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The Nature of the State (Political Science)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The state is the quintessential modern political institution. What has been referred to variously as “the modern state,” “the nation-state,” “the constitutional state,” or “the bureaucratic state” has existed for no longer than five centuries and no less than two. Yet, in that time, the very nature of human society has undergone monumental transformations, and states have been at the center of each change. While the relevance of states to modern society—and to modern forms of politics—is widely recognized, the precise nature of the state and state power is the subject of perennial debate. Over the course of the 20th century, the study of politics has ebbed and flowed from state-centered explanations of political phenomena to society-centered explanations, wherein the state is seen as epiphenomenal to more-microlevel processes. Passionate debates continue over whether states are more or less coherent entities capable of autonomous, directed, state-interested action, or whether they fundamentally reflect the interests of the competing groups or classes that constitute society. Is there a universal category of political organization called the state or are particular institutions associated with the state mediated through widely varying cultural practices and institutions? More contentious still are debates over the political implications of how states are defined and constructed, through language and through law, and whether these images and discourses reproduce structures of power that consistently favor certain groups at the expense of others. Finally, as goods, capital, information, and people cross the borders of territorial states with increasing ease, some scholars question whether the notion of sovereignty has become obsolete or whether new ways of organizing social power will, if they have not already, relegate territorial states to the dustbins of history. This article is organized according to a loose chronology of the major approaches to and thematic debates about the nature of the state since the early 20th century. An additional section (Conceptual Foundations) reaches back further in order to introduce some of the theoretical and conceptual forebears to a political science or sociology of the state.
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  5. General Overviews
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  7. Several overviews provide useful introductions to theories of the state. Two classics are Dyson 2009 and Vincent 1987. The former is a much more comprehensive intellectual history of the state as an idea in western European thought; the latter a history of normative political interpretations of the state. A more recent intellectual history is Nelson 2006, which makes an explicit attempt to embed the Western tradition in its social context. Marinetto 2007 and Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009 are the most up-to-date overviews, each a comparison of various approaches to the state. Michael Marinetto’s emphasis is on modern approaches to the state, spending one chapter on the classical theories before moving into post-structuralism. The authors of Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009 are more interested in comparing the classical theories to modern innovations and critiques, and so they spend more time to elaborate those foundations. Hay, et al. 2006 is an edited volume with an excellent introductory chapter, followed by thematic chapters by experts. Both Barrow 1993 and Hobson 2002 are thematic overviews. The former is dedicated to parsing the history of debates within Marxist accounts of the state; the latter, within international relations (IR), a subfield of political science.
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  9. Barrow, Clyde W. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
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  11. Dated but extensive introduction to the major Marxist theories of the state.
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  13. Dryzek, John S., and Patrick Dunleavy. Theories of the Democratic State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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  15. Survey of theories of the liberal-democratic state. Includes chapters on classical theories of the democratic state and critiques, in particular from feminist, environmental, conservative, and postmodern/post-structuralist perspectives.
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  17. Dyson, Kenneth H. F. The State Tradition in Western Europe: A Study of an Idea and Institution. ECBR Classics. Colchester, UK: ECPR Press, 2009.
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  19. Classic intellectual history and analysis of the idea of the state in Western political thought. Great comparison of British and Continental traditions. Originally published in 1980 (Oxford: Martin Robertson).
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  21. Hay, Colin, Michael Lister, and David Marsh, eds. The State: Theories and Issues. Political Analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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  23. Excellent collection of essays on historical and modern approaches to the state. Each chapter written by an expert in its respective literature. Includes a chapter on green/ecological theories of the state.
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  25. Hobson, John M. The State and International Relations. Themes in International Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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  27. Introduction to theories of the state from an IR perspective. Also serves as a short but high-quality introduction to IR theory.
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  29. Marinetto, Michael. Social Theory, the State and Modern Society: The State in Contemporary Social Thought. Theorizing Society. Maidenhead, UK: McGraw-Hill International, 2007.
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  31. Well-written and relatively current tour of the state in modern social theory. It has the advantage of being written by a single author: a narrative arc.
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  33. Nelson, Brian. The Making of the Modern State: A Theoretical Evolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  34. DOI: 10.1057/9781403983282Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  35. A concise book that integrates political, sociological, and ideological context into a historical analysis of the origins of the modern state and state theory.
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  37. Vincent, Andrew. Theories of the State. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
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  39. Well-written introduction to classical theories of the state from a political-philosophy perspective. Includes chapters on the absolutist state, (liberal) constitutional state, (Hegelian) ethical state, (Marxist) class state, and the pluralist state, with discussion of the English and American traditions of pluralism.
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  41. Conceptual Foundations
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  43. Many of the debates over the nature of the state take as points of departure concepts of the state inherited from modern political and early social theory. Many of these works were concerned with justifying the state as a particular form of political organization, and, through them, concepts and themes that continue to be featured in discussions about the state—including, especially, sovereignty, the notion of political development, and a state-society distinction—were elaborated in rigorous detail. Niccolò Machiavelli (Machiavelli 1979) is commonly credited with having first used the term “the state” in a manner consistent with how it used today. As Skinner 2009 demonstrates, how we conceive of the state depends a great deal on language inherited, and often misappropriated, from the past. Bodin 1992 introduced an early modern concept and justification of sovereignty—the notion that power in a political community should be concentrated in a supreme authority. The origins of sovereignty would later be theorized by Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes 1994), who, along with John Locke (Locke 1980) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau 2002), is included in a group collectively termed “contract theorists” of the state. Each of these philosophers was preoccupied with explaining not only the nature of this new political organization, but also its origins, which they conceived as having been borne of a social contract between individuals in a “state of nature” and a sovereign ruler. They also used the state of nature and social-contract metaphors as points of departure to justify the appropriate limits to sovereign power, an issue that would be taken up again in Schmitt 2005. Whereas classical liberals, such as Locke, conceived of the state as separate from society and, at best, a necessary evil, Georg W. F. Hegel (Hegel 1991) saw the state as the ultimate expression of human freedom—the identity of the individual and the universal will. Thus, Hegel’s idealist state poses a radical break with the classical liberal conception of the “negative” state and is the source of inspiration for the 19th-century liberal, social-democratic state. Weber 1994 is included here because Max Weber’s definition of the state is so widely cited that it provides a major point of departure for most modern debates about the nature of the state.
  44.  
  45. Bodin, Jean. On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth. Edited and translated by Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  46. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511802812Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  47. Originally published in 1576. Bodin developed the first modern concept of sovereignty, “the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth.” Sovereign power was absolute in that it was unbound by any law, and perpetual in that it continued even beyond the life of a particular ruler.
