State in Society - Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another PDF
State in Society - Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another PDF
State in Society - Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another PDF
State in Society
The essays in this book trace the development of Joel S. Migdals state-in-
society approach. His process-oriented analysis illuminates how power is
exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change.
Despite the triumph of the concept of state in social science literature,
actual states have demonstrated less coherence than their theoretical counter-
parts, and, despite their apparent resources, have had great difficulty in trans-
forming public policies into successful social change. The state-in-society
approach demonstrates both that states are fragmented and that they face a
multitude of social organizations families, clans, multinational corporations,
domestic businesses, tribes, political parties, and patron-client dyads that
maintain and vie for the power to set the rules guiding peoples behavior.
These ongoing and overlapping struggles ally parts of the state with groups
in society against other such coalitions. In the process, they determine how
societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day
life, including the nature of the rules that govern peoples behavior, whom they
benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and
which divide them, and what shared meanings people hold about their rela-
tions with others and their place in the world.
General Editor
Margaret Levi University of Washington, Seattle
Associate Editors
Robert H. Bates Harvard University
Peter Hall Harvard University
Stephen Hanson University of Washington, Seattle
Peter Lange Duke University
Helen Milner Columbia University
Frances Rosenbluth Yale University
Susan Stokes University of Chicago
Sidney Tarrow Cornell University
JOEL S. MIGDAL
University of Washington
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
Acknowledgments page xi
Part I: Introduction
1 THE STATE-IN-SOCIETY APPROACH:
A NEW DEFINITION OF THE STATE AND
TRANSCENDING THE NARROWLY
CONSTRUCTED WORLD OF RIGOR 3
Bibliography 265
Index 287
ix
Acknowledgments
The ideas in this book have been battered by merciless criticism from col-
leagues and students at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and the
University of Washington over the last three decades. Colleagues from
other universities also weighed in at various times with their own brands
of dissatisfaction. I suppose that only the hard-edged nature of their cri-
tiques forced me to work over these ideas countless times. The book, I
think, is the better for it. A number of colleagues deserve special thanks:
Myron Aronoff, Mickey Glazer, Penina Migdal Glazer, Resat Kasaba, Atul
Kohli, Ben Smith, Robert Vitalis, and Patricia Woods. Chandni Gupta,
Kammerle Schneider, Tina Smith, Cathy Vuong, and Zo Stemm pro-
vided selfless hours of research assistance and preparation time. And Jane
Meyerding helped in final preparation of the manuscript. Support for work
on the book came from the Robert F. Philip Professorship at the Univer-
sity of Washington. Nothing has been more important to me than the
warm, supportive environment my sprawling clan has given me over the
years. It is with warm affection that I dedicate this book to my sisters and
brothers, by birth and by marriage (the latter known in our family as the
zugekommeners).
xi
PA R T I
Introduction
1
This introductory chapter frames the ideas that have preoccupied me over
the past two decades, when the remaining essays in this book were written.
I have four primary goals here. First, I want to present a concise statement
of the state-in-society approach that is the centerpiece of the book, espe-
cially in light of the literature that I have drawn on and have found
wanting. My second aim is the principal one for this chapter: I present a
new definition of the state in place of Max Webers widely used one, which
I believe has led scholars down sterile paths. My hope is that the new def-
inition will offer social scientists a better, more grounded way to conceive
of the state and will suggest new, innovative lines of inquiry to them.
Third, implicitly these essays reject what has become standard method in
political science and related social science disciplines. I want to spell out
the point of how better to approach comparative research and state why
I think political scientists should abandon the blinders that have limited
their work. And, finally, I want to show how a state-in-society perspective
can provide new and exciting answers to well-studied issues in compara-
tive studies by recounting the work of several young scholars who have
used the approach.
thinkers in every period and in practically every culture. They have been
at the center of modern social science for the last two centuries.
As for me, these issues first began to enter my consciousness when I
was still a college student in the tumultuous 1960s, as I viewed the topsy-
turvy world around me. I and thousands of other college students like me
hooted, sat-in, and marched in the hope of bringing about change in
U.S. Vietnam policy and, eventually, to transform the way authority was
exercised both in the United States and in the international arena. I do
not think that I can underestimate the lasting impact of the Vietnam War
on me, especially in cultivating what would become my life-long preoc-
cupation with how authority and power are established, maintained, and
transformed.
From a far more distant perch, I witnessed during my high school and
college years an epic revolution in the world map. The crumbling of the
great European empires led to the appearance of dozens of new states in
Africa and Asia. New political leaders made all sorts of bold claims about
the prospects for social change inside their borders as well as their inten-
tion to break the stranglehold of outmoded forms of authority interna-
tionally. It was a moment of great optimism. Even in the midst of the
never-ending background noise of the Cold War, with its own not-so-
subtle messages about world power about governmental mastery and
personal vulnerability the Vietnam War and the larger process of decol-
onization of which it was a part made me acutely aware of patterns of dom-
ination and gave me confidence that the more pernicious forms of it could
be upended.
The books that I consumed in those years grappled sometimes explic-
itly, more often implicitly with the question of who makes the rules for
how others behave, who forces his or her will on others, and when such
patterns are transformed. The social science works I read fell into several
camps as authors tried to put their finger on the heartbeat of the new
postwar world. By far the most popular, and probably the most unsatisfy-
ing, was the literature drawing from Talcott Parsonss social-systems
theory.1 Parsonss approach subsumed both state and society in a broad
conception of the so-called social system, whose various parts are bound
together by an overarching and unified set of values. Ultimately, accord-
ing to the social-system approach, it is that package of values that takes
center stage in the analysis of power, structure, and change. Parsons
1
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951).
4
The State-in-Society Approach
stressed that the study of political structure and process was in the context
of a general theoretical analysis of the total society as a social system.2 He
noted that the core of a society, as a system, is the patterned normative
order through which the life of a population is collectively organized.3
His analysis relied on the concept of a singular set of social values and
norms, which he argued were internalized by societys members.4 Follow-
ing his lead and using a somewhat tendentious reading of Weber, other
scholars saw norms and values weaving together elites and institutions
from the social, political, religious, and economic realms.
In the United States and sometimes in Europe, scholars characterized
the operation of these forces the controlling values and their ties to elites
and social institutions as pluralism, a harmonious operation of com-
peting interest and status groups. Again, Parsons explains the rationale
for pluralist theories of the period: No society can maintain stability in
the face of varying exigencies and strains unless interest constellations
of its members are grounded in solidarity and internalized loyalties and
obligations.5
For other parts of the world, especially the newly formed countries
in Asia and Africa where such normative solidarity was presumed to be
absent, the focus was on the development of an ethic powerful enough to
transform divergent (unharmonious) norms and institutions (often seen as
traditional and inferior). The key in effecting (desirable) change, then, was
to knit together a normative consensus that would be the center or engine
for a functioning social system. While that would seem a daunting task
after all, which of all the dissenting normative sets would win out? the
problem was wished away by assuming teleologically that modern,
Western values would inevitably triumph in the end.
Parsons was the leading sociologist of his era, but his influence
extended beyond his discipline to other social scientists, as well. As a
political science major in college, I initially engaged the problems of
domination and change through variants of social-systems, or simply
systems, theory. Among the most prominent political science authors
2
Talcott Parsons, The Political Aspect of Social Structure and Process, in David
Easton (ed.), Varieties of Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966),
p. 71.
3
Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 10.
4
Parsons, Societies, p. 14.
5
Ibid.
5
Introduction
in this stream were Gabriel A. Almond and David Easton.6 To me, the
clearest and deepest thinker promoting this view of domination and
change in new states was Edward Shils, an important collaborator of
Parsons and a person whose work I continue to find endlessly fascinating
and largely relevant.7 For all his extraordinary insights, Shils also slipped
into teleological traps, repeatedly writing of the not-yet developed
centers outside the West.
Shils seemed to have an intuitive feel for both the material and ethe-
real sources of authority that eluded many other writers. He grasped the
elusive point that societies are not, and cannot be bound only through
material and instrumental relations. Peoples connection to one another
rests just as fundamentally on a transcendental notion: they seek and create
powerful common understandings or meaning in their relationships,
forming a strong relational glue that binds them together. For him, a
community is not just a group of concrete and particular persons; it is,
more fundamentally, a group of persons acquiring their significance by
their embodiment of values which transcend them and by their confor-
mity with standards and rules from which they derive their dignity.8
I admired the way Shils, as an academic engaged in secular analysis,
did not shy away from the difficult issue of the transcendental, absorbing
into the core of his analysis how people seek larger meaning in their
lives and in their relations with others. I began to think that social con-
nections go beyond the cognitive to affective factors, beyond the instru-
mental to emotional dimensions.9 And I continue to feel that social science
has erred badly in ignoring phenomena such as revelation and redemp-
tion, which have played such a central role in human history. Only a
handful of major scholars, such as the brilliant legal scholar Robert Cover,
have made revelation a pivotal part of their thinking.10 Weber made some
6
Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: System, Process, and
Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1978); David Easton, The Political System: An
Inquiry into the State of Political Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
7
Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975); Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951).
8
Shils, Center and Periphery, 138.
9
On the role of emotion in analysis (in this case, the analysis of nationalism), see Kenneth
Gregory Lawson, War at the Grassroots: The Great War and the Nationalization of Civic
Life, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2000.
10
Robert Cover, Nomos and Narrative in Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat
(eds.), Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover (Ann Arbor: University
6
The State-in-Society Approach
references to the centrality of redemption but did not pursue its impor-
tance in the modern state. For Shils and others dealing with such issues
as the creation of shared meaning, including peoples feelings about the
purpose of society and their place in it, there was an understanding that
the forging of social bonds through non-instrumental means excludes as
well as includes, setting demarcation lines of who is part of society and
who is outside it.
One difficulty that I had with Shils and others was the way in which
their use of the systems approach and its cognates blurred the locus of
authority. In his celebrated essays on center and periphery, for example,
Shils saw the source of authority and change as inhering in a witchs brew
of elites, institutions, and shared values.11 But the source and coherence of
this brew, particularly of the shared values, seemed mysterious. Somehow
it came together and then used its powerful ideas, resources, and people
to seep outward, incorporating in its path less powerful others who oper-
ated according to different sets of rules. It all seemed so elusive to me.
When I went to graduate school in 1967, I came into contact with a
different school led by the person who was to become my dissertation
advisor, Samuel Huntington. Huntington, along with a few others in the
1960s such as J. P. Nettles, insisted that the place to look for the sources
of power to enforce order is in political institutions specifically. After a
detour into dependency and world-systems theory, both of which prop-
erly insisted on the importance of taking into account international
power relationships for the purpose of understanding domination and
change in any single society, social science theory returned to Hunting-
tons insight in the late 1970s and 1980s. Authors began to insist that
the state should be seen as an organization maintaining a special,
autonomous status; it has been, in fact, the locus of change.12 Indeed, that
premise has remained a powerful part of social and political theories right
up to the present, expressed in statism, structuralism, rational choice the-
ories, neorealism, and more. Domination and change have frequently been
analyzed as part of a process in which the state is the fulcrum. Through
law, bureaucracy, violence, and other means, the argument goes, the
of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 108. Cover writes intriguingly about the imagined instant of
unified meaning.
11
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 4.
12
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
7
Introduction
modern state has reshaped peoples behavior and, by extension, their sense
of who they are.
The most important line of criticism the new statist literature aimed at
the social systems models and Marxist theories was their inability to dis-
tinguish analytically between the state with its seemingly central role in
shaping social relations and personal identity and other sectors of society.
The critics, instead, posited the power and autonomy of the state in deter-
mining patterns of behavior and stratification.13 The argument of state
theorists was that states do not simply blend into an array of elite-run insti-
tutions as Parsons had described it, the political must systematically
articulate with the other sub-systems14 but stand out as autonomous,
highly powerful organizations in their own right. The call was for
researchers to shift their focus from the general social system to the unique
place of the state in rule making and in effecting social change. In so doing,
state theorists aimed to move from the emphasis on the harmony or
consensus at the center to the conflicts between a headstrong state and
other groupings in society. Like the systems theorists, the state-oriented
scholars drew heavily from Max Weber. But the Weber they followed was
the one who stressed the conceptualization of the state as an autonomous
organization with extraordinary means to dominate.
In 1974, a couple of years after I had finished my dissertation, I led a
seminar of five masters students at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, where I
held my first teaching post. The course examined the city and its role in
larger societal and political change through history. We looked into the
centrality of the city in popular imagination and, directly or indirectly,
in the various social science theories of change and domination. I think
that my years in Israel itself, including the traumatic three weeks of the
Yom Kippur War and its long, painful aftermath, as well as the months I
spent in the villages of the occupied West Bank researching a book,15
unconsciously brought into doubt many of my assumptions about how
authority is exercised and how it changes.
13
Ibid. State-centered theory aimed its general critique at another type of literature, though
one far less popular in the United States, which was the home of much of social science
writing in the decades after World War II. That was neo-Marxism. As with the systems
approach, the state theorists faulted the neo-Marxist literature for failing to account for
the states autonomy from social forces, in this case, from the dominant social class.
14
Parsons, The Political Aspect of Social Structure and Process, p. 104.
15
Joel S. Migdal, et al., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980).
8
The State-in-Society Approach
Despite the almost mythical power of the Israeli state, especially after
its resounding six-day victory against three Arab states in 1967, I found
that the situation in the Palestinian villages that it occupied bore only
slight resemblance to its carefully designed policies. The same impression
of a disjunction between state leaders will and the actual outcomes of their
policies came through strongly during and after the 1973 war, as I sat in
Tel Aviv glued to the radio and then visited both fronts, the Golan Heights
and Suez Canal. Nor did the United States fare any better with its
policies in Vietnam. At about that time, too, I heard a lecture by a visitor
in the department, Seymour Mann, arguing that, while the Model Cities
program in the United States had indeed initiated substantial social and
political change in inner cities, the results were a far cry from what
policymakers had planned or anticipated.
I began to grow increasingly uncomfortable with what I was teaching
in that seminar in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. During one of the
class sessions, it struck me that the various schools of social science liter-
ature may have been posing their questions in an unhelpful way. They
implicitly asked where they could find that center or state or distinctive
set of institutions that could have its way with the population, that could
effectively make and enforce the rules for daily life and, in so doing, mold
peoples understanding of themselves. Once that magical site was discov-
ered, it would unlock the secrets, whether material or cultural, depending
on the theory, that could tell us how patterns of domination are estab-
lished and how they change. The assumption was that the city or center
or core or state or dominant social class some integrated locus of author-
ity held superior resources and ideas that it could use in order to extend
its will throughout an entire society.
Those acted upon, the objects of control, played little role in the
theories; they were the ones who changed, the passive recipients of others
rules. More often than not, they were assumed to be a supine mass. Only
later would subaltern theories from South Asia and works by scholars such
as James C. Scott challenge those views. In 1974, Western social scientists
seemed nearly unanimous in the mechanics of domination and change
that discounted the active role of the masses. Beyond that, they variously
asked why some loci of authority succeeded more and others less?;16
16
For example, Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1968); a more recent example is David Waldner, State Building and
Late Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
9
Introduction
why some states took on particular forms, such as democracy, and others
not?;17 and so on. Even various shades of Marxists seemed to reserve a role
for lower classes only in fiery revolutions, not in day-to-day patterns of
domination.
Possibly, I suggested to the participants in the seminar, domination
and change were not best understood in terms of the outcomes of purpose-
ful, goal-oriented loci with overpowering resources and ideas at hand,
such as the state, as we found in prevailing theories. Perhaps, we should
look at multiple sites to understand domination and change and at results
that did not fit any of the parties designed policies. I submitted to the stu-
dents that the unintended outcomes of multiple conflicts in society over
whose rules should prevail, over which ideas should predominate may
explain more about domination and change than did existing theories.18
States (or any other integrated site of resources and ideas) engage in
pitched battles with other powerful figures and groups with entrenched
ways of doing things. Sometimes, the power of these other social forma-
tions is obvious, as in the ability to withhold badly needed credit; some-
times, it is veiled, as in ostracism in a small community. In either case, the
struggles over revenues, other goodies, and which ideas should prevail are
fierce and real.
In Israel in the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars, these conflicts were
intense and pervasive. The students witnessed them daily in the form of
wildcat strikes, the overnight establishment of illegal settlements in the
West Bank, resistance of numerous couples to state-mandated religious
weddings, marches by so-called Black Panthers protesting Ashkenazi dom-
ination, scattered acts of resistance by Palestinians in the occupied terri-
tories, and much more. Israel was in turmoil, and the sorts of conflicts that
were hard to detect prior to these two wars were now out in the open and
impossible to overlook. I asked if the conflicts that underlay these acts, as
well as the coalitions that formed around them, might not tell us far more
17
Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Guillermo ODonnell and
Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986); Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the
Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
18
Recently, a scholar made this point by noting that any attempt to preserve particular
hegemonic representations of class, gender, and community . . . are interrupted by
moments of contestation. Leela Fernandes, Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class,
and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997),
p. xiii.
10
The State-in-Society Approach
about patterns of domination and change than the designs and goals of
single, admittedly powerful sites or actors. Indeed, could the apparently
rock-hard Israeli state remain fundamentally the same after engaging
in these difficult domestic battles? (The answer was soon to be clear; it
could not.19)
Of course, I could not imagine during the seminar that my ques-
tions to the students back then would lead me to think and write about
these issues for the next quarter of a century. In fact, the ideas generated
in that class turned out to be the seed of the state-in-society approach
developed in the following essays, as well as the origin of a revised
definition of the state, which I will offer later in this introductory
essay. Throughout the book, my emphasis will be on process on the
ongoing struggles among shifting coalitions over the rules for daily
behavior. These processes determine how societies and states create and
maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life the nature of the
rules that govern peoples behavior, whom they benefit and whom they
disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them,
what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and
about their place in the world. And these processes also ordain the ways
that rules and patterns of domination and subordination are challenged
and change.
My view of the inner workings of domination and change starts with
the axiom that no single, integrated set of rules, whether encoded in state
law or sanctified as religious scriptures or enshrined as the rules of eti-
quette for daily behavior, exists anywhere. Quite simply, there is no uncon-
tested universal code in law, religion, or any other institution in any
society for guiding peoples lives. The state-in-society model used here
zeroes in on the conflict-laden interactions of multiple sets of formal and
informal guideposts for how to behave that are promoted by different
groupings in society.20 These multiple groupings, all of which use subtle
and not-so-subtle rewards and sanctions including, at times, out-and-out
violence to try and get their way, comprise loose-knit informal collec-
tions of people as well as highly structured organizations with manifold
19
See Joel S. Migdal, Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2001).
20
Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir, The Roots of Peacemaking: The Dynamics of Citizen-
ship in Israel, 194893, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 391413.
They describe this axiom as a conceptual framework that deconstructs the multiple and
competing conceptions of citizenship (p. 392).
11
Introduction
21
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), p. xiii.
22
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
12
The State-in-Society Approach
today . . .). More than that, state leaders have relentlessly pushed the idea
that the state, as a purposeful and coherent entity, is a representation of
the transcendental meaning that Shils referred to in his essays: the state is
the embodiment of the nation or the people, and its rules The Law
hold a special sanctity.23 As one activist in Egypt, criticizing the arrest of
a sociologist who supposedly defamed Egypt by referring in a docu-
mentary to election fraud, noted, The government has convinced the
people that Egypt and the government are one and the same thing.24 And,
while that notion has been regularly contested (e.g., peoples proclamation
of fidelity to a higher law), it has had a considerable effect on popular think-
ing. Indeed, people characterize others by their overall orientation to that
singular Law, as in, She is a law-abiding citizen, but he is a law-breaker.
The Laws transcendental quality, then, is represented not only in its role
in connecting people, making them The People, but also in its funda-
mental moral quality as the right way to behave.
Many of the same elements found in popular thinking have also
appeared in social science literature with a slightly different twist. Weber,
who cast such a large shadow over twentieth-century social science, offered
what has become a now-classic definition of the state. It still maintains
wide currency as the way to understand todays states. First, he wrote, the
modern state is a compulsory association which organizes domination.25
For him, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation
supported by means of legitimate (i.e., considered to be legitimate)
violence.26 In his most widely quoted statement, A state is a human com-
munity that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physi-
cal force within a given territory.27 Weber assumed that states are
goal-oriented associations, but because they can hold such disparate goals
he chose to define them in terms of their means (the use of force) instead.
For him states are purposeful associations with varied purposes but similar
means.
23
Shils, Center and Periphery, pp. 756, recognizes that the center does not hold a monop-
oly of authority and that there are multiple sources of competing authority. But an impos-
ing center, he notes, integrates society through the image of the society which it
precipitates (p. 74).
24
Gasser Abdel Razik quoted in The New York Times, July 10, 2000, p. A10.
25
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 82.
26
Ibid., p. 78.
27
Ibid., p. 78.
13
Introduction
28
Law exists when there is a probability that an order will be upheld by a specific staff of
men who will use physical or psychical compulsion with the intention of obtaining con-
formity with the order, or of inflicting sanctions for infringement of it. From Max Weber,
p. 180.
29
Only bureaucracy has established the foundation for the administration of a rational law
conceptually systematized on the basis of such enactments as the latter Roman imperial
period first created with a high degree of technical perfection. . . . The rational inter-
pretation of law on the basis of strictly formal conceptions stands opposite the kind of
adjudication that is primarily bound to sacred traditions. From Max Weber, p. 216.
14
The State-in-Society Approach
of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the
image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a represen-
tation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its
multiple parts.
Actual states are shaped by two elements, image and practices.30 These
can be overlapping and reinforcing, or contradictory and mutually destruc-
tive. Image has tended to be homologous from state to state, especially the
image of the modern state that has its origins in the fifteenth through sev-
enteenth centuries in northwest Europe and came to encompass the entire
globe in the last half of the twentieth century. Conversely, practices have
tended to be diverse, and, while there are certainly recognizable compar-
ative patterns, they have defied neat categorization.
First is the image. I adapt this from Shils, who used the term to describe
the center, not the state. The image, he explained, amalgamates the
numerous institutions of which the performers are members and on behalf
of which they exercise authority, into an image of a dominant and single
center of society.31 In the definition here, the image of the state is of a
dominant, integrated, autonomous entity that controls, in a given terri-
tory, all rule making, either directly through its own agencies or indirectly
by sanctioning other authorized organizations businesses, families, clubs,
and the like to make certain circumscribed rules.32
Image implies perception. Here, perception of the state is by those
inside and outside its claimed territory as the chief and appropriate rule
maker within its territorial boundaries. In that regard, the perception
assumes a single entity that is fairly autonomous, unified, and centralized.
While everyone recognizes the complexity and sheer sprawl of this orga-
nization that its parts will not always work in pure harmony, that image
30
Akhil Gupta, Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics,
and the Imagined State, American Ethnologist 22 (May 1995): 375402. In this brilliant
article, Gupta attempts an ethnography of the state by looking both at its everyday prac-
tices and its discursive construction. I first read a draft of the article in the late 1980s,
and I think subconsciously it had a major effect in my working toward the present defin-
ition of the state. While his discursive construction differs from my understanding of
image, the article makes clear the need to take into account [the states] constitution
through a complex set of spatially intersecting representations and practices (p. 377).
These ideas will be echoed below.
31
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 74 (my emphasis).
32
Weber writes, The right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to indi-
viduals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole
source of the right to use violence. From Max Weber, p. 78.
16
The State-in-Society Approach
is a likeness that does not display every wart still, the image of the state
induces people to perceive its agencies as generically integrated and acting
in conjunction with one another.
The image posits an entity having two sorts of boundaries: (1) territo-
rial boundaries between the state and other states, and (2) social bound-
aries between the state its (public) actors and agencies and those subject
to its rules (private). While for some limited groups, such as certain
nomadic tribes, territorial borders may appear not to exist, for most
others, from travelers to importers, the lines on school maps represent
clearly defined images of how the world is structured geographically.
Weber got it right in saying, Territory is one of the characteristics of
the state.33
More than that, the image of territorial borders separating spaces of
control by different states is augmented by the common notion that those
states somehow embody the people inside their lines; this is what I referred
to as representation in the definition at the beginning of this section. Thus,
it does not seem incongruous to read in the newspaper about a chief ex-
ecutive speaking for the people, as if the states boundaries manifest
some underlying unity among those in the territory. In the image, the state,
although separated from the general population of the territory, as will be
discussed momentarily, is the avatar of that population, as seen in UN
votes, interstate diplomacy, or any number of other daily venues. Such rep-
resentation signifies that territorial boundaries serve both as limits of state
control and the circumscribing of a connected people. I will return to the
issue of the connection of the people shortly.
Besides territorial boundaries, the second sort of boundary that the
image of the state includes is a social boundary, separating the state from
other non-state, or private, actors and social forces. Weber noted that the
separation of public and private he was looking particularly at public and
private law is a hallmark of the modern, bureaucratized state. The con-
ceptual separation of public and private law presupposes the conceptual
separation of the state, as abstract bearer of sovereign prerogatives
and the creator of legal norms, from all personal authorizations of
individuals.34
The state is not only separated, it is elevated. That is, its representa-
tion of the people distinguishes it from all other entities, which in the
image can signify only particular interests. Only the state is the general
33 34
Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 239.
17
Introduction
35
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon,
and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 103.
18
The State-in-Society Approach
36
Bertrand Russell, Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness in Sceptical Essays (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1928).
37
Jean-Franois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Batrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State
in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
19
Introduction
38
Instead of treating corruption as a dysfunctional aspect of state organizations, I see it as
a mechanism through which the state itself is discursively constituted. Gupta, Blurred
Boundaries, p. 376.
39
Gupta, Blurred Boundaries, p. 379.
20
The State-in-Society Approach
The coalitions inside Turkey and into the European countries. con-
tested the image of Turkish state morality and representation. I smail
Besiki, who spent years in prison for his writing on Kurds, challenged the
exclusivity of state morality: Sociological realities are denied by means of
an official ideology [i.e., morality]. Official ideology is not just any ideol-
ogy. Official ideology implies legal sanction. Those who stray outside the
40
Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, pp. 612.
41
Nicole Watts, Virtual Kurdistan West: States and Supra-territorial Communities in
the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington,
forthcoming.
42
Nicole Watts, Kurdish Rights, Human Rights: Boundaries of Transnational Activism,
paper presented to the Workshop on Boundaries and Belonging, July 1999, p. 2.
21
Introduction
boundaries of official ideology are shown the way to prison.43 Despite the
risks, both state officials and private actors in Turkey forged alliances chal-
lenging the morality and representation contained in the states image,
adopting practices that denied the moral rightness and exclusivity of state
ideology.
In encapsulating both image and practices, the definition of state here
uses the concept of field, adopting it (and adapting it) from Bourdieu.44
He notes that the field highlights relationships in a multidimensional
space, one in which the symbolic element is as important as the material
(what he calls substances). What is at stake, writes Bourdieu, is the
very representation of the social world.45 The central phenomenon is
struggle. Every field is the site of a more or less overt struggle over the
definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field.46 In describ-
ing the state as a field of power, I want to emphasize what Bourdieu calls
the multi-dimensional space of positions, using the word power to
denote the struggles over who dominates.
In brief, the state is a contradictory entity that acts against itself. To
understand domination, then, demands two levels of analysis, one that
recognizes the corporate, unified dimension of the state its wholeness
expressed in its image, and one that dismantles this wholeness in favor of
examining the reinforcing and contradictory practices and alliances of its
disparate parts. The state-in-society model focuses on this paradoxical
quality of the state; it demands that students of domination and change
view the state in dual terms. It must be thought of at once (1) as the pow-
erful image of a clearly bounded, unified organization that can be spoken
of in singular terms (e.g., a headline stating, Israel accepts Palestinian
demands), as if it were a single, centrally motivated actor performing in
an integrated manner to rule a clearly defined territory; and (2) as the prac-
tices of a heap of loosely connected parts or fragments, frequently with ill-
defined boundaries between them and other groupings inside and outside
the official state borders and often promoting conflicting sets of rules with
one another and with official Law. Theories that do not incorporate the
two sides of the paradoxical state end up either overidealizing its ability to
43
Cited in Nader Entessar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 105.
44
Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups, Theory and Society 14
(November 1985): 72344. I am also indebted to Zubaidas development of the concept
of political field. Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and
Movements in the Middle East (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 14552.
45
Ibid., p. 723.
46
Ibid., p. 734.
22
The State-in-Society Approach
47
This statement comes from an interview that he gave in Amsterdam in 1969. Johan Gouds-
blom and Stephen Mennell (eds.), The Norbert Elias Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998),
p. 143.
23
Introduction
readily from much of hard political science and other social science
disciplines, I have also grown increasingly impatient with limitations
built into their standard methods. Much has been made of the rigor of
the methods used in rational-choice, empirical/quantitative, structural,
and other fashionable approaches in the social sciences. But this rigor,
I have found, is as limiting as it is illuminating. The presentation of
highly stylized pictures in which the action is frozen, in which we are
presented with static independent variables (such as fixed preferences or
structures or institutional arrangements) bearing the weight of causality,
places far too restrictive blinders on students of comparative domination
and change.
Such approaches can trap social and political life within a narrowly con-
structed world of rigor. One way that is done is through the search for
what might be called the moment of original sin the event or condition
or crossroads that one can read back to from the present to see how the
current state of affairs came to be. It is the quest for that frozen moment
in time that determines what is to follow. In Waldners language, it is a
critical juncture.48 Geoffrey Eley and David Blackburn brilliantly criti-
cized this sort of historiography, which, they claim, fruitlessly attempts to
pinpoint the momentous turning point that explains the rise of Nazism in
Germany.49 And here, too, the explanation for development, or lack of it,
is, in Eliass terms, in relation to the static the decisive structural condi-
tion of elite conflict at the outset.
The problem is that this sort of hard causality overdetermines the
present state of affairs and forces history into the holding pen of its
hypotheses. Fashionable rigor may force-feed overly constraining
hypotheses on readers by searching for one-way causality that starts at a
key moment. Existing methods popularly found in political economy,
rational-choice, and structural analyses can overemphasize the explanatory
power of independent variables, such as distinctive institutional arrange-
ments. By fixing those variables in time, they ignore how the effects that
they spawn may, in turn, transform them.
Existing understanding of rigor may divert the observer from the con-
tinuing dynamic that Cover called narrative the unexpected, the unsta-
ble, the reactive to daily life. Cover did not rule out the hard variables
48
Waldner, State Building and Late Development.
49
Geoffrey Eley and David Blackburn, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and
Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
24
The State-in-Society Approach
what he called nomos, that is, the structure of the normative world but
at the same time he noted that nomos is continually transformed by how
it enables us to submit, rejoice, struggle, pervert, mock, disgrace, humil-
iate, or dignify. . . . The very imposition of a normative force [e.g., the
inclination to court lower classes due to elite conflict or a particular set of
preferences by powerful actors] upon a state of affairs, real or imagined,
is the act of creating narrative.50 Countries stories do not end with the
original sin or the critical juncture where there is the imposition of a pow-
erful normative force; they only begin, for those forces call into being
resistance and struggle, cooperation and coalitions, that transform the
original impulse.
To put it a bit differently, social scientists need to understand the
effects, not only of revelation, but also of the quest for redemption.
Revelation is an act fixed in time, in which Truth is collectively dis-
covered and assimilated. It creates the founding principles that inspire
people to act within a shared framework of meaning, displacing their own
material desires in favor of those hallowed principles, even to the point of
martyrdom or dying for ones country. But the quest for redemption
is ongoing. It holds out the hope for deliverance from the ills and
decline that are part of the human condition pain, sickness, poverty,
decadence, decline, corruption, selfishness, and the like. Redemption
offers the promise of collective deliverance and restoration. It prompts
ongoing reactions to the world in which people find themselves, continu-
ally motivating responses to the failed human condition, to the failed
promise of revelation.
The sort of method implied by Elias and Cover extends even to terri-
torial dimensions of states. Social scientists have tended to treat the terri-
torial configurations of states as constants in their inquiries, as nearly
invariable and largely uncontested. They have been inclined to see world
space as carved up into static blocks called states, which can periodically
go through an eruptive change, as in the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
but for long periods in between stay constant. Ian Lustick was one of the
first theorists in recent years to challenge this perspective, urging schol-
ars to see states as entities with often fundamentally contested, changing
boundaries.51
50
Cover, Nomos and Narrative, pp. 100, 102.
