The State

Past, Present, Future

Bob Jessop

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745669946
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política

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.

1
Introduction

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 ...