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  49. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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  51. Originally published in 1821. The state is the final end of human ethical development, through which human freedom is achieved. The state is not separate from society but is integrated organically with society, expressing its most fundamental interests. The state is also sovereign vis-à-vis other states, and, thus, the international arena is inherently competitive.
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  53. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.
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  55. Originally published in 1651. The first unambiguous theory of the modern state. To escape a state of perpetual war, individuals in a hypothetical “state of nature” would forgo natural liberty in exchange for protection by a sovereign state in the form of absolute monarchy.
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  57. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980.
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  59. Originally published in 1689. The state is the outcome of a social contract between individuals in a state of nature and is a sovereign guarantor of “life, liberty, and property.” In contrast to Hobbes, Locke argues that consent cannot be the basis of absolute rule, but only of a limited state.
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  61. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Portable Machiavelli. Edited and translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Viking Portable Library. New York: Penguin, 1979.
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  63. Credited with innovating use of the term “state” (lo stato). Debate about whether he employed “lo stato” in the modern sense of impersonal rule over a circumscribed territory or merely departed from its Latin origin meaning “status” or “condition.” See especially The Prince and The Discourses on Livy.
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  65. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses. Edited by Susan Dunn. Rethinking the Western Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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  67. Originally published in 1762. Rousseau attempts to transcend Hobbes and Locke, arguing that the sovereignty of the state must be absolute while still allowing individuals to remain free. Devises the concept of “the general will,” common to each citizen and, thus, the ultimate end of the state.
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  69. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  70. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738901.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  71. Originally published in 1922. Sovereign authority resides in the person (or institution) who, in situations of emergency, or “states of exception,” can make binding decisions for a political community. Since the sovereign also has the capacity to decide what constitutes a state of exception, Schmitt justifies a strong sovereign state.
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  73. Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 325–370.
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  75. A genealogy of “the state” in anglophone traditions of political thought reveals that there has scarcely ever been agreement on a definition of the term, and much less can it be said to have “any essence or natural boundaries.”
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  77. Weber, Max. “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.” In Weber: Political Writings. Edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, 309–331. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  79. Originally published in 1919. Provides the most widely cited definition of the state. Weber famously argued that, since there is no task that states have not attempted to perform, they must be defined in terms of the means peculiar to them. To wit, “a state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory” (pp. 310–311; italics in original).
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  81. Prewar Marxism
  82.  
  83. While Karl Marx never articulated a systematic theory of the state, in his extensive writings on society and the capitalist mode of production with his colleague Friedrich Engels, he nonetheless laid the foundations for such a theory. Arguably, they laid the foundations for more than one theory of the state (Barrow 2000), and subsequent Marxist scholarship has been preoccupied with debating the merits of each. At the core of Marxist state theory, however, is an argument that the state functions to promote the interests of the dominant class. Marx (Marx 1978a) foreshadows this stance when he argues, in contrast to Hegel, that society is the basis of the state. The instrumentalist version is evident in Engels 2010a and Marx and Engels 1978. In this formulation, the state is conceived as a tool of the dominant class, a repressive apparatus through which it is able to subordinate recalcitrant elements of the working class. Elsewhere, Marx 1978b suggests that, even while representatives of the bourgeoisie may cede the reigns of the state apparatus, the state nonetheless has a bias toward the status quo. Through new taxes, through the expansion of its bureaucracy, or through force, it operated to defend the “material order” of the capitalist system against any upheaval. Another common theme in Marxist writing regards the nature of political change and, thus, has something to say about the origins of the state as a particular form of political order. Fundamental political change, according to Marxists, occurs only when severe contradictions exist between the productive economic forces and the extant social order, out of which is spawned a new social order under the domination of an ascendant economic class. Therefore, the modern state is a particular form of organization that could only—perhaps must—emerge out of the ashes of a particular class conflict for a particular class interest (Engels 2010b). Therefore, the imperative of the proletariat must be to eclipse the state, establishing a new political order, a process that would necessarily entail violent conflict: the proletarian revolution (Marx 1978c, Lenin 1975.)
  84.  
  85. Barrow, Clyde W. “The Marx Problem in Marxian State Theory.” Science & Society 64.1 (2000): 87–118.
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  87. Arguments about what constitutes a Marxist theory of the state rely on different versions of what constitutes the Marxist canon. This is, in large part, a result of the fact that classical Marxist texts are “incomplete” and “ambiguous and often self-contradictory.” There is, therefore, a wide range of defensible interpretations of Marxist state theory.
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  89. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. Cambridge Library Collection. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010a.
  90. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511792700Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  91. Originally published in 1844. Possibly the earliest Marxian statement of what is now referred to as an “instrumentalist” theory of the state: the state is merely a tool of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie uses the state apparatus to repress subordinate-class opposition and thereby guarantee its property interests.
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  93. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin, 2010b.
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  95. Originally published in 1884. A historical-materialist theory of the origins of the state. The state emerges only at a particular point in history: when class antagonisms are so great that it is necessary for an organization to stand above and apart from society in order to maintain order.
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  97. Lenin, Vladimir I. “The State and Revolution.” In The Lenin Anthology. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 311–398. New York: Norton, 1975.
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  99. Originally published in 1917. The capitalist state cannot be used to promote the socialist cause but instead must be replaced with a new type of state: the proletarian state. The state is a fundamentally coercive institution, and, therefore, to move beyond it, violent revolution is unavoidable.
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  101. Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 16–25. New York: Norton, 1978a.
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  103. Originally published in 1844. Early rudiments of a society-centered theory of the state. Criticizes Hegel and “speculative philosophy” for regarding the family and civil society as engendered by the state, which is deemed an abstraction. On the contrary, the state is underpinned by the family and civil society, which are concrete realities.
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  105. Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. New York: Norton, 1978b.
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  107. Originally published in 1852. Marx departs from the instrumentalist view of the state proffered in “The German Ideologyin favor of a structuralist view. Though ostensibly the representative of French smallholding peasants, socioeconomic and political structures determined that the Bonapartist state would function to preserve a “material order” that served bourgeoisie class interests.
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  109. Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 618–652. New York: Norton, 1978c.
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  111. Originally published in 1871. Analysis of the Paris Commune, the first historical example of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The imperative of the proletariat must be to transcend the state, a form of political organization that can promote only the interests of bourgeois class rule.
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  113. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology: Part 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146–203. New York: Norton, 1978.
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  115. Originally published in 1846. A historical-materialist theory of the instrumentalist state. The development of private property led to the emergence of the bourgeoisie as an economic class (and not merely an estate), necessitating the state as an entity apart from civil society, but nonetheless the servant of the dominant class.