51
Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel
and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
25
Introduction
As noted above, the image of the state rests on the notion of two
stable boundaries, territorial borders and the separation between state
and other social actors. But, as the definition of state offered here
makes clear, a focus on image alone can be quite misleading. Both sorts
of boundaries have acted not only as simple social separators, dividing
one people or nation from another and state actors from private ones in
the territory. Boundaries have also suggested realms of meaning, in the
sense suggested by Shils. Practices that have neutralized these boundaries
have done more than destroy the image; they have created their own
new spatial configurations of meaning, as Watts made clear in the Turkish-
Kurdish case. De Certeau made this point, stating that resistance to the
image (what he called the historical laws of a state of affairs) and its
dogmatic legitimations ends up redistributing its space.52 Whereas
Lustick urged scholars to see variability in territorial boundaries both
physically and in terms of public debate over their physical placement,
I am suggesting that, even when physical boundaries are static, their effect
as lines encompassing a people connected through shared meaning may
vary considerably.
Smuggling rings, clan and tribal relationships that have spanned
territorial and/or public-private boundaries, regional and secessionist
movements, certain sorts of religious solidarities, and numerous other
social formations have quietly put forth systems of meaning that imply
boundaries quite different from those represented in the image of the
state. Some have sought to change the lines on maps; others act only to
minimize the importance of those lines. In both cases, they have openly
or surreptitiously challenged a key element in the image of the state:
its claim to be the avatar of the people bounded by that territory and
its assumption of the connection of those people encompassed by state
borders as a (or the) primary social bond. In short, the ongoing con-
testation of rules has implied, as well, a continuing struggle over
systems of meaning and the territorial and social divisions marking off
a group of persons acquiring their significance by their embodiment
of values which transcend them.53 Territorial boundaries may vary
even though the formal lines on maps remain unchanged; the meaning
attached to those boundaries in the image of the state may be challenged
in a variety of ways.
52
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 18.
53
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 138.
26
The State-in-Society Approach
54
Niall . Murch, Labor, the State, and Ethnic Conflict: A Comparative Study of British
Rule in Palestine (19201939) and Northern Ireland (19731994), Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Washington, 2000.
27
Introduction
each outburst through the end of the 1930s accompanied by yet another
White Paper or commission out of London proposing an answer to the
interminable ferment and brutality. None worked. In Northern Ireland
violence peaked a few years after the beginning of the Troubles in 1969,
but the British failed for a quarter of a century beyond that peak to control
the violence fully and move toward some sort of long-term solution.
The answer as to why violence grew in the face of the commitment of
one of the worlds great powers to stamp it out, Murch argues, starts
with skepticism about the image of the powerful British state. Britains
seemingly inexplicable ineptitude leads in his analysis to an initial ques-
tioning of the reach and coherence of the state. Despite British leaders
continued call to overseas bureaucracies to impose order, those elements
of the state that were supposed to impose a solution found themselves with
cripplingly limited knowledge about local groups and woefully insufficient
resources to do the job. In both cases, parts of the British state located in
the territories tried to overcome these deficiencies by forming quiet coali-
tions with local agents in society. In fact, they became dependent on the
Jews and Protestants for capital, local knowledge, skilled manpower, secu-
rity personnel, and more. Murch argues that each of these groups
entered into a capital-coercion bargain with the state.
In Palestine, the severe fiscal restraints placed by London on the High
Commissioner and his Palestine Government made that government
highly dependent on Jewish immigration and capital investments, despite
the unending ire these raised among Arab leaders. Britains failure in
Northern Ireland to find some sort of accommodation from 1968 to 1974
led to its emphasis on security. To achieve that, local officials beefed
up a number of security agencies, all of which were almost entirely
staffed by Protestants. The devolution of a solution from London to
Ulster fostered a coalition between elements of the UK state with the
Protestants.
Those coalitions in Palestine and Northern Ireland intersected and
neutralized the lines between the state and other social formations implied
in the states image and emphasized by British state officials in far-off
Britain. The quiet trade-off for Jewish capital and Protestant security was
both direct and indirect British support for each of these groups to main-
tain an ethnically divided labor market. The split labor market excluded
Arabs and Catholics from certain sectors and industries and kept their
wage levels lower than those for Jewish and Protestant workers. In so
doing, it was fuel for continuing ethnic conflict.
28
The State-in-Society Approach
55
Patricia Woods, Courting the Court: Social Visions, State Authority, and the Religious
Law Debates in Israel, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, forthcoming 2001;
also see Paula R. Newberg, Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Mark J. Osiel, Dialogue with Dictators:
Judicial Resistance in Argentina and Brazil in Law and Social Inquiry 20 (Spring 1995):
481560, Martin Shapiro and Alec Stone, The New Constitutional Politics of Europe
in Comparative Political Studies, Special Issue: The New Constitutional Politics in Europe, 26
( January 1994): 397420.
30
The State-in-Society Approach
decision. Why once again risk parliamentary retribution that could set
back the High Courts other apparent gains, such as the power of judicial
review?
Woods argues that crucial implicit alliances between the court and
social forces inside and outside Israel gave the justices the motivation and
strength to challenge other parts of the state. In so doing, they upset the
existing balance of power among the key institutions of the state. Three
sets of social groups turned to the court in the 1980s after being repeat-
edly rebuffed by the Knesset: the womens movement, the religious plu-
ralism movement, and the civil rights movement. The mere existence of
social movements in Israel is a relatively new phenomenon, and the court
seemed to sense this change and jump to take advantage of it. Still, none
of these movements was much more than a blip on the radar screen in
Israeli society small, marginal, often fractious, their causes certainly did
not resonate with the larger Israeli population. Nonetheless, the most suc-
cessful of these, the womens movement, ended up effecting far-reaching
changes in Israeli society by turning to the High Court in a series of what
turned out to be pivotal cases.
The High Court, in turn, seized on the increased demand the move-
ment generated for court decisions through its suits and appeals, as well
as on the arguments of law that the movement put forth in its briefs. Using
general Israeli law (particularly basic laws promising gender equality) and
natural law suggested by the movements leaders, the justices weighed into
some of the most contentious boundary issues imaginable: who is a Jew
(and who not) and who is an Israeli (and who not)? These issues went to
the heart of questions of group boundaries, of who is in and who is out of
the nation or society. Precisely who are the people of which the state is a
representation?
In time, the court itself was transformed by the implicit alliance with
the womens movement and the new sorts of cases that this alliance thrust
upon it. Early on, it used the womens cases to make narrow judgments,
arguing that state religious decisions and practices needed be overturned
because they trod on legal guarantees of gender equality articulated in
general Israeli law. But the natural law language found in the decisions,
while not the basis for those decisions, expressed a vision of society involv-
ing rights, personal freedoms, and the states responsibility in defending
the individual, even at the expense of deeply entrenched communal, and,
later, even security, values and issues. The new language implied too that
it was the High Court, among all the institutions of the state, that was
31
Introduction
56
Speech by Yossi Beillin, Israels Minister of Justice, to the Association of Israel Studies
Annual Meeting, Tel Aviv, June 26, 2000.
32
The State-in-Society Approach
settlements and the ability of the security services to use physical force to
interrogate terrorist suspects.
57
Kenneth Gregory Lawson, War at the Grassroots: The Great War and the Nationaliza-
tion of Civic Life, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2000.
58
Ibid., p. 90.
33
Introduction
59 60
Thomas Lawrence quoted in ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 125.
34
The State-in-Society Approach
reason resented being drawn into war, took great risks for letting their feelings be
known or for refusing to share in the sacrifice.61
Conclusion
The central issues in the three pieces of research that I have recapitulated
ethnic conflict, the growing power of judiciaries, and the complex rela-
tionship between nation and state have received considerable attention
in many other social science works, as well. Yet, Murch, Woods, and
61 62 63 64
Ibid., pp. 1267. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., pp. 2634.
35
Introduction
the state as means that state leaders use to reinforce the image of the state
and keep them intact.
In the following section, Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change,
I deal with what social scientists today fashionably call the micro-
foundations of theory. Much of contemporary theory has become trapped,
as the title here emphasizes, within its narrowly constructed world of rigor.
Part of the problem, I believe, rests on standard theories micro-founda-
tions, on the view of the individual as an integrated personality, with clear
preferences that are hierarchically ordered and that motivate one to act.
This understanding of the individual originates in established American
psychology, which rests on unspoken liberal assumptions and sees per-
sonality development coming from the anxiety generated by conflicts that
threaten the unity of the personality, dissonance. In Chapter 6, I critique
assumptions about the individual particularly the unity and integrity of
personality found in some of the most important early works on the
Third World. It is important to add that these same limiting assumptions
are still very much a part of todays literature, particularly rational-choice
works. The chapter presents an alternative conception of the individual,
one that I believe allows researchers to escape the assumptions of standard
positivistic theories and move toward a process-based method. Rejecting
a simple material or methodological-individualist approach to human
change, the article presents a model based on inconsistency in individual
behavior, depending on the context of action what I call the syncretic
personality. Such a model points to the conflicting sets of principles and
values that individuals call upon in an environment of conflict among states
and other social organizations.
Finally, the last part of the book, Studying the State, takes aim at how
scholars have conceived the state. The two essays in this section set the
stage for the new definition of the state that I presented above. The first,
Chapter 7, demonstrates how assumptions about European states were
extended by social scientists to the new states that emerged after World
War II. It argues that the ontological status that states had in this Europe-
based view needs to give way to a perspective in which states are not treated
as omnipotent givens but as variable in their ability to effect social policy
and reshape society. The final chapter deals with the issues of meaning
that I referred to earlier. Here, I advocate modifying the strong structural
emphasis in institutional analyses to incorporate cultural variables.
Through their practices, states lay claim to the collective consciousness of
their population. Institutions and symbols have been at the core of the
37
Introduction
38
PA R T I I
1
See, for example, two articles by Benjamin Neuberger: The Western Nation-State in
African Perceptions of Nation-Building, Asian and African Studies 11 (1976): 24161; and
State and Nation in African Thought, Journal of African Studies 4 (Summer 1977):
198205.
41
Rethinking Social and Political Change
that have kept them in office for years on end but of the severely limited
capability of states to regulate and transform their societies as had been
expected.
The earlier images of modern states shaping formerly traditional soci-
eties were based on presuppositions about the overall role of politics in
the organization of society and the dynamics of social and political change.
The next section will examine some of these important premises about
order and change many of, which have survived in contemporary
research in one way or another. The chapter will then present an alterna-
tive understanding of the role of politics in society and a model for how
to approach the question of overall societal change.
many of the premises dealing with order and change in such a model.
Drawing on Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, during the course of thirty
years Edward Shils penned a large number of essays on aspects of this
model.2 These are worth looking at not only because of Shilss own impact
upon the social sciences, but also because in them he spelled out what were
for others implicit assumptions about the relations between center and
periphery, modern and traditional, and other dichotomous models. What
did Shils mean by center and periphery? In fact, he never gave a precise
definition, but from several scattered statements we can sketch a picture
of the modern center. Three primary components constitute the center:
values and beliefs, institutions, and elites, and these combine in a seamless
weave.
Values and beliefs what Shils called the central value system form
the core of what people in society hold sacred and the foundation that the
elites act upon. Shils saw the center not simply as a random collection of
stated and unstated preferences, but in regularized and harmonious terms
as the order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which govern the society.3
Thus, besides giving society a recognizable configuration by differentiat-
ing center from periphery, Shils was eager to set forth the internal struc-
ture of centers, making them comparable in form if not in content. It is
this form, this order, that is irreducible, connecting the centers values and
beliefs.
A second component of the center is institutional. This is the critical
realm of action. The offices, roles, and organizations express the order
inherent in the central value system. No group of people has completely
homogeneous values; the institutional component implements the values
of the center throughout society. Its authority is the motor of social
change. Shilss center is activist and aggressive; its institutional network
both embodies and propounds the centers values and beliefs. The
center, he wrote, consists of those institutions (and roles) which exercise
authority, whether it be economic, governmental, political, military, and
of those which create and diffuse cultural symbols (religious, literary, etc.)
through churches, schools, publishing houses, etc.4
2
Many of those essays are collected in Edward Shils, Center and Periphery (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1975). Also, see his Political Development in the New States (Paris:
Moution, 1966).
3
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 3 (my emphasis); see also 489.
4
Ibid., p. 39.
44
A Model of State-Society Relations
5
Shils, Political Development, pp. 810.
6
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 44 (my emphasis).
46
A Model of State-Society Relations
which, according to Shils, were not real societies at all but only protoso-
cieties. Others have added that even in contemporary Western Europe,
a jumble of different value systems continue to survive, suggesting that
centers may not be that effective and dominant in modern societies either.7
Historically, Charles Tilly wrote, the Europeans of 1500 and later did not
ordinarily expand from a highly organized center into a weakly organized
periphery.8
By the 1970s and 1980s, criticism of the center-periphery or modern-
traditional models also mounted over their supercilious treatment of the
state. Social scientists pointed to the special, perhaps even autonomous,
role that the state organization plays in making and enforcing rules and in
influencing the very structure of society. Differing components do not
mesh into a center as effortlessly as Shils and others had suggested. Indeed,
there was a stealthy reemergence of the state in Shilss work. Unexpect-
edly, and only after his three major essays on center and periphery, he
referred to the prominence of the governmental center.9
7
Suzanne Berger and Michael J. Piore, Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
8
Charles Tilly, Reflections on the History of European State-Making, in Charles Tilly
(ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1975), p. 24.
9
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 74.
10
See, for example, Frederick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism: Social-
Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1974); and David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1979).
47
Rethinking Social and Political Change
11
See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1968); and Gerald A. Heeger, The Politics of Underdevelopment
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1974).
12
Social control is used in a broad sense and is interchangeable with a concept such as
power. It refers to situations in which A gets B to do something he would not other-
wise do. David A. Baldwin, Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends Versus Old
Tendencies, World Politics 31 (January 1979): 1623. Baldwin notes that it is important to
denote both the scope and domain of such concepts. The issue of domain (who is influ-
encing whom) is at the heart of the rest of the discussion. The domain (influence in respect
to what) involves the social behavior of individuals in a given society.
48
A Model of State-Society Relations
universal this goal has become. There have been few universals in the
processes of social change, yet on this issue one can generalize very
broadly. By the middle of the twentieth century, in practically every society
on earth, political leaders asserted the idea of the state as right
and proper to create a state organization that would itself either make
the rules that govern the details of peoples lives or determine which
other organizations might establish these rules (and then monitor those
organizations).
But success in achieving this goal has been elusive. Political leaders
have faced tremendous obstacles in their drive to assert such control,
obstacles that they have often failed to overcome. Leaders of other
social organizations have been unwilling to relinquish their prerogatives,
their ability to devise rules governing some aspects of peoples lives,
without a fierce struggle. These other formal and informal social organi-
zations have joined forces with parts of the state, sometimes even with the
beleaguered heads of states themselves, and developed practices contra-
dicting the official laws and regulations of the state. The participation of
fragments of the state in such coalitions that intersect the state-society
divide are practices of the state, and practices of the state may directly
contradict the idea of the state. Indeed, the central political and social
drama of recent history has been the battle between the idea of the
state and the often-implicit agendas of other social formations (which may
very well include parts of the state itself) for how society should be orga-
nized. The dispute is over who makes the rules, who grants the property
rights that define the use of assets and resources in the society, whose
system of meaning people will adopt to explain to themselves their place
on this earth.
Scholars dealing with the maintenance of order and change in society
as a whole need an approach that brings this struggle for social control
into stark relief. The model I am suggesting, what I call state-in-society,
depicts society as a mlange of social organizations rather than a dichoto-
mous structure. Various formations, including the idea of the state as well
as many others (which may or may not include parts of the state) singly
or in tandem offer individuals strategies of personal survival and, for some,
strategies of upward mobility. Individual choice among strategies is based
on the material incentives and coercion organizations can bring to bear
and on the organizations use of symbols and values concerning how social
life should be ordered. These symbols and values either reinforce the
forms of social control in the society or propose new forms of social life.
49
Rethinking Social and Political Change
Indeed, this struggle is ongoing in every society. Societies are not static
formations but are constantly becoming as a result of these struggles over
social control.
To be sure, in some instances, the idea-state may make and enforce
many rules in the society or may choose to delegate some of that author-
ity to other mechanisms, such as the church or market. There are other
societies, however, where social organizations actively vie with one another
in offering strategies and in proposing different rules of the game. Here,
the mlange of social organizations is marked by an environment of con-
flict, an active struggle for social control of the population. The state is
part of the environment of conflict in which its own parts struggle with
one another. The battles may be with families over the rules of education
and socialization; they may be with ethnic groups over territoriality;
they may be with religious organizations over daily habits. In the early
twentieth century, Mustafa Kemal of Turkey locked horns with religious
organizations over whether men should wear hats with brims or without.
As with so many other skirmishes, the issue was not as inconsequential as
it may appear; the conflict was over who had the right and ability to make
rules in that society.
In many third-world societies, where these struggles are most evident
in the 1980s, states face a multitude of social organizations that maintain
and vie for the power to set rules. Families, clans, multinational corpora-
tions, domestic businesses, tribes, political parties, and patron-client dyads
may be among those actively engaged in the environment of conflict. Why
have state leaders taken on all these foes, in rhetoric and often in direct
action, to struggle for the ultimate rule-making capability? After all,
central political organizations have not always taken such an aggressive
stance. This sort of multi-front war can easily sap the states strength and
eventually topple it.
The answer can be found by considering the special character of the
world system that has been the backdrop for these struggles, forming a
second tier of relationships for each state. Each state is not only one orga-
nization in a domestic mlange but is also one among many states glob-
ally. Its role on one tier, the society, is highly interdependent with its place
in the other, the system of states. Since the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, when modern states began to appear in Western Europe, they have
presented dire threats to all other existing political forms. Their fantastic
comparative advantage in mobilizing and organizing resources for war and
other purposes brought the survival of other political entities into ques-
50
A Model of State-Society Relations
13
Krasner has made the point quite well. A states strength in external relations rests on its
strength in relation to its own society. Stephen D. Krasner, Domestic Constraints on
International Economic Leverage, in Klaus Knorr and Frank N. Trager, eds., Economic
Issues and National Security (Kansas City: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). To be sure, the
state is dealing in two different domains, and internal social control is not totally and
immediately fungible to power in the world of states. Nonetheless, such social control is
a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to exercise power internationally.
51
Rethinking Social and Political Change
life should be ordered, what the rules of the game should be. They can
also be officials of the state themselves or be allied with such officials.
There is no guarantee that states will act as totally coherent organizations,
as the idea of the state suggests. Actual state practices may support con-
flicting forms of social control.
brief, state leaders may find that despite all the seeming riches at their
disposal, their organization, the state, lacks the wherewithal to dislodge
people from the existing strategies offered by organizations with rules
different from the states. The periphery is far more important in
shaping the future of a society than either Shils or later writers on the
state imagined. And, with the resources they mobilize and the legitimacy
they garner, these other social formations may use parts of the state, from
single positions to whole bureaus, to further their own sets of rules and
meaning.
The bounty of state resources and personnel does have a tremendous
impact on the rest of society, but often in ways unintended and unantici-
pated by state leaders. Social control by other organizations, gained from
their mobilization of portions of the population, gives them a strength that
can be very threatening even to the states local political representatives or
bureaucrats inclined to follow official laws and regulations. The state
official is caught in a vise, with clear instructions from state superiors on
how to use resources but with counterpressures from other social groups
to employ different priorities. To avoid the damage local authorities might
inflict upon their chances for advancement or even their political survival,
many strategically placed state employees accommodate these local
figures. State resources in many cases have had a deep impact on local
society but in ways that have strengthened local social organizations at the
states expense.
Whole portions of states have been captured by people enforcing guide-
lines on how to use state resources that differ from those advanced by state
leaders. State leaders rules are contained in the official policies designed
to regulate and monitor strictly the flow of state resources. It is tempting
to see any deviation from these rules as corruption, as if the problem
involved only a deficiency in monitoring distribution. In fact, much of
what is commonly called corruption is not simply a single individual stuff-
ing his or her pockets with state resources. It is behavior according to dis-
senting rules, established by organizations other than the state. Nepotism,
for example, though against state law, may be a cardinal norm within the
family or clan. How people are recruited into state jobs is an indication of
whose rules of the game are being followed. The issue goes beyond tech-
nical monitoring of state functionaries to guard against nepotism or other
infringements of state rules. Such transgressions reflect pockets of social
control outside of the domain of state leaders, which have been able to
shape how the state acts or, at least, how one tentacle of the state acts.
54
A Model of State-Society Relations
Even in the most remote parts of a country, states have had a huge impact.
At times, it is difficult to imagine how a given place might have evolved
without state penetration. Remote villages have state-financed police,
roads, potable water, state tax collectors, credit, marketing cooperatives,
schools, subsidized contraceptives, electricity, health care, and more. The
distribution of state goodies, collection of taxes, and application of force,
however, may not be at all what state leaders had in mind not to mention
the resulting social structure, the effective rulers in the village, or the
distribution of social control.
14
Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 13.
55
Rethinking Social and Political Change
15
Baldwin makes a point that should lead those writing on corporatism and bureaucratic
authoritarianism to exercise some caution. The so-called paradox of unrealized power
results from the mistaken belief that power resources in one policy-contingent framework
will be equally useful in a different one. . . . The theme of such explanations is not he had
the cards but played them poorly, but rather he had a great bridge hand but happened
to be playing poker. Baldwin, Power Analysis, p. 164.
56
A Model of State-Society Relations
57
3
1
See, for example, Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, Social Science Research
Council Items 36 ( June 1982): 18, Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), Stephen D. Krasner, Approaches
to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics, Comparative Politics 16
( January 1984): 223.
58
Strong States, Weak States
studies, at least, one could probably better say that the state was more
assumed or taken for granted than neglected during the 1950s and 1960s.
Many social scientists writing about non-Western societies saw the con-
scious manipulation of social life public policy as a central ingredient
of the social histories and futures of newly independent societies. Such
manipulation, of course, lies at the heart of politics. The concept of the
state came to be assumed, rather than dealt with in more explicit terms,
only because politics was often viewed as the outgrowth of other sorts
of more fundamental processes (for example, those in economic life or in
communications). Or politics and states were subsumed within larger
constructs, such as centers and modern sectors, which were portrayed
as the movers (or potential movers) in shaping new social habits, a
new national consciousness, and new politics in formerly intractable
peripheries.
It was not until Samuel P. Huntingtons well-known article in the
1965 volume of World Politics, Political Development and Political
Decay, that politics as an independent and autonomous enterprise became
a widely accepted notion.2 Even then, however, the acceptance of the
centrality of politics (and the notion of the state itself ) did not lead to
unanimity about the capabilities of states. One still finds projected in
the literature of the 1970s and 1980s the two images of states sometimes
the very same state as both strong and weak. Many scholars tended
to dismiss existing third-world states as ineffective manipulators of social
life. Huntington himself began his book Political Order in Changing Soci-
eties by noting that the major distinction between states lies not in their
type of government but in the degree to which the government really
governs.3 Or as Aristide R. Zolberg put it with respect to African states,
The major problem is not too much authority, but too little.4 While
holding out hope and even giving prescriptions for political institutional-
ization, consolidation, and centralization of states, many authors found
third-world states to be disorganized, confused conglomerates of people
and agencies. Instability and ineptness stood out as primary subjects of
inquiry.
2
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Development and Political Decay, World Politics 17 (April
1965): 386430.
3
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1968), pp. 12.
4
Aristide R. Zolberg, One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast, revised edition (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. x.
59
Rethinking Social and Political Change
At the same time, the image of the strong third-world state managed
to hold its own, or even to increase in importance. This perspective was
undoubtedly influenced by studies of Western societies. The Western
states autonomy (or at least relative autonomy) and its ability to organize
social groups able to penetrate deeply into the fabric of society became
major topics of research.5 And to a considerable degree within the last
decade, the presumptions about the Western state have spilled over into
the study of non-Western ones. Literature on states, particularly those in
Latin America and East Asia, emphasizes how they reshape societies. States
promote some groups and classes while repressing others, all the while
maintaining autonomy from any single group or class.
The activism and strength of the third-world state in regulating, even
shaping, the eruptive conflicts that come from industrialization and the
mobilization of new social groups have been emphasized in theories of cor-
poratism and the bureaucratic authoritarian state.6 The state, wrote James
M. Malloy, is characterized by strong and relatively autonomous govern-
mental structures that seek to impose on the society a system of interest
representation based on enforced limited pluralism.7
Although this second image of the state in the Third World as robust
and capable was influenced by recent works on the West, it had also been
inchoate in many of the earlier studies of non-Western societies written
in the 1950s and 1960s. Even before the word state became fashionable,
Charles W. Anderson noted the attraction to such an image in Latin
American studies. Many contemporary notions about development, he
remarked, seem to posit government as a kind of omnipotent given that
could if it would set matters right.8 Although contemporary corporatist
and bureaucratic authoritarian theories are often less sanguine about the
5
See, for example, the works in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), Between Power and Plenty: Foreign
Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1978).
6
See, for example, the chapters by Douglass H. Graham and by Douglass Bennett and
Kenneth Sharpe in Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Richard S. Weinert (eds.), Brazil and Mexico:
Patterns in Late Development (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982),
and by Guillermo ODonnell and others in David Collier (ed.), The New Authoritarianism
in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
7
James M. Malloy, Authoritarianism and Corporation in Latin America: The Modal
Pattern in James M. Malloy (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 4.
8
Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Rest-
less Nations (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 5.
60
Strong States, Weak States
9
Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1982), p. vii.
10
Merilee Serrill Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico: A Case Study in
Public Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 178.
11
Linn A. Hammergren, Corporatism in Latin American Politics: A Reexamination of the
Unique Tradition, Comparative Politics 9 ( July 1977): 449. A couple of older works on
Latin America voiced this refrain as well. See Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic
Change in Latin America, pp. 1056; and Merle Kling, Toward a Theory of Power and
Political Instability in Latin America, in James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin (eds.), Latin
America: Reform or Revolution (New York: Fawcett, 1968), p. 93.
61
Rethinking Social and Political Change
12
Francine R. Frankel, Indias Political Economy, 19471977: The Gradual Revolution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 196.
62
Strong States, Weak States
part of a larger world social system with established relations and patterns
of trade, investment, borrowing, labor migration, and more that have their
origins in precolonial days. This social system has created a worldwide
pattern of stratification, as well as domestic patterns of stratification. It is
only at the greatest peril that state leaders can ignore in domestic policy
the power relations generated within the world social system.
It would be a grave mistake to assume (as many writers have) that
these power relations determine totally the domestic stratification
pattern and the character of state-society relations in third-world coun-
tries. The second arena within which states operate, that of the domes-
tic society, allows for important social dynamics and has room for sig-
nificant state maneuvering. It is here that state leaders seek to maximize
their autonomy whenever and wherever possible, even within a context
of constraints from world forces. Likewise, leaders of other social groups
try to skirt the obstacles placed before them and use as many resources
as they can garner, including those from the world arena, to expand
their own autonomy. It is this context of domestic state-society relations
that needs to be unraveled in order to understand the results of state
leaders efforts to reshape, ignore, or circumvent the strongest groups in
their societies. We must move away from a perspective that simply pits
state against society. The state is part of society, with many characteristics
not very different from those of other social organizations. Officials of the
state are members of the larger society. What must be sorted out is any
distinctive patterns of their interactions with those in other groups and
organizations.
The state is a sprawling organization within society that coexists with
many other formal and informal social organizations, from families to
tribes to large industrial enterprises. What distinguishes the state, at least
in the modern era, is that state officials seek predominance over those
myriad other organizations. That is, they aim for the state to make the
binding rules guiding peoples behavior or, at the very least, to authorize
particular other organizations to make those rules in certain realms. By
rules I mean the laws, regulations, decrees, and the like that state
officials indicate they are willing to enforce through the coercive means at
their disposal. Rules include everything from living up to contractual com-
mitments to driving on the right side of the road to paying alimony on
time. They involve the entire array of property rights and any of the other
countless definitions of the boundaries delineating acceptable behavior
for people.
63
Rethinking Social and Political Change
will give new insights into the processes of social and political change,
since the very purposes for which leaders employ the state seeking
predominance through binding rules automatically thrust it into conflict
with other organizations over who has the right and ability to make those
rules. Many of the existing approaches to understanding social and polit-
ical change in the Third World either have downplayed conflict altogether
(e.g., much of modernization theory), or have missed these particular
sorts of conflicts, which only on occasion are class based (e.g., much of the
Marxist literature), or have skipped the important dynamics within domes-
tic society altogether (e.g., dependency and world system theories).
As we shall see shortly, it is far from inevitable that the efforts of state
leaders will achieve predominance for the state. In cases where it is un-
attainable, at least for the time being, the state does not simply disappear
nor does it always continually incur the high costs of battling those who
are effectively making the rules in this realm or that, in one locality or
another. The most subtle and fascinating patterns of political change and
political inertia come in accommodations between states and other pow-
erful organizations in society accommodations that could not be pre-
dicted simply by assuming the autonomy of the state or the determining
influences of world forces. The struggle over the states desire for pre-
dominance, the accommodations between states and others, and the
maneuvering to gain the best deal possible in any arrived-at accommoda-
tion are the real politics of many third-world societies politics that often
take place far from the capital city. These processes can help give a clearer
portrait of the state, especially by examining what happens to public
policies upon their implementation in the far corners of society, a ques-
tion rarely asked in the vast literature on postcolonial societies.
Public policy entails the attempt by state leaders to use their organi-
zation to make new rules and consequently change the behavior of the
public. Sometimes public policy aims to modify the behavior of only a
minute fraction of the population, as, for instance, in certain banking
regulations. Of course, in cases of policies directed toward large portions
of the population, these policy efforts by state leaders represent
massive undertakings, often involving the movement of significant
resources through the state apparatus and into the society. Such attempts
broadly challenge the existing rules in society and, with them, the social
organizations that enforce those rules and the leaders of those organiza-
tions, who benefit most from them. On the one hand, resistance of
one sort or another is nearly inevitable. Such resistance will come in
65
Rethinking Social and Political Change
The literature on the Third World has paid scant attention to existing
rule-making organizations outside the domain of the state and in conflict
with the aims of state leaders. Yet, strategies offered to people through
these structures may be quite complex and binding.13 During the last
century, there has been a tremendous upsurge in the strength of many
such organizations. In a large number of cases, colonial divide-and-rule
policies injected vast new resources most notably, wealth and force into
the hands of local and regional leaders, enabling them to strengthen the
strategies of survival they could offer clients and followers. In turn, their
ability to make and enforce binding rules of behavior also increased. Even
where there was no direct colonialism, the expanding world economy fun-
neled resources into societies quite selectively, allowing for the strength-
ening of caciques, effendis, caudillos, landlords, kulak-type rich peasants,
moneylenders, and others. Through credit, access to land and water, pro-
tection, bullying, and numerous other means, these leaders or strongmen
(for want of a better general term) fashioned viable strategies of survival
for numerous peasants and workers.
Although their rules and systems of justice have been quite different
from the states (and, often, from one anothers), these strongmen have,
nonetheless, enforced those rules and thus ensured a modicum of social
stability if not the same social justice state leaders would like. Challeng-
ing these leaders and their organizations, then, threatens social stability
unless viable strategies of survival offered by state agencies or organiza-
tions allied with the state, such as a political party, are at hand, ready to
be substituted. The fear of instability should be a strong motivation for
state leaders to build as effective a set of agencies as possible.
There are certainly other inducements as well. When state policy is
effectively establishing the rules of behavior, for example, state agencies
can better mobilize material resources through tax collection and reorga-
nization of production. Much of what is traditionally meant by power,
writes Alan C. Lamborn, does involve the governments capacity to
mobilize resources.14 Not only are state revenues enhanced for domestic
purposes, but some of the severe pressures state leaders confront from the
13
The main exception is the literature on the clientelism, which was a topic of some inter-
est to social scientists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then relatively little has
appeared on the subject.
14
Alan C. Lamborn, Power and the Politics of Extraction, International Studies Quarterly
27 ( June 1983), p. 126.
67
Rethinking Social and Political Change
15
J. P. Nettl notes that political mobilization is the collective and structural expression of
commitment and support within society. Such expression may take the form of political
parties or quasi-parties interest groups, movements, etc., anything that has a well-
articulated structure. See J. P. Nettl, Political Mobilization: A Sociological Analysis of Methods
and Concepts (New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. 123.
