts as well as with the forces acting towards the state, the situations in which ‘it’ acts, and so on.
First, insofar as the state is treated as a subject, in what does its subjectivity reside? In premodern states, this could be answered, perhaps too easily, in terms of the person of the ruler. This is reflected in the early modern statement attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Louis XIV of France: L'État c'est moi (‘I am the state’). Opinions differ as to whether he said this on his deathbed or when deputies in the French parliament challenged the authority of his edicts. But, in the former case, it is also reported that he said: Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours (‘I am leaving but the state shall remain forever’). Interestingly, whereas the first statement, if made, signifies the embodiment of the state in the person of the king, the second denotes its impersonal character, separate from any single individual.
This separation was reflected in the growing use of the concept of the state to describe an enduring, impersonal apparatus responsible for producing a good ‘state of affairs’ in the territory controlled by that apparatus (Boldt et al. 1992; Luhmann 1989; Skinner 2009). The state concept signified the historical contrast between (1) the identification of the polity with a specific personage, agency, or institution (polis, civitas, regnum, imperium, etc.) and (2) the more abstract character of political rule in modern, functionally differentiated societies. In such societies the political system, with the state at its centre, is institutionally and operationally disembedded from the wider society and the state takes the form of an impersonal power that is separate from those who exercise power in the name of the state and, at a later stage, separate from the parties or political alliances that form the government from time to time. In the fifteenth century the European ‘mirror of princes’ literature revealed a semantic slippage between status, estate, and state. Such treatises advised rulers how to maintain their own status, maintain a peaceful state of affairs in their dominium, and maintain a functioning state apparatus (Skinner 1989; Viroli 1992). In turn, the natural law tradition that justified absolutism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made a sharper distinction between the newly emerging single, supreme sovereign authority, those who held office in that state and exercised power on its behalf, and the people over whom sovereign authority was exercised, whether in their own name or not. In addition, since a state of peace occurs in a given territorial realm, the state apparatus that secures peace comes to signify dominance over the territory itself. In short, in contrast to the different connotations of the earlier plurality of competing terms, the semantics of the state highlighted the distinctive features of this new form of territorialization of political power. Further, as the political system itself grew more complex internally, juridico-political discourse also became more complex within the framework of constitutional, administrative, and public law (Luhmann 1989: 107–8; Nettl 1968; Loughlin 2014). And, finally, once this new state lexicon emerged it started to play a key role in the institutional integration and strategic orientation of the state (see Jessop 1990: 347–9).
The process of political institutionalization is reflected in the contrast between Louis XIV's remark in the seventeenth century that he embodied the state, L'État, c'est moi, and the claim to be ‘the first servant of the state’ made in the eighteenth century by the Prussian Emperor Frederick II, who thereby sought to justify his position through deeds rather than divine right (Brubaker 1992: 58). An associated theme is that of lèse majesté: a slight or injury to the person of the sovereign and his/her immediate family, or even to the heads of other states. This idea survives in some constitutions (e.g., of Denmark, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Thailand) and such slights or injuries (real or imagined) have met with punishment in dictatorships identified with a leading personality (e.g., Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Moammar Qaddafi, Kim Il-jun) or with a tight-knit high command (e.g., Myanmar's military junta). It can also extend to attacks on state symbols, for instance by burning a national flag or by counterfeiting coins. With the rise of the modern state, however, authority becomes more impersonal and its ‘personality’ is seen as a legal fiction. In turn, lèse majesté is absorbed into the crime of sedition against the government (as opposed to treason against the state and its people). This impersonal character underpins the continuity of the contracts and obligations of the state as well as the authority of individuals to act in its name, especially when they hold a defined office in a (quasi-)constitutional document.