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  117. Elitism
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  119. Elites are distinguished from ordinary citizens or “the masses” by inordinate access to economic, political, or ideological power resources. Elite theories, then, cohere around the idea that in every society, a more or less identifiable minority will constitute a ruling class or ruling elite. Most theories of elitism are not explicit theories of the state, as such, but theories of social organization. Nevertheless, they have made important contributions to debates about the state insofar as they suggest how power is structured in political organizations broadly. The earliest sociological theories of the elite gained popularity in the first decades of the 20th century. Michels 1915, for example, makes an argument about all organizations, of which the state is one, in the author’s oft-quoted “iron law” of oligarchy: “who says organization, says oligarchy.” Pareto 1991 critiques Marxist and liberal assumptions about the essential class bias (Marxism) or neutrality (liberalism) of the liberal state. Mosca 1939 is often credited with being the first study to articulate an explicitly political theory of elitism and an elite political class. The “ruling class” is capable of maintaining its domination over the masses only by promoting a unique “political formula” or legitimating narrative. In contrast to these classical theorists of elitism, who were generally supportive of power concentrated in an elite, the authors of Mills 1999 and Bachrach 1967 offer normatively critical contributions to elitism theory. American political science during the 1950s was dominated by liberal-pluralist theories, which saw politics as constituted by competing groups with more or less equal footing. C. Wright Mills, in contrast, argued that competition did occur, but never for control of the pinnacle of political power, which was dominated by a cluster of political, economic, and military elites—the “power elite.” Notwithstanding these important contributions to the nature of power in society, and thus in the state, elitism theories have been criticized for lacking testable propositions supported by empirical evidence (Dahl 1958). To that end, Domhoff 2014 attempts to ground elitism theory in empirical data, which has been updated regularly (the book is now in its 7th edition).
  120.  
  121. Bachrach, Peter. The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique. Basic Studies in Politics. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
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  123. Analyzes and critiques the underlying logic of several strands of democratic elitism. Argues for more-participatory forms of democracy, which is not simply a decision-making principle, but a mode of human development.
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  125. Dahl, Robert A. “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model.” American Political Science Review 52.2 (1958): 463–469.
  126. DOI: 10.2307/1952327Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  127. Ruling-elite models are not falsifiable. To “test” the impact of an elite, one would have to demonstrate empirically that (1) such a well-defined group exists, (2) it has preferences at variance with other potential power holders, and (3) under such circumstances, elites’ preferences are translated into policy.
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  129. Domhoff, G. William. Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.
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  131. Originally published in 1967. Now in its 7th edition, this is a book whose thesis remains essentially unchanged, but with updated empirical data. Domhoff marshals empirical evidence to demonstrate the socioeconomic and sociocultural affinities between members of a national upper class. The political elite are either chosen from this group or assimilated into it once in power.
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  133. Michels, Robert. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915.
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  135. Political organizations, parties and states included, can only be superficially democratic because all forms of organization are biased toward bureaucracy and, ultimately, oligarchy. Republished as recently as 2012 (Memphis, TN: General Books).
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  137. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  139. Originally published in 1956. Power in modern societies is concentrated atop a hierarchy separating the masses from organized interests and the “power elite.” Political elites constitute only one element at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Their interests may converge with or diverge from those of economic and military elites, each group having considerable autonomy.
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  141. Mosca, Gaetano. The Ruling Class. Edited by Arthur Livingston. Translated by Hannah D. Kahn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939.
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  143. In all societies, the existence of an elite ruling class, a minority from which political elites are drawn, is inevitable. A particular ruling class maintains its position in part by propagating a unique “political formula,” a legitimating discourse, the failure of which makes way for another ruling class. In democratic regimes, the political formula is complicated by the fact that elites must also make occasional concessions to the masses. Republished as recently as 2013 (Charleston, SC: Nabu).
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  145. Pareto, Vilfredo. The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991.
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  147. Originally published in 1901. In every sphere of human activity, a small class of individuals will emerge who are more capable than the general population. A ruling elite is, therefore, inevitable. Political history is not linear, but cyclical, characterized by a “circulation” of ascendant and descendent classes of elites. Reprinted as recently as 2005.
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  149. Young, Michael D. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1958.
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  151. A satirical novel in which a sociologist investigates the rise and fall of a political system, “meritocracy,” in which positions are allocated on the basis of educational competition and intelligence tests. Meritocracy is portrayed as a dystopian solution to the problem of “sentimental egalitarianism”; namely, mediocrity. Reprinted as recently as 1979.
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  153. Microfoundations
  154.  
  155. Microfoundational approaches to politics are united by an insistence that politics are driven by microlevel factors such as individuals and groups. This inclination toward methodological individualism, which dominated American political science during the 1950s and 1960s, results, in turn, in a conception of the state as the sum or outcome of the behavior of individuals and groups in competition. An early work in this line is Bentley 1995. Truman 1971 and Dahl 2005 see the US state as a neutral, and relatively effective, arbiter of the interests of competing groups. For David Truman, the stability of the political system depended on a state acting as referee, setting the “rules of the game,” ultimately constraining the behavior of self-interested groups. These ideas would come to be associated with American pluralism, identified most strongly in political science with Robert Dahl. Dahl 2005 is both a critique of elitist theories of politics and a defense of American liberalism—a plurality of interests are represented in the state, and no group is effectively excluded from influencing the direction of policy. In a more ambitious attempt to articulate a universal theory of politics, Easton 1953 adopts the concept of the political system in place of what the author considered “mystifications” such as state and society. The political system included all those institutions that perform equilibrium-maintaining functions for social order, and, thus, systems theorists have been criticized for a conservative bias. Similarly, pluralists have been seen as describing an American political process as they wished it actually worked, ignoring the fact that many groups are not well represented in the political process. This is the case for Theodore Lowi (Lowi 2010), who makes a group-based explanation both for the increased size and exclusivity of the American state bureaucracy.
  156.  
  157. Bentley, Arthur F. The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995.
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  159. Originally published in 1908 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Concepts such as “the people” or “the state” are abstractions. All politics are the outcome of interaction, or competition between the only political actors that matter: groups. Had a great influence on American political science from the 1930s to the 1950s, especially on scholars associated with the behavioralist movement and pluralism.
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  161. Dahl, Robert A. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. 2d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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  163. Originally published in 1961. Study of New Haven, Connecticut, which, due to its competitive two-party system, is seen as an analogy for US national politics. No social class or interest group is able to capture the state because no group controls all the resources necessary to dominate politics.