68
Strong States, Weak States
had overseen, however, was a painstaking process. Nasser and his cohorts
fell back on middle peasants (those with holdings large enough so that
members of their household need not seek work outside the farm) and rich
peasants (those whose holdings were extensive enough to demand extra
hired labor on a regular basis) to perform these functions. Some of these
rich and middle peasants had played similar roles in earlier years as agents
for the owners of large estates. At the same time, Nasser pushed ahead
in building state agencies and a single political party. By the mid-1960s,
the agencies challenged the strongmen on whom the regime had needed
to rely, the middle and rich peasants who had spun out their own
strategies of survival for Egypts vast number of land-poor and landless
peasants. Party cadres branded the middle and rich peasants as feudal
elements.
Nassers own organizations, however, began to concern him. By the
early 1960s, Field Marshal Abdul Hakim Amir had built an officer corps
loyal to him, and he withstood attempts by Nasser to bring him under
presidential control. To counter Amirs threatening power, Nasser moved
in the mid-1960s to build up the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) as the party
that could serve as a civilian counter to the military.16 But, by the late
1960s, even the ASU was a cause for worry. It had clearly moved beyond
challenging other social organizations with their feudal rules to chal-
lenge Nassers own power within the state. In the end, Nasser attempted
to neutralize the ASU itself, going so far as to arrest its powerful first sec-
retary, Ali Sabri, for smuggling. In the countryside, the ASUs Committee
of the Liquidation of Feudalism slipped quietly into oblivion. The rich and
middle peasants, although a bit worse for wear, remained the most pow-
erful forces in rural Egypt. The Egyptian state had not achieved predom-
inance in large part because its ruler feared his own agencies, the army and
the ASU, which were needed to achieve that predominance.
The dilemma of state leaders this paradox of fearing and under-
mining the very mechanisms they need in order to reach their own goals
has reverberated throughout the Third World. The degree to which this
dilemma has hamstrung state leaders in appropriating power in having
their rules apply throughout the country has varied from country to
country. Where strongmen have been able to maintain a tight grasp on
local resources, state mobilization of the population has been all the more
16
John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 316.
69
Rethinking Social and Political Change
difficult, and the dilemma of state leaders has been acute. On the other
hand, where strongmen have been weakened in their control, more op-
portunities have existed for penetration by state authority. Nasser, for
example, did have to his credit the destruction of the most powerful class
in rural Egypt. The large landlords had become vulnerable as they moved
from the countryside, leaving charge of their affairs to local agents, often
rich and middle peasants. The opening that absentee ownership gave
Nasser allowed him to build a regime that has now lasted for half a century
and to penetrate every village in Egypt through a number of state
agencies. The hold of the rich and middle peasants, however, forced un-
anticipated accommodations (of a sort we shall discuss later) between them
and state officials.
Elsewhere, I discuss at some length the causes of variation in state
strength from country to country.17 Briefly, the rapid and deep extension
of the world market from the late 1850s through World War I made
many of the existing rules in Asian, African, and Latin American societies
irrelevant. Colonial administration, in many areas, further undermined the
control of strongmen. It was as if a great wind swept through the non-
Western world, knocking Humpty Dumpty off the wall. Where colonial
rule took hold, Western administrators deeply influenced how Humpty
Dumpty was put together again. In some instances, centralizing indige-
nous groups were promoted. Far more frequently, however, colonial
resources were used to reestablish fragmented social control through the
promotion of old and new strongmen. Other factors could also influence
the hold of strongmen. For example, devastating wars could lead to the
flight of landlords and to changing man-land ratios, greatly diminishing
the existing social control of strongmen.
The relative control of the state and other social organizations pro-
fessing other rules vary substantially from country to country. Nonethe-
less, many third-world countries in the postwar era have witnessed a
remarkable further strengthening of local organizations and their strong-
men, leaders with rules and agendas in contradiction to those professed
by state leaders. The middle and rich peasants of Egypts four thousand
villages have counterparts in many societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Far from being anachronistic relics, such strongmen and their
organizations have often thrived during the last generation.
17
Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities
in the Third Word (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
70
Strong States, Weak States
The common, particular views in a given agency that develop over time
among its top officials about the purposes and functioning of the entire
state apparatus threaten the coherence and, indeed, the stability of the
state. Such particular views are created and reinforced in any number
of ways, including shared socialization (as in a military academy), the
repeated representation of the agencys interests in wider forums (as in the
competition for funds), daily personal interaction, the effective allocation
of resources and status within the agency, and so on. These factors are
found in any complex organization, and the centrifugal forces they gener-
ate are familiar to all students of bureaucracy. What is threatening to
leaders is abiding loyalties in state organs or allied political parties
in the absence of a multitude of effective, opposing centripetal forces.
Political mobilization through a large number of channels provides those
centripetal forces in many states. In countries in which such support
is absent and costly to achieve where a very few agencies have an
oligopoly on mobilizational capabilities the position of state leaders
may be precarious indeed.
The temptation, then, is to solve the problem by lessening the
centrifugal forces. In other words, where the dilemma of state leaders is
acute, a top priority may become a set of actions designed to prevent any
large concentrations of power from arising. Like Nasser in his attack
against his own agencies the fast-growing army and ASU other state
leaders have resorted to weakening any group in society that seems to
be building extensive mobilizational strength, even agencies of the state
itself. Bizarre as it may seem, then, state leaders with limited capacity to
mobilize their public have themselves crippled the arms of the state,
the very organs that ultimately could have given them that mobilizational
ability. We may term their strategies the politics of survival. The actions
characteristic of the politics of survival are discussed in the following
subsections.
age and spoils they can dispense, provide them with an important largess.
At their disposal is a complex, task-oriented organization staffed by
officials, many of whom owe their careers to the person at the top of
the agency.
The big shuffle is a set of preemptive actions taken by state leaders,
using their own power of appointment, to prevent loyalties in potentially
strong agencies from developing in the first place. These leaders have
frequently replaced ministers of state, commanders of armed forces, party
leaders, and top bureaucrats in order to prevent threatening centers of
power from coalescing. At the apex of the state, the political style can
resemble a dizzying game of musical chairs. In some cases, the same people
appear over and over in different key posts. Yesterday, one was the com-
mander-in-chief of the armed forces; today, minister of the interior;
tomorrow, ambassador to the United States or chief executive officer of a
major state enterprise. In other instances, officials disappear altogether
from the political scene.
The sexenio in Mexico, for example, has the effect of ensuring that state
agencies do not develop deep internal ties over time. Every six-year pres-
idential administration witnesses a turnover of approximately 18,000 elec-
tive offices and 25,000 supportive posts.18 Those figures were given four
decades ago; no doubt they are even higher today. In the dominant party
and the bureaucracy, many of those displaced fill new posts, but at the top,
many leave public service permanently.
In Egypt, which is probably more representative of a large number of
other cases, the falls from the pinnacle have not been as routinized as in
Mexico. Field Marshal Amir had successfully kept control of the promo-
tion process within the officers corps and was able, in addition, to place
his people in upper-level management in the growing public sector, as well
its the diplomatic corps and the ranks of provincial governors.19 He was
placed under house arrest in September 1967, and several days later his
suicide was announced. Amirs demise came after Nasser had retired
hundreds of officers. Many others were dropped from the high ranks of
state agencies by Nasser and his successor, Anwar el-Sadat. Even more
extreme are states that experience a permanent purge of top state and party
personnel.
18
Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1964), p. 157.
19
Waterbury, Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, p. 336.
73
Rethinking Social and Political Change
At the core of all these manifestations of the big shuffle lies the weak-
ness of state leaders their inability to use political mobilization as a check
to any threatening centers of power within the state organization itself.
Sadat, upon assuming leadership in 1970, had no institutional base of
support at all. One of his first impressions was that those heading impor-
tant state agencies and the Arab Socialist Union never paid any regard to
the interests of Egypt and wanted nothing but to remain in power, seeking
their own interests and motivated by hatred and jealousy.20 One might
put it a bit more kindly by saying that the agency heads understood the
interests of Egypt differently from Sadat. Their posts gave them partic-
ular perspectives on what was good for Egypt.
Within a year after assuming the presidency, Sadat attacked what he
termed the power centers that threatened his rule, forcing out simulta-
neously six cabinet ministers and three party chiefs. Perhaps even more
interesting for understanding the dynamics of the big shuffle is what
happened to those who stood by Sadat in the political crisis of May 1971,
when so many top agency officials fell. John Waterbury recounts their fates
in a footnote:
Ashraf Marwan, married to Nassers daughter, gave Sadat tapes that incriminated
Sabri. He became Sadats advisor on Arab affairs until 1978 and then was dropped.
Muhammed Sadiq was arrested in late 1972. Mumduh Salim went on to be prime
minister but then was given an honorific post advisor after 1978. Hassanein Heikal
was fired from the editorship of al-Ahram in 1974. Aziz Sidqi had had no public
role since 1978. Hafiz Badawi, who became speaker of parliament, was dropped in
favor of Sayyid Marai. Dakruri, Darwish, Abd al-Akhir, and Mahmud were all put
on the Discipline Committee of the ASU; two went on to governorships and two
to cabinet positions. All had disappeared by the late 1970s. Abd al-Salam al-Zayyat
survived as an M.P., but was briefly arrested in 1980 and again in 1981. Hussain
Shafai of the RCC was made a vice-president and then replaced by Husni Mubarak
in 1975. Those who fared best were Mahmud Fawzi, who retired with honor, and
Sayyid Marai, who remained an influential but somewhat marginal figure in the
early 1980s.21
The big shuffle is not a one-time event nor is it reserved for enemies.
It is a mechanism for deliberately weakening arms of the state and allied
organizations a kind of deinstitutionalization in order to assure the
tenure of the top state leadership.
20
Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
p. 207.
21
Waterbury, Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, p. 352 n.
74
Strong States, Weak States
Nonmerit Appointments
The power of appointments that lies in the hands of state leaders involves
more than merely dismissing people from positions. Appointments are a
source of patronage that can be doled out selectively to prevent the devel-
opment of centers of power within the state itself. The result is that some
third-world states take on an almost familial character (for a few, one could
just as well drop the almost), displaying many of the characteristics of
much less bureaucratized and complex patrimonial systems.22
Probably the most popular method here is to appoint top agency offi-
cials who have deep personal loyalties to the state leaders. In India, Syria,
Egypt, and elsewhere, one finds in recruitment to critical state posts
patterns of kinship ties; of common regional origins (at times, limited to
a single town or several villages); of shared ethnic, tribal, or sectarian back-
grounds; of school connections; and of other sorts of personalities. In Iraq,
for example, many top officials are from one family group, the Begat
section of the Albu Nasir tribe, and primarily from the small town of Takri
in the northwest.
In those countries where strongmen have retained tight grips and con-
tinue to make the effective rules, appointment to the state bureaucracy,
state-owned enterprises, and government parties on the basis of personal
loyalty is a means of mitigating powerful centrifugal forces. In postrevo-
lutionary Mexico, for example, the top elite has nurtured a series of rein-
forcing personal, political, and business ties. At the foundation of all these
linkages is membership in what Roger D. Hansen calls the Revolutionary
Family.23 In Sierra Leone, as far back as colonial times, tribal chiefs moved
to monopolize positions in missionary and state schools. It was the sons,
brothers, relatives, and wards of chiefs . . . who had benefited from such
educational opportunities.24 Their attempt, which later proved to contain
considerable merit, was to ensure that those with the backgrounds to
assume leadership from the British colonialists would have strong personal
ties to them. Where the dilemma of state leaders is acute and the sustained
22
On neopatrimonialism, see S. N. Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopat-
rimonialism, vol. 1 of Sage Research Papers in the Social Sciences, Studies in Comparative
Modernization Series (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage 1973): 129.
23
Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1973), p. 129.
24
Gershon Collier, Sierre Leone: Experiment in Democracy in an African Nation (New York:
New York University Press, 1970), p. 85.
75
Rethinking Social and Political Change
25
Robert Springborg, Family, Power, and Politics in Egypt: Sayed Bey Marei His Clan, Clients
and Cohorts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 98 ff.
26
James Alban Bill, The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes and Modernization (Columbus, OH:
Charles E. Merrill, 1972), pp. 449.
27
Hansen, Politics of Mexican Development, p. 126.
28
Waterbury, Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, p. 349.
76
Strong States, Weak States
Where loyalties to other groups run high and where the states
rules confront heavy opposition, state leaders take great care in making
appointments. Their goal is not simply to construct a representative
bureaucracy or military, in which the proportion of various ethnic groups
in the state agency reflects the proportion in society at large. Nor is
their aim to expand state authority by following formal organizational
principles in extending the reach of the state. Rather, allocations of posts
reflect the loyalty of particular groups, the threat of other groups, and the
29
Cynthia H. Enloe, Police, Military and Ethnicity: Foundations of State Power (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 7.
30
Robert Molteno, Cleavage and Conflict in Zambian Politics: A Study in Sectionalism,
in William Tordoff (ed.), Politics in Zambia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
1974), 95n.
77
Rethinking Social and Political Change
importance of specific state agencies. The most loyal elements, often the
tribe or ethnic group of state leaders themselves, are assigned to the agen-
cies that are potentially most threatening to state leaders and that would
exercise the most control in society, such as the military. (A good rule of
thumb for quickly ascertaining the group most loyal to state leaders is to
note the background of the minister of the interior and the commander
of the palace guard.) Likewise, those from the least trustworthy groups
may be co-opted into more marginal, low-budget agencies.
Shaul Mishal recounts that King Abdullah of Jordan assigned Palestin-
ian elites to senior positions in the ministries of agriculture, economics,
education, development, and foreign affairs. These appointments came
after Jordans annexation of the West Bank and its Palestinian population
in 1949. The Palestinians, as a group, were much less trustworthy in
Abdullahs eyes than the Bedouin tribal groups of the East Bank. Even
among the Palestinians, the king rewarded those who had facilitated
annexation and also tended to use the appointments policy to placate or
co-opt his enemies.31 The real centers of power, however, were not the
agencies under Palestinian direction but the offices of the prime minister,
the ministry of the interior, and the army (the Arab Legion). There, those
from Bedouin tribal groups constituted the most important appointees.
While trying to give the army a national character by recruiting
Palestinians, Mishal writes, the central authorities encouraged the con-
centration of loyal [East Bank] elements in key positions and in elite
combat units.32
Appointments based on personal loyalty, co-optation, and ethnic bar-
gaining can further limit the ability of states to make the binding rules in
a society. Waterbury made this point regarding the Egyptian shilla: By its
very nature the shilla vitiates ideological and programmatic politics and
maximizes the wielding of group influence for personal gain.33 Mishal
echoes the point for Jordan: The absence of uniform procedures in the
public service in terms of broad discretion in hiring and firing also led to
weakness in the staff units of the Jordanian administrative system.34
The states prerogatives come to be bounded in much the same ways that
31
Shaul Mishal, Conflictual Pressures and Cooperative Interests: Observations on West
Bank Amman Political Relations, 19491967, in Joel S. Migdal (ed.), Palestinian Society
and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 176.
32
Ibid., p. 177.
33
Waterbury, Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, p. 346.
34
Mishal, Conflictual Pressures and Cooperative Interests, p. 178.
78
Strong States, Weak States
35
Eugene Bardach, The Implementation Game: What Happens After a Bill Becomes a Law
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 36.
36
Hanna Batatu, Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syrias Ruling, Military Group
and the Causes for Its Dominance, Middle East Journal 35(Summer 1981): 33144.
79
Rethinking Social and Political Change
al-Assad, another brother, led this unit. Even in a state confronting as dif-
ficult a security situation as that faced by Syria four major wars in the
fifteen years from 1967 to 1982 the goal in building military forces was
not simply to create as coherent and coordinated a fighting machine as
possible. Isolation of units from one another, appointments and deploy-
ments on the basis of loyalty, and the creation of overlapping functions
all became central elements in the politics of survival in Syria.
Fear of joint action against state leaders leads in some countries to unco-
ordinated branches of the military. In others, elements of the armed forces,
particularly the praetorian guards, are deployed against other military
units of the state. In still other cases, the praetorian guards overlapping
functions are tolerated because such an arrangement offers greater oppor-
tunities for direct control by state leaders. In India, paramilitary police
forces in the Border Security Forces, the Central Reserve Police, and the
Home Guards numbered about half a million in the mid-1970s. As Myron
Weiner stated,
A critical feature of these agencies is that they are not part of the military, and
hence not under the control of the Defense Ministry. Nor are they under the
control of the state governments, as are the state police. The paramilitary forces
are directly under the control of the Home Ministry. This means that the prime
minister has control of a quasi-military force for dealing with domestic crises.37
Dirty Tricks
With the Carter Administrations emphasis on human rights and the
awarding of the Nobel Prize to Amnesty International, probably no aspect
of the politics of survival has received as much recent notoriety as dirty
tricks. These actions by top-ranking state personnel include imprison-
ment and deportation, strange disappearances, torture, and the use of
death squads. Although such actions have been directed occasionally at
rival leaders within the state itself, these means have often been used
against those in non-state organizations who are considered threatening
by state officials. Removal of key figures is used to preempt the emergence
of competing centers of power and to weaken or destroy groups already
powerful enough to threaten the prerogatives of top state rulers.
37
Myron Weiner, Motilal, Jawaharlal, Indira, and Sanjay in Indias Political Transforma-
tion, in Richard J. Samuels (ed.), Political Generations and Political Development
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), p. 74.
80
Strong States, Weak States
38
Amnesty International Report 1983 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1983),
p. 189.
39
U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981
(Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 221.
81
Rethinking Social and Political Change
can raise a large portion of their revenues through rent (e.g., petroleum
sales or royalties) may be less compelled to create powerful agencies or
allow complex social organizations to gain footholds. In nonrentier states,
however, state leaders must either bring the necessary agencies under
central control in order to assure adequate production and revenue
collection or find some way to cope with large, complex agencies and
organizations that retain threatening bases of power.
The simplest method of coping with these threatening power bases is
to follow the old dictum that the squeaky wheel gets grease. Those agen-
cies and organizations whose services and products are of direct benefit to
a regime that cannot bring them under central control may be bought
off with state resources, prerogatives, discriminatory tax policies, and the
like. Here again one is struck by the patrimonial characteristics of such
regimes.40 A method demanding somewhat more political skill is to enter
into loose, often shifting coalitions with the strongest agencies and
non-state organizations. In these coalitions, rulers seek to play off
agencies against one another, as well as to create an alliance directed at
other threatening groups, such as laborers or peasants.
Although industry still takes a decided back seat to agriculture and other
raw-material producers in the great majority of third-world countries, the
concentration of capital in industry poses problems for political rulers.
The power stemming from both foreign and local capital contrasts with
the lack of a firm base for the states rulers, despite the great expansion of
the state organization itself. Local capital in particular, frequently rein-
forced by nonmarket solidarity derived from kinship and friendship ties,
is in a position to make effective claims for state resources and favors.
State-owned enterprises are in a similarly strong position to make demands
upon vulnerable state leadership. As Peter Evans has noted for Brazil,
The most important resources the local partners may possess is political
power, and the local partners with the most direct political leverage are
state-owned firms.41
State leaders may carve out for themselves some area for maneuver in
balancing state-owned enterprises, local capital, multinational firms, and
other important state agencies (including the military) against one another.
40
See Gerald A. Heeger, The Politics of Underdevelopment (New York: St. Martin Press, 1974),
especially p. 53.
41
Peter B. Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital
in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 212.
82
Strong States, Weak States
Effective use of budgets and other prerogatives, along with other measures
of the politics of survival, such as shuffling heads of state-owned enter-
prises, may prolong the life of a regime. It would be mistaken, however,
to confuse such maneuvering with effective state autonomy. Without
sufficient coherence and coordination of state agencies to effect mass
political mobilization, state leaders are reduced to ruses and stratagems
building and rebuilding coalitions and balances of power while using state
resources to reinforce the existing distribution of power and wealth in the
society. Such mechanisms may turn out to foster economic growth, but
they do not create a more capable, autonomous state.
When successfully practiced, the politics of survival can lead to stabil-
ity and longevity of regimes even when their leaders have not dislodged
others who apply different rules and strategies of survival. In fact, as we
have seen, keeping state leaders afloat may paradoxically involve the sys-
tematic weakening of the states agencies. Since the era of decolonization,
leaders may have experienced a learning curve with respect to how to
survive in the churning waters of politics where states have relatively little
social control over broad segments of their societies. Leaders and future
leaders of states may have taken note of the risks involved in rushing head-
long into ambitious programs of social change. They may have witnessed
the dangers inherent in pursuing full social agendas through their agen-
cies to carry out far-reaching policies of change. Their own tenure is
brought into question by these Frankensteins the bureaus they have
created as long as widespread political mobilization remains beyond their
grasp. Learning can come from watching the precarious grip of those who
preceded them; the brief three-year rule of Algerias independence hero,
Ahmed Ben Bella, may have been very instructive to the man who deposed
him, Houari Boumedienne. Also, mechanisms to deal with the threats and
risks of rival centers of power can be learned by state leaders. Use of death
squads, for instance, spread from South America to Central America to
countries as distant as Indonesia.
The conclusion is not that leaders of third-world states that have suc-
cessfully displaced strongmen and achieved predominance are pure, while
all those in states that have not achieved these goals rise to power as cynical
connivers and manipulators of personnel. Engaging in the politics of sur-
vival does not mean that a leader has never had the slightest interest in
using the state as a vehicle for progressive social change. Indeed, such a
leader frequently ascends to power with a full social agenda. It is the struc-
ture of the dilemma that such a leader faces in power the danger of
83
Rethinking Social and Political Change
42
Donald S. Van Meter and Carl E. Van Horn, The Policy Implementation Process: A
Conceptual Framework, Administration and Society 6 (February 1975): 449.
84
Strong States, Weak States
grams at local levels. These middle-level officials may have considerable discretion
in pursuing their tasks and, even when it is not defined as part of their formal duties,
they may have a decided impact on individual allocation decisions.43
In short, implementors are the state personnel who take the programs, leg-
islation, and policy statements of leaders and are responsible for acting on
those guidelines, making them the rules of daily behavior. They must make
policy work at the ground level.
Who affects the behavior of implementors? The most obvious people
they need to look to are their supervisors. After all, these are the officials
at the regional and national levels who are supposed to produce results and
who are in charge of overseeing those below them in the bureaucratic hier-
archy. Next are the clients of the program those intended to benefit
from, or be regulated by, the rule changes involved in the policy. In
addition, there are regional actors from other state agencies and from the
government-sponsored party, who take a keen interest in the alloca-
tion of resources and the changing of rules within their jurisdictions.
Finally, there are non-state local leaders, such as landlords or moneylen-
ders, those referred to earlier as strongmen. These are the people who
have fashioned for the local population the existing strategies of survival
the rules of behavior and whose social control is jeopardized by the
state rules and strategies conveyed by a new policy.
In negotiating through the maze of pressures and cross-pressures gen-
erated by all these groups, implementors are motivated by careerism, a set
of standards with which they can weigh pressures and evaluate the possi-
ble impact on their professional standing. The degree to which the imple-
mentor weighs pressures from one quarter or another to ascertain their
effect on his career varies from state to state, even region to region. Where
the accountability and control within the agency are high, and especially
where supervisors are willing to protect their officials from other groups
pressures, then agencies tend to have high morale and to follow the pur-
poses laid down in law and policy statements. Morton H. Halperin has
described highly motivated personnel as believing that what they are
doing makes a difference and promotes the national interest44 (at least as
43
Merilee S. Grindle, The Implementor: Political Constraints on Rural Development in
Mexico, in Merilee S. Grindle (ed.), Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 197.
44
Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institutions, 1974), p. 54.
85
Rethinking Social and Political Change
they understand it). Even here, however, careerism stands out. Above all,
Halperin continued, the career official must believe that there is room
for advancement in the organization and that the organization is seeking
to protect his opportunities for advancement.45 One could add the flip
side of the coin: the career official must believe that the organization can
protect him from ouster or demotion due to attacks by those opposing
policy goals.
The politics of survival at the apex of the state can diminish account-
ability and control below tremendously. First, appointment of agency
leaders on the basis of their loyalty to the ruler or their ethnic affiliation
cuts into the efficient operations of a bureau and its ability to supervise
efficiently. Such appointments also undermine the unity of purpose of the
agencys personnel and the motivation that comes from the belief that
toeing the line furthers the national interest.
Second and probably more important, the frequent shuttling in and out
of new agency heads can have a devastating impact on policy implemen-
tation. New agency chiefs come in with their own policy agendas. By the
very nature of policy and its assault upon existing rules, it cuts into the
interests of strongmen who receive disproportionate benefits from their
own existing rules. It is the implementor who must do battle with these
strongmen, all the while risking an assault by them on the policy itself and
on the career of the implementor. If the agency chief is to be shuttled out
of the agency in a matter of months and along with him his agenda of
programs the implementor becomes very reluctant to confront the
intense pressures local leaders can exert in order to push forward a policy
that will disappear with its originator. With the new chiefs, no doubt, will
come new burning priorities and innovative policies.
In Mexico, where the whole implementation process is subject to the
shadow of the sexenio, policy implementation takes on a special rhythm.
The first two years of a presidential administration are taken up with the
tremendous task of shuffling people among agencies. Agency chiefs must
familiarize themselves with new surroundings and set priorities. By the last
third of the sexenio, implementors become extremely cautious, fearing too
public an identification with any policy that might be out of favor in the
next administration. Top-level personnel are already distracted by the pol-
iticking for new positions. Only in the middle two years of the period is
there a major push toward reform, hardly enough to ensure the staying
45
Ibid.
86
Strong States, Weak States
power needed. Implicit through all this is, as Grindle notes, the need to
promote ones own career or that of ones superior.46
The bureaucrat has too much at stake, especially his own career, to
become closely identified with any one policy. Anthony Downs has com-
mented on the inevitable leakage of authority as a policy moves through
an agency.47 Where accountability and control are crippled and where the
big shuffle is under way, that leakage can turn into a massive hemor-
rhage. Careerism in these cases leads to resistance by implementors to the
policies handed down from above. Resistance most often takes the form
of what Bardach calls tokenism, which involves an attempt to appear to
be contributing a program element publicly while privately conceding only
a small (token) contribution.48
Bureaucrats in the Third World have been singled out by scholars and
foreign aid officials alike for their slothfulness, their lack of will, and their
lack of commitment to reform. Very little attention has been paid by these
scholars to the calculus of pressures these bureaucrats face that makes them
so lazy or uncommitted. Success for public policies does not lie around
the corner in a new breed of implementor. It certainly will not be found
in an exclusive focus on new management techniques.
The consuming obsession for careerist implementors is to prevent
the upward flow of information to their supervisors and agency chiefs
that would indicate the implementers are not handling the situation. As
Bardach notes in the American context, A great deal of energy goes into
maneuvering to avoid responsibility, scrutiny, and blame.49 This general-
ization is even stronger for those third-world cases where frequent shuf-
fles at the top make officials in the upper reaches of the bureaus even less
patient with implementors who cannot keep local situations local. The
implementor must hunker down while somehow assessing who may pass
undesirable information upward and what can be done to stop it.
It is usually not the intended beneficiaries of social programs who pose
serious threats to the implementor. They often lack the contacts and means
to publicize failures in implementation or reach and influence national
political leaders with damaging information about the poor implemen-
tation of policy. Their voices are often muted, as well, because of their
46
Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico, p. 169; see also p. 160 ff.
47
Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), p. 134.
48
Bardach, Implementation Game, p. 98.
49
Ibid., p. 37.
87
Rethinking Social and Political Change
50
Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico, p. 180.
88
Strong States, Weak States
51
Thomas B. Smith, The Policy Implementation Process, Policy Sciences 4 ( June 1973):
198.
52
Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico, p. 179.
53
Antonio Ugalde, Power and Conflict in a Mexican Community: A Study of Political Integration
(Alberquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), p. 122.
54
Weiner, Motilal, Jawaharlal, Indira, and Sanjay, p. 72.
89
Rethinking Social and Political Change
cooperative credit were being transformed into public subsidies on the cost of
private investment (and in come cases, consumption and moneylending activities)
for the more affluent landowning classes.55
Accommodation at the local level means that no single group not the
implementors, not the local politicos, and not the strongmen monopo-
lizes power. Local politics reflects the bargaining strength of each of the
actors. Implementors, as noted, must guard against any damaging flow of
information and must avoid scrutiny from above. Nevertheless, since they
allocate so many of the resources that come through the state pipeline,
they are often in a strong bargaining position at the local level. In cases
where accountability and control still have some meaning in their agen-
cies, they use their bargaining power to protect their careers by narrow-
ing the perimeters of what can be done with the resources they allocate.
Where, on the other hand, effective supervision has all but disappeared,
implementors can use their leverage for personal gain with little regard
for the overall purpose of any given policy. In either case, bureaucrats at
the regional and local level remain key actors in determining who gets
what and what they can do with it. The state bureaucracy, then, cannot
avoid but being a major factor in the local allocation of resources. The
limitation on state power, of course, is that the allocation may deviate
tremendously from the prescriptions set out in law and policy statements
in the capital city.
District leaders, state governors, local party chiefs the local and
regional politicos face constraints and opportunities similar to those of
the implementors. The closer the scrutiny from above, the more they must
narrow the perimeters of acceptable behavior. Where supervision is lax,
they can use their budgetary discretion, their contacts with top-level state
leaders, and the force at their disposal for personal gain. Like the imple-
mentors, however, they are vulnerable to damaging publicity and are
dependent on those who exercise social control the strongmen for any
sort of popular mobilization they need to carry out.
Perhaps the most interesting figures of all in the web of political bar-
gaining are the strongmen. As time goes on, they become reliant on state
resources from contracts to handouts in order to maintain the depen-
dency of their segment of the population. While the social control they
exercise enables these strongmen to make demands upon the state, the
fragmentation of their petty baronies of their rules and organization
55
Frankel, Indias Political Economy, 1967.
90
Strong States, Weak States
The state has become, then, the grand arena of accommodation. Such
accommodation takes place on at least two levels. First, local and regional
strongmen, politicians, and implementors accommodate one another in a
web of political, economic, and social exchanges. Their bargaining deter-
mines the final allocation of state resources that have made their way to
the region. Second, accommodation also exists on a much grander scale.
The local stability that strongmen can guarantee as long as they provide
workable strategies of survival to the population is critical to the overall
stability of the regime. State leaders accept this stability, which they garner
even without building a complex, institutionalized apparatus, in exchange
for their implicit consent not to contest actively the strongmens control
in local areas or even their capture of the states tentacles. The strongmen
end up with an enhanced bargaining position or with posts in the state
itself that influence important decisions about the allocation of resources
and the application of policy rules.
Conclusion
Tokenism on the part of bureaucrats, frequent reshuffling of cabinets, and
human rights abuses by state officials are not random or idiosyncratic
happenings in the Third World. Nor are they simply explained as the
products of depraved, mendacious, or inept regimes and leaders. Societys
structure, I have argued in this essay, affects politics at the highest levels
of the state and the actions of the implementors of state policy at much
lower levels. If one wants to understand the capabilities and characters of
state leaders their ability to make the rules for their population and the
degree to which the politics of survival predominate over other agenda
items one must start with social structure. Where social structure has
not been marked by strongly entrenched strongmen or where such strong-
men have been weakened, state leaders have greater opportunities to apply
a single set of rules the states rules and to build channels for wide-
spread, sustained political support. In such instances, leaders are in a posi-
tion to pursue broad social and political agendas. The struggle for survival
need not become so consuming as to weaken the states abilities to carry
out any other public policies.
The emphasis in this essay has been on other circumstances societies
in which social control is vested in numerous local level social organiza-
tions. Here, rules of behavior have been dictated by critically placed
strongmen landlords, caciques, bosses, moneylenders, and others. Their
92
Strong States, Weak States
94
PA R T I I I
A Process-Oriented Approach
CONSTITUTING STATES AND
SOCIETIES
4
1
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
97
A Process-Oriented Approach
when have other social forces, whether entire social classes or tiny cliques,
thwarted or co-opted the state and had their own way in devising effec-
tive symbolic systems, molding daily social behavior, and shaping the pat-
terns of economic life?
As in the classical debates of the last two centuries, the decades since
World War II have seen the fashions of scholarship swing between society-
centered and state-centered theories in explaining social transformation.
In the last decade or so, theorists confronting the major social and
political transformations of the last half milleniumin have leaned toward
state-centered approaches. They have explicitly acknowledged the central
institutional role of the state in determining patterns of domination in
society.2
But, in both the periods of state-centered explanations and those of
society-centered ones, while many empirical researchers wrote nuanced
accounts of association and authority, many middle-range and grand
theorists have unfortunately tended to treat states and societies in all-too-
undifferentiated terms. In presenting states or civil societies as holistic,
some scholars have given the misleading impression that at key junctures
in their histories states or societies have pulled in single directions. State-
centered theorists (when that sort of explanation has been fashionable)
have taken this tendency so far so as to reify and anthropomorphize the
state. By treating the state as an organic entity and giving it an ontologi-
cal status, they have obscured the dynamics and patterns of the struggle
for domination in societies.
