State and State Building Issues

THE STATE AND STATE-BUILDING

Bob Jessop

The state has been studied from many perspectives but no single theory can fully capture and explain its complexities. States and the interstate system provide a moving target because of their complex developmental logics and because there are continuing attempts to transform them. Moreover, despite tendencies to reify the state and treat it as standing outside and above society, there can be no adequate theory of the state without a wider theory of society. For the state and political system are parts of a broader ensemble of social relations and neither state projects nor state power can be adequately understood outside their embedding in this ensemble.

1 What is the State?
...........................................................................................................................................................

This innocuous-looking question challenges anyone trying to analyze states. Some theorists deny the state’s very existence (see below) but most still accept that states are real and provide a valid research focus. Beyond this consensus, however, lies conceptual chaos. Key questions include: Is the state best defined by its legal form, coercive capacities, institutional composition and boundaries, internal operations and modes of calculation, declared aims, functions for the broader society, or sovereign place in the international system? Is it a thing, a subject, a social relation, or a construct that helps to orient political action? Is stateness a variable and, if so, what are its central dimensions? What is the relationship between the state and law, the state and politics, the state and civil society, the public and the private, state power and micropower relations? Is the state best studied in isolation; only as part of the political system; or, indeed, in terms of a more general social theory? Do states have institutional, decisional, or operational autonomy and, if so, what are its

References: Abrams, P. 1988. Notes on the difficulty of studying the state. Journal of Historical Sociology, 1: 58–89. Allen, J. 1990. Does feminism need a theory of ‘‘the state?’’ In Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, ed. S. Watson. London: Verso. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Badie, B. and Birnbaum, P. 1983. The Sociology of the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barrow, C. W. 1993. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Beck, U. and Grande, E. 2005. Cosmopolitan Europe: Paths to Second Modernity. Brown, W. 1992. Finding the man in the state. Feminist Studies, 18: 7–34. Chomsky, N. 2001. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. London: Pluto. Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. 1963. The Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of Bureaucratic Societies. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Elias, N. 1982. The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell. Engels, F. 1875/1975. The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Pp. 129–276 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 26. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Foucault, M. 1980a. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hintze, O. 1975. The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. New York: Oxford University Press. Jenson, J. 1986. Gender and reproduction: or, babies and state. Studies in Political Economy, 20: 9–46. Jessop, B. 2001. Bringing the state back in (yet again). International Review of Sociology, 11: 149–73. Knutilla, M. and Kubik, W. 2001. State Theories: Classical, Global and Feminist Perspectives. Lauridsen, L. S. 1991. The debate on the developmental state. In Development Theory and the Role of the State in Third World Countries, ed. J. Martinussen. Roskilde: Roskilde University Centre. MacKinnon, C. 1989. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mann, M. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melossi, D. 1990. The State and Social Control. Cambridge: Polity. Miliband, R. 1969. The State in Capitalist Society. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Porter, B. 1994. War and the Rise of the State. New York: Free Press. Poulantzas, N. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes. London: New Left Books. Rokkan, S. 1999. State Formation, Nation-Building and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, M. 2000. Theory of the Global State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, A.-M. 2004. A New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. 1948. Politics as a vocation. In Essays from Max Weber. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.