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  165. Easton, David. The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science. New York: Knopf, 1953.
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  167. Abstractions such as “state” and “society” obscure the fact that politics are the sum outcome of individuals’ behavior. Easton seeks to abandon the concept of the state in favor of a less ideological concept, the political system, which functions to “allocate values” for a society (p. 46).
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  169. Lowi, Theodore J. The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 2010.
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  171. Originally published in 1969. The liberal state grew to its immense size and presence by accommodating the demands of major organized interests. New legislative initiatives, effectively delegated to the private sector, in turn tighten the grip of interest groups over the bureaucracy, simultaneously excluding large swaths of the public from the policymaking process.
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  173. Truman, David B. The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. 2d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
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  175. Originally published in 1951; republished as recently as 1993 (Westport, CT: Greenwood). First serious attempt to apply Bentley’s group approach. Departs from Bentley by arguing that “rules of the game” help account for how competing groups result in stable systems as opposed to collapse. The primary function of government is to referee group competition (i.e., to establish the rules of the game).
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  177. Postwar Marxism
  178.  
  179. In the aftermath of World War II, several shortcomings of classical Marxist accounts of politics became apparent. In spite of intense processes of industrialization and concentrations of capital in western Europe, a proletarian revolution had yet to emerge. On one hand, rather than fight alongside proletarians in other countries, many working-class members acted against their “objective” class interests and in support of fascism at home. On the other hand, the expansion of welfare state institutions seemed to delay rather than hasten the advance of socialism. Indeed, the contradictions between the need to support capital accumulation and the need to placate an increasingly enfranchised working class posed a variety of legitimation crises for liberal-democratic welfare states (Habermas 1975, O’Connor 1979, Offe 1984). Postwar Marxist reflections on the state, then, have largely been concerned with reinterpreting classical Marxist assumptions about the relationship between the state and economic classes. For Gramsci 1971, class struggle, even the state itself, extends into the realm of culture and ideas, where discourses are produced that justify the established order. According to Althusser 2014, the institutions necessary to reproduce these discourses extend beyond the state apparatus as traditionally conceived, into a more diffuse system of social institutions: the ideological state apparatuses. Such “structural” accounts of the state contrast with the instrumentalist approach in Miliband 2009, which argues that the class nature of the state is determined by the interests of those who occupy the offices at the apex of the state apparatus. The state was, thus, a state “in capitalist society” as opposed to “a capitalist state” functioning to serve the interests of capital in spite of capitalists. Opposing sides of the instrumentalist-structuralist debate were most famously expressed in a decade-long dialogue between Ralph Miliband (Miliband 2009) and Nicos Poulantzas (Poulantzas 2014; also see Barrow 2002), but similar lines of analysis are evident elsewhere. According to Block 2010, for example, “state managers,” who may even be drawn from the ranks of the capitalist class, are not directly involved in the relations of production. This allows them to act with “relative autonomy” from class interests, and state power is therefore not simply reducible to class power. This notion of relative autonomy is a major point of contention for the German “state derivation” approach (Holloway and Picciotto 1978). Finally, Jessop 2002 seeks to understand the effects of an increasingly integrated global economy on the power of national states. Bob Jessop maintains that while globalization has impaired or transformed the role of the Keynesian welfare state, national states nonetheless are still the central actors involved in the regulation and facilitation of capital accumulation.
  180.  
  181. Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. New York: Verso, 2014.
  182. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  183. The state consists of a centralized repressive state apparatus—government, administration, army, police, courts, etc.—and a system of ideological state apparatuses—social institutions such as family, religion, media, and schools. The former creates the conditions for capitalist exploitation; the latter work to reproduce the relations of production.
  184. Find this resource:
  185. Barrow, Clyde W. “The Miliband-Poulantzas Debate: An Intellectual History.” In Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered. Edited by Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, 3–52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
  186. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  187. Summarizes and elaborates the debate between instrumentalist Ralph Miliband and structuralist Nicos Poulantzas about the nature of states in capitalist modes of production. This debate has served as the point of departure for most subsequent Marxist theories of the state.
  188. Find this resource:
  189. Block, Fred. Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.
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  191. Originally published in 1987. Seeks to reconcile the claim that capital’s interests predominate state policy, with the observation that the state often acts against capital’s interests. State managers are “relatively autonomous,” having greater concern for the persistence of the capitalist system than for short-term interests of capital. See especially chapters 2 and 4.
  192. Find this resource:
  193. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
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  195. Novel and considerably broader Marxist interpretation of the state. The state apparatus is not an exclusively repressive organization. Rather, “the integral state” also comprises the institutions and practices through which the ruling class inculcates the masses with its own cultural values (i.e., maintains “hegemony” over the subordinate classes).
  196. Find this resource:
  197. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1975.
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  199. In welfare states, a “contradiction” exists between what is required to sustain capitalist accumulation and what is required to provide for the general welfare. When the state can no longer conceal its capitalist bias from the masses, it faces a potential “legitimation crisis.”
  200. Find this resource:
  201. Holloway, John, and Sol Picciotto, eds. State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.
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  203. Translation of and introduction to several key texts in the German “state derivation” (staatsableitung) approach. The form of the state is derived from the mode of production, and, therefore, relative autonomy is a fiction. As a result, efforts to transition to socialism via legal reforms of the state are futile.
  204. Find this resource:
  205. Jessop, Bob. The Future of the Capitalist State. Oxford: Polity, 2002.
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  207. The nature of capitalism has changed due to the increasing globalization of the world economy. Rather than obviating the need for states, these changes have forced states to shed many functions and acquire some new ones. The state, however, still functions to serve the interests of the capitalist class.
  208. Find this resource:
  209. Miliband, Ralph. The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western System of Power. Pontypool, UK: Merlin, 2009.
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  211. Originally published in 1969. The interests and activities of those who constitute the “state elite” determine the nature of state power. In a capitalist society, then, the state is capitalist. Sparked a decade-long debate between Miliband, an instrumentalist, and Poulantzas, a structuralist, over the nature of the state and state power.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. O’Connor, James. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979.
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  215. The state’s competing obligations to (1) encourage capital accumulation investment and consumption and (2) legitimize capitalist society through social expenditures result in a fiscal crisis characterized by increasing budget deficits.
  216. Find this resource:
  217. Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Edited by John Keane. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1984.
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  219. Collection of essays published between 1973 and 1983. Modern welfare states are characterized by a fundamental contradiction: the demands of redistribution work at cross purposes with the demands of capital accumulation. Welfare states, therefore, undermine the conditions of their own preservation.