In this chapter, I argue how we can go beyond establishing a balance in
scholarship between state and society, nudging the needle away from the
extreme state-centered side of the guage. The need is to break down the
undifferentiated concepts of state and society in order to understand how
2
By domination, I refer to the ability to gain obedience through the power of command.
Weber used such a designation for domination in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. See Max
Rheinstein, ed., Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1954), pp. 32237. The motivation to obedience can be coercion or voluntary com-
pliance that comes when one sees the rulemaker as the legitimate authority. ( Weber speaks
of the sources of domination in slightly different terms, seeing domination as a virtue of
ones interests, the monopoly position of the dominator, or by virtue of authority, the power
to command and the duty to obey [p. 324].) Domination, as used here, is thus more inclu-
sive a term than just coercion or just legitimate authority. Domination can be localized or
it can be exercised broadly over society. The term hegemony, on the other hand, while also
including elements of coercion and legitimate authority, includes only domination exer-
cised broadly over society.
98
An Anthropology of the State
3
For a good recent example, see Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988).
4
Manning Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), p. viii.
5
Nash wrote, Which building blocks . . . are invoked to construct a category and what
boundary forged to set the category off from others is historically specific. Ibid., 5.
99
A Process-Oriented Approach
6
Resat Kasaba, A time and place for the nonstate: social change in the Ottoman Empire
during the long nineteenth century, in Joel S. Migdal, Atual Kohli, and Vivienne Shue
(eds.), State Power and Social Forces (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
101
A Process-Oriented Approach
7
The term Third World is not used with any special precision or analytical rigor here. A
good case for the limitations in the term and its utility, nonetheless, is found in Christo-
pher Clapham, Third World Politics: An Introduction (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), chap. 1.
8
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982), p. 296.
9
Max Beloff, The Age of Absolutism, 16601815 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 20.
102
An Anthropology of the State
social flux, can offer similar insights for the twentieth century. Here, norms
and rules, regulations and laws, symbols and values, have been objects of
intense, if sometimes hidden, discord. State autonomy and class formation
so glibly, perhaps even teleologically, assumed and expected by recent
state-centered theories have not at all been assured outcomes. The need
in social science is for an approach that pinpoints the struggles for domi-
nation that lie at the heart of twentieth-century social and political change.
The approach here portraying the state in society not only will have rel-
evance for the Third World but will depict useful ways for understanding
state and society in Europe, including the former Communist states, and
North America, as well.
My starting purview is those spaces in society the arenas of domina-
tion and opposition where all sorts of social forces, including the insti-
tutions of the state, engage one another. I suggest boring in on the clashes
and coalitions between state organizations and other social organizations
(and their unexpected results) as these various social forces attempt to
impose their own stamp on ordinary life, everyday social relations, and the
ways people understand the world around them. The guide here highlights
the relations between states and other social forces by simultaneously
scanning and breaking down three phenomena, a task akin to watching the
three rings of a circus. They are the society; the state itself; and the actual
junctures, the engagements and disengagements, of state and society. In
the remainder of this essay, I will look at each of these rings in turn.
Society
Because society is so complex and amorphous, so difficult to grasp,
one common method for using the concept in social theory has been
to impute to some general integrated framework the ability to establish
patterns for all (or most) of societys disparate parts. Social scientists
drawing on Marxism have portrayed the ruling class or the hegemony
generated by a combination of the ruling class and the state as dominat-
ing across society. Where society is seen as pulling in different directions,
the struggles are understood to be between this class and other broadly
constructed social classes. Like the Marxists, liberal social scientists have
often accepted axiomatically that the existence of society presupposes the
exercising of some sort of hegemony, or society-wide domination. For
them, the integrated framework is the consensus of norms, partially
expressed within the authoritative structure of a somewhat constrained
103
A Process-Oriented Approach
state, about how individual and group competition proceeds over the ques-
tion of who gets what.10 Social struggle comes through a set of plural inter-
ests competing for influence over public policies, all under the umbrella
of well-established rules of the game. Recent state-centric theories have
also accepted the notion of society-wide domination or hegemony, only
they have been more prone than either the Marxists or liberals to focus
explicitly on the frameworks and authority created by the societys state
organization.11
The approach to society offered here questions the presumption of a
unifying framework (whether a ruling class, a consensus of norms about
competition, or the state) to explain patterns of domination and distribu-
tion in all cases. I ask an empirically prior question: Have the outcomes of
struggles in multiple arenas aggregated to create, in fact, broad classes with
cohesive projects that can shape a society or a widely agreed upon nor-
mative framework or a state organization capable of containing competi-
tion? And, if one indeed finds such classes or frameworks or states, must
one assume that they will hold together indefinitely?
In the case of the Marxists, unified social classes and wide-ranging
social struggles for dominance class struggles have often been easier
to find in imaginative theorizing than in real societies. Class, noted E. P.
Thompson, has become a broad heuristic device when, in fact, it is the
particular result of historical conditions only in certain places and only at
certain times: Class, as it eventuated within nineteenth-century industrial
capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic
category of class, has in fact no claim to universality.12 Referring to the
10
Vincent notes that the consensus that is assumed by liberal theorists is a collective good.
But, he complains, the pluralists seem at times to conjure this collective good out of thin
air. Not all groups may accept the basic framework; he explains, Groups can be as
oppressive, mean-minded and destructive of liberty as any state. Andrew Vincent, Theo-
ries of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 216.
11
See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State
Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Vincent notes of the liberal plu-
ralists that they were trying to theorize an idea of the state incorporating maximal diver-
sity of group life and some kind of central authority. He noted that some have argued
that the State was smuggled in through the backdoor. Vincent, Theories of the State,
p. 210.
12
E. P. Thompson, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?
Social History 3 (May 1978): 150. Stedman Jones ends up taking a different position from
Thompson but is even more adamant about the tenuous relationship between heuristic
devices and what was found in history. One should not proceed upon the assumption that
class as an elementary counter of official social description, class as an effect of theo-
104
An Anthropology of the State
105
A Process-Oriented Approach
struggles in societies have often been over who establishes the procedures,
rather than competition over the course of public policy within an over-
arching legitimate framework for all of society. The establishment of
legitimate authority over a large territory in which plural competition can
occur has, like unified class rule, been exceptional in twentieth-century
history and the result of distinctive historical conditions.15 Even in as
established a democracy as India, Atul Kohli argues, integrating frame-
works of authority are difficult to find today.16 In fact, the opportunities
provided by democracy for mobilization have opened the way for new
groups, especially the lower and lower-middle strata, to expand their par-
ticipation in politics substantially. The result has been an increasingly frag-
mented politics, with few institutional or normative frameworks that could
contain increasingly vitriolic competition.
State-centered theories encounter similar difficulties when they assume
the state organization is powerful and cohesive enough to drive society.
That assumption, too, is open to empirical verification. In addition, it has
frequently led to the tendency to strip the other components of society of
their volition or agency, portraying them as malleable putty in the hands
of the most powerful element of society, the state.17 Such a perspective
leaves us at a loss to explain such instances as Catherine Boones
Senegalese case.18 Rather than finding an increasingly capable state in
the postcolonial years, Boone observed that political practices seemed
to undermine the administrative capacities and resource bases of the
15
In Gramscis language, these historical contingencies are conjunctural. Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quitin Hoarc and Geoffrey N. Smith (New York:
International Publishers, 1971). There has been a tendency among liberal theorists to deny
the existence of a real society in cases where an integrative framework, with clear rules of
the game, does not exist. Shils, for example, has spoken of such cases as proto-societies.
But that simply accepts the reality of the bounded nature of society and the linking of
associative behavior and common memories while denying the status of society where con-
flict still exists over the framework for action. See Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972).
16
Atul Kohli, Centralization and powerlessness: Indias democracy in a comparative per-
spective, in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces.
17
The inhabitants of countries also possess social attributes like language, a cultural her-
itage, and a common history. . . . Unlike the countrys political structure, the common
attributes of society do not possess any representative agency that speaks for the whole.
Reinhard Bendix, John Bendix, and Norman Furniss, Reflections on Modern Western
States and Civil Societies, Research in Political Sociology 3 (1987): 2 (authors emphasis).
18
Catherine Boone, State and ruling classes in postcolonial Africa: the enduring contra-
dictions of power, in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces.
106
An Anthropology of the State
19
The existence of a social organization, formal or informal, necessarily implies domination.
Note Weber: A circle of people who are accustomed to obedience to the orders of leaders
and who also have a personal interest in the continuance of the domination by virtue of
their own participation in, and the benefits derived for them from, the domination, have
divided among themselves the exercise of those functions which will serve the continua-
tion of the domination and are holding themselves continuously ready for their exercise.
This entire structure will be called organization. Max Rheinstein, ed., Max Weber on Law
in Economy and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 335. I use the
broader term, social forces, to signify such relations of domination in organizations but
also to signify where there is obedience in movements where no clear organization is
present.
107
A Process-Oriented Approach
coalitions.20 These are not simply policy arenas in which various groups
attempt to shape public policy. In addition to contestation over govern-
mental policy, struggles and accommodations take place over the basic
moral order and the very structure within which the rights and wrongs of
everyday social behavior should be determined: Who has the right to inter-
pret the scriptures? Who is to be respected over others? What system of
property rights will prevail? How will water and land be distributed within
the context of the prevailing system of property rights?21
Various social forces endeavor to impose themselves in an arena, to
dictate to others their goals and their answers to these and related
questions. Their aims may vary and may be asymmetrical. Some people
use social forces for extracting as much surplus or revenue as possible;
others look for deference and respect or doing Gods will or simply
power to rule other peoples behavior as an end in itself. Whatever the
motivation and aims, attempts at domination are invariably met with oppo-
sition from others also seeking to dominate or from those trying to avoid
domination. Rarely can any social force achieve its goals without finding
allies, creating coalitions, and accepting accommodations. Landlord and
priest, entrepreneur and sheikh, have forged such social coalitions with
power enough to dictate wideranging patterns of belief and practice.
Frances Hagopian demonstrates how in Brazil, the authoritarian military
regime found it had to reinstate accommodations with local traditional
oligarchic elites after it had instituted a political system of domination
that it believed had rid Brazilian politics of these old forces: The military
was no more successful at cleansing the political system of patronage
politics than it was at purging the state of the traditional political elite.22
The old patrons ability to manipulate resources in order to achieve
20
An arena is not necessarily spatially limited but rather is a conceptual locus where signif-
icant struggles and accommodations occur among social forces.
21
Arenas of domination and opposition thus differ in some fundamental respects from Lowis
arenas of power. Such arenas of power, he writes, include events, issues, and leadership
[which should] be studied within defined areas of governmental activity. These areas are,
in effect, the functions of government defined more broadly than a single agency, more
narrowly than government with a single political process. Theodore J. Lowi, At the Plea-
sure of the Mayor: Patronage and Power in New York City, 18981958 (New York: The Free
Press, 1964), p. 139. In contrast, arenas of domination and opposition are not functions
of government (although they may include government actors) nor are they limited to
governmental activity.
22
Frances Hagopian, Traditional politics against state transformation in Brazil, in Migdal,
Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces, p. 44.
108
An Anthropology of the State
23
Elizabeth J. Perry, Labor divided: sources of state formation in modern China, in
Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces.
109
A Process-Oriented Approach
The State
Any number of scholars have offered formal definitions of the state, most
of which draw heavily on the notions of Max Weber.24 These definitions
24
Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedmister Press, 1968), vol. 1, p. 64; and
Rheinstein, ed., Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, p. 342.
110
An Anthropology of the State
have not differed tremendously from one another. They have tended to
emphasize its institutional character (the state as an organization or set of
organizations), its functions (especially regarding the making of rules), and
its recourse to coercion (monopoly of the legitimate use of physical
force25). At the core of these definitions lies the question of domination
or authority in the states claimed territory and the degree to which
the states institutions can expect voluntary compliance with their rules
(legitimacy) or need to resort to coercion.
One work, for example, considers the state to be a set of organizations
invested with the authority to make binding decisions for people and orga-
nizations juridically located in a particular territory and to implement
these decisions using, if necessary, force.26 Another looks at the state as a
power organization that engages in centralized, institutionalized, terri-
torialized regulation of many aspects of social relations.27 By the power
of the modern state, authors usually mean what Michael Mann has called
infrastructural power, the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil
society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the
realm.28
Scholars understand the state to be the culmination of a process tran-
scending the old localized organizations in societies, which had previously
made the rules. It is a more impersonal and public system of rule over
territorially circumscribed societies, exercised through a complex set of
institutional arrangements and offices, which is distinguished from the
largely localised and particularistic forms of power which preceded it.29
Since the sixteenth century, the theories maintain, the emergence of this
new sort of public power with its large standing armies, formidable bureau-
cracies, and codified law has made the old forms of rule antiquated. The
25
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (trans. and eds.),
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 78.
26
Dietrich Reuschemeyer and Peter B. Evans, The State and Economic Transformation:
Toward an Analysis of the Conditions Underlying Effective Intervention in Evans, et al.,
Bringing the State Back In, pp. 467.
27
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Begin-
ning to A.D. 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 26.
28
Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and
Results, in John A. Hall (ed.), States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 113.
Also see John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry, The State (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 114.
29
Roger King, The State in Modern Society: New Directions in Political Sociology (Chatham, NJ:
Chatham House, 1986), p. 30.
111
A Process-Oriented Approach
state has forged close-knit nations out of societies that had been but loose
associations of local groups. It is simply assumed that there is no longer
any dispute that the state is the framework for the authoritative making of
rules: In the modern world only one form of political unit is recognized
and permitted. This is the form we call the nation-state. 30
Although there is much to recommend these definitions, they also pose
certain problems. For one, they tend to feature one dimension of the state,
its bureaucratic character. The accent on this side of the state highlights
its capabilities, its proficiency in achieving a fixed set of goals and in imple-
menting formal policies. A whole other aspect to the state exists that many
of these definitions do not capture well, the formulation and transforma-
tion of its goals. As the state organization comes into contact with various
other social forces, it clashes with and accommodates to different moral
orders. These engagements, which occur at numerous junctures, change
the social bases and the aims of the state. The state is not a fixed ideolog-
ical entity. Rather, it embodies an ongoing dynamic, a changing set of
aims, as it engages other social forces. This sort of engagement can come
through direct contact with formal representatives, often legislators, or,
more commonly, through political parties closely allied with the state.
Resistance offered by other social forces to the designs of the state,
as well as the incorporation of groups into the organization of the state,
change its social and ideological underpinnings. The formulation of
state policy is as much a product of this dynamic as it is a simple outcome
of the goals of top state leaders or a straightforward legislative process.
The results of the engagement with (and disengagement from) other social
forces may modify the state agenda substantially; indeed, they may alter
the very nature of the state.31 Even as self-consciously an ideological state
as that in postrevolutionary China a state, as Vivienne Shue puts it, that
set out to do nothing less than reinvent society found itself transformed
by its engagement with other social forces.32 Maos China, to be sure,
30
Anthony D. Smith, State-Making and Nation-Building, in Hall (ed.), States in History
(New York: B. Blackwell, 1986), p. 228.
31
Alfred Stepans use of the term political society, which he adapted from Gramsci, opens
the way to consideration of the changing basis of the states symbolic system and its behav-
ior. Political contestation, Stepan argues, is within the framework of political society and
is about control over public power and the state apparatus. Alfred Stepan, Rethinking
Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988), p. 4.
32
Vivienne Shue, State power and social organization in China, in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue
(eds.), State Power and Social Forces.
112
An Anthropology of the State
33
Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections
on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea, Comparative Studies in Society and History 29
( January 1987).
113
A Process-Oriented Approach
that produces his perceptions of people, of himself and others: of who are
the nobodies and who the somebodies, who the deprived and who the
gifted, who the better-never-to-have-been-born and who the heroes.34
Transformative states set about trying to influence how people place them-
selves in mattering maps, the content and ordering of the symbols and
codes determining what matters most to them. Concern with mattering
maps implied that transformative states simply could not let any struggle
over domination within its official boundaries go uncontested;35 state
leaders want the state to matter most, enough to die for.
With only isolated exceptions, leading state officials have adopted the
goal of heading a transformative state. They have seen the state as an orga-
nization that can (or, at least, should) dominate in every corner of society.
It should mold how people see themselves on mattering maps define the
moral order and set the parameters of daily behavior, or, minimally, autho-
rize and defend other social organizations to undertake some of those
tasks. Even in recent cases of privatization and liberalization of markets,
for example, a frequent underlying assumption is that the state should not
entirely abdicate economic questions to markets. It should seek to carve
out limits to the autonomy of those markets and, at the same time, to
authorize, regulate, and defend their operation.36
In short, throughout the territory they claim to govern, most state
leaders have maintained that the state should have primacy. In some
instances, that has meant efforts to stake out autonomy for powerful social
forces with which state leaders are allied, such as markets, churches, or
families. But, commonly, the quest is for the state to exercise that
autonomy directly to impose centrally its own systems of meaning and
boundaries for acceptable behavior on peoples mattering maps, in every-
thing from sexual unions to labor-management relations.
State leaders attempt to create an aura of invincibility about the state.
The more the state seems all-powerful, the more likely are subjects to
accept it in their ordinary lives and, in the process, reduce the burden of
34
Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1983),
p. 22.
35
By transformative, we do not necessarily mean progressive. Even a state seeking to pre-
serve an existing order must be transformative if it is to have its way in the context of
international changes sweeping over its boundaries.
36
The state is as central to the economics of development as to its politics. Peter Evans
and John D. Stephens, Studying Development since the Sixties: The Emergence of a
New Comparative Political Economy, Theory and Society 17 (1988): 723.
114
An Anthropology of the State
enforcing all its dictates. In fact, those social scientists who wittingly or
unwittingly exaggerate the capabilities of the state become part of the
states project to present itself as invincible. State sovereignty, the actual
imposition of supreme state authority over its claimed territory, has simply
too often been taken for granted.37
Despite their best efforts and to their never-ending frustration, state
leaders have not had a clear way of imposing their domination their
systems of meaning, their rules for social behavior, and their economic
plans upon society. All states have not succeeded in reshaping mattering
maps, as their leaders have envisaged. Like any other organizations, states
have real limits to their power: what they can do and what they cannot do,
when they can collect taxes and when not, which rules they can make
binding and which not. Ambitious goals for states aims of actually
penetrating throughout the society, regulating the nitty-gritty of social
relations, extracting revenues, appropriating resources that determine the
nature of economic life, and controlling the most dearly held symbols
have seldom been approximated, certainly not in the case of most new or
renewed state organizations in the Third World.
One of the reasons that much recent literature on states has consistently
overestimated their power and autonomy is the homogeneous way that
works present them. The focus all too frequently has been on the very top
leadership, the elites in the upper echelon of the state organization, as if
they alone are the state, as if their wills are re-created faithfully through-
out the labyrinth of state branches and bureaus. Note in Manns statement
how the interest in states and their top leadership go hand in hand: My
principal interest lies in those centralized institutions generally called
states, and in the powers of the personnel who staff them, at the higher
levels generally termed the state elite. 38
37
King writes that the constitutional state is characterised by a unitary sovereignty which
becomes manifest in a single currency, a unified legal system, and an expanding state edu-
cational system employing a single national language. A literary tradition in this national
language erodes cultural particularism, and a system of national military conscription,
which replaced the local recruitment of ancient military units, also tends to overcome
peripheral or localist identities. Roger King, The State in Modern Society: New Directions
in Political Sociology (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1986), p. 51.
38
Mann, Autonomous Power of the State, p. 112. The identification of the state with its top
elites or leadership, with its own distinct interests and perspectives that are independent of
specific other socioeconomic interests, does not mean that authors do not recognize what
King (The State in Modern Society, p. 53) calls the plurality of foci of the state. But these
foci are seen largely as differentiated institutional expressions of a fairly singular will.
115
A Process-Oriented Approach
But the state is far from the re-creation of the aims and wills of the state
elite. Like the ideological basis of the state and its formulation of policy,
the implementation of policies also reflects the dynamic of the states
engagement with other social forces. To understand what happens to the
state and its policies as state leaders attempt to shape and regulate society,
one must look at the multiple levels of the state. Social scientists must
develop a new anthropology of the state. They need a method that looks
carefully at its different parts (just as anthropology often focuses on small
portions of society); they require an approach that analyzes how its various
components, often impelled by conflicting interests and pulling in differ-
ent directions, relate to one another. Such an anthropology would reject
the assumptions implicit in many studies concerning the smooth inter-
locking of relations within and between organs of the state organization
or of a state that simply reflects the will of its top leaders.
Personnel in the various components of the state organization operate
in markedly different structural environments. Various units of the state
have diverse histories of their own, leading to differing sorts of esprit de
corps, senses of purposefulness, and insularity by their staffers or politi-
cians. The first step in understanding the different directions in which
components of the state pull is to identify the forces that constitute the
various environments in which state officials operate. Only then can a
researcher begin to inquire about the weights of these forces for different
parts of the state in particular circumstances.
Five types of social forces and groups stand out as immediate factors
that impinge directly on state officials: (1) supervisors (at least for state
personnel not elected nor at the very top of the hierarchy); (2) under-
lings, state employees that one directly or indirectly supervises; (3) peers,
staff in other agencies or politicians at roughly similar levels; (4) domes-
tic social forces, those not part of the state organization but from within
the society (including clients of state policies, blocs of voters, contractors,
and others); and, perhaps, (5) foreign social forces from the international
system.
The state, then, does not generate a single, homogeneous response to
an issue or problem, or even necessarily a varied but coordinated set of
responses. Rather, its outcomes the formulation and implementation of
its policies are a series of different actions based on the particular cal-
culus of pressures that each engaged component of the state faces in its
particular environment of action. Those environments of action, the loci
of conflicts and coalitions, of pressure and support, involving parts of the
116
An Anthropology of the State
state and other social forces, are what we have termed the arenas of
domination and opposition.
There is certainly little guarantee that the sum of actions of the various
components of the state, each facing distinctive struggles within the par-
ticular arenas in which it engages other social forces, will represent some
harmonious mesh. The outcome can just as likely be a sum of ill-fitting
responses that stem from the different components of the state as they
respond to their various arenas of domination and opposition. As Shue
writes of Maoist China, Frontline officials, despite their status as agents
of the state, frequently found it advisable, or easier, or more natural, or
just in accord with their own convictions, to throw in their lot with local
people and departmental associates, against the impersonal requirements
of the state bureaucracy above them.39
At different points in the state organization, the calculus of pressures
on state officials differs markedly depending on the particular array of
forces in their arenas and their relative weight. To speak of the overall
autonomy of states, as much recent theory does, might not at all be the
best initial point of inquiry for those studying the state. Researchers must
first ask about the autonomy of the various components of the state, for
which the calculus of pressures differs so markedly. What sorts of social
forces predominate at different points in the state hierarchy and why?
Does the calculus of pressures allow for discretionary room for state
officials and representatives? Do supervisors influence decisions of state
personnel, or are they outweighed by other social forces?
It would be impossible, of course, for any researcher to study the
calculus of pressure for each state official. In order to simplify the task, we
can identify four levels of the state organization, from bottom to top, as
the trenches, the dispersed field offices, the agencys central offices, and
the commanding heights. On the first three levels, those involved in an
anthropology of the state must carefully choose instances that can illumi-
nate processes and trends beyond the specific cases the sort of choice
that social or cultural anthropologists have had to make in selecting the
right village for study.
39
Vivienne Shue, State power and social organization in China, in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue
(eds.), State Power and Social Forces, p. 71.
117
A Process-Oriented Approach
forces. They must execute state directives in the face of possibly strong
societal resistance. They are the tax collectors, police officers, teachers,
foot soldiers, and other bureaucrats mandated to apply state rules and
regulations directly. Their contacts are with the intended clients, targets,
and beneficiaries of official state policies. For state personnel in the
trenches, pressures come not only from supervisors but also directly from
intended clients and from lower-level figures in other large social organi-
zations or heads of small-scale organizations who stand to lose or gain by
the states policy success. They must confront the local businessman or
farmer or the local representative of a national labor union. These other
social forces that weigh in on the actions of lower-level state officials may
reinforce the pressure of supervisors or may act in an entirely different
direction.
The Dispersed Field Offices. A notch higher in the state hierarchy are
the regional and local bodies that rework and organize state policies and
directives for local consumption, or even formulate and implement wholly
local policies. The dispersed field offices include the bureaus, legislative
bodies, courts, and military and police units that work exclusively within
a circumscribed territory within the larger territory claimed by the state
as a whole. These organs make key decisions about local appropriation of
resources funnelled through national ministries or garnered locally. Where
will state schools be built? How will local postal distribution be organized?
Which villages will benefit from the digging of new tube-wells or irriga-
tion canals? Who will be hired in the trenches?
Among those at the level of the field command stand provincial gover-
nors and legislators, district police chiefs, members of local school boards,
and the officials who Merilee S. Grindle has called the implementors.
These implementors are middle-level bureaucrats, the first and second
ranks of the field administration, who have the task of organizing the exe-
cution of policy in a given region.40 Like their underlings in the trenches,
implementors face supervisors in their agencies but ones who usually are
physically far removed. Implementors are responsible for the course of a
policy once it (and the resources attached to it) are passed from the capital
city to the regions where it will be installed. Their supervisors are cen-
40
Merilee S. Grindle, The Implementor: Political Constraints on Rural Development in
Mexico, in Grindle (ed.), Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 197.
118
An Anthropology of the State
The Agencys Central Offices. In the capital city are the nerve centers
that constitute the various agencies central offices, the places where
national policies are formulated and enacted and where resources for
implementation are centrally marshalled. These offices are staffed by
national parliamentarians and heads of ministries or agencies of the state.
It is these various central offices that have overall responsibility for the
states attempts to penetrate and regulate society in particular realms
of social life. They may be responsible for housing, welfare, education,
revenue collection, conscription, security, or other broadly defined, but
still limited, social areas. Or they may be the center for generating overall
legislation but with no executive responsibilities.
Those heading central offices are most often directly accountable to the
top leadership of the state, the presidents office or some equivalent, but
pressures come from a number of other directions, as well. For one, they
are engaged in an endless process of bargaining with each other. In their
negotiations, both in their competition and cooperation, they face the
tough pressure that their peers can bring to bear on them. They compete,
after all, for tight resources, and they build countless temporary coalitions
with other agency chiefs and legislators to forward their own agencys
perspective on an issue.
The solidarity of the agencys central staffers helps shape its distinctive
perspective. Part of that solidarity grows out of self-serving aims the pro-
tection of individual careers and common turf which are reinforced by
the patronage (largely appointments) controlled by heads of the agencys
central offices. In fact, where other pressures from the states top lead-
ership, other central agency commands, and non-state social forces are
muted, the large bureaus of the state may end up as little more than
extended patronage networks. But pressures from within an agency itself
can have other effects besides fostering an arena of patronage. The special
perspective of the agency puts pressure on its chiefs. They face a rocky
road within their own bureaus or parliamentary groups if they fail to
represent those perspectives faithfully.
Finally, those in the central offices often must deal with the most
powerful forces in society from outside the state organization. Of these,
large capital enterprises, both domestic and foreign, are the most pro-
minent. Others may include political parties, large labor unions, major
media organs, and religious organizations. Although powerful social forces
may operate on different levels of the state, well-organized social classes,
communal groups, and other key social organizations weigh in heavily
120
An Anthropology of the State
The Commanding Heights. At the pinnacle of the state are the com-
manding heights, housing the top executive leadership. Social scientists
have devoted much ink to studies of state leaders. Presidents, prime min-
isters, even juntas, certainly do not work in obscurity as do those in the
trenches, the dispersed field offices, and even, at times, an agencys central
offices. But the attention of social scientists has not frequently focused
on the structural strains between them and other layers of the state.41
41
For a good exception seen John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political
Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
121
A Process-Oriented Approach
then, the array of perspectives in the rest of the state organization gener-
ates unexpected conflict. When top state leaders speak with the minister
of defense, they hear that security and defense are by far the most impor-
tant elements of the national interest. The minister of education asks what
could be more important for the nations future than a literate, skilled cit-
izenry and workforce. Individual health adds up to national health, insists
the minister of health.
State leaders at the commanding heights face pressures from all of them
but may not identify fully with any of them. In other words, an agencys
central offices, whose actions are themselves the outcome of different
arrays of pressures in varying arenas, become simply one pressure point in
the top state leaderships own arena of domination and opposition. The
forces pressuring the commanding heights come from a broader field than
those affecting the lower levels of the state. The power of important inter-
national actors and the heads of the weightiest indigenous social forces,
who can gain direct access to the top, only exacerbate the conundrum for
the top leaders of the state.
To conclude this section, there has been an unfortunate tendency in
social science to treat the state as an organic, undifferentiated actor. States
have been assigned an ontological status that has lifted them apart from
the rest of society. As a result, the dynamics of the struggles for domina-
tion in societies, in which components of the state have played differing
roles in various arenas, have been obfuscated. Those struggles have not
only been about who seizes the commanding political heights in society.
They have involved alliances, coalitions, and conflicts among social forces
in multiple arenas, including components of the state.
Varying perspectives (parochial or universal, regional or countrywide)
within state components have derived from the distinct arenas of domi-
nation and opposition in which they operate. The sum of all the compo-
nents responses to the distinctive mix of pressures in the particular arenas
in which they engage other social forces together have created the out-
comes of the state. What is certainly true is that the cacophony of sounds
stemming from the wildly different arenas in which components of the
state interact often have resulted in state actions that bear little resem-
blance to the original schemes or policies conceived by leaders of the state
or by particular state agencies.
But state policy outcomes have been more than just the sum of inde-
pendent actions by different components of the state. One portion of the
relevant arena for each part of the state has been yet other segments of
123
A Process-Oriented Approach
the state organization. In fact, one can inquire into the roots of particular
forms of the state, such as democratic checks and balances or tyranny, by
tracing the evolving relationship of the states components to one another
in light of the other environmental forces that these various parts of the
state encountered.
To trace such an evolution, we need develop an anthropology of the
state the study of the parts of the state in their environments and of the
relationship of the parts to one another. The four levels of the state that
I have delineated are simply one tentative scheme that allows us to see
components of the state in various arenas of domination and opposition.
Alternative ways of breaking down the state may illuminate other dimen-
sions of state behavior as its components engage a variety of social forces.
Whatever the particular anthropology of the state that is selected,
we can conclude the following: The more diverse and heterogeneous the
arrays of pressures that various components of the state encounter on their
different levels, especially when there are strong pressures applied by mul-
tifarious domestic and foreign social forces, the less likely is it that the state
ends up with complementary behavior by its many parts and the less likely
is it that it can successfully convey a coherent system of meaning. Despite
its international stature and its sheer bulk in society, the state may be a
crippled giant in the quest for domination. That bulk will surely mean that
it cannot be ignored in conflicts over domination in society, but more
meaningful initiatives and more coherent actions may come from other
social forces.
42
Of all elements concerning identity and the state, probably the least remarked upon has
been gender. One good exception is a recent book by Parpart and Staudt. They write,
For us, gender is at the heart of state origins, access to the state, and state resource
124
An Anthropology of the State
allocation. States are shaped by gender struggle; they carry distinctive gender ideologies
through time which guide resource-allocation decisions in ways that mold material reali-
ties. Through their ideological, legal, and material efforts, states foster the mobilization
of certain groups and issues. This mobilization usually benefits men rather than women.
While over the long haul, state action may submerge and obscure gender conflict, over
the short term, the obviousness with which male privileges are fostered may actually aggra-
vate that conflict. Jane L. Parpart and Kathleen A. Staudt, Women and the State in
Africa, in Parpart and Staudt (eds.), Women and the State in Africa (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 1989), p. 6. Also, see chapters 2, 3, and 10.
43
Smith, State-Making and Nation-Building, pp. 22930.