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Poulantzas, Nicos. State, Power, Socialism. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Radical Thinkers. New York: Verso, 2014.
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  223. Originally published in 1978 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). The capitalist state is a particular form of state, not merely an instrument of the dominant class. The state is a “social relation” that functions to align the interests of an otherwise amorphous capitalist class, and to disrupt the capacity of subordinate classes to organize against this power bloc.
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  225. State-Centered (Statist) Approaches
  226.  
  227. These works are connected by an emphasis on the state as an autonomous actor capable of an independent effect on social processes. Most of these works are reacting to tendencies either within behavioralist-pluralist or Marxist approaches to the state, which viewed the state as epiphenomenal to the more fundamental processes of interest group competition or class struggle. An early forebear in this regard is Nettl 1968, but the most-influential texts did not appear until the late 1970s. Krasner 1978 and Skocpol 1979 provide early examples of this approach, the former from an international-relations realist perspective, the latter from a comparative political-sociology perspective. Nordlinger 1981 is unique in this camp in that the author shares some affinity with behavioral pluralists. For Eric Nordlinger the state is an aggregate of interests, but those interests are limited to state personnel who can and do have autonomy from society-borne interests. Krasner 1984 is an excellent review of several early works, demonstrating how they depart from other approaches to the state. Perhaps the two most paradigm-changing texts are Evans, et al. 1985 and Mann 2012. The former is an edited volume whose title—Bringing the State Back In—is a clarion call to the fields of political science and political sociology. The introduction by Theda Skocpol is probably the most complete and widely referenced statement of the statist approach. Mann 2012 innovates the approach by distinguishing between two possible categories of state autonomy: despotic and infrastructural power.
  228.  
  229. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  230. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511628283Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Seminal collection of essays critiquing the reductionism of pluralism, structural functionalism, and neo-Marxism. The editors argue that the state is not merely an arena within which (or a vehicle for which) social groups compete, but rather an autonomous site of power, capable of constraining the behavior of groups and classes.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Krasner, Stephen D. Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
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  235. The behavior of states does not necessarily derive from the interests of groups or classes. States and societies are distinct entities; the former is autonomous from the latter and, particularly in areas such as foreign policy, can act in the “national” as opposed to a class or group interest.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Krasner, Stephen D. “Review: Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics.” Comparative Politics 16.2 (1984): 223–246.
  238. DOI: 10.2307/421608Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Reviews several early works associated with the then “new” statist approach to politics and contrasts them with approaches informed by behavioralism, specifically pluralism. Focuses on the issues of state autonomy and congruity between states and their social contexts.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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  243. Originally published in 1993. The state has autonomous power vis-à-vis other social power groups in society (e.g., military, ideological, or economic power groups) due to its unique position as a territorially centralized form of organization. Mann elaborates his distinction between two forms of state power: despotic and infrastructural.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Nettl, J. P. “The State as a Conceptual Variable.” World Politics 20.4 (1968): 559–592.
  246. DOI: 10.2307/2009684Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. The state is an essentially sociocultural phenomenon. It has a conceptual existence that is resilient because the notion of the state is incorporated into people’s thinking and behavior.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Nordlinger, Eric A. On the Autonomy of the Democratic State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
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  251. Similar to pluralists, sees the state as an aggregate of interests: those of public officials. However, unlike society, the state can behave as a purposeful actor. Even in democracies it can translate its preferences into authoritative action in spite of resistance from social actors.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  254. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511815805Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. Examines the role of the state in social revolutions. States are, at least potentially, autonomous actors dually anchored in relationships with not only economic classes but also with other states. International threats to “weakened” old regimes paved the way for class-based social revolutions.
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  257. Critiques of Statist Approaches
  258.  
  259. While there exists a large body of work that is implicitly critical of the neo-statist movement, these works target that literature specifically. A unifying theme, expressed well in Migdal, et al. 1994, is that, whether intentionally or not, proponents of the statist approach had a tendency to reify the state as a coherent, unified monolith, distinct from the society within which it must be embedded. Some critics accused the statists of misrepresenting past and ignoring new scholarship (Cammack 1989). Others argued that the reification of the state itself had political implications that we should be wary of (Mitchell 1991). Interestingly, Philip Abrams’s critique (Abrams 1988) was originally written in 1977 and was directed at two neo-Marxists (Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband; see Postwar Marxism), but the article was not published until 1988, at which time it also served as a critique of statist approaches.
  260.  
  261. Abrams, Philip. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1.1 (1988): 58–89.
  262. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00004.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. Distinguishes between the “state-system,” an actually existing network of institutions and practices, and the “state-idea,” a reification of the state-system. The former should not be confused with the latter, a projected image that serves ideology more than social science.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Cammack, Paul. “Bringing the State Back In?” British Journal of Political Science 19.2 (1989): 261–290.
  266. DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400005469Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  267. A Marxist critique of the statist program. Primarily criticizes Evans, et al. 1985, which is cited under State-Centered (Statist) Approaches, for ignoring classical Marxist thought, for ignoring Marxist empirical work on the state, and for misrepresenting, and then using as straw men, various works of neo-Marxist thought.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Migdal, Joel S., Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds. State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  270. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139174268Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Collection of essays arguing that states need to be disaggregated and resituated in their social contexts. While states certainly shape societies, they are in turn shaped by—indeed, constituted by—those very societies. Thus, state capacities depend a great deal on the nature of “states in societies.”
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Mitchell, Timothy. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” American Political Science Review 85.1 (1991): 77–96.
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  275. The boundary between state and society is ambiguous, but rather than reifying states or abandoning the state concept altogether, we should inquire into the process by which an artificial distinction has come to be seen as real. The state-society distinction is itself a technique of modern political order.
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  277. European State Formation
  278.  
  279. The authors represented here share the view that the origins of the state as a unique world-historical form of political organization can tell us something about the nature of that organization. In other words, what the state is—and what will become of the state (van Creveld 1999)—depends in great measure on how the state came to be. What unites these authors is a conviction that modern states first emerged in the context of the decentralized late feudal system of western Europe. This point is made most forcefully in Badie and Birnbaum 1983. Poggi 1978 spends time to elaborate an often-neglected but critical form of political order, the Ständestaat, which existed in between the height of European feudalism and the emergence of centralized states. These authors differ, however, in terms of how they conceive the timing and the dynamic of the process of state formation. Strayer 1970, for example, is unaccompanied in identifying the rudiments of the modern state as early as the 12th century. Tilly 1975, written by the author of the oft-quoted phrase “war made the state, and the state made war,” may be the most widely cited proponent of the state’s militarist origins. Giddens 1985 adds that while the organization of violence was an essential prerequisite for modern state formation, internal “pacification” also required a heightened capacity for surveillance made possible, in part, by territorialization. Ertman 1997 would later build on Tilly 1975 to show how forms of military organization interacted with native political organizations to create different variations of states. Spruyt 1996 is essential because the author adds an element of contingency to his explanation: modern states were only one competing form of political organization, and it is important to identify why this form came to predominate and not another. Gorski 2003 makes a novel contribution, arguing that forms of discipline and organization commonly associated with states were in fact innovated in religious—in particular Calvinist—organizations in early modern Europe.
  280.  
  281. Badie, Bertrand, and Pierre Birnbaum. The Sociology of the State. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
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  283. The modern state, now a universal political institution, was not the inevitable product of historical forces. The state emerged out a social and historical context unique to western Europe and then spread throughout the world either by “imposition or imitation,” resulting in political orders reflecting various qualities of stateness.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Ertman, Thomas. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  286. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511529016Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. Variation in local forms of government and military competition explain variation in modern state forms, particularly whether states developed bureaucratic or patrimonial administrative structures, and whether sufficient constraints on the authority of rulers emerged.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Giddens, Anthony. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 2, The Nation-State and Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
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  291. Nation-states are “bordered power-containers” that not only monopolize coercive means but also “pacify” their societies through extensive modes of surveillance. However, the obverse of internal pacification is external hostility toward other nation-states.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Gorski, Philip S. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  294. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304861.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. A “disciplinary revolution,” the result of developments during the Reformation, promoted new modes of organization and political control associated with the rise of the modern state. Calvinist organizations, in particular, pioneered modes of surveillance, imprisonment, and bureaucratic organization, with an explicit goal of exporting these institutions to the world.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Poggi, Gianfranco. The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978.
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  299. Focuses on France and Germany to elaborate the institutional features that distinguish the ideal types of four forms of political order: feudalism, the late medieval Ständestaat (“the polity of estates”), the absolutist state, and the modern constitutional state.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Spruyt, Hendrik. The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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  303. Following feudalism, there existed a number of alternative forms of political organization in addition to the sovereign state. It was not inevitable that the state would emerge as the dominant form, nor did its war-making capacity give it a necessary advantage over the Italian city-state or the Hanseatic League.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Strayer, Joseph R. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.
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  307. The essential features of the modern state—permanent, impersonal institutions and loyalty to an authority capable of making binding decisions for the collective—emerged over the course of five hundred years beginning in 1100 CE.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Tilly, Charles, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Studies in Political Development 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
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  311. Seminal work on the relationship between war making and state making. Tilly and the other contributors argue that the organizational demands of warfare during the Early Modern period influenced the structure of political organizations to such an extent that a historically new form of organization—the state—became the dominant model.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. van Creveld, Martin. The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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  315. The state is but one organizational type in the longue durée of the history of political orders. Though it has been the dominant form of political organization since the mid-17th century, since the late 20th century, many state functions have been performed by suprastate and nonstate actors, thus heralding its decline.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Non-European State Formation
  318.  
  319. If the nature of the state depends, in whole or in part, on its unique origins, then states that emerge in different contexts may exhibit features and processes quite distinct from their European counterparts. Indeed, that is what the authors in this section argue. Anderson 2013 juxtaposes the emergence of state forms in western Europe with their subsequent adoption and variant effects in eastern Europe. A significant theme that runs through much of this literature is the path-dependent nature of institutional development. Among the most significant factors channeling the paths of state development were the institutions inherited from the colonial era (Skowronek 1982, Young 1994, Centeno 2002, Bensel 1990), the nature and supply of state revenues and natural-resource endowments (Luciani 1990, Young 1994, Herbst 2014, Centeno 2002, Bensel 1990), the nature of integration into or isolation from regional and global politics (Anderson 2013 Luciani 1990 Herbst 2014, Centeno 2002, Hui 2005), and the relationship between war making and state making (Hui 2005, Centeno 2002, Bensel 1990).
  320.  
  321. Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso World History. New York: Verso, 2013.
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  323. Originally published in 1974. A historical-materialist account of the emergence of the absolutist state, which was the product of class antagonisms that threatened the status of the nobility, compelling them to support concentrated power in order to reassert control over the peasant masses. Eastern European polities adopted modern state forms only in reaction to an encroaching West.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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  327. Analyzes the relationship among political economy, war, and state formation in American political development. Sectional competition for control of the national economy resulted in secession, Civil War, and the expansion of the state both in the North and the South. Postwar resistance to Reconstruction initiatives, especially from financial capitalists, halted further state-strengthening opportunities.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Centeno, Miguel Angel. Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
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  331. Interrogates the relationship between war making and state making, arguing that the scope, scale, and world-historical timing of wars constrain the effect that war has on state development. In contrast to Europe, limited wars in Latin America led to limited states and weak national identities.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
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  335. Originally published in 2000. Emphasizes the importance of geographic and historical-institutional constraints on the formation and development of African states. In particular, there were fewer incentives and greater costs associated with extending authority to the periphery, since land was plentiful, peasants were mobile, and rulers were insulated from competitors by natural boundaries.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Hui, Victoria Tin-bor. War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  338. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511614545Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Both early modern Europe and ancient China experienced competitive interstate systems, but contingent factors—institutional reforms and merciless strategies of warfare—led the Qin emperor to constitute a lasting regional hegemon, while Europe maintained a balance-of-power system of interstate relations.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Luciani, Giacomo, ed. The Arab State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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  343. Collection of essays on how the unique social, historical, and economic features of the Arab world affect the nature of state formation and development in that region. Of particular interest are the essays on rentier states and how recourse to fossil fuels affects the nature of state-society relations.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
  346. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511665080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. In the United States, the state-building response to industrialization happened in the context of a fragmented and decentralized polity where courts and political parties were the dominant actors. The “reconstituted” American state was a “patchwork” of institutional fixes, lacking concentrated power in a national administrative apparatus.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
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  351. Emphasizes the legacy of colonial rule on the development of African state institutions. States and societies are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive. Colonial powers created rapacious, exclusionary state apparatuses, preventing the emergence of strong civil societies to counterbalance them. These institutional malignancies are the foundations of modern African states.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Post-structuralism and Governmentality
  354.  