125
A Process-Oriented Approach
of society. The goal has been to penetrate society deeply enough to shape
how individuals throughout the society place themselves on mattering
maps. The organization of the state has been to effect such far-reaching
domination. It has included vertically connected agencies, designed to
reach to all pockets within the territory, and specialized components
to promote the states system of meaning and legitimacy (e.g., schools), to
make universal rules (legislative bodies), to execute those rules (bureau-
cracies), to adjudicate (courts), and to coerce (armies and police). Major
policy initiatives by the state have led to a massive inundation of new ele-
ments (from fresh ideas to personnel and hard cash) as well as to the deple-
tion of others through taxation, conscription, relocation, mass murder,
or other means. Even the most benign states have made extraordinary
demands upon those they have claimed as their subjects: to sequester their
children in state institutions for thirty hours per week, to dispose of their
bodily wastes in only prescribed ways, to treat their sick exclusively with
state-licensed healers, to prove a proprietary relationship to land solely
through state-issued deeds, and so on. Whatever their specific programs,
states have shaken up existing relationships of social forces in societys
arenas, renewing active struggles for domination.
In the multiple meeting grounds of states and other social components,
some social forces have tied their own fortunes to that of the state or
accepted it as the appropriate organization to establish the proper prac-
tices for all of society. But, in other instances, some forces have sought to
appropriate resources, positions, personnel, even whole bureaus of the
state for their own purposes. Still others in society, such as peasants or
slum-dwellers, who were already dominated by other social forces, have
also, at times, actively or quietly resisted the attempts of officials to impose
new state domination. These struggles and accommodations in the junc-
tures between components of the state and other social forces have pro-
duced a range of outcomes. We can capture these in three ideal types of
results. First is total transformation. Here, the states penetration leads to
the destruction or subjugation of local social forces and to the states dom-
ination. In such cases, the components of the state successfully transform
how the people of an arena place themselves on the mattering map. Forced
migration, replacement of the locals by a settler population, widespread
use of violence, and other draconian means may nullify or destroy local
dominating social forces and the contours of mattering maps. Where there
is no severe social dislocation, it is unlikely that total transformation will
occur within a single generation.
126
An Anthropology of the State
44
Michael Bratton, Peasant-state relations in postcolonial Africa: patterns of engagement
and disengagement, in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces.
127
A Process-Oriented Approach
in little transformative effect upon the society and limited effects of the
society upon the state. Failures to engage in arena struggles in even the
most remote parts of the country can affect the state in the capital city by
denying state components their resources and support from the larger
society.
Only rarely have real cases approached the two extreme ideal-types,
total transformation or disengagement. Most have offered some variant of
the middle two types, where state components and other social forces have
been involved in a recursive relationship, that is, mutually transforming
struggles. In fact, not only may states and other social forces alter one
another, they may also affect the very integrity of the other through
encroachment. In the midst of such struggles and accommodations, the
boundary between the state and other parts of society may continually
shift, as powerful social forces in particular arenas appropriate parts of the
state or as the components of the state co-opt influential social figures.
While state leaders may seek to represent themselves as distinct from
society and standing above it, the state is, in fact, yet another organization
in society. And, as one organization among many, it is subject to the pushes
and pulls in societys arenas that can change the line between it and other
social forces.
In parts of colonial Africa, for example, the British attempted to extend
the scope of the colonial state by incorporating tribal chiefs as paid offi-
cials. Many chiefs, for their part, gladly accepted the salary and any other
perquisites that they could garner but often ignored the directives from
their superiors in the state hierarchy. The demarcation between the state
and other parts of society in such instances was difficult to locate and was
in constant flux. Chiefs were state officials but sometimes indeed, many
times simply used their state office and its resources to strengthen their
previous roles as chiefs.
To talk of the relations between state and society as if both always have
had firm boundaries, as much recent social theory does, is to miss some of
the most important dynamics of transforming struggles.45 Chiefs, like
other state employees and officials, play multiple roles. State organizations
45
I am indebted to Timothy Mitchell for illuminating the point about the shifting bound-
ary between states and societies. See Timothy Mitchell, The Effect of the State, working
paper presented at the workshop on state creation and transformation of the Social Science
Research Councils Committee on the Near and Middle East, Istanbul, September 13,
1989.
128
An Anthropology of the State
may succeed in having them suppress roles with different norms (as
members, for example, of kinship or tribal groups) while performing their
state duty. The desire to mold special state norms and suppress the norms
of other roles is one reason that states attempt to create their own space
for officials, such as separate state office buildings or new capital cities. In
state-designated space, the assumption goes, officials would be less likely
to succumb to the logic of the struggle being played out in specific arenas.
But states may fail to capture chiefs or other state workers, resulting in
the domination of the norms of other social forces.
In arena after arena, then, social forces have reorganized to deal with
the new reality of ambitious states. Where those forces have created or
found the spaces and methods to sustain, sometimes even augment, their
own social and economic power outside the framework of the states moral
order and its rules, the society comes to be characterized by dispersed
domination. Here, neither the state nor any other social force has estab-
lished an overarching hegemony; domination by any one social force takes
place within an arena or even across a limited number of arenas but does
not encompass the society as a whole. Social life is then marked by strug-
gles or standoffs among social forces over questions ranging from personal
and collective identity and the saliency of symbols to property rights and
the right to use force. Peoples mattering maps remain remarkably diverse
in such a society.
Even in those twentieth-century cases closer to the ideal type of
dispersed domination, the state has rarely been a negligible actor. The
junctures of the state with other social forces have taken place in the
multiple arenas of society, and in most cases the states agencies have
created a formidable presence, precipitating realignments of local
forces. But the components of the state have not achieved total trans-
formation or even successful state incorporation of local powerful
social forces in all or most of these settings. This pattern contrasts with
integrated domination, which is inclusive, or society-wide. In cases of
integrated domination, the state, whether as an authoritative legal
system or a coercive mechanism of the ruling class, is at the center of the
process of creating and maintaining social control. Its various com-
ponents are integrated and coordinated enough to play the central role at
all levels in the existing hegemonic domination. That domination includes
those areas of life regulated directly by the state, as well as the organiza-
tions and activities of society that are authorized by the state within given
limits.
129
A Process-Oriented Approach
46
Hegel put forth the notion of civil society as one that emerges from the interde-
pendence of individuals, their conflicts, and their needs for cooperation. Those needs
give rise to the state; and it is the law, the principle of rightness, that links civil
society to the state. Hegels Philosophy of Right (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1942),
pp. 1223, 1345. Marx reacted to Hegels conception, arguing that the state is merely
the mechanism to defend privileged propertied interests in civil society. He under-
stood civil society in a material sense, the expression of particular property rights:
Bureaucracy is the state formalism of civil society. David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx:
Early Texts (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 68. Gramsci noted that besides the educa-
tive agencies of the state helping maintain hegemony, there are, in reality, a multitude of
other so-called private initiatives and activities [that] tend to the same end initiatives and
activities which form the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling
classes. This, for Gramsci, is civil society. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
p. 258.
47
One difference among them has been the direction of causality: does the state create civil
society or does civil society bring about the state? Whereas Hegel believed that society
created the demand for the state, others, including Stepan, have argued that the state can
create civil society. Otto Hintze alluded to this mutuality of the state and civil society and
the role of the state in creating its own civil society, using the term nationalities instead
of civil society: The European peoples have only gradually developed their nationalities;
they are not a simple product of nature but are themselves a product of the creation of
states. Otto Hintze, The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study
in History and Politics, in Felix Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze ( New
York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 161.
48
Bendix et al. do note that civil society comprises only a segment of the population.
Those not in civil society tend to be marginal sorts those abandoned by their parents,
homeless people who do not participate in the market, illegal immigrants, etc., Reflec-
tions on Modern Western States and Civil Societies, p. 23. John Keane sees even larger
elements of European societies that have been excluded from civil society (most of those
who are not white, heterosexual male citizens). Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predica-
ments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social
and Political Power (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 14.
130
An Anthropology of the State
49
Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, p. 128.
50
Bendix, et al., note that the independence of private associations is a synonym for civil
society and that for civil society to exist, a consensus is required between state and
society. Reflections on Modern Western States and Civil Societies, pp. 1415.
51
In the 1980s, the term civil society came to be used by analysts of Eastern Europe. They
were looking for a way to break the theoretical umbilical cord between state and civil
society. For them, the term civil society implied a spunky society, which develops auton-
omy through organizations in opposition to the state. See, for example, Andrew Arato,
Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 19812, Telos (19812): 1948. For a critique, see
131
A Process-Oriented Approach
position, the strain between civil society and the state is seen in overarch-
ing terms between these two integrative entities. Civil society is still an
aggregate of diverse interests, which on one level pull in a single direc-
tion. Together, they attempt to oppose the states moral order and impose
one of their own.
There are several problems with analyzing the junctures of state and
society through such a view of civil society. For one, as I have discussed
elsewhere, even within civil society, various social forces are not always
aggregative and inclusive, leading to a hegemony of fundamental ideas.52
We need to develop a much more careful understanding of the constitu-
tive elements in civil society and not assume it is made up only of inter-
est groups and private voluntary organizations, which tend to create a
harmonious consensus in society. Also, an integrative view of civil society
misses entirely cases of dispersed domination. Society and civil society are
not synonomous; the heterogeneous struggles in societys multiple arenas
of domination and opposition, in which social forces pull in different direc-
tions, also affect the state profoundly. The way the concept of civil society
is most commonly used leaves no room for these dispersed struggles over
societys moral order. As Naomi Chazan points out, Civil society encom-
passes only one portion of what has become a complex and diverse
associational scene. What distinguishes those groups incorporated in civil
society from other associations is their partial nature: they are separate
from but address the state.53 Society as a whole may include other orga-
nized components (not just marginal individuals), which strive to make
their own rules and institute their own moral orders, without addressing
the state directly.
Many contemporary societies have included significant elements that
have struggled against all or many of the claims of the state to be the orga-
nization in society with supreme authority. Some social forces have not
lent their support to the states universal pretensions or, for that matter,
the pretensions even of a civil society pitted against the state. Their rela-
Zbigniew Rau, Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockean
Contractarian Approach, Political Studies 35 (1987): 57392. On Western Europe, see
Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (see, for example, 312).
52
Joel S. Migdal, Civil Society in Israel, in Ellis Goldberg, Resat Kasaba, and Joel S.
Migdal (eds.), Rules and Rights in the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1993).
53
Naomi Chazan, Engaging the state: associational life in sub-Saharan Africa, in Migdal,
Kohli, and Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces, p. 278.
132
An Anthropology of the State
tion to the state has been one of resistance (overt or covert) or one in which
they have sought to transform or appropriate part of the state for their
own purposes. Similarly, their orientation to the other forces that make up
civil society has often ranged from disinterest to outright hostility.
The multiple arenas of society and the interactions among them have
been the cauldrons within which the contingent, particular historical out-
comes have been brewed for each society and its state. The ultimate form
of the state (democracy or some other type of government), its goals,
its capabilities, its scope, its domination by particular social forces or its
autonomy, as well as the form, systems of meaning, capabilities, and auton-
omy of other social forces, all these have been determined through these
critical struggles and accommodations in the multiple arenas of society and
the relationships among arenas. States do not succeed in establishing their
own domination by default. In fact, they may end up as much the trans-
formed as the transformative states.
In brief, scholars need ask if and how the struggles in various arenas
carry over to other arenas and, possibly, to domination in the society as a
whole. Have resources and support generated in struggles and accommo-
dations in one arena then been carried into other domains in society, pos-
sibly to create an integrated domination? Integrated domination, whether
by states, social classes, civil society, or any other groupings, results from
successful reallocation of resources and support garnered from activities
in one arena into other arenas.54 What Sidney Tarrow has called the vast
issues, roiling conflicts, and deep-seated social and economic cleavages in
societies cannot be understood divorced from the more limited arena con-
flicts. It is in the latter that people organize their relations with the state,
reconcile or fight out conflicts of interest, and attempt to adapt politically
to wider social pressures.55 The ability of any social force, including the
state, to develop the cohesion and garner the material and symbolic
resources to project a meaningful presence at the society-wide level
depends upon its performance in more circumscribed arenas. In those
54
In the United States, social theorists have been particularly reticent about admitting that
the state is, in fact, exercising supreme authority. More often the emphasis has been on
social organizations that regulate themselves, with little attention as to how the state
creates the authoritative legal framework within which markets and other social organi-
zations function. See Gary C. Hamilton and John R. Sutton, The Problem of Control
in the Weak State, Theory and Society 18 ( January 1989): 1516.
55
Sidney Tarrow, Introduction, in Territorial Politics in Industrial Nations (New York:
Praeger, 1978), p. 1.
133
A Process-Oriented Approach
134
5
On the face of it, it is puzzling that more states do not simply fall apart.
Why do their components not fly off in a thousand different directions?
It has happened to some in recent years: Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Somalia,
Liberia, Zaire, even the vaunted Soviet Union. Why not to others? What
can account for the staying power of so many state organizations, most
with tens of thousands of workers toiling in hundreds of different agen-
cies with countless sets of varying procedures, goals, interests, pressures,
and incentives? All these are scattered across variegated territories with
diverse populations. The potential for interagency turmoil, mad grabs
for scarce resources, forces pulling in different directions, contestation of
internalized global forces, and conflicting priorities seems endless and
all that in an organization harboring the feasibility for inflicting tremen-
dous violence.
Surveying European expansion across five centuries, David Strang
found remarkable ability of non-European polities at least those that
were recognized as sovereign to survive.1 He found only eleven that went
from sovereign to dependent status between 1415 and 1987, and fifteen
non-European polities that merged or underwent dissolution. What was
striking about the last half of the twentieth century was how many states
were created unprecedented numbers in the annals of world history
and how few disappeared, dissolved, or imploded.
In fact, during the years of the Cold War, one is hard pressed to point
to more than a handful of cases in which states vanish or fall apart
perhaps Pakistan and Nigeria for a spell, certainly Lebanon, and then some
1
David Strang, Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and
Institutional Accounts, International Organization 45 (Spring 1991): 14362.
135
A Process-Oriented Approach
odd instances such as Egypt, Syria, and the United Arab Republic. At the
same time, social scientists wrote volumes on how frail so many states have
been. They used terms such as quasi-state or soft state or weak state to
indicate the vulnerability of many political entities, both to outside forces
and to organized domestic groups.2 Does not state weakness also indicate
a fragility that would lead many to shatter irrevocably?
The disintegration of vast empires after World War I and World
War II coupled with the powerful idea of self-determination led to a
proliferation of new states, many extremely weak in terms of internal
coherence and their ability to effect public policy that could change
peoples behavior in intended ways. In the two decades following World
War II alone, the number of states more than tripled. Indeed, the middle
of the twentieth century became the heyday for states as practically the
universal political form.
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live in the age of the
state as survivor. New political forms, led by the European Union and
powerful nongovernmental organizations, loom on the horizon. Book after
book has appeared describing how the states sails have been trimmed.3
Others have predicted its imminent demise with such chilling phrases as
the Lebanization of the world.4 The state is increasingly portrayed as
2
See for example: Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and
the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joel S. Migdal, Studying
the State, in Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman (eds.), Comparative Politics: Ratio-
nality, Culture, and Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3
See for example: Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a
Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Brookfield, VT: E. Elgar, 1992); Ivo D. Duchacek, Daniel
Latouche, and Garth Stevenson, Perforated Sovereignties and International Relations: Trans-
Sovereign Contacts of Subnational Governments (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); John
Dunn, Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State? (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Julie A.
Erfani, The Paradox of the Mexican State: Rereading Sovereignty from Independence to NAFTA
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Gidon Gottlieb, Nation Against State: A New Approach
to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty (New York: Council on Foreign Relations
Press, 1993); Christine Ingebritsen, The Nordic States and European Unity (Ithaca: NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998); Peter Katzenstein, Tamed Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1997); Edmond J. Keller and Donald Rothchild, Africa in the New Interna-
tional Order: Rethinking State Sovereignty and Regional Security (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
1996); Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (eds.), Beyond Westphalia?: State Sover-
eignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995); Claus Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996);
Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial
Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
4
Jean-Marie Guehenno, The End of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995), p. 35.
136
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
the crippled Leviathan, whose life-support system might give way at any
time. But reports of its near-death seem decidedly premature state weak-
ness has not meant state collapse.
In the next two sections, I review several reasons offered by scholars
to explain why states stay intact. The first involves the role of forces from
the international environment, which become internalized domestically in
both states and societies. The second draws from organization theory and
its emphasis on the trade between states and their subjects: loyalty and
support in exchange for selective access to public goods. A third reason
focuses on a variant of exchange, where the state serves as an umbrella and
money tree for diverse patron-client ties.
While these factors help us in understanding some of the elements that
fend off disintegrative forces, they do not tell us enough. The main argu-
ment of the paper in the final section is that certain areas of state-society
interaction can create meaning for people in society, and that meaning, in
turn, can naturalize the state. Naturalization means that people consider
the state to be as natural as the landscape around them; they cannot
imagine their lives without it. If that belief is widespread, it provides a
powerful antidote to disintegrative forces, even in the face of continued
weakness in delivering goods, effecting policy, and gaining efficiency.
We will explore three overlapping areas where meaning and practice
are created the generation of law in society, the use of public ritual in a
context in which politics is seen as theater, and the constitution and con-
tinuing reconstitution of public space. We are not yet at the point where
we can specify under what conditions meaning is created in these three
areas leading to a bolstered state, and where the opposite happens. But it
is important at this point to explore these areas of state-society relations
in order to understand their underlying relationship to state cohesion and
disintegration.
5
Jackson, Rosberg, Rosenau, and Strang are clear exceptions. See: Robert H. Jackson and
Carl G. Rosberg, Why Africas Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in
137
A Process-Oriented Approach
impression that the state is to politics what the hidden hand is ( la Adam
Smith) to economics.6 Many ignored the question of state stability,
instead naturalizing the concept of the state in their writings. By the early
nineteenth century, they argued, states had become the sole constitutive
elements of the international system at the exclusion of others.7 As the
normative and juridical way to organize governance in fact, as nearly
the only successful way the twentieth century saw to establish rule the
state came to seem as much a part of the landscape as mountains and rivers.
Little reason existed to question its presence or its future.
International law and the international society of states consecrated its
form and worked to preserve, not only the society of states as a whole, but
frequently individual states as well. Indeed, Jackson and Rosberg maintain,
that if we were to take another criterion besides the juridical existence of
states, such as whether states effectively control all of their territory, we
could count many more of them as having failed to remain intact. They
write that one cannot explain the persistence of some states by using a
concept of the state that does not give sufficient attention to the [interna-
tional] juridical properties of statehood.8 Jackson referred to the interna-
tional conditions that sustained states as negative sovereignty.
While a few scholars investigated how international conditions propped
up states, most simply took the states continued existence for granted. In
addition, the bedrock assumptions of International Relations theory rein-
forced the idea of the inviolability of the state. Models emphasized its
rationality, thereby assuming its integrity and coherence.9 International
Relations thinkers dealt with states almost exclusively as independent
variables, rather than dependent ones.10 While these writers were reacting
against pluralist approaches, systems theory, and Marxist notions, they too
like those they reacted against simplified the state, treating its complex
internal workings as unproblematic.
Statehood, World Politics 35 (October 1982): 124; James N. Rosenau, The State in an
Era of Cascading Politics: Wavering Concept, Widening Competence, Withering Colos-
sus, or Weathering Change? Comparative Political Studies 21 (April 1988): 1344; Strang,
Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion.
6
Rosenau, The State in an Era of Cascading Politics, p. 14.
7
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
8
Jackson and Rosberg, Why Africas Weak States Persist, p. 4.
9
Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and
Dissolve (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 29.
10
Ibid., p. 213.
138
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
11
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
12
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back
In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
13
See Cederman; Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran
to Cambodia, A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Knopf, 1997); Klaus Schlichte,
Why States Decay: A Preliminary Assessment (Mimeograph, 1997).
14
See for example: Alexander Wendt, Constructing International Politics, International
Security 20 (1995): 7181; Michael N. Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in
Regional Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Peter Katzenstein, Culture
of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996); Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Martha Finnemore, National Interests in
International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
15
Joels S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces: Domi-
nation and Transformation in the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
139
A Process-Oriented Approach
incentives for their parts to hang together, and relief for them from much
of their traditional role in defending borders against outside attack. Now,
with the end of the Cold War and the increased intensity of economic
globalization, the buzz is that the state is at the end of its rope. State weak-
ness, in the absence of the old international props, might now translate
directly into state collapse.
The termination of the Cold War, indeed, has brought an increase in
the collapse of some states enough to spur thinking about why they dis-
solve.16 But the vast majority, even ones that seemed to be little more than
propped-up artifacts of East-West competition, have remained intact and,
for the moment, seem in no threat of disintegration even when public
funds have been squandered and public policies, largely ignored.
Part of the reason for the relative stability of the state is that the inter-
national factors supporting and sustaining states did not all disappear with
the end of the Cold War. Embassies and ambassadors, the United Nations
and the World Bank, foreign aid and international agencies all implic-
itly or explicitly have designated the state as the proper representation of
the people in a given space. As strong as economic and environmental
factors have been in making the states boundaries quite porous, we have
had a countervailing set of international regimes that have encouraged,
sustained, and legitimated states as the proper form of rule.17 As Strang
argues, the stability of states can be explained, in large part, by the cul-
tural constitution of the Western state system as a community of mutual
recognition.18
It is very rare indeed that international organizations and procedures
have not promoted the state as the interlocutor of populations. One recent
exception to the rule has been the restrictions placed by the United Nations
on the Iraqi state with respect to its Kurdish population following the Gulf
War. But that is a true rarity. More common is a case such as that portrayed
in Peter Dauvergnes article on the Solomon Islands.19 There, a state whose
16
Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth; Schlichte, Why States Decay; Cederman, Emergent Actors
in World Politics.
17
Finnermore, National Interests in International Society, pp. 23; Klotz, Norms in International
Relations, p. 24.
18
Strang, Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Insti-
tutional Accounts, p. 162.
19
In Peter Dauvergne, Weak states and the environment in Indonesia and the Soloman
Islands, Working Paper presented at Australian National University (Canberra: Depart-
ment of International Relations, 1997).
140
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
20
Gran Ahrne, Social Organizations: Interaction Inside, Outside and Between Organizations
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 5. Ahrne notes the belief that func-
142
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
and opportunities that units of the organization encounter may have divi-
sive effects, but its leaders at the top of the hierarchy of authority and
control formulate strategic responses and adjust organizational structure
to meet the challenges.21 This process is what organizational theorists have
called adaptation.
Because state organizations deal with fundamental needs, such as per-
sonal security, there is a temptation to say that they are there because
people need them to be. But this formulation tells us very little about why
state organizations are the dominant mode to fill these needs why not
some other type of organization? or why some of these organizations
may fail and others not.
To be fair, sociologists have recognized the possibility (perhaps even
probability) that organizations will fail. Arthur L. Stinchcombe got the ball
rolling by proposing that young organizations are more likely to die than
old ones.22 In the case of states, however, Stinchcombes analysis runs into
difficulties; young states have fared remarkably well over the last four
decades. Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, arguing that organiza-
tions inertia diminishes the chances for successful adaptation, maintain
that different environments select organizations that fit the specific local
conditions well and cause ones that are ill-suited to the environment to
fail.23 Their thinking leads to the notion that organizations necessarily look
quite different from one environment to another, but, again in the case of
states, one is at pains to say why states the world over look so similar.24
More recently, Ahrne has simply pointed to what organizations have to
do to avoid failure. Positions have to be fitted together into a working
143
A Process-Oriented Approach
25 26
Ahrne, Social Organizations, p. 104. Ibid., p. 111.
144
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
With regard to breadth, states are the most densely linked institutions in the con-
temporary world. Change the nature of states and virtually everything else in
human society would also have to be changed. Hence, even though environmen-
tal incentives have dramatically changed since the establishment of the state system
in the seventeenth century, there is little reason to believe that it will be easy to
replace sovereign states with some alternative structure for organizing human
political life.27
27
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: An Institutionalist Perspective, Comparative Political
Studies 21 (April 1988): 76.
28
Offe, Modernity and the State, p. 63.
145
A Process-Oriented Approach
29
Thomas A. Koelble, The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology,
Comparative Politics 27 ( January 1995): 233.
146
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
30
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of
Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).
31
Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quienscence (Chicago:
Markham, 1971), p. 2.
147
A Process-Oriented Approach
the states cohesion. That factor is dealt with mainly by theorizing about
material distributive issues. A key tenet of organizational theory is that
organizations (here, states) maintain themselves by eliciting maximally
efficient conduct from members, which they do by most effectively
distributing public goods selectively. The conclusion would be that the
most efficient organizations in this regard would have the best chances
of survival.
But, as Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker have shown, maxi-
mally efficient conduct is often not attained and organizations neverthe-
less continue to exist.32 States are prime examples of often inefficient,
sometimes highly inefficient, organizations that keep on going. Benedict
Kerkvliet portrays a Philippine state repeatedly failing to fulfill its promises
with respect to agrarian reform.33 But it still remains very much intact,
and, indeed, is held in high esteem even by those patiently waiting for
reform. The remarkable survival of what at first blush seem like pitifully
weak states demands explanations that explore issues beyond efficiency and
material distribution and, as Kerkvliet suggests, more nuanced under-
standings of what weak and strong entail.
One possibility suggested in some of the Asia Pacific cases is that states
may survive as a result of odd bargains in which elements of the state par-
ticipate. These bargains are between patrons and their clients. At times
the patrons inhabit state offices and, at times, not. In either case, elements
of the state provide cover for these exchanges. In addition, its administra-
tive apparatus does not interfere too much with existing bargains between
patrons and clients. It is in these bargains that meaningful exchanges
of material goods and compliance are actually made. There is little
Weberian rationality in the provision of services here, nor is there orga-
nization theorys maximal efficiency. Instead, the states stability rests in
good part on its integration into a web of strongman-follower ties.
While grossly inefficient in their own ability as coherent actors to
provide security and material benefits to the population, states may provide
a secure framework for numerous, disjointed patron-client bargains to
flourish. The state, despite its weakness in providing the kinds of services
32
Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker, Permanently Failing Organizations (Newbury
Park: Sage, 1989), p. 47.
33
Benedict Tria Kerkvliet, Land Regimes and State Strengths and Weaknesses in the
Philippines and Vietnam, in Peter Dauvergne (ed.), Weak and Strong States in Asia-Pacific
Societies (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998).
148
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
34
Peter Dauvergne, Weak States and the Environment in Indonesia and the Solomon
Islands, in Dauvergne (ed.), Weak and Strong States in Asia-Pacific Societies.
149
A Process-Oriented Approach
has not been seriously questioned.35 How, then can we explain states sur-
vival, even in the face of enduring weakness and even when ties to extra-
state distributional methods (i.e., patrons) are not determining?
35
Harold Crouch, Indonesias Strong State, in Dauvergne (ed.), Weak and Strong States
in Asia-Pacific Societies.
150
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
1. Law
While its meaning seems quite straightforward at first glance, as Robert
Cover notes, the word law itself is always a primary object of con-
tention,36 but it is in the interest of the state to present the law as if
no such contention existed. In its raw form, law involves compelling
people to behave in certain ways, but the institution of law implies a
sense of justice and rightness that legitimates and obscures the process of
forcing others to submit to a particular will. State leaders, especially, have
had a very strong interest in presenting their idea of law as if no other
meanings of it existed or mattered. They have wanted people to believe
that there is no law other than state law and that peoples sense of what is
just and right finds expression in that law. The legitimacy of the state and
its ability to gain peoples obedience have depended upon it. Again, as
Cover states:
There is not automatic legitimation of an institution by calling it or what it
produces law, but the label is a move, the staking out of a position in the
complex social game of legitimation. The jurisprudential inquiry into the ques-
tion what is law is an engagement at one remove in the struggle over what is
legitimate.37
36
Robert Cover, The Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction, in Martha Minow, Michael
Ryan, and Austin Sarat (eds.), Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 174.
37
Ibid., p. 175.
151
A Process-Oriented Approach
for controlling the population of a territory and for its own internal
control.
The second meaning of law is one that involves self-limitation by states
through the creation of, or at least respect for, individual and property
rights. Here, it has been liberal states, in particular, that have advocated
the notion of inalienable property and human rights, inviolable powers and
privileges for individuals. Law here has involved states creation of islands
of action for individuals, especially in the context of a capitalist society,
that cannot be constrained or regulated by the sorts of restrictive law found
in the first category, law as social control.
Both of these notions of law stress the centrality of the state. It
legislates and executes and adjudicates. It creates laws and implements
them. The handful of states in the common law tradition do look outside
the state organization itself for the basis of law, valorizing the origins of
laws in practical everyday transactions and custom, but even in these cases
it is state legislative bodies and judiciaries that formalize and validate codes
of action. States stand at the center of self-limiting laws as well as ones
geared toward social control; it is the state organization that determines,
or at least codifies, what rights individuals have. The awesome force of
the state its police and judges and jails and executioners stands behind
its edicts.
To be sure, scholars and jurists have recognized that actual practice has
not always conformed to state law. It has been contravened by outright
criminality, of course, but also by customary law or social convention. Still,
the essence of power in this state-centered view of law lies in the narrow-
ness of the gap between state-imposed codes and social practice and in the
acceptance by society of state law as the proper and just form of rule. This
perspective on law, it seems to me, takes as unproblematic the question of
why people should obey the law when there is little or no threat of state
violence. In other words, what makes the law seem legitimate in their eyes
beyond the big stick it wields?
Covers comments about the conflicts over who gets to make law imply
an alternative standpoint to the state-centered one, that of legal pluralism.
It stresses the existence of multiple sets of laws in society, including those
opposed to the state, others not controlled by the state but not necessar-
ily in opposition to it, and still others complementary to state law. Some
of these may be formal codes, such as Islamic law; others may be long-
standing but much less formal, such as the law of the manor in feudal soci-
eties; and still others may be loose, recently generated sets of norms. This
152
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
last sort of law although law may be too lofty or lowly a term to
describe it,38 consists of what various groups of people in society think
is just and use as their guide to proper behavior.
In this alternative view, the notion of state law as singular is nothing
more than a state-professed ideology seeking to enhance power and
legitimacy. In fact, state law stews in a cauldron with numerous other sets
of law some friendly to it, some not.39 This alternative perspective also
notes that these other sets of laws and practices invariably have an effect
on state law. Finkel characterized the differences between the state-
centered and the legal-pluralist perspectives in this regard as should the
law [read, state law] follow the path laid by community sentiment [read,
other sorts of law], or should the community follow the path the law has
laid?40 In the legal pluralist view, state law often follows the path set by
non-state forms of law.
The notion that state law has been or should be deeply affected by these
other sets of law has not been universally accepted, by any means. The
mainstream of legal theory has long held that governmental law, the offi-
cial pronouncements of the state, constitutes the dos and donts for
society, and not the opposite. In this view, people outside the institutions
and offices of the legal system receive rather than generate legal author-
ity.41 Through its rules and rights, law does shape and structure society
law creates and maintains hierarchy and dominance in society.42 But it
is important to understand, too, how that society shapes and reshapes state
law, as well.
If Cover is right that law is a powerful legitimating force and I think
that he is then the ability of states to remain intact rests in part on their
relationship to these other sets of law. The ability of other categories of
law to subvert, strengthen, or transform state law has a deep impact on the
chances for the state to hold together and be effective. Much of what law
state and others does is to delineate a universe of meaning for people:
what is acceptable and what not, what is right and what wrong. Law is not
38
Norman J. Finkel, Commonsense Justice: Jurors Notions of the Law (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2.
39
Mark Galanter, Justice in Many Rooms: Courts, Private Ordering, and Indigenous Law,
Journal of Legal Pluralism (and Unofficial law) 19 (1981): 5672.
40
Finkel, Commonsense Justice, p. 1.
41
John Brigham, The Constitution of Interests: Beyond the Politics of Rights (New York: New
York University Press, 1996), pp. 67.
42
Susan Burgess quoted in Brigham, Constitution of Interests, p. ix.
153
A Process-Oriented Approach
just setting out what to do and what not to do, it is asserting what is
right to do and what is wrong. When state law successfully creates a
broadly shared meaning what Durkheim would call social solidarity
it enhances the conditions for its own survival. Broad social solidarity
reinforces the cohesion of the state. State law in such cases is taken by the
population as a delineation of right from wrong. It becomes a critical
process that coalesce[s] groups with diverse concerns into a single polit-
ical force and that infuse[s] individual participants with the intense affect
that comes from defense of ones identity.43 But where state law sits
uneasily with other sets of law in the society, it undermines its own ability
to give people that sense of meaning in their lives and to gain the legiti-
macy it desperately needs.
We still know very little about how different sets of laws interact. We
also have little sense of how the transformation of state law through the
interaction with other forms of law may help create a broadly shared sense
of meaning for a population, including legitimacy that can enhance the
states cohesion. What we can suggest is that state law has been deeply
affected by other sets of law, especially by what various groups of people
in society have thought is just and have used as their guide to behavior.