  355. Post-structuralism is a label attributed to a range of analytical approaches to social phenomena united by a critique of the ways in which language and discourse—the practices by which meaning is assigned to the social world—shape or construct reality. Post-structural critiques of the state and of state theory, then, interrogate how power is embedded in and reproduced by the promotion of certain concepts of the state and the exclusion or marginalization of others. No other thinker has been more influential in this regard than Michel Foucault, who, among other things, traced the origins of particular “disciplinary” practices associated with the rise of the liberal state to question our assumptions about the locus of power in modern society (Foucault 1977). Modern political theory’s obsession with the state had blinded it to the nature of power, which, in liberal states, was not primarily located at the apex of the state apparatus but was diffused throughout society in various institutions and practices (Foucault 1980). Foucault sought to “decenter” the state, to shift the analysis of power away from the state and toward the varied institutions, practices, and discourses that work to embed control in self-regulating individuals (Foucault 1991). Several scholars have since advanced this project, so-called governmentality studies, both in methodological (Dean 2010) and theoretical (Rose 1999) terms. Other scholars have focused their attention on how particular conceptions of the state (Bourdieu 1994) and of state sovereignty (Ashley 1988, Agamben 1998) are themselves constitutive of the state and state power, as such.
  356.  
  357. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Meridian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
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  359. Foucault neglects the role that sovereignty plays in the production of the notion of a prepolitical, natural life. Such a “bare life” does not actually exist outside the political realm; rather, it is a construct of sovereign power. Governmentality simply reveals the long-obscured identity between the public and the private realms.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Ashley, Richard K. “Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique.” Millennium 17.2 (1988): 227–262.
  362. DOI: 10.1177/03058298880170020901Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. The discourses of state sovereignty and international anarchy are mutually constitutive and, if taken as axiomatic, determine the nature of world politics. By attributing to the state a particular identity—a coherent, rational, self-interested, sovereign actor—we thereby preclude the possibility of a nonanarchic world order.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” Sociological Theory 12.1 (1994): 1–18.
  366. DOI: 10.2307/202032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. Philosophical, juridical, and social-scientific writings on the state construct the state, as such. They are not merely theories, but “political strategies,” producing specific images that, in turn, serve the interests of those who posit them. It is in this realm of symbolic production that the state is most powerful.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2d ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010.
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  371. Originally published in 1999. Articulates a methodological program for governmentality studies—an “analytics of government.” Includes empirical chapters that trace the “governmentalization” of the state. Second edition includes a chapter on international governmentality.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
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  375. Modern systems of surveillance and incarceration replaced torture and public execution as the primary forms of criminal punishment. These changes to penal institutions reflected broader patterns in the exercise of social power, a “microphysics of power,” whereby mundane practices and institutions ensure that individuals remain autonomous, yet “docile” and self-regulating. Reprinted as recently as 2009.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited and translated by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
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  379. Critiques political theory’s “obsession” with the notion of sovereignty and “the sovereign,” a singular power centered in the state apparatus. These (Marxist and liberal) accounts of power ignore how power actually operates; that is, through a network of institutions, practices, and discourses that extend well beyond the state. Reprinted as recently as 2010 (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education).
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
  382. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226028811.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Introduces the concept of governmentality, a portmanteau of “government” and “rationality.” Citizens in modern liberal societies are legally “free” but nonetheless are governed by diffuse techniques of administration by explicitly nonstate entities: institutions, practices, and ideas. Society becomes “statified,” the state is decentered, and coercion becomes a means of last resort.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  386. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511488856Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. A “genealogy of freedom.” Freedom is an “artifact of civilization,” a resource of governmentality with associated technologies of power. At the same time that liberalism safeguards the autonomy of the individual, it sanctions experts who “invent” norms, instilling shame in those who deviate from standard conduct.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Culture and Anthropology
  390.  
  391. The “cultural turn” in state theory has, arguably, two orientations, both of which share certain affinities with post-structuralist critiques of state theory. Specifically, the works cited here reflect the contention that there is an important relationship between state making and meaning making. Indeed, some of the authors represented here suggest that culture and state power are mutually constitutive (Duara 1988, Steinmetz 1999). On one hand, culture has an impact on the nature of the state. That is, the manner by which citizens experience the state is refracted through the lens of particular cultures (Geertz 1980, Duara 1988). On the other hand, states themselves have played important roles in molding cultures through the imposition of conventions and standards (Scott 1998), the “invention” of traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012), or the wholesale fabrication of “national” identities (Anderson 2006).
  392.  
  393. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 2006.
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  395. Originally published in 1983. Nascent capitalism, print technology, and territorial states interacted to create the conditions for “imagining” communities of strangers united by culture and language, as such. Once the nation is imagined, the nation-state becomes modular, a political model than can be adopted and deployed by other states.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Duara, Prasenjit. Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
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  399. In Imperial China, a “cultural nexus of power” integrated local actors and organizations into a larger framework of authority including the imperial state. Institutions imbued with cultural norms and symbols that legitimated the power structure were undermined by republican-era state-building reforms, leaving a power vacuum later filled by the Chinese Communist Party.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Geertz, Clifford. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
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  403. In 19th-century Bali, the performative aspects of power were privileged over the coercive. The rituals and symbols of the court served as models of the cosmos and, in turn, for social relations, constituting the state, as such.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Canto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  406. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107295636Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. Originally published in 1983. Modern nation-states portray themselves—their origins—as rooted in ancient history. However, many so-called traditions,—indeed, national cultures—are, in fact, the quite recent inventions of states.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
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  411. Modern states have attempted to make societies “legible” from the state center. “State simplifications”—permanent last names, uniform weights and measures, planned cities, standardized language and laws—render complex local social practices into synoptic data capable of being documented, monitored, and controlled at a distance.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Steinmetz, George, ed. State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
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  415. The introduction by Steinmetz is an important contribution to the cultural critique of state theory. Statists and neo-Marxists see culture as epiphenomenal to state structures and practices, but, on the contrary, superficially identical state institutions are embedded in widely varying cultural milieu, which fundamentally alter the nature of state-society interaction.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Feminism
  418.  
  419. Feminist approaches tend to see the state as an inherently oppressive institution, one that works, not simply in practice but also in form, to subordinate women to men. Thus, like Marxism, there is a political project embedded in the feminist critique of the state: to transform or substitute this form of political organization for another more just and more inclusive form, operating according to an alternative logic of politics. A prominent argument is that patriarchal and hierarchical institutions permeate social life, and the state is but one such institution (Millett 2000, Ferguson 1984). Other feminists have focused their critique on the “liberal state” in particular, arguing that it is presented by liberals as a value-neutral institution when, in fact, it masks an inherently male bias (Pateman 1988, MacKinnon 1989, Brown 1992). This effect is produced primarily by drawing a stark theoretical and legal distinction between the public and private spheres: the former, the exclusive arena of state authority; the latter, in practice, the domain of patriarchal authority embodied in fathers and husbands (Pateman 1988; see also Engels 2010b, cited under Prewar Marxism). Ultimately, women are forced into dependence for protection by the very system that relegates them to a position of subordination (Pateman 1988, Brown 1992, Mink 1996). Finally, some non-Western scholars question the universality of Western feminism’s critique of the state, insofar as it rests on the production of a stark divide between the public and private spheres that may be experienced only in a limited context (Bhattacharjee 1997).
  420.  
  421. Bhattacharjee, Anannya. “The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community.” In Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 308–329. Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1997.
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  423. Western feminism’s critique of the state takes for granted a sharp distinction between the public and private spheres. Bhattacharjee challenges this dichotomy through an examination of South Asian migrant women’s experiences of domestic violence.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Brown, Wendy. “Finding the Man in the State.” Feminist Studies 18.1 (1992): 7–34.
  426. DOI: 10.2307/3178212Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. State power is multidimensional and nonsystematic. Brown focuses on four dimensions of state power—liberal (juridical-legislative), capitalist, prerogative (coercive), and bureaucratic (institutional)—each of which functions in different ways to reproduce male hegemony.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Ferguson, Kathy E. The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy. Women in the Political Economy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.
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  431. A feminist critique of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, like patriarchy, is a form of hierarchy, entailing relationships of domination and subordination. These are essentially male/masculine forms of organization.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
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  435. The liberal state is an essentially “male” institution. While its laws may be procedurally neutral, they nonetheless were constituted by and for male interests. Explores how laws related to rape, abortion, and pornography, even when applied “fairly,” have a masculine bias.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Originally published in 1969 (New York: Doubleday). Patriarchy—rule by men—does not simply describe familial relations but, rather, is an institution that pervades multiple arenas of social life, from literature to politics. Families, societies, and states are mutually constituting institutions that are deeply embedded with patriarchal practices.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Mink, Gwendolyn. The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
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  443. Progressive Era efforts to guarantee and extend welfare benefits to mothers without husbands concealed an underlying cultural conservatism. Essentialist concepts of “good mothering” served to reinforce and reify subordinate gender roles and to marginalize the cultural norms of, first, immigrant and, later, African American mothers.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. The liberal state is fundamentally patriarchal, predicated not only on a social contract, wherein individuals exchange certain freedoms for the protection of the state, but also on a tacit “sexual contract,” where women and children are assumed to have contracted away their rights to husbands and fathers. Reprinted as recently as 2009.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Globalization
  450.  
  451. Particularly vocal at the turn of the millennium was a varied literature that questioned whether the state, as the predominant form of political order, was in decline. Debates centered on the proposition that increases in the density and intensity of transborder flows of goods, financial capital, people, and ideas might erode the sovereignty of national states. Proponents of this view argued that states were no longer the most-important players in terms of regulating the economy or social relations (Strange 1996), and that models of “governance,” the appropriation of governing functions by various nonstate entities, might be at hand (Rhodes 1997, Shaw 2000). According to some scholars, the very idea of the sovereign state was rendered suspect by the processes of globalization, which, of necessity, impinged on state sovereignty (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, Hardt and Negri 2000). However, others argued that while new forms of nonstate authority were emergent, the state nonetheless had a significant role to play in governing social and economic outcomes (Castells 2011; also see Jessop 2002, cited under Postwar Marxism). Furthermore, modern states are not all of a piece, and the effects of globalization on diverse states vary significantly (Mann 1997, Weiss 1998, Evans 1997). Indeed, the processes associated with globalization might even give impetus to state retrenchment (Evans 1997). Finally, Krasner 1999 challenges the very notion that globalization is a fundamentally new phenomenon and that state sovereignty was ever as sacrosanct as state “retreatists” claim.
  452.  
  453. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Vol. 2, The Power of Identity. 2d ed. E-book. New York: John Wiley, 2011.
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  455. Originally published in 1997 (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Globalization challenges sovereignty but does not signal the demise of the nation-state, which still exerts influence on social outcomes. A “network state” has emerged: the nation-state is a node in an integrated matrix connecting different sources of authority—governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations—at local, regional, and national levels.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Evans, Peter. “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization.” World Politics 50.1 (1997): 62–87.
  458. DOI: 10.1017/S0043887100014726Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. The logic of economic globalization provides just as much rationale for “high stateness” as it does for “low stateness.” The greater danger is that, in an effort to stave off the total collapse of public institutions, societies may accept even more repressive forms of state-centered public authority.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29.4 (2002): 981–1002.
  462. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. The image of the state—as positioned over and above society and as encompassing the other institutions that constitute society—is an effect of state power, produced by the exercise of “mundane bureaucratic practices,” and is challenged by an increasingly globalized political economy.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
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  467. Under the conditions of a globalizing world, state sovereignty has been superseded by a new form of sovereignty: empire. Empire represents a world political order constituted by a network of national and supranational organizations that decenter and deterritorialize sovereignty. It also marks the telos of world political development.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
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  471. Threats to the sovereignty of national states are nothing new, and norms of sovereignty have never been universally respected under all circumstances. The national state is still the indispensable actor, and national power and interest are still the prime movers on the world stage.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Mann, Michael. “Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?” Review of International Political Economy 4.3 (1997): 472–496.
  474. DOI: 10.1080/096922997347715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. The effects of four processes—economic globalization, environmental change, identity politics, and the decline of “hard” geopolitics—on the strength of states vary by country, region, and economic and institutional development. Thus, general statements about the impact of globalization on nation-states are misplaced.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Rhodes, R. A. W. Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability. Public Policy and Management. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1997.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. A study of the United Kingdom during the Margaret Thatcher era. Notable for sparking widespread interest in governance: “governing without government.” The state becomes a “hollow state” as many of its traditional [functions] are performed by private actors and market mechanisms.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Shaw, Martin. Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge Studies in International Relations 73. Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  482. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511521782Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Post–World War II interstate relations have resulted in new forms of global consciousness, as well as the integration of previously autonomous sites of state power, giving rise to a new state form: the global-Western state.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Strange, Susan. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge Studies in International Relations 49. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  486. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511559143Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. The domain of state authority over economy and society is shrinking, increasingly displaced by other sources of authority. Economic globalization has shifted the balance of power from states to markets, and few states can claim greater loyalty from citizens than can the family, the firm, or the political party.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Weiss, Linda. The Myth of the Powerless State. Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. The effects of globalization are mediated by domestic state institutions, and states exhibit wide variation in their capacities to channel external economic forces. The “East Asian Tiger” states, for example, exploited economic integration as a development strategy, thereby enhancing state strength.
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