Lawrence M. Friedman demonstrated how remarkably U.S. law was trans-
formed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century as a result of peoples
changing understanding of themselves and what proper behavior there-
fore should be.44 Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the very meaning of
the individual (or, better, individualism) changed, which has led to a very
different legal system from that of a century ago.
In any society, significant social change brings with it a proliferation of
sets of laws, of legal meanings. Those new legal meanings may turn into
texts of resistance, as Cover calls them, threatening the cohesion of the
state.45 But where state law has been transformed by these other sets of
law, where it has created the conditions for melding diverse sets of law
generated in society, it has put states in a position to benefit from renewed,
broadly shared meaning in society. In other words, social changes in
elements of the public and the generation of new non-state forms of
43
Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action, p. 12.
44
Lawrence M. Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
45
Robert Cover, Nomos and Narrative, in Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat
(eds.), Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 150.
154
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
law among these publics can transform the make-up of the state (here, in
legal terms), the very way the state is constituted. And the state, in turn,
can transform society through its application of new law as well as by syn-
thesizing different sets of societal law that may be at odds with one another.
Where such a double transformation takes place, states come to be asso-
ciated among those publics with what is right, gaining key legitimacy from
that shared sense of meaning.
In the colonial context, where we might have expected the clashes of
different sets of laws to be severe, we can find cases of transformation
with unexpected results. The imperial powers law interacted with previ-
ous ways of doing things in complex ways. Ornulf Gulbrandsen, for
example, wrote about a people and an area, the Northern Tswana of the
then Bechuanaland Protectorate, in which effective precolonial legislative
and judicial bodies interacted with the newly imposed British law.46 The
result of the interaction, perhaps surprisingly, was the strengthening of the
preexisting bodies, giving the society considerable potentials to counter-
act the penetration of European categories and valuations.47
For the Tswana the maintenance of a system of law counteracting
Britains attempts to impose a singular, hegemonic law had interesting
results. For one, their distinctive strong law kept the British willing to
retain the Protectorate in the face of the continuous pressure for annexa-
tion to the apartheid regime of South Africa.48 It also prompted the
British rulers increasingly to absorb Tswana leaders into the domain of
state laws and institutions. Despite their inability to do what they had
set out to do, that is, to create a British legal system, the colonial rulers
found themselves gaining legitimacy from the changes society imposed
upon them.
Martin Chanock uncovered a different African pattern. In his case, the
attempt to impose British law had the unintended effect of actually creat-
ing de novo an African customary law, for the perceptions of the tradi-
tional order arise from current concerns and are necessary to current
conditions.49 Chanock notes that the interaction of colonial state law with
46
Ornulf Gulbrandsen, Living Their Lives in Courts: The Counter-Hegemonic Force of
the Tsawana Kgotla in a Colonial Context, in Olivia Harris (ed.), Inside and Outside the
Law (New York: Routledge, 1996).
47
Ibid., p. 127.
48
Ibid., p. 152.
49
Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 8.
155
A Process-Oriented Approach
this new customary law (which the British pretended had prefigured colo-
nialism) had, and continues to have, complementary effects:
For the colonization of Africa by western legal forms and institutions continues
under the aegis of the growing legal profession, which in other circumstances, has
been among the most verbally ardent of the opponents of colonialism. This
process, however, is partly being legitimated by its presentation as a development
of a customary law which is essentially African, a recapturing of a pre-colonial
dynamic.50
Outside of colonial situations, too, states have had to rely on, respond
to, and contend with other systems of law extant in society. In nineteenth-
century Russia, the state had serious difficulties in providing some overall
shared meaning for the society through law. Social changes that produced
an active urban middle class pushed legal reformers at the end of the
century to introduce modern codes derived from Western Europe, par-
ticularly France. Key principles of the new systems of law conflicted with
the law of the manor for serfs and patriarchal law for women. The clash
of varying sets of laws raised important questions. Were women and serfs
(or former serfs) to be understood as rights-possessing individuals subject
to state law or as subject to the authority of fathers and husbands? Could
the Russian state afford to assert legal authority over aspects of life for-
merly ruled by males in families and lords of the manor and still maintain
sufficient social stability?
As Laura Engelstein shows, the interaction of these varying sets of
laws raised immediate and practical dilemmas.51 How would the state
treat public women (prostitutes), who were not subject to the author-
ity of husbands or fathers? What would the role of the police be:
guarding the morals implied by the other sets of law or treating women
as rights-bearing individuals (which implied a whole different sense of
what is right)? The state appeared confused, moving back and forth on
the implementation of the new codes and unable to develop a coherent
system of meaning across its vast territories. State law certainly was
transformed but not in a direction that successfully incorporated and
integrated the other sets of legal meanings in society. Increasingly, the
Russian state found it difficult to generate a law that could produce
50
Ibid., p. 238.
51
Laura Englestein, Gender and Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-
Century Russian Criminal Codes, Journal of Modern History 60 (September 1988):
45895.
156
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
2. Public Ritual
Sociologists have observed that organizations often persist despite regu-
larly falling short of doing what they are supposed to do: We are sur-
rounded by organizations whose failure to achieve their proclaimed goals
is neither temporary nor aberrant, but chronic and structurally deter-
mined.53 States are among those that regularly fall short of passing effi-
ciency tests, some failing abysmally. Their failures are hard to hide; they
range from failure to supply security, as evidenced in crime, to the inabil-
ity to deliver on their end of material bargains, such as not paying soldiers
or bureaucrats. One way in which states have overcome their gross inef-
ficiencies and grave difficulties in meeting central goals has been to gain
loyalty and support other than through efficient allocation of public goods;
52
Paula R. Newberg, Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mark J. Osiel Dialogue with Dictators: Judi-
cial Resistance in Argentina and Brazil, Law and Social Inquiry 20 (Spring 1995): 481560;
Martin Shapiro and Alec Stone, The New Constitutional Politics of Europe, Compara-
tive Political Studies 26 ( January 1994): 397420.
53
Paul DiMaggio, Foreword, in Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker (eds.), Perma-
nently Failing Organizations (Newbury Park, Sage, 1989), p. 9.
157
A Process-Oriented Approach
they have garnered backing by blurring the line between state officials and
citizens through the use of public ritual.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan argue that the survival prospects
of organizations increase when they successfully adopt ceremonies
that express institutional rules functioning as powerful myths. These
ceremonies may conflict head on with the goals of efficiency; that is,
organizations dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional envi-
ronments instead of the demands of their work activities.54 In the
case of states, this means that state organizations adopt ceremonies that
appeal to the particularities of their population over procedures that
maximize their efficiency. They incorporate elements which are legiti-
mated externally, rather than in terms of efficiency.55 Expensive corona-
tions, which can drain resources needed to achieve stated goals, for
example, may affirm moral values by which many in society live and iden-
tify the state with those values in peoples minds; they are acts of national
communion.56
Ritual and ceremony it is impossible to conjure up states without
thinking about them, from the grand entrance of judges into courtrooms
to military parades.57 State practice from the age of kings to the era of
republics has been suffused with elaborate ritual. Ceremonies have had the
effect of forging unity, whether of the kings physical body with the body
politic or of scattered individuals into a unified carrier of sovereignty
supporting a particular state organization.58 The central authority of an
orderly society, whether it be secular or ecclesiastical, wrote Shils, is
acknowledged to be the avenue of communication with the realm of the
sacred values.59 Rituals and ceremonies connect the sacred to the notion
of the nation and the mundane institutions of the state. States and soci-
eties both shape, and are shaped by, rituals and the beliefs that they
support.
54
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structures as
Myth and Ceremony, American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 341.
55
Ibid., p. 348.
56
Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975), p. 139.
57
Ritual is a stereotyped, symbolically concentrated expression of beliefs and sentiments
regarding ultimate things. Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 154. Also, see his discussion of
the term ceremonial on p. 155.
58
See Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915):
427.
59
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 151.
158
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
This last sentence is almost a disclaimer of what was said earlier. Huet
follows it by noting, This theater was not theater, of course; under the
exterior signs of a frivolous scene almost familiar in its frightening levity,
History was unfolding.62 But the temptation is strong to make what
happens into theater or, as in the case of Lynn Avery Hunts The Family
Romance of the French Revolution, into a scripted story. In both works, the
symbolic relationship of politics to a play or novel gives the gory events
of the moment a shared and enduring meaning among the people. And,
as the French Revolution vividly portrayed, the society can choreograph
events as well as be choreographed by them. Hunt puts it this way, I use
the term family romance(s) in order to suggest that much of this imagina-
tive effort [that is, the peoples reconfiguring their relationship to politi-
cal authority] went on below the surface, as it were, of conscious political
discourse.63
The connection between politics and theater has been made repeat-
edly by observers, from Cicero to Hobbes to Burke. Edmund Burke, for
example, saw close links between the two, approving the use of drama in
60
James E. Combs, Dimensions of Political Drama (Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing,
1980).
61
Marie-Hlne Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marats Death 17931797
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 3.
62
Ibid., p. 4.
63
Lynn Avery Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), p. xiv.
159
A Process-Oriented Approach
the case of the British monarchy and regarding it with horror in the case
of Frances revolutionaries.64 One way commonly used to understand the
relationship between theater and politics is to see how spectacles have been
used by politicians to enhance their power. By creating spectacles, as does
the theater, in which the public participates, state officials have sought to
inscribe its laws within the spectators mind, not as foreign but as inher-
ent, self-imposed, moral. 65
Clifford Geertz also suggests an association between the state and
theater, between ritual and power, one that may not always be instrumen-
tal.66 His case came from the nineteenth-century Balinese state, Negara.
Power in this instance was not foremost on the mind of political rulers.
Indeed, they showed indifference to actual governing, hesitancy in regu-
lating peoples everyday actions, and lack of interest in territorial sover-
eignty. Their attention pointed toward spectacle, toward ceremony,
toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese
culture: social inequality and status pride. It was a theatre state in which
the kings and princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, and
the peasants the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. . . . Power
served pomp, not pomp power.67
In this view the court-and-capital is not just the nucleus, the engine,
or the pivot of the state, it is the state. . . . It is a statement of a con-
trolling political idea namely, that by the mere act of providing a model,
a paragon, a faultless image of civilized existence, the court shapes the
world around it into at least a rough approximation of its own excel-
lence.68 In his study, Geertz deals with the threat of state dissolution
directly. He sees a constant threat from the disintegrative forces of the
power system composed as it was of dozens of independent, semi-
independent, and quarter-independent rulers.69 But what underlies the
staging of politics, the controlling political idea (or what we might label
64
Edmund Burke in C. C. OBrien (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France (London:
Penguin, 1969); Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Paul Hindson and Tim Gray, Burkes Dramatic Theory
of Politics (Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1988).
65
Scott C. Bryson, The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power (Saratoga,
CA: Anma Libri, 1991), p. 3; Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
66
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980).
67 68 69
Ibid., p. 13. Ibid. Ibid., p. 19.
160
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
70
Sean Wilentz, Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 4.
71
Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 120.
72
Ibid.
73
Bryson, The Chastised Stage; Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution; Huet,
Rehearsing the Revolution.
161
A Process-Oriented Approach
too, note the importance in the midst of the French Revolution of script-
ing a new dramatic representation of unity and authority.
Still, both in the instances of the French Revolution and the Balinese
state, those who use the theatrical metaphor present it as a tool used by
states to mold and energize society. We can think of this line of thinking
as the impresario theory of politics. This metaphor of theater implies
an impresario or producer as one who puts together the production; in
the case of politics, the producer is the supreme leadership of the state.74
We can counterpose to that impresario model a collective one. Here the
state is not totally free to cast people however it wants; elaborate staging
alone will not save any state. The will of the actors, the reaction of the
audience, even the attitudes of the stagehands all count heavily in the
eventual success or failure of the production, and all good producers take
account of them in staging their spectacle. The state is not only respon-
sive to the society, it is changed by the nature of the population and its
beliefs.
Warding off the disintegrative forces pulling at the state involves
creating a unity among some or all of the people, as the impresario model
implies, and having the state shape itself to key beliefs in society, as the
collective model suggests. It is a unity in which the ruled see their roles as
tied in to those of friends and strangers around them, even to strangers
they will never meet, including the officials of the state who demand their
obedience. For state leaders, that means creating a negotiated process
relying on the skills of the theatre to achieve spontaneous cooperation
between human actors.75 Elaborate ritual has been key to forging a sem-
blance of oneness among disparate peoples and groups. As in the theater,
rituals have been used to arouse passions, to create affective ties between
audience and spectators. Even the elaborate capital cities that every state
has laid out and the costly public buildings they have erected are integral
74
Runciman in Pluralism and the Personality of the State (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997) contrasts this sort of model with a more pluralist model in the context of the-
atrical metaphors. He notes Hobbess notion that all freedoms lie with the author of the
drama, who is the sovereign (p. 237). He contrasts this view with that of Ernest Barker,
the early twentieth-century British political theorist: Initially, Barker is happy to describe
all the state as a stage, just as he is to describe all the persons within it as actors treading
across its boards. The literal image of the state, however, is rather too passive to convey
that sense of agency on which Barkers idea of the state depends. So he extends his analogy
to take in those agents the dramatist and producer with whom responsibility for the
staging of any drama rests (p. 251).
75
Hindson and Gray, Burkes Dramatic Theory of Politics, p. 8.
162
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
76
Ibid., p. 31.
77
E. P. Thompson, Patrician Society, Plebian Culture, Journal of Social History 7 (Summer
1974): 389.
78
Ibid., p. 387.
79
For example, see: Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Acting Out Democ-
racy: Political Theater in Modern China, Journal of Asian Studies 49 (November 1990):
83565.
80
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York:
Basic Books, 1983), pp. 1423.
163
A Process-Oriented Approach
meaning in society, in the forging of a social unity that naturalizes and sus-
tains states. This dimension involves informal interactions in public space.
The concept of public space or the public sphere has been much dis-
cussed during the last generation, in good part due to the influence of
Jrgen Habermas.81 His concern is with the debate on public issues by
private people (as opposed to policymakers or others whose vocation make
them part of political society or the state). Any number of practical dis-
courses may proceed simultaneously on varied issues.
Habermas and those who followed him have been largely preoccupied
with the quantity and quality of public debate and its effect on democra-
tic politics. Nonetheless, some important presuppositions have gone into
their thinking that raise questions related to our concern, the ability of
states to remain intact. For one, the public sphere is understood to be an
egalitarian space, that is, one in which arguments and not statuses deter-
mine decisions.82 Beyond that, the public sphere includes, not only the
content of conversations on public issues, but also an understanding of
how give-and-take should take place. Seyla Benhabib calls these conditions
universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity.83 She goes on to say that
democratic debate is like a ball game where there is no umpire to defin-
itively interpret the rules of the game and their application.84 Somehow,
without the state or other authoritative umpires, rules for conversation
among strangers do develop, at least in some societies.
The kinds of rules of the game to which Benhabib refers have to do
with social interaction geared toward civic engagement. She is certainly
right that these sorts of rules are preconditions for conversations that can
influence political decisions and that such influence is essential in a democ-
racy. But it is not only democratic debate that is like a ball game without
an umpire. All societies, democratic and nondemocratic alike, have broad
dimensions of public life life outside the walls of ones home where
social interaction is frequent and largely ungoverned by state law. And
81
Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cat-
egory of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Craig Calhoun, Habermas
and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Stephen Edgell, Sandra
Walklate, and Gareth Williams (eds.), Debating the Future of the Public Sphere (Brookfield,
VT: Avebury, 1995).
82
Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, p. 1.
83
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 105.
84
Ibid., pp. 1067.
164
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
these, too, require rules without the benefit of an umpire, in part to insure
social tranquility but also to create a sense of unity or solidarity among
those in society.
In the section on law above, I referred to these sorts of rules as a form
of non-state law consisting of what various groups of people in society
think is just and use as their guide to proper behavior. The arena outside
ones private or family domain can be threatening and frightening, and
state laws have been able to provide only a modicum of security there. No
matter how effective or pervasive the state apparatus, it cannot alone
provide the kind of security that Hobbes imagined. Indeed, the perceived
effectiveness of the state rests on how well other sorts of implicit law or rules guide
proper behavior and limit to some manageable level the deviance with which
the state must deal.
Thinkers through the years have made reference to these non-state
rules. Burke, for example, characterized them as the human links, which,
although having no legal status, act to constrain and restrict, as well as to
give motion to the organised activity of a society.85 Contemporary writers,
too, continue to dwell on the issue of the rules of social engagement.
Robert D. Putnam relates the amount of civic engagement, including such
mundane things as membership in choral societies and football clubs,
to the effectiveness of governance in different regions of Italy.86 And he
worries about the decline of social capital networks, norms, and social
trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation in the United States.87
He argues that networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of gen-
eralized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust.88 In a
similar vein, David D. Laitin stresses the importance of societies develop-
ing what he calls shared points of concern.89 These are a critical foun-
dation for forging common understandings about what the public agenda
should be and agreement on the proper ways to disagree.
How and why do strong social networks form in public space? Which
societies manage to hammer out shared points of concern that determine
85
Hindson and Gray, Burkes Dramatic Theory of Politics, p. 8.
86
Robert D. Putamn, What Makes Democracy Work? National Civic Review 82 (Spring
1993): 1017.
87
Robert D. Putamn, Bowling Alone: Americas Declining Social Capital, Current 373
( June 1995): 4.
88
Ibid., p. 4.
89
David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 175.
165
A Process-Oriented Approach
what is up for discussion and what not, and which societies fail to do that?
How do forms of engagement with others whom one encounters only
fleetingly become established? All societies have multiple sites of jurisge-
nesis, law creation, but which ones have some dovetailing of the under-
standing of what is proper and appropriate public behavior? Unfortunately,
we do not yet have answers to these questions, so essential for under-
standing the cohesion of states.
What we can say at this point is that the public space in modern
times has been marked by three related characteristics, all of which
have complicated the ability of societies to create and maintain a sem-
blance of social solidarity. First, the rules for engagement in the public
space have been constantly renegotiated. Urbanization, migration, tourism,
mass media, and womens liberation, among other powerful processes,
all have repeatedly introduced new groups and individuals into the
public space as well as different ideas of proper modes of interaction. In
short, the public space has continued to expand dramatically. That never-
ending process has put tremendous pressure on social stability and soli-
darity. In some cases, the new faces in the public space have assimilated
into existing conventions; at other times, they have successfully induced
changes in the existing ways of doing things to accommodate them;
and, in still other instances, they have precipitated fierce struggles
over who should rightfully participate in the public sphere and whose
conventions will prevail. These conventions may include everything
from how to behave when two people are walking directly toward each
other on the sidewalk (who gives way?) to how much emotion to display
in a conversation.
Second, the claim for egalitarianism has energized the entry of new groups
into the public space. Habermas emphasizes the importance of bourgeois
society in the creation of the public sphere and the notion, mentioned
earlier, that in egalitarian space, arguments and not statuses determine
decisions.90 Once introduced, the idea of equal claims on the right to par-
ticipate in and shape the conventions of the public space is insidious. It
did not end with the demands of the bourgeois stratum, by any means.
Whatever a groups social basis for participation in the public sphere,
whether class, gender, ethnicity, or some other, it has used the claim of
equality to challenge others feelings of entitlement to dominate public
space. And that has been a very powerful demand indeed.
90
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 23.
166
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
Conclusion
International factors, such as the globalization of capital and the actions
of United Nations agencies, have both buffeted and sustained the state.
But any thoroughgoing explanation of why so many states have avoided
collapse and stayed intact must deal with issues beyond these systemic,
environmental factors. We must look to the actual relations between states
and those they purport to govern. Organizational theorists point us toward
social exchange, where individuals trade loyalty for selective access to
public goods. Underlying this notion is an understanding that the states
efficient allocation of goods in that exchange will enhance its chances for
survival. While that is a very helpful notion, it still leaves us wondering
how so many grossly inefficient states continue to withstand disintegrative
forces. How do states sustain loyalty and compliance even when their
delivery systems falter?
Our answer starts with the dictum that the heart has its reasons which
the mind does not suspect.91 The argument here has implied a realm of
feelings and implicit understandings that go beyond rational calculation.
Relying exclusively on provision of services or material goods to its pop-
ulation, whether directly through a complex bureaucracy or indirectly
through an umbrella for patron-client ties, is a flimsy foundation for states.
Their staying ability will ultimately rest on how well they tie into peoples
hearts.
Where states have tapped into the creation of shared meaning in society,
they have become naturalized, and the thought of their dissolution or
91
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 135.
167
A Process-Oriented Approach
disappearance has become unimaginable. That shared sense that the state
is as natural as the rivers and the mountains has gone far in combating the
effects of disintegrative forces, including the states own inefficiency. We
have identified three areas in which changes in society and the nature of
ensuing state-society relations can bolster or batter the cohesion of the
state. The three are the generation of law in society, the sharing of public
rituals between state and society, and the ongoing renegotiation of the rules
of informal behavior in the public sphere.
What we cannot say at this point is under what conditions changes in
these areas will work to keep the state intact. What we can suggest is how
they can work to sustain the state. First, the three areas of state-society
engagement can both alert state officials to important changes in society
to who is participating, to what practices are emerging, and to what import
or meaning the changes hold and induce the state to adapt to the reconsti-
tution of society. Second, changes in participants, practices, and meaning can
lead, at times, to more social solidarity or unity, enhancing the unques-
tioned presence of the state. More than that, states can provide symbols,
forums, and institutions that can increase the chances that social changes
will dovetail to create social solidarity. Third, these sorts of changes, when
they do dovetail, can increase social stability. Informal practices in the
public sphere and other forms of non-state law can lead to greater public
civility and tranquility, further enhancing the state. Finally, these practices
can seriously lighten the burden on the state. A state like one envisioned
by Hobbes, responsible for all social security, would simply be stretched
too thin. Where non-state practices provide security in their own right,
the state is in a position to marshal and deploy its scarce resources more
successfully.
Can we expect changes in informal practices and in the groups
clamoring to be heard in the public space to help states remain intact
or hurt them? From Habermas on, a dark pessimism has pervaded dis-
cussions of changes in the public sphere and the future of (democratic)
states. In the United States, in particular, expressions of the deteriora-
tion of the public sphere have been commonplace.92 One encounters
92
For example, see: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafs, Coffee Shops, Community
Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the
Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989); Robert D. Putamn, Tuning in, Tuning Out: The
Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America, PS: Political Science and Politics 27
(December 1995): 66483.
168
Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
foreboding book titles, like The Fall of Public Man,93 or references to the
American trauma.94
My own inclination is to be more cautious about proclaiming an immi-
nent apocalypse or even a slow deterioration of a public space that can
produce social solidarity. It is tempting to view the public sphere as belea-
guered, in part because it is an area of ongoing renegotiation, contesta-
tion, and struggle. Present-day clashes take on an ominous cast and
precipitate a nostalgia for some idyllic past, when the public sphere was
really a civil space.
It is doubtful that such a heartwarming past did exist in the period from
the industrial revolution on. But, more than that, those characteristics of
contestation and struggle also give the public space countless possibilities
for rebirth and new vigor. Claims and counterclaims surrounding the
public sphere signal and spur parts of the state to change themselves and
to renegotiate their coalitions with segments of society. Encounters in the
public space also goad some in the state to nudge diverse social changes
in common directions, building complementarities rather than fostering
divisions. Out of these processes may come reinvigorated states. Focusing
on these sorts of state-society relations in the future should give us an
indication of when that happens and when it does not.
93
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).
94
Martin E. Marty, The One and the Many: Americas Struggle for the Common Good
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
169
PA R T I V
Scholarly writing about rapid political and social changes, especially in the
Third World, has had a Janus-faced quality. Some scholars focused on
macro-level topics, dealing with changes at the structural or organizational
level. Much of the research labeled political development, social and polit-
ical modernization, economic development, and dependency was pitched
at this level. Others concentrated on the individual as the key to the direc-
tion and content of rapid societal change. Rarely did a single work seri-
ously attempt to join the two levels of analysis.
Frequently authors writing on one level would do little more than
acknowledge the problems and complexities on the other. More often than
not, scholars dealing with macro-level topics shrouded the subject of indi-
vidual change in implicit assumptions instead of explicit assertions. Or, at
times, they put forth ideas of individual change based on purely mecha-
nistic notions of individuals as rational actors, who engage in simple cost-
benefit calculations.1 Those focusing on the level of the individual likewise
made simple assumptions about complex macro-level political and social
changes.
Every theory of social and political change must have a correspond-
ing model of individual change: There is no social change without indi-
vidual change and vice versa. The gap between the two levels of analysis
has led to some curious developments. Whereas the literature on
macro-level change written in the several decades after World War II has
come under severe attack leading to new approaches to the subject, the
literature on individual change in the throes of rapid social and political
1
See, for example, Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979).
173
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
transformation has suffered much less from such a relentless and wide-
spread assault. As a result, models of change in the individuals outlook and
motivation for action have not kept pace with knowledge about macro-
level changes in societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America since the
1950s.
This article has two purposes. First is to show the progression of think-
ing about, and the intellectual influences on, the subject of individual
change in the context of third-world studies. The second is to demonstrate
how that thinking failed to provide an adequate complement to what was
learned about macro-level change. It will be argued that the abandonment
of theories that divide types of societies and polities into simple
dichotomies, such as traditional and modern, has not led to a corre-
sponding reassessment of the nature of individual change. As a result,
newer approaches to the study of rapid social and political change have
rested on inadequate micro-theoretical foundations, ones that rely much
too strongly on the concept of a unified personality.
2
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 46.
3
Ibid., p. 48.
174
Individual Change
4
For eample, Easton and Hess argue that political socialization is largely completed by the
time one is in the eighth grade. David Easton and Robert Hess, Youth and Political
System, in Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal (eds.), Culture and Social Charac-
ter (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), p. 240.
175
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
5
This is not to say that their theories are purely maturational. They are not. They also
reject the other extreme, a learning (behavioristic) model. Kohlberg stated that the cogni-
tive developmental approach to socialization takes a middle position, emphasizing the inter-
action between innate structures and the environment. There is no doubt, however, that
in concern for finding developmental universals, the stress is on the organism structur-
ing tendencies, which are in stages and which assimilate the environmental inputs. See
Lawrence Kohlberg, Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive Developmental Approach to
Socialization, in David A. Groslin (ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 34852. For a second critique of Kohlbergs notion
that these changes take place during childhood only, see Todd Isao Endo, The Relevance
of Kohlbergs Stages of Moral Development to Research in Political Socialization, Ph.D.
dissertation, School of Education, Harvard University, 1973.
6
There are six forms of thinking and they constitute an invariant sequence of stages in
each culture. Lawrence Kohlberg, Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the
Platonic View, in James M. Gustafson (ed.), Moral Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970), p. 70. Kohlberg did some work on a seventh stage as well. Also,
he admitted to some temporary backsliding, but that is inconsequential to the larger
process. Moral development, like political development, may be arrested, but there is a
strong prescriptive element in Kohlberg, not unlike that found in Lerner and other writers
in political development, that the highest stage is the best stage. See Ben Zingman,
Lawrence Kohlberg: Morality sans Community, unpublished paper, p. 18. Note a similar
176
Individual Change
177
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
does not seek a higher level goal until he has satisfied his needs at the next
lower level.
Although in his development of the theory Maslow did not have avail-
able the concept of cognitive dissonance, he effectively worked out a
similar concept himself in his own language. He talked of a new discon-
tent and restlessness that characterizes a person who has satisfied his
needs at the first four levels and feels impelled to move on to the next
level.12 Maslow, then, subscribed to the assumption of the importance of a
critical threshold in the process of personal change. Once a person satis-
fies all his needs at any level, he reaches a new threshold that catapults him
to the next motivational level. Maslow wrote, Another peculiar charac-
teristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is
that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change.13 That is,
ones total outlook reflects ones motivational level. And, finally, for
Maslow personality development has a certain universality (or, as he writes,
relative unity) that minimizes the roles of social history and culture as
important factors in understanding individual change.14
Lerners understanding of the emergence of the mobile person-
ality rested upon the same sorts of assumptions found in the schools of psy-
chology of the period that Kohlberg and Maslow represented. Elements
that go into making up a traditional person, Lerner implied, simply cannot
coexist within an individuals mind with the elements of a modern person.
Such coexistence would be anomalous, an unbearable contradiction in the
individuals mind. Exposure to wholly different life-styles forces the indi-
vidual to a resolution involving a new, higher state. Important changes in
social-political life, then, come about when there are sufficient numbers of
mobile personalities. These personalities, in turn, emerge once people
reach the critical threshold where cognitive dissonance forces them to find
new means of resolution. The unity of personality principle means that
12
Maslow, Motivation and Personality, p. 91. Elsewhere, he expresses this concept for all the
levels as a hierarchy of relative prepotency (p. 83).
13
Ibid., p. 82.
14
Ibid., p. 101. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (second edition; New York: W. W.
Norton, 1963), was developing his psychosocial theory at the same time Maslow was
writing Motivation and Personality (Childhood and Society was first published in 1950).
Erikson was much more sensitive to historical factors and their effect upon personality
development, but he shared some of the same assumptions of unidirectionality, stages, and
thresholds. He wrote, The human personality in principle develops according to steps
predetermined in the growing persons readiness to be driven toward, to be aware of, and
to interact with, a widening social radius (p. 270).
178
Individual Change
15
Lucian W. Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962).
179
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
16
Ibid., pp. 512.
17
David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York: The Free Press, 1961).
180
Individual Change
18
Daniel Chirot, Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977), p. 2.
19
McClelland, The Achieving Society, p. 3.
20
Ibid. In Chapter 10, Accelerating Economic Growth, McClelland indicated a number
of ways in which high n Achievement may be induced. Most of these are tied in to his
stress on the main source of n Achievement he has identified, child-rearing practices
(see Chapter 9), but a small number suggest the possibility of adult change under certain
stringent conditions.
21
Ibid., p. 394 (McClellands emphasis).
181
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
22
Ibid., p. 437.
23
M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), 6.
182
Individual Change
castes became more and more Sanskritized.24 Not only has change on a
group level not seemed to be unidirectional or replicated from group to
group in India, but even within individuals the pattern of change has
seemed to be more complex than reflected in the theories surveyed above.
Srinivas indicated, for example, that the Brahmins themselves became the
filter through which Western traits were transmitted to the rest of the pop-
ulation, but those same Brahmins also found some of the Western ways
difficult to accept.25
Srinivass findings were path-breaking in several ways. Rapid environ-
mental change after contact with the West, he found, could strengthen old
social institutions, such as caste, rather than weaken them.26 The breakdown
of old social commitments by the individual was not a necessary result of
rapid change in other spheres.27 Collective behavior (as in collective social
mobility), with its maintenance of strong ties to kinship and other so-called
traditional groups could become more important than any process of indi-
vidualization. Increased religiosity could result instead of secularization.
These findings could undermine notions of mutually exclusive syn-
dromes of motivation and a critical threshold catapulting the person into
a whole new philosophy of the future. Despite the fact that Srinivas wrote
about his findings as early as the 1950s, they did not contribute to a chal-
lenge of models of personal or institutional change until the latter portion
of the 1960s. And, even then, the challenge was largely to the usefulness
of modernization theory at the structural and organizational level.
Assumptions about individual psychology and change were only infre-
quently linked to these social findings. Only in 1966 did Joseph R. Gus-
field, a sociologist studying India, begin to challenge modernization
theories directly and to question the then accepted view that tradition
and innovation are necessarily in conflict.28 Even Gusfield, however,
24
M. N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (Bombay: Asia Publishing House,
1962), Chap. 2.
25
Ibid. For some analogies to Sanskritization in an Egyptian case, see Hussein M. Fahim,
Change in Religion in a Resettled Nubian Community, Upper Egypt, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 16377.
26
Srinivas, Caste in Modern India, Chap. 1.
27
On the breakdown of old commitments, see Karl W. Deutsch, Social Mobilization and
Political Development, American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 493514.
28
Joseph R. Gusfield, Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social
Change, American Journal of Sociology 72 (November 1966): 35162. Also writing on this
theme were Lloyd I. Rudolph and Suzanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
183
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
29
G. William Skinner, Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and
Shut Case, Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (July 1971): 27081. Skinner asked
why students of Chinas peasantry were silent on the theoretical issues concerning peas-
antry: In part, it is because we are so few and too preoccupied with our own peasants to
have time for anybody elses. More to the point, however, the whole body of inherited
anthropological wisdom concerning peasantries seems somehow alien and irrelevant to
students of Chinese society (270). A rule of thumb may be that the more difficult a lan-
guage for area studies (and thus the more time social scientists have to devote language
skills), the less likely are those area studies to be tied into broader theoretical thinking in
the field.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., p. 278.
32
For a look at the other end of Chinas social structure the intellectuals see Benjamin
Schwartz, The Limits of Tradition Versus Modernity as Categories of Explanation: The
Case of the Chinese Intellectuals, Daedalus 101 (1972): 83. Schwartzs line of thinking
suggested that one reason individual change whether of Indian Brahmins or Chinese
intellectuals occurred in such unexpected patterns was because there might be less real
dissonance causing tension between the categories than previously believed.
184
Individual Change
Perhaps, of all the regions of the Third World, Africa presented some
of the most unsettling evidence in terms of the accepted assumptions about
the individual in the midst of rapid social change. J. Clyde Mitchells essay
on the Kalela dance is among the best works on personal change.33 He
found that in the mid-1950s, as southern African blacks urbanized, they
did not adopt a broad territorial identity (as Europeans had presumably
done previously), nor did they drop their tribal identities. On the contrary,
tribalism seemed to be on the upswing as tribal dancing became a promi-
nent feature of city life throughout southern Africa.
Much of the dancing was in the form of organized recreation in which
teams of dancers competed weekly. Christian men, who often worked as
unskilled laborers during the week, pulled together artifacts from two
diverse worlds in their Sunday and holiday dances. They dressed for the
dance in sharp European-style clothes. Their accompaniments were huge
drums made out of forty-two-gallon oil drums covered with cowhide. At
times the dancing was punctuated by the shrill blowing of a football
whistle. Teams sang distinctive songs, not in their native languages, but in
the language of the urban area. In the songs, they praised their own lands
and origins and lampooned those of other tribes. The dancers on each
team ignored the significant differences in their rural origins in order to
assert their unity vis--vis all the other tribes of the urban area. Mitchell
wrote of the situation:
In other words, we are presented with an apparent paradox. The dance is clearly
a tribal dance in which tribal differences are emphasized but the language and the
idiom of the songs and the dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence
which tends to submerge tribal differences.34
The paradox is even stronger, for the Africans resorted at times to trib-
alism (as in the dance competitions) and at other times organized along
more modern, social-class lines. Mitchell addressed the paradox by noting
that it is impossible to generalize operation of these principles without
reference to the specific social situation in which the interaction takes
place.35 When dealing with Europeans, the Africans frequently ignored
33
J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 27 (New York:
Humanities Press, 1956). Another author who dealt with issues in Africa challenging much
of the dominant theory is C. S. Whitaker. See Whitaker, A Dysrhythmic Process of Polit-
ical Change, World Politics 19 ( January 1967): 190217.
34
Mitchell, The Kalela Dance, p. 9.
35
Ibid., p. 43 (emphasis added).
185
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
both social class and tribal differences and identified with others accord-
ing to skin color. Within specific tribal associations, class differences
played a major role. And, in the context of social interactions among
urbanized Africans, tribal differences were paramount. The fact that trib-
alism emerges as a significant category of interaction only in certain situ-
ations, may help to explain some of the apparent contradictions which
acute observers have noted from time to time.36
Mitchells findings, like those of Srinivas, did not have an immediate
impact. Taken together, however, their work, combined with countless
other empirical studies in all parts of the Third World during the 1960s
and early 1970s, brought into question the established theories of social
change, especially modernization theories. Unfortunately, critics most
often ignored the implications of the evidence on models describing indi-
vidual change in outlook and motivations. Yet, a close look at that evidence
brought into question existing models, which simply did not allow for
an interpretation of the individual that was as situational as Mitchell and
others implied was necessary where the individual utilizes different
principles for interactions in different social situations. Certainly, the
two-state, critical threshold assumptions seemed woefully inadequate. The
fundamental assumption of the unity of personality of a single self in a
single social world did not fit the wave of new accounts coming from all
parts of the Third World. Neither were theories of lag very helpful. The
tribes in Mitchells study were not mere vestiges. They differed radically
in function and organization from those that the urban laborers had left
behind in the countryside. These new urban tribes were very much a part
of the new semi-industrial city. A new individual seems to emerge who is
very responsive and adaptive to his life experiences in Mitchells case to
the unfortunate mixture of classes, tribes, and races and who seems to
be changing in ways inadequately explained by stages, threshold, unidi-
rectionality, and limited periods of psychological adaptation.
36
Ibid., p. 43.
186
Individual Change
37
Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1974). The six countries were Argentina, Chile, East Pakistan, India, Israel, and
Nigeria.
38
Ibid., p. 5 (emphasis in original).
39
Ibid., p. 264.
40
The multiple correlation between our small set of basic explanatory variables and indi-
vidual modernity scores went as high as 79. (Ibid., p. 7).
187
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
41
The subthemes were generated by three perspectives that the authors took: the analytic
(a coherent viewpoint on modernity, including such items as openness to new experience,
orientation to time, etc.), the topical (views on assorted institutions and issues that may
be obstacles to modernization such as kinship and family, womens rights, etc.), and the
behavioral (behavior reported and behavior tested). Ibid., Chap. 2.
42
C. S. Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition: Continuity and Change in Northern Nigeria
19461966 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Alex Weingrod, Reluctant
Pioneers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).
43
Jon W. Anderson, Sentimental Ambivalence and the Exegesis of Self in Afghanistan,
Anthropological Quarterly 58 (October 1985): 204.
188
Individual Change
44
They also collected additional independent information on behavior. However, these sup-
plemental measures were not used systematically in the analysis reported in this book
(Inkeles and Smith, Becoming Modern, p. 34). More importantly, these additional measures
were collected only on behavior in the factory and thus give us no hint whether there are,
in fact, anomalies between behavior in the factory and behavior in outside institutions,
such as family or tribe.
189
Linking Micro- and Macro-Level Change
promised at the beginning of their book that it would, namely, give a model
of individual change in which thinking and feeling (the level of the indi-
vidual) tell things one would not know by looking only at organizing and
doing (the level of social and political change). If anything, they showed
that thinking and feeling are mere artifacts of institutional change. If
institutions need modern people, the conclusion seems to be, then, they
produce them without the fuss of considering thinking and feeling.
The organizational setting whether factory, school, or agricultural co-
operative is the best independent factor explaining change.45
45
Becoming Modern is not the only example of a purported social psychological or cultural
approach undermining its own basis for inquiry. For two other examples, see George M.
Foster, Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good, American Anthropologist, 67
(April 1965): 293315, and F. G. Bailey, The Peasant View of the Bad Life, The Advance-
ment of Science 23 (December 1966): 399409.
190
Individual Change
46
William B. Swann, Jr., John J. Griffin, Jr., Steven C. Predmore, and Bebe Gines, The
Cognitive-Affective Crossfire: When Self-Consistency Confronts Self-Enhancement,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (May 1987): 887.
47
Ibid.
48
Ann Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies, American Sociological Review 51
(April 1986): 276.
49
Ibid., p. 277.
191
PA R T V
When Daniel Lerner surveyed Middle Eastern societies nearly half a cen-
tury ago, the word that came to mind as he sought to make sense of the
many images he encountered was chaos.1 It is not a term most social sci-
entists would use very comfortably in describing any sort of situation.
Lerners initial bewilderment at the dizzying pace and scope of change was
not atypical, however, nor was his response to societies seemingly engaged
in a headlong rush into confusion. As Harry Eckstein put it, The devel-
opment theorists tried, in essence, to find patterns in pervasive novelty
and seeming flux to get bearings in a world devoid of all fixity and
precedents.2 Lerners reaction, much like that of other social scientists,
was to ferret out a pattern, a system indeed, even to impose an intellec-
tual order where social and political order could not be discerned. The
term development came to denote the movement from social and politi-
cal chaos in Africa, Asia, and Latin America toward some implicitly
understood order.
From the beginning, the field of development and change was
constitutive; it was the musings of scholars seeking the principles of
political and social orders and the conditions initiating them. Although
the study of formal constitutional process was already considered
somewhat antiquated in political science by the end of the 1950s,
writing on non-Western politics came to be nothing less than excur-
sions into how societies and states might be constituted or better yet,
1
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York:
Free Press, 1958).
2
Harry Eckstein, The Idea of Political Development: From Dignity to Efficiency, World
Politics 34 (1982): 457.
195
Studying the State
3
Very few authors acknowledged their debt to the earlier constitutional writers. An excep-
tion came in one of the very best books written on Africa see Martin Kilson, Political
Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierre Leone (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
4
Lucian Pye, The Concept of Political Development, Annals of the American Academy 358
(1965): 113.
5
Samuel P. Huntington, The Change to Change: Modernization, Development and
Politics, Comparative Politics 3 (1971): 282322.
6
The most notable rejection of the idea of patterned change is found in C. S. Whitaker, Jr.,
A Dysrhythmic Process of Political Change, World Politics 19 (1967): 190217. Among
other serious, critical articles are Dean C. Tipps, Modernization Theory and the Com-
parative Study of Societies, Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 199240;
Benjamin Schwartz, The Limits of Tradition Versus Modernity as Categories of Ex-
planation: The Case of the Chinese Intellectuals, Daedalus 101 (1972): 7188; Joseph R.
Gusfield, Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,
American Journal of Sociology 72 ( Jan 1967): 35162.
196
The Politics of Development and Change
with a discussion of how this new scholarship has affected the under-
standing of first principles.
7
For example, see Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing
Areas. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Max F. Millikan and W. W.
Rostow, A Proposal Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957); Lerner, The
Passing of Traditional Society.
8
John D. Montgomery, The Quest for Political Development, Comparative Politics 1
(1969): 28595.
9
In Lerners concept of empathy, we find the basis for the psycho-cultural school, which
has included such notable scholars as David C. McClelland.
197
Studying the State
The herald of such change may have been the rapid transformation of
the international environment, but the internal transformations siphoned
off almost all of the interest of scholars. Second, at the macro-level,
political scientists focused upon the creation of central institutions (the
term state was not yet in vogue) and their ability to transform society.
Third, at the micro-level, they used surveys and other research tools
to assess the process of individual change, and its relationship to social
processes, such as urbanization, industrialization, and the like. Karl
Deutschs concept of social mobilization, with its stress on the relation-
ship between the breakdown of personal commitments and these near-
universal social processes, became the byword for interpreting aggregated
individual change.10
Understanding macrochange the configuration of institutional trans-
formations in an entire society demanded a framework of a different
order. Several such frameworks were employed, often differing only in
terminology. The most popular was the modern traditional dichoto-
my used by Lerner and other important social scientists such as Almond
and Coleman, David E. Apter, C. E. Black, S. N. Eisenstadt, Marian J.
Levy, and Edward Shils.11 Also widely employed was the metaphor of
center and periphery.12 Among the other concepts used to make fairly
similar distinctions are: elite-mass;13 diffracted-fused;14 Great Tradition
little tradition;15 and even, at times, urban-rural.16 Some scholars added
10
Karl W. Deutsch, Social Mobilization and Political Development, American Political
Science Review 55 (1961): 493514.
11
See for example: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society; Almond and Coleman, The Pol-
itics of the Developing Areas; David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: Uni-
versity Press, 1965); C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative
History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); S. N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and
Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Marian J. Levy, Jr., Modernization and
the Structure of Societies: A Setting for International Affairs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1966); Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States, Compara-
tive Studies in Society and History 2 (1960): 26592. This work also appeared as Edward
Shils, Political Development in the New States (Paris: Monton, 1962).
12
See for example, Daniel Lerner. Some Comments on Center-Periphery Relations, in
Richard L. Merritt and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Comparing Nations (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1966); also see Edward Shils, Center and Periphery.
13
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939).
14
Fred W. Riggs, Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
15
Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
16
See for example: Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-industrial City (New York: Free Press, 1960);
Charles Tilly, The Vendee (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967).
198
The Politics of Development and Change
17
See J. P. Nettl, The State as a Conceptual Variable, World Politics 20 (1968): 55992; and
Charles Tilly, ed., Western State-Making and Theories of Political Transformation, in
The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
199
Studying the State
18
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 39.
19
See for example, Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1971); Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Fernando
Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
20
Shils, Center and Periphery, p. 44.
21
Ibid., p. 89.
200
The Politics of Development and Change
22
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1968), p. 2.
23
Joseph LaPalombara, Political Science and the Engineering of National Development,
in Monte Palmer and Larry Sterns (eds.), Political Development in Changing Societies
(Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1971), p. 53.
24
Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
201
Studying the State
of societies actually were, not at what they had not yet become nor at
what they formally were supposed to be. Questions concerning the real
political capabilities of states, of the possibility of institutional decay or
breakdown, now became central topics of concern. For political scientists,
the political institutions were returned to the limelight, no longer sub-
sumed within the broader category of center nor made the simple out-
growth of nonpolitical events, as they were in Lerners work.
Huntingtons analysis was in some ways a technical one. The guiding
question was what specific kinds of mechanisms maintain political stabil-
ity even in the face of increased political demands potentially destabi-
lizing demands growing out of the near-universal process of social
mobilization. The effective mechanisms, he answered, were political insti-
tutions, especially political parties: institutions that are adaptable, complex,
autonomous, and coherent. Still left to be answered, however, were the
political-philosophical questions that had informed the field from the
1950s: What are the principles rather than the mechanisms of social
and political order? Why have some societies generated effective con-
stitutional principles and institutions while others have not? What are
the processes of change involved in constituting new orders? If modern
sectors or centers are not what they are supposed to be how can we explain
order and change?
In the 1970s and 1980s the means chosen to answer these macro-
level questions resulted in a number of startling changes in the devel-
opment field. First, the field, which usually had been defined by a
residual geographic area non-Western, non-Communist, neither
from the First nor Second worlds but from a heterogeneous Third
World was now extended into all other geographic regions, including
the West. Second, in a subdiscipline that had regarded itself as au courant,
that had concentrated on the subject of becoming modern in the
postWorld War II era, there was now an unexpected return to history.
And such history was not simply the obligatory background preceding
the real analysis but was a primary subject of research. Third, in a
field that had restricted itself almost exclusively to domestic concerns,
that had placed itself firmly under the heading of comparative politics,25
there were now new frameworks that were as much international as
comparative.
25
Dankwart A. Rostow, Modernization and Comparative Politics: Prospects in Research
and Theory, Comparative Politics 1 (1968): 3751.
202
The Politics of Development and Change
26
Mark Kesselman, Over-institutionalization and Political Constraint: The Case of
France, Comparative Politics 3 (1970): 2144; and Ronald Inglehart, Cognitive Mobi-
lization and European Identity, Comparative Politics 3 (1970): 4570.
27
Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
203
Studying the State
to see what kinds of distortion had crept into the models used in under-
standing processes of change in the Third World.28
What some writers came to question was the utter confidence that
infused the works of those who used the modern-traditional metaphor
or other similar imagery. Had centers coalesced or states centralized in
Western history as completely and smoothly as had been assumed? Have
peripheries been as passive and malleable as has been thought? In an excel-
lent monograph, Suzanne Berger found that even a state as highly cen-
tralized as France found itself faced with a peasantry and its imperfect
insertion into the body politic.29 In France there had arisen corporative
organizations characterized by their efforts to regulate peasant matters
fully without tying these matters into the politics of the state. The corpo-
rative organizations were able to build a reservoir of political loyalty
by assuming functions important to the peasantry. They then jealously
guarded this arena of conflicts and interests that lay beyond the reach of
the centralized state and, as a result, they inhibited change in the politi-
cal system by withdrawing from the domain of parties and the state those
issues on which alignments of interests and values are formed.30
Bergers later work extended some of the conceptions that underlay this
analysis to other European cases and to sectors besides the peasantry.
Various segments of some European societies have continued to differ sub-
stantially from one another. These variations (or dualism) have not been
mere way stations to ultimate convergence through the authority of
centers or states. Rather traditional segments have endured because of
the ways in which [their] political and economic interests overlap with
those of the modern sector.31 In this, European societies differ little from
non-Western ones: The evidence from both developed and developing
countries suggests the persistence, not the disappearance, of the traditional
or informal sector.32 As Ronald Rogowski and Lois Wasserspring put it,
even in advanced industrial societies, nothing compels individuals . . . to
28
See for example, Stein Rokkan, Cities, States, and Nations: A Dimensional Model of the
Study of Contrasts in Development, in S. N. Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Build-
ing States and Nations (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1973).
29
Suzanne Berger, Peasants Against Politics: Rural Organization in Brittany 19111967 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 2.
30
Ibid., p. 168.
31
Suzanne Berger and Michael J. Piore, Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies (Cam-
bridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 87.
32
Ibid., pp. 45.
204
The Politics of Development and Change
33
Ronald Rogowski and Lois Wasserspring, Does Political Development Exist? Corpo-
ratism in Old and New Societies, Comparative Politics Series 2 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,
1971), p. 44.
34
Berger, Peasants Against Politics, p. 9.
35
Phillippe C. Schmitter, Interest Intermediation and Regime Governability in Contem-
porary Western Europe and North America, in Susan Berger (ed.), Organizing Interests
in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism and the Transformation of Politics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 93.
36
Howard J. Wiarda, Transcending Corporatism? The Portugese Cooperative System
and the Revolution of 1974, Institute of International Studies Essay Series 3 (Columbia:
University of South Carolina, 1976), p. 5.
205
Studying the State
that.37 The term corporatism came to be associated with states and soci-
eties mired in habits and institutions ill-fitted to the twentieth century.
Corporatism and the corporatist tradition, wrote Howard J. Wiarda, are
a natural, almost inherent part of the Iberic-Latin political culture.38
By the mid- to late 1970s, practically all of these associations began to
die. Rather than the antithesis of Iberalism and democracy, corporatism
began to appear in titles such as Liberal Corporatism and Party Govern-
ment, The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies, and
Corporatism, Parliamentarism, and Social Democracy, no longer asso-
ciated exclusively with Iberic and Latin American cultures, corporatism
blossomed into a tool of analysis for other parts of Europe, Japan, and else-
where.39 And, instead of being the scourge of industrialization, corporatism
has been heralded as the foundation for advanced industrial growth and
adaptation.40 More and more, writers came to accept that corporatism,
like liberalism or socialism, may take a variety of forms, both as between
nations and within a single nation over time.41 The new authoritarianism
in Brazil following the coup of 1964, Salazars old Portugal, the Portuguese
shift toward socialism after the 1974 coup, Japans corporatism without
labor, along with many other cases, all became subjects of corpo-
ratist analysis.42 The difficulty with the concepts success is that without
proper specification and disaggregation, it may become little more than a
37
Ronald C. Newton, Natural Corporatism and the Passing of Populism in Spanish
America, in Federick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch (eds.), The New Corporatism: Social-
Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1974), p. 35.
38
Howard J. Wiarda, Corporatism and Development: The Portuguese Experience (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1977), p. 4.
39
Gerhard Lehmbruch, Liberal Corporatism and Party Government, in Philippe Schmit-
ter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation (Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage, 1979); Leo Panitch, The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democra-
cies, ibid; Bob Jessop, Corporatism, Parlimentarism, and Social Democracy, ibid.
40
See examples: T. J. Pempel, Japanese Foreign Economic Policy: The Domestic Bases for
International Behavior, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), Between Power and Plenty: Foreign
Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1978).
41
Wiarda, Corporatism and Development, p. 5.
42
See for example: Alfred Stepan, Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); Schmitter, Interest Intermediation and Regime
Governability in Contemporary Western Europe and North America; Wiarda, Corpo-
ratism and Development; T. J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa, Corporatism Without
Labor? The Japanese Anomaly, in Schmitter and Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Towards
Corporatist Intermediation.
206
The Politics of Development and Change
43
See Nedelmann and Meier, Theories of Contemporary Corporatism: Static or
Dynamic? and Pempel and Tsunekawa, Corporatism without Labor?
44
Schmitter, Still the Century of Corporatism, p. 86.
45
Ibid., p. 87.
46
See, for example, Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Class
(London: NLB, 1975).
207
Studying the State
47
Claus Offe, The Attribution of Public Status to Interest Groups: Observation of the West
German Case, in Suzanne Berger (ed.), Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism,
Corporatism, and the Transformation Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
48
But see John T. S. Keeler, Corporatism and Official Union Hegemony: The Case of
French Agricultural Syndicalism, in Berger (ed.), Organizing Interests in Western Europe.
49
Leo Panitch, Recent Theorization of Corporatism: Reflections on a Growth Industry,
British Journal of Sociology 31 (1980): 160.
50
Schmitter, Interest Intermediation and Regime Governability in Contemporary Western
Europe and North America, p. 318.
51
Gudmond Hernes and Arnie Selvik, Local Corporatism, in Berger (ed.), Organizing
Interests in Western Europe, p. 104.
208
The Politics of Development and Change
industrial growth. These are states within which populist interests and par-
ticipatory politics are reduced in scope, distributional concerns ignored or
placed in low priority, and the maximization of economic growth and rapid
industrialization given a top priority.52 In the corporatist structure, the
state does not just mediate within voluntarist arrangements among existing
functional groups, as in Western Europe. In Latin American corporatism,
the state creates these groups or, at the very least, imposes firm control over
them. The tensions of social and economic change, then, have demanded
substantial changes in politics as well, leading to a new sort of political
system characterized by the bureaucratic authoritarian regime.
Ruth B. Collier and David Collier attempted to bridge the gap between
European-style and Latin Americanstyle corporatism by viewing the two
types not as a dichotomy but as part of a continuum with considerable
variation within each one.53 Their argument is that corporatism can be
categorized for different societies by classifying the inducements and
constraints employed by the state with respect to group representation.
Nonetheless, the thrust of the literature on Latin America emphasizes the
authoritarian character of the state. I will return to this literature, espe-
cially that on bureaucratic authoritarianism, later in the essay when con-
sidering how some in the field have moved away from such dichotomous
paradigms as modern and traditional.
Here, it is worth noting that the revival of corporatism and the devel-
opment of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Latin America had reverbera-
tions for study far beyond Western Europe. Daniel Chirot, for example,
wrote an essay entitled The Corporatist Model and Socialism.54 Although
the article dealt largely with the case of Romania, it did raise the point that
corporatism offers the same advantage of social and political stability to
socialist states driving toward rapid industrialization that it provides for
those in the Third World. Corporate structures have emerged to deal with
the immediate problems generated by rapid social and economic change,
despite the ideal of the Communist party to create a unitary society.
52
Douglass H. Graham, Mexican and Brazilian Economic Development: Legacies, Pat-
terns, and Performance, in Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Richard S. Weinert (eds.), Brazil and
Mexico: Patterns in Late Development (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues,
1982), p. 14.
53
Ruth B. Collier and David Collier, Inducements Versus Constraints: Disaggregating
Corporatism, American Political Science Review 73 (1979): 9789.
54
Daniel Chirot, The Corporatist Model and Socialism, Theory and Society Journal 9
(1980): 36381.
209
Studying the State
55
Jan F. Triska and Paul M. Cocks, eds., Political Development in Eastern Europe (New York:
Praeger, 1977), p. xv.
56
See for example: Ken Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The
Case of Romania, 19441965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Jan F. Triska
and Paul M. Johnson, Political Development and Political Change in Eastern Europe: A
Comparative Study, University of Denver Monograph Series in World Affairs 13, Book 2
(1975); Walter D. Connor, Revolution, Modernization, and Communism: A Review
Article, Studies in Comparative Communism 8 (1975): 38996; David W. Paul, The Cultural
Limits of Revolutionary Politics: Change and Continuity in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Boulder,
CO: East European Quarterly and Columbia University Press, 1979).
57
Bruce Cumings, Corporatism in North Korea, Working paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Association (New York, 1981).
58
Ibid., p. 11.
210
The Politics of Development and Change
traditional Iberian and Latin American societies to one dealing with the
dynamics of change in a number of regions. The decline of static concep-
tions associated with the end of ideology and postindustrial societies
opened the door in the West for theories and frameworks stressing social
and political transformation. It was this new emphasis on change that
enabled approaches dealing with the Third World to have such a telling
effect elsewhere.
59
Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
60
Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
61
Peter H. Merkel, The Study of European Political Development, World Politics 29
(1977): 463.
62
See: Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt, Crisis, Choice, and
Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little Brown, 1973); Charles
Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States and Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1975); and Raymond Grew, ed., Crisis of Political Development in Europe
and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
211
Studying the State
on maintaining the continuity of the field, even with its new departure into
Europe and into history. He wrote in a matter-of-fact manner:
The logic of our undertaking was elementary. As the Western nations were in some
sense modern, and the non-Western ones were in almost all cases not modern but
seeking to become so, the historical experience of the modern nations had some
relevance for our understanding of the problems and prospects of modernizing
efforts among the new nations. . . . Our search for a cure in history now took a
more modest, empirically grounded, form. The logic of our inquiry was simple.
Since the development that we were seeking to explain occurred in history, why
not select several historical episodes, examine them in great detail, try out our vari-
eties of developmental explanation, and see how they fit?63
63
Gabriel A. Almond, Approaches to Developmental Causation, in Almond et al. (eds.),
Crisis, Choice, and Change, pp. 2, 22.
64
Charles Tilly, Reflections on the History of European State-Making, in Tilly (ed.), The
Formation of National States in Western Europe.
212
The Politics of Development and Change
question by the finding that the Europeans of 1500 and later did not ordi-
narily expand from a highly organized center into a weakly organized
periphery.65 Second, the Tilly volume raised doubts about the relevance
of European political change for current third-world states. At best, it
argued, some broad inferences may be drawn and some generalizations
made about comparative processes of state building.
What seems to have been less obviously pursued after the appearance
of the Almond, Flanagan, and Mundt volume is the quest for a universal
theory of development that could explain European history as well as
events in the contemporary Third World. More and more, one sees a focus
on specific historical forces whether in a single country or, as is increas-
ingly the case, in world historical terms linking the fate of nations in
order to explain the root causes of differing types of social and political
change.
There are, however, several promising paths that have been pursued
seriously in the last few years to get at such causes. The distant and not-
so-distant past, even outside Europe, now has become increasingly accept-
able as part of the purview of political scientists; the horizons of the field
have widened considerably. Excellent studies such as those by David Vital
on Zionism or Elizabeth J. Perry on China seek to understand the politi-
cal changes that have had deep ramifications in the postwar period by
examining events in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.66 Jorge
I. Dominguez took a longer look back at the insurrections that brought
the end of Spanish rule in the Americas. In his introduction, he was explicit
about the need for a dialogue between history and the viewpoint of con-
temporary political science.67
Another path came directly from the questioning by some that a uni-
versal model of development could be created. As Almond and others rec-
ognized, the concepts and classification schemes of the 1950s and 1960s
were Western in character.68 Grew noted, To argue that modernization
is a new type of Great Tradition pointing toward a worldwide civiliza-
tion is at the same time to admit that the roots of the process lie in Western
65
Ibid., p. 24.
66
See David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Zionism: The
Formative Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolu-
tionaries in North China 18451945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980).
67
Jorge I. Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 12.
68
Almond, Approaches to Developmental Causation, p. 2.
213
Studying the State
69
Grew, Crisis and Political Development in Europe and the United States, p. 5.
70
Howard J. Wiarda, Toward a Non-Ethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative
Conceptions from the Third World, Working paper presented to the American Political
Science Association (1981), p. 2.
71
See Vrajendra Raj Mehta, Beyond Marxism: Towards an Alternative Perspective (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1978); and Claudio Viliz, The Centralist Tradition in Latin America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1980).
72
Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
73
Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspectives: A Book of Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 7.
74
Grew, Crisis of Political Development of Europe and the United States, p. 35.
214
The Politics of Development and Change
75
Albert O. Hirschman, The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization
in Latin America, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (1968): 232.
76
James R. Kurth, Industrial Change and Political Change: A European Perspective, in
David Collier (ed.), The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979).
77
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Richard S. Weinert, Brazil and Mexico: Patterns in Late Develop-
ment (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982).
78
Douglas Bennett and Kenneth Sharpe, The State as Banker and Entrepreneur: The Last
Resort Character of the Mexican States Economic Intervention 19171970, in Hewlett
and Weinert (eds.), Brazil and Mexico.
79
See Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1981); Lance E. Davis and Douglass C. North, Institutional Change and American
Economic Growth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
215
Studying the State
80
North, Structure and Change in Economic History, pp. 2019.
81
See George Modelski, The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 21435; N. D. Kondratieff, The
Long Waves in Economic Life, The Review of Economic Statistics 17 (1935): 10515; Joseph
Schumpeter, Business Cycles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939); Nisbet, Social Change in
History, p. 211 ff.
82
Stephen D. Krasner, Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous, Inter-
national Organization 36 (1982): 497510.
83
Leonard Binder, Crises of Political Development, in Binder, Pye, Coleman, Verba,
Sidney, LaPalombra, Joseph, Weiner, and Myron (eds.), Crises and Sequences of Political
Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
216
The Politics of Development and Change
84
Ibid., pp. 69, 67.
85
Sidney Verba, Sequences and Development, in Binder et al. (eds.), Crises and Sequences
of Political Development.
86
Binder, Crises of Political Development, p. 69.
87
Richard Sandbrock, The Crisis in Political Development Theory, Journal of Development
Studies 12 (1975): 16385.
88
For example, see Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and
Revolution: Pressures Towards Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1974); see Migdals essay Capitalist Penetration in the Nine-
teenth Century: Creating Conditions for New Patterns of Social Control, in Robert
Wheeler and Scott Guggenheim (eds.), Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural
Unrest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982).
89
See for example: Berger, Peasants Against Politics; Peter Gourevitch, The Second Image
Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics, International Organization 32
(1978): 881912; Peter J. Katzenstein, Corporatism and Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1984).
90
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and
China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
217
Studying the State
between sectors of civil society and the state. This crisis response explanation of
the existence of corporatism competes with one in which corporatism is viewed as
a function of historical continuity.91
91
Stepan, The State and Society, p. 47.
92
See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasants: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast
Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976) and Joel S. Migdal, Why Change?
Toward a New Theory of Change Among Individuals in the Process of Modernization,
World Politics 26 (1974): 189206.
93
Gourevitch, The Second Image Reversed, p. 881.
94
Ibid., p. 883.
95
See Perry Andersons Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974) and Skocpols
States and Social Revolutions.
218
The Politics of Development and Change
est has come in the effects of international economic influence and control
on domestic structures.
Unlike practically all other streams in the development field indeed,
in the social sciences generally the dependency literature has not been
an American invention, packaged and shipped off to eager academic
consumers in the Third World. Latin American scholars, following in the
footsteps of economist Raul Prebisch, created dependency explanations
against the current of accepted works in development. The standard writ-
ings had anchored the field securely in the waters of comparative politics:
domestic, immanent factors lie at the heart of any causal explanation of
systemic political change, or lack of change. Only in the 1970s and 1980s,
did the ideas and concerns of the dependency theorists begin creeping
into mainstream North American social science96 on Latin America and,
to a much more limited degree, on Africa and Asia.97 Peter Evans sum-
marized the thrust of the dependency literature:
The starting point is still relations with the external world. A dependent country
is one whose development is conditioned by the development and expansion of
another economy. Dependent countries are classically those whose histories of
involvement with the international market have led them to specialize in the export
of a few primary products. While the income from these few products is absolutely
central to the process of accumulation in the dependent country, for the center
each product represents only a tiny fraction of total imports, and can usually be
obtained from several different sources. The development of the dependent
country, however, requires the continued acceptance of its products in the center.
Therefore, economic fluctuations in the center may have severe negative conse-
quences for the periphery, whereas an economic crisis in the periphery offers no
real threat to accumulation in the center.98
96
Richard R. Fagen, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Market: Thoughts on
Extending Dependency Ideas, International Organization 32 (1978): 287.
97
It is interesting to note that dependency literature included the first serious challenge
by Marxist and Neo-Marxist works to the dominant approaches in the United States to
development and change. For a review of this literature and its relationship to moderni-
zation literature in the United States, see Richard Higgott, Competing Theoretical
Perspectives on Development and Underdevelopment: A Recent History, Politics 13
(1978): 2641.
98
Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinationals, State, and Local Capital
in Brazil (Prinecton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 267.
219
Studying the State
is that key sectors of the local productive apparatus are integral parts of
capital that is controlled elsewhere, then accumulation in the dependent
country is externally conditioned more by the development and expan-
sion of center-based capital rather than by the development and expan-
sion of another country. The asymmetry is there nonetheless.
Dependence is then defined most simply as a situation in which the rate and direc-
tion of accumulation are externally conditioned.99
99
Ibid.
100
Andre G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1967).
101
Andre G. Frank, Crisis: In the Third World (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981).
102
Fernando Enrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Associated-Dependent Development:
Theoretical Practical Implications, in Alfred Stepen (ed.), Authoritarian Brazil: Origins,
Policies and Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
220
The Politics of Development and Change
103
Evans, Dependent Development.
104
Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America.
105
See, for example, Hendenrik-Jan A. Reitsma, Development, Geography, Dependency
Relations, and the Capitalist Scapegoat, The Professional Geographer 34 (1982): 12530.
106
James A. Caporaso, Introductions to the Special Issue of International Organization
on Dependence and Dependency in the Global System, International Organization 32
(1978): 2.
107
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
221
Studying the State
The new literature on international regimes has been only one pro-
duct of the paradigmatic shift. George Modelski drew specifically on
the transnational literature and on the cure in history to develop an
approach to international relations based on the idea of the modern world
system.108 A world system perspective in the field of development and
change also borrowed from other disciplines, such as Eric R. Wolfs anthro-
pological work dealing with the effects of nineteenth-century capitalism on
peasant societies.109 Most important of all, however, was the flowering of
world-systems theory in sociology, especially in the work of Wallerstein,
but also in that of others.110 Their macrosociological views built on the
point raised by the dependency theorists: that is, it is misleading to assume
that once external factors impinge on a society, the main consequences
occur through the internal structural processes that maintain the coher-
ence of the society as a bounded system.111 They rejected
the intellectual tradition [that] emphasizes the treatment of societies as real units
of analysis. . . . This is clearly naive. The economies, states, and cultural systems
of almost all national societies are historical creations of the European political
economy. . . . Further, the current evolution of most national societies is greatly
affected by the economic, political, and cultural events which occur entirely out-
side their boundaries. Economic developments in Africa, the Near East or Latin
America are clearly resultants, for better or for worse, of dominant world markets
and technologies. Similarly, political events in such areas (e.g., the Nigerian civil
war, the creation of an independent Angola) are also creations of the world
system.112
108
George Modelski, Transnational Corporations and World Order: Readings in International
Political Economy (San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1979) and his working paper presented
at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Long Cycles of
World Leadership (New York, 1981).
109
Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
110
See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins
of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974)
and The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World
Economy, 16001750 (New York: Academic Press, 1974). For other world-systems theo-
ries, refer to: Daniel Chirots, Social Change in a Periphery Society: The Creation of a Balkan
Colony (New York: Academic Press, 1976) and his Social Change in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovisch, 1977); John W. Meyer and Michael T. Hannan,
National Development in the World System: Educational, Economic, and Political Change,
19501970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Barbara H. Kaplan, Social
Change in the Capitalist World Economy (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978); Walter L.
Goldfrank, The World System of Capitalism: Past and Present (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,
1979); Skocpol, State and Social Revolution.
111
Meyer and Hannan, National Development and the World System, p. 3.
112
Ibid., pp. 1112.
222
The Politics of Development and Change
113
Immanuel Wallerstein, A World System Perspective of the Social Sciences, British
Journal of Sociology 27 (1976): 349.
114
See, for example, Modelski, The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,
and Aristide R. Zolberg, Origins of the Modern System: A Missing Link, World
Politics 33 (1981): 25381.
223
Studying the State
115
United Nations, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New
York: United Nations, 1950).
116
Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of
Restless Nations (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 3.
117
Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America, p. 5.
118
Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State, p. 1.
225
Studying the State
119
Guillermo ODonnell, Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State and the
Question of Democracy, in David Collier (ed.), The New Authoritarianism in Latin
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
120
Ibid., p. 4.
121
Ibid.
226
The Politics of Development and Change
122
James M. Malloy, Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America: The Modal
Pattern, in James M. Malloy (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 4.
123
Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State.
124
Merilee S. Grindle, Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico: A Case Study in Public
Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 160.
227
Studying the State
125
Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America, p. 5.
126
Gerald A. Heeger, The Politics of Underdevelopment (New York: St. Martins Press, 1974).
127
Ibid., p. 49.
128
Linn A. Hammergren, Corporatism in Latin American Polities: A Reexamination of the
Unique Tradition, Comparative Politics 9 ( July 1977): 443.
129
Ibid., p. 449.
228
The Politics of Development and Change
130 131
Ibid., p. 456. Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies.
132
Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America, p. 5.
229
Studying the State
133
Berger and Piore, Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies, p. 2.
134
See: Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interests: Raw Materials Investments
and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), P. 57; Peter J.
Katzenstein, Conclusion: Domestic Structures and Strategies of Foreign Economic
Policy, in Katzenstein (ed.), Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced
Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
230
8
1
See for example Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free
Press, 1964); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quitin Hoare and
Geoffrey N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Gabriel A. Almond and
Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A
Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979).
231
Studying the State
I will claim, has led to a mystification of its capabilities and power. Finally,
if we are to develop a more useful way to approach the state, we will
need to recognize it as the limited state. To accomplish that will mean
blending the largely ignored culturalist perspective with the more domi-
nant institutionalist approach, as well as shifting the analytic focus from
the state as a freestanding organization to a process-oriented view of the
state-in-society.
2
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of System Change
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3.
3
Robert H. Jackson and Alan James, eds., States in a Changing World: A Contemporary Analy-
sis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 611.
232
Studying the State
achieved. Astonishingly, some states have been able to garner from peoples
yearly earnings a share equivalent to all their work performed through
April or May or, sometimes, even June of that year and to sequester their
children for thirty or so hours a week in a state institution. Premodern
political leaders could not have imagined such audacious goals.
Now, whether one feels high taxes and compulsory public education
are justified or not, the ability of some states to accomplish these acts
over expansive territories in fairly uniform ways is truly remarkable. For
that reason alone, states should remain centerpieces in the study of
comparative politics well into the twenty-first century. Other important
factors also suggest that scrutiny of the state will continue to hold sway in
the decades ahead but most likely with a different sort of research agenda.
In Western Europe, the very birthplace of the state, debates have raged
over the proper distribution of powers between long-standing states and
the European Union. Elsewhere, in what used to be the Third World
and the Communist bloc, the late 1980s and the 1990s have brought the
simultaneous disintegration of existing states and the birth of new ones.
The demise of old states has included rock-solid ones, as in the case of
the Soviet Union, as well as flimsy reeds, such as Somalia, Liberia, and
Afghanistan. The last decade has been the first time in more than half a
century that some states have simply disappeared from the world map. At
the same time, we have witnessed the creation of a gaggle of new states,
the most proclamations of independence since the end of the colonial era
about thirty-five years ago. From Kyrgyzstan to Croatia, from Eritrea to
Palestine, new states and state wannabees have imposed themselves on the
existing international system. The leaders of new states have made the
same claims of territoriality, sovereignty, autonomy, and independence that
marked the rhetoric of earlier states. And they have made similar calls for
the obedience of their populations, for governing the minutiae of personal
life, as did their forerunners. At the very moment that officials have been
proclaiming the inviolability of their new states sovereignty, however,
global forces have cut into the prerogatives of even the well-established
ones.4 From the formal constraints imposed by the International
Monetary Fund or international environmental conventions to the subtle
(or sometimes not-so-subtle) pressures stemming from the vast increases
in capital flows, new forces have emerged that have given the word
4
David J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
233
Studying the State
5
See for example: Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a
Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Brookfield, VT: Edward Edgar, 1992); Ivo D. Duchacek,
Daniel Latouche, and Garth Stevenson, Perforated Sovereignties and International Relations:
Trans-Sovereign Contacts of Subnational Governments (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988);
Julie A. Erfani, The Paradox of the Mexican State: Rereading Sovereignty from Independence to
NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Gidon Gottlieb, Nations Against State: A New
Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1971); Edmond J. Keller and Donald Rothchild, Africa in the New International Order:
Rethinking State Sovereignty and Regional Security (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996);
Thom Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996); Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno, eds., Beyond West-
phalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, Changing Boundaries: Global
Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
6
Philosophers, too, have come back to the question of the state. See John T. Sanders and
Jan Narveson, eds., For and Against the State: New Philosophical Readings (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
234
Studying the State
tive political scientists. If they are to understand the yawning gap between
state rhetoric and performance, their old ideal-typical images of states
as able to successfully impose uniformity, as capable of building an iron
cage, need to be replaced by theories that start with the limitations of
actual states.
For two decades now, political scientists have isolated the state as a
subject of inquiry.7 Through a variety of lenses and approaches, they have
studied this distinctive structure of the modern age intensively. The liter-
ature has been most prominent in research on the non-Western world, in
large part because of the appearance of so many new states in Asia and
Africa after World War II. Much of the research has focused on what some
political scientists have called the developmental state, looking especially
at state building or state capabilities. But books such as Krasners Defend-
ing the National Interest mined the field for North American and European
cases, as well.
My contention in the coming pages is that these sorts of inquiry ones
that isolate the state as a subject of study, focusing on its structure first and
only then on how it fits in a world of other structures have led too often
to a mystification of the state and its capabilities. In the next section, I will
review how political scientists using a variety of perspectives have
approached the structure of the state. I will note here how the cultural-
ists and rationalists approaches were fairly marginal to the study of state
structure as it emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rather it was the
system-dominant structural perspective that swept political scientists off
their feet two decades ago. But the gap between rhetoric and reality,
between an image of powerful states and the diversity in practices of actual
states, has led to disillusionment with this approach, too. Increasingly,
comparativists have moved to an institutions perspective on the state that
is much less deterministic and more open to a diversity of outcomes.
I will go on to argue in the following section that a focus on structure,
on the state in isolation, is insufficient. If we are to understand the inher-
ent limitations of states we must develop a focus on process, one that starts
with the web of relationships between them and their societies. At the heart
7
In this regard, they have been influenced heavily by Weber who emphasized repeatedly
the need to study the power of command. In his discussion of Weber, Rodney Barker
notes that authority stems from an author who is both its possessor and its source. Barker,
Political Legitimacy and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 50. It was
authority of the state, as seen through its structure and practices, toward which Weber
pointed us.
235
Studying the State
of the modern states successes and failures, especially with respect to its
ability to gain obedience, is the nature of its relationship to those it claims
to rule. The battering of states by global economic and information systems,
by the challenges of supranational organizations like the European Union,
by the disintegrative effects of virulent ethnic and tribal forces, all have
deeply affected the relationship between states and their populations.
The point of departure in looking at process in this essay is the engage-
ment of the contemporary state with those people within its boundaries.
Again using different colored lenses, particularly those of culturalists and
institutionalists, I will review how scholars have conceived states and their
relationship to their populations. The argument will center on how a basic
paradox in that relationship demands a move toward a different under-
standing of the state, one that starts with its hamstrung and limited qual-
ities. Only by adding a culturalist approach to the prevailing institutions
perspective can the study of states move in the twenty-first century to the-
ories that explain the varieties of limited sovereignty and capabilities that
we find in actual cases.
8
Margaret S. Archer, The Myth of Cultural Unity, British Journal of Sociology 36
(September 1985): 333.
9
David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 171.
10
Marc Ross, Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis, in Mark Lichbach
and Alan Zuckerman (eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
236
Studying the State
11
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 13.
12
Ibid.
13
Similar attention to the ceremony of the state is made by other anthropologists. A. I.
Richards for example, notes the deference paid in Buganda to the Kabaka, or king.
237
Studying the State
In this view the court and capital is not just the nucleus, the engine,
or the pivot of the state, it is the state. . . . It is a statement of a con-
trolling political idea namely, that by the mere act of providing a model,
a paragon, a faultless image of civilized existence, the court shapes the
world around it into at least a rough approximation of its own excel-
lence.14 Geertz does not hide from interests and institutions. He sees a
constant tension between the integrative effects of the state provided by
ideals or the master narrative what he calls the controlling political idea
and the disintegrative forces of the power system composed as it was
of dozens of independent, semi-independent, and quarter-independent
rulers.15
Implicitly, Geertzs notion takes issue with political scientists who
simply assume the coherence that rationality or structure and institutions
provide or to those who pay lip service to the role of values and norms
while actually devoting themselves to studying the ins and outs of the orga-
nization of the state. His assumption is the opposite: we cannot look at the
bricks of the state without understanding the mortar. We should expect
that a complex of organizations would be pulled in a hundred different
directions; only a controlling idea, a cultural glue, could keep them from
doing that. A century ago Gaetano Mosca made reference to a similar
notion in his analysis of the political formula, the legal and moral prin-
ciple that sustains the ruling class.16 A comment made by one writer on
Geertz concerning rulers and ruled might serve as a yellow flag for polit-
ical scientists: master narratives operate as the unchallenged first princi-
ples of a political order, making any given hierarchy appear natural and
just to rulers and ruled.17
A political scientist, David Laitin, modified Geertzs insights and
adapted them to political science. He also tried to break down the notion
of master narratives to more workable subunits, what he called shared
points of concern. Here is how Laitin interpreted Geertz:
238
Studying the State
Social systems are not rigid. Subsystems have their own internal dynamics that
influence the wider social system. Exogenous change puts pressures on different
subsystems and ultimately the social system as well. Social systems are therefore
adaptive; they accommodate change as subsystems mutually adjust their values so
that there will be a homeostatic equilibrium in the society.18
Laitin allows for more discord than Geertz in saying that the points of
concern, rather than simply values or preferences, represent sets of values
that people share on what is worth worrying about: A symbol system will
provide a clue to what is worth fighting about and also to what is so com-
monsensical that attempts to change it seem pointless.19 In other words,
the cultural glue does not necessarily mean the existence of a broad con-
sensus about some master narrative but can refer to common understand-
ings about what the agenda should be and agreement on how and when
to disagree.
Even in cases in which we are not talking about precolonial entities,
Geertzs prescription resonates. Modern states are made up of multiple
agencies and bureaus with widely different tasks and interests. The forces
pulling them in different directions regional demands, interest group
leverage, international pressures are tremendous. A focus on culture,
whether it refers to some master narrative or simply points of concern,
directs researchers toward the beliefs and shared meanings that prevent
institutional chaos. Geertzs understanding of culture and the state differs
from some of the more common cultural approaches in sociology, which
zero in on the integration and disintegration of society as an indirect
means of applying the notion of culture to the state or which focus on the
interaction of culture and the state, including the manipulation of culture
by the state (where the state is seen largely in structural or institutional
terms).20 Geertz also goes beyond common cultural approaches found
in political science, such as that in an influential book like The Civic
18 19
Laitin, Hegemony and Culture, p. 175. Ibid.
20
See: Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972);
Michael Schudson, Culture and Integration of National Societies, International Social
Science Journal 46 (February 1994): 6382; Archer, The Myth of Cultural Unity; Gilbert
M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Popular Culture and State Formation, in Gilbert M.
Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the
Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Helen
Siu, Recycling Rituals and Popular Culture in Contemporary China, in Perry Link,
Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowiez (eds.), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and
Thought in the Peoples Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989).
239
Studying the State
Culture, where the actual construction of the state plays a negligible role
and the focus, instead, is on how broadly held values affect politics. Geertz
examines directly the concrete social institution21 of the state, and he
devises a cultural explanation for its ability to stay together and shape its
society.
E. P. Thompson, who seemingly came to the idea of the state as theater
independently of Geertz, ended up at much the same point, although in
the end he gave even more credence to the bricks that make up the state
than Geertz. A great part of politics and law, Thompson observed, is
always theater; once a social system has become set, it does not need to
be endorsed daily by exhibitions of power . . . ; what matters more is a con-
tinuing theatrical style.22 To note that control is cultural, he wrote, is
not to say that it was immaterial, too fragile for analysis, insubstantial. To
define control in terms of cultural hegemony is not to give up attempts at
analysis, but to prepare for analysis at the points at which it should be
made: into the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of
subordination.23
Others have picked up on the idea of theater states and have tried to
apply it to more contemporary cases.24 Even Geertz makes no secret
of his belief that an approach stressing theater and master narratives
should be applied to modern examples, too. In another essay, he wrote,
Now, the easy reaction to all this talk of monarchs, their trappings, and
their peregrinations is that it has to do with a closed past, a time in
Huizingas famous phrase, when the world was half-a-thousand years
younger and everything was clearer. . . . Thrones may be out of fashion,
and pageantry too, he continued, but political authority still requires a
cultural frame in which to define itself and advance its claims, and so does
opposition to it.25
Culture for Geertz is not the cults and customs but the master narra-
tives that give shape to peoples experience. The problem for him and for
21
Geertz, Negara, p. 19.
22
E. P. Thompson, Patrician Society, Plebian Culture, Journal of Social History 7 (Summer
1974): 389.
23
Ibid., p. 387. Thompson borrowed the concept of cultural hegemony from Gramsci.
24
See for example: Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Acting Out Democ-
racy: Political Theater in Modern China, Journal of Asian Studies 49 (November, 1990):
83565.
25
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York:
Basic Books, 1983), 1423.
240
Studying the State
others seeking to apply this approach to the study of todays states is how
to do that. Geertz himself notes, One of the things that everyone knows
but no one can quite think how to demonstrate is that a countrys politics
reflect the design of its culture.26 Perhaps that is why the flurry of excite-
ment with Geertzs approach, which rippled through the scholarly com-
munity in the 1970s and early 1980s, could not sustain itself.27 We know
that culture is important, that the state is more than a configuration
of roles or an interchangeable structure; we just cannot quite figure out
how to study it comparatively, how to make it much more than a giant
residual category.
26
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books,
1973), p. 310.
27
See for example, Wilentz, Rites of Power.
28
See: Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986); Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant
in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Skocpol, States and Social
Revolution; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press,
1974); Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back
In (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
241
Studying the State
29
Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981); Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materi-
als Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
30
Meredith Woo Cummings, Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Stephen Haggard, Pathways from the Periph-
ery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
31
Ira Katznelson, Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics, in Lichbach and
Zuckerman (eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure.
32
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1991).
242
Studying the State
much at all. Nor do the different institutional paths that widely varying
states and societies have taken. His theory has removed agency, the power
of people to affect the course of history, from both state and society. In
the end, we remain with an overly determined portrait in which the dif-
fering institutional histories, contrasting systems of meaning, and the ini-
tiatives of groups or individuals count for very little in the unfolding of
history.
33
Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural
Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
34
Robert H. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian
Development in Kenya (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
35
Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton,
1981).
243
Studying the State
The rationalist approach merged nicely with the reemergence of the state
as a subject of study. It moved political scientists away from exclusive
concern with extremely broad, often slippery macrostructures or master
narratives to a much more manageable level of research. As Margaret Levi
notes, rational choice theory drew on its experience with voting and elec-
toral politics to provide a grounded, empirical approach to broad com-
parative questions.40 This orientation led to a concern with hard evidence,
too often sloughed off in the structuralist or culturalist perspectives.
By specifying leaders goals clearly, it allowed researchers to deduce
their actions and, as a result, political outcomes from those goals and
from the specific configuration of circumstances that the rulers faced. In
that sense, like structuralism, one could treat the units of study as largely
coherent actors that were theoretically interchangeable. It lent great
36
Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market, p. 6.
37 38 39
Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 1512.
40
Margaret Levi, A Model, a Method, and a Map: Rational Choice in Comparative and
Historical Analysis, in Lichbach and Zuckerman (eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality,
Culture, and Structure.
244
Studying the State
41 42
Ibid., p. 149. Katznelson, , in Lichbach and Zuckerman, Comparative Politics.
245
Studying the State
43
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of
Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 4.
44
Ibid., p. 4.
45
Barbara Geddes, Politicians Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
46
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
47
Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo have distinguished historical institutionalism from
rational-choice institutionalism. Thelen and Steinmo Historical Institutionalism in
Comparative Politics, in Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (eds.),
Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1992). Another key formative figure in historical institutionalism, who will not be dis-
cussed here, is Gerschenkron.
246
Studying the State
those who were dissatisfied with behavioralist and (mostly Marxist) system-
dominant approaches and who were interested in developing a historically
grounded perspective. Behavioralists concerns with the characteristics,
attitudes, and behavior of individuals and groups tended to minimize his-
torical factors and miss the important impact that varying forms of orga-
nization could have. At the same time, Marxisms determinism seemed to
deny the importance of institutional diversity.
The subtitle of Polanyis book, The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time, hints not only at Polanyis own ambition but at a more
general belief that such an approach need not devolve into small-scale idio-
graphic studies and explanations. While Polanyi wove numerous threads
through his narrative, in the end his preoccupation was with the demon
that had turned his own world on its head, fascism. In dealing with that
dreaded political form, he had to come to terms with the material inter-
ests approach that had so influenced his thinking and still find a way to
steer clear of Marxs propensity to overdetermine outcomes. Note the fine
line that Polanyi walks:
If ever there was a political movement that responded to the needs of an objective
situation and was not a result of fortuitous causes it was fascism. At the same time,
the degenerative character of the fascist solution was evident. It offered an escape
from an institutional deadlock which was essentially alike in a number of coun-
tries, and yet, if the remedy were tried, it would everywhere produce sickness unto
death. This is the manner in which civilizations perish.48
48 49
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 237. Ibid., p. 57.
247
Studying the State
At the same time, the state, through the pressure put on it by labor
groups in parliament, became the basis for paternalistic regulationism.50
Groups organized a countermovement, a reaction against a dislocation
which attacked the fabric of society.51 This bundle of contradictions in
the state, the clash of economic liberalism and social protection, caused
deadlock. The Alexander who could cut this Gordian knot was a new
institutional configuration, fascism. Its solution was both to transform the
market and to eliminate democracy.
Polanyis goal was a delicate one. He at once wanted to show how a par-
ticular array of forces could explain the emergence of the fascist state (just
as a good system-dominant structuralist would) and to leave open the pos-
sibility of other outcomes. Neither Britain nor the United States where he
sat writing his book during the dark days of World War II had succumbed
to the fascist solution. Institutions adapt to the real environment within
which they are embedded for Polanyi that environment was a world
economy marked by the gold standard and a system of states within a
balance of power. But that is not an infinitely replicable process. Differ-
ent states and societies could respond in varying ways.
In the postwar era, Samuel P. Huntington stressed the same lesson: dif-
ferent sorts of political actions and varying types of engagement by social
groups with the state produce disparate political results. His immediate
attention was with the proliferation of new states that came out of the
decolonization process and with the fond hopes that they would lead their
societies to the promised land of modernity and prosperity. He observed
rather dourly that political decay and instability were as likely an outcome
as political development.52
Huntington did not use the word state it was not fashionable yet
but it was very much present in his analysis. In fact, if anyone could be
credited with bringing the state back in, it is Huntington; without the word
at hand to encompass it, he described how the actions and characteristics
of the array of public institutions in a country (the state) made a vast dif-
ference for society. He returned public institutions to center stage. Indeed,
his theory implies that if we focused exclusively on how well the state devel-
oped its institutions, we would not have to look much further. His thesis
is simple: only where the level of political institutionalization outstrips the
50
Ibid., p. 125. 51 Ibid., p. 130.
52
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1968).
248
Studying the State
53
See for example: Ruth B. Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical
Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991); Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Indus-
trial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert H. Jackman,
Power Without Force: The Political Capacities of Nation-States (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993); John Waterbury, Exposed to Innumerable Delusions: Public Enterprise
and State Power in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1993); Catherine Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992); Frances Hagopian, Traditional Politics and Regime
Change in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Atul Kohli, Democracy
and Discontent: Indias Growing Crisis of Governability (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide:
Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995).
54
Evans, Embedded Autonomy, p. 11.
249
Studying the State
statement comes a long way in allowing for the diversity of actual states.
But like the works of those using the culturalist, structuralist, and ratio-
nalist perspectives, it still reflects the emphasis on looking first and fore-
most at the state as a freestanding structure, as an entity that can be isolated
in inquiry.
250
Studying the State
not tell us how the actual contours of this amorphous organization are to be drawn.
. . . The state appears to stand apart from society in [an] unproblematic way.55
55
Timothy Mitchell, The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their
Critics, American Political Science Review 85 (March 1991): 82.
56
Mitchell, The Limits of the State.
57
Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austan Sarat, eds., Narrative Violence and the Law: The
Essays of Robert Cover (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 21114; see
also Charles Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, in Peter Evans,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
251
Studying the State
58
Political life centers on the exercise of power, and that, unlike physical force, power is
intrinsically relational. Although all states have the capability to inflict physical sanction,
their ability to exercise power is the key element of their political capacity. In this context,
the prolonged use of force reflects a loss of power and is fundamentally apolitical, because
it indicates a deterioration in the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Jackman,
Power Without Force.
59
In fact, the overburdened state (as seen, for example, in the mushrooming prison popula-
tion in the United States) is one important part of the puzzle explaining the disparity
between state goals and achievements.
60
Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities
in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
252
Studying the State
61
Thomas A. Koelble, The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology.
Comparative Politics 27 (January 1995): 233.
62
Evans, Embedded Autonomy.
63
Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide.
64
Ibid., p. 5.
253
Studying the State
The engagement of the state, or parts of it, with individuals and groups
in society so aptly emphasized by the historical institutionalists has
been not a static process but a mutually transformative one. One criticism
of the rational choice institutionalists approach has been its acceptance
of goals, strategies, and preferences as given (and often fixed) rather
than as changing over time in meaningful ways.69 We might add that the
very process of interaction of ruler and ruled, looked at so convinc-
ingly by a rational choice institutionalist, such as Levi, substantially
changes both. This mutual transformation may limit the usefulness of
rational choice methodology. The engagement of state and society
involves the creation of alliances and coalitions and, for each side of the
bargain, the incorporation of a new material basis as well as new ideas and
values into its constitution. That process of incorporation of new con-
stituencies and their ideas transforms the preferences and bases for action
65
Hagopian, Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil.
66
Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena.
67
Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal.
68
Catherine Boone, States and Ruling Classes in Postcolonial Africa: The Enduring Con-
tradictions of Power, in Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue (eds.), State Power
and Social Forces (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 133.
69
Thelen and Steinmo, Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics, p. 9.
254
Studying the State
of the original actor. What rational choice theorists assume is fixed may
very well be a moving target. Beyond coercion, then, why have people
obeyed state rules and dictates? The historical institutionalists, as we
saw, respond by pointing to the calculation of individuals within the
confines of rules and procedures and the routinization of their behavior
within the possibilities that existing institutions afford. They picture the
actions of the states subjects as running on a treadmill to create viable
strategies of survival (not maximization) or to satisfice, in James G.
March and Johan P. Olsens terms.70 Institutions create routines, and,
even with coercion only a distant threat, those routines ensure significant
obedience.71
Another answer as to why and how states can avoid stationing police
every fifty meters is much trickier. To understand it fully, comparative
political scientists must turn to the culturalist approach and develop new
tools within that genre. The answer rests on the premise that in individ-
uals, as Shils wrote, there is a state of consciousness which includes an
awareness of a self residing in them, including them, and transcending
them.72 That is, humans are not only animals who run in packs, creating
institutions for themselves. They also have conceptions about themselves
as members of the pack and of the pack as something with a life beyond
their personal existence. Those packs are societies, which in human
history have come in all shapes and sizes that is, with different institu-
tional configurations.73
How have societies taken form? Lauren Berlant wrote that the acci-
dent of birth within a geographical/political boundary transforms individ-
uals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its
metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for
a collective consciousness.74 That shared alphabet imposes a discipline
upon people, molding their discourse and action. Like Geertzs theater
state, Berlants subjects are drawn into props and pomp, into stories and
metaphors, which mark them off from others outside. The formation of
societies leads, again in Shilss words, to some degree of authority and the
70
March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions.
71
Ruth Lane, The Art of Comparative Politics (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 11422.
72
Shils, The Constitution of Society, p. vii.
73
There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate
in association. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927).
74
Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 20.
255
Studying the State
75
Shils, The Constitution of Society, p. vii.
76
Ibid., p. xii.
77
Identities . . . produce societal boundaries allowing individual members as groups and col-
lectivities, in actual or desired, existing or imaginary communities, to make sense of us
versus them. Dahlia Moore and Baruch Kimmerling, Individual Strategies of Adopt-
ing Collective Identities: The Israeli Case, International Sociology 10 (December 1995).
78
Max Weber, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, ed. Max Rheinstein (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 342.
256
Studying the State
so, state leaders assert, within the parameters set by the state. If a family
exercises its authority by abusing its children, or a business sets discrimi-
natory rules, the state steps in, even to the point of disbanding the family.
In a fundamental sense, then, the state appears to stand above and apart
from the rest of society. Even if the actual image of states standing above
society is flawed, as Mitchell notes, at the very least state leaders aim for
a ghost-like effect,79 where the state appears to be standing above society,
with a finger in every pot. In John Breuillys terms, there exists a dis-
tinction, peculiar to the modern world, between state and society.80
But, as important as the private-public marking (or its appearance) is in
establishing the special status of state authority, it also has created enor-
mous problems for state officials in demanding obedience. The appear-
ance of a gulf separating the state from the rest of society makes it difficult
for its leaders to tap into a basis of authority beyond coercion or a mar-
ketlike equilibrium of interests for calculating individuals. As an entity
appearing to stand apart from society and its individuals, it has difficulty
gaining conformity through individuals tying their personal identities to a
collective of which they self-consciously felt a part. This is the paradox of
the modern state, one that theoretically and practically leads us to the
conception of the limited state.
The challenge for political leaders has been how to remain apart
from society the state as the ultimate authority while somehow still
benefiting from peoples collective self-consciousness, their sense of
belonging to something bigger than themselves of which they are an
integral part.81 Or, to pose the problem differently, state leaders and their
agencies have sought ways to change those they rule from disconnected
subjects of state rule to some other status that would connect their personal
79
Mitchell, The Limits of the State, p. 91.
80
John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
p. 390.
81
The problem for states is related to that posed by Habermas, regarding the legitimation
crisis of the state. He writes, The state must preserve for itself a residue of uncon-
sciousness in order that there accrue to it from its planning functions no responsibilities
that it cannot honor without drawing its accounts. . . . This end is served by the separa-
tion of instrumental functions of the administration from expressive symbols that release
an unspecific readiness to follow. Jrgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1975), pp. 6970. But in the end he notes, The state cannot simply take over the
cultural system (p. 73). The administrative (authoritative) role of the state does not sit
easily with a cultural role, no matter how much theater is employed (as examples of such
theater, Habermas offers symbolic use of hearings, juridical incantations, and others).
257
Studying the State
identities to the continued existence and vitality of the state. And state
rulers have sought to establish this connection while all the while having
state institutions, such as courts, remaining the ultimate authority and
arbiter, standing in a continuing object-subject relationship with them.
Officials have dealt with the paradox of the state appearing to be above
society but needing to seem an integral component of society in a number
of ways, each of which aims to transform society. One has been the Com-
munist path, to abolish society entirely. In that case, the individuals new
status is that of state functionary, a role reserved not for a select subset of
the population (public officials) but applicable to everyone. The popula-
tion is not a society in the sense that its parts have been largely stripped
of authority and it does not play an active role in peoples collective
consciousness. Those who by dint of class background are deemed un-
worthy of the new status may be resocialized into it during a transition
period or, at worst, eliminated altogether. The new identity of individuals
(such as the new Soviet man and woman) indicates a collective self-
consciousness revolving entirely around the state; no separate society,
characterized by its own authority and the maintenance of order, exists.
Through raw power and through an impressive array of theatrical symbols,
Communist leaders sought the extraordinarily ambitious goal of making
the state the single authoritative entity and thus the only one with which
people could ground their own identities.
A far more common route of transforming society involves, as Breuilly
puts it, abolishing the distinction between state and society altogether
through the use of nationalism.82 In that case, the transformation of society
comes by creating a subset of it, the nation, and a special status for those
defined as nationals. Nationalist state leaders have aimed to eliminate the
perception that the state stands above society and to foster an alternative
view, that the state and the society are indistinguishable in purpose, if not
in form.
Here is not the place to review the voluminous and growing literature
on nationalism. But it is important to note that nationalism has been used
to nibble at the state-society divide; states have sought added obedience
and conformity through the merging of personal identity first and fore-
most with the collective self-consciousness of the nation. As the expres-
sion of the nations sovereignty, the state has aimed to gain compliance
beyond what it could expect from coercion and appealing to the calcula-
82
Brecilly, Nationalism and the State, p. 390.
258
Studying the State
83
Paul C. Stern, Why do People Sacrifice for Their Nations? Political Psychology 16 (1985):
21735.
84
See: Anthony D. Smith, Myth of the Modern Nation and the Myths of Nations, Racial
Studies 11 ( January 1988): 126; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
85
Smith, Myth of the Modern Nation and the Myths of Nations, p. 2.
86
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.
87
Ibid., p. 7.
88
Berdun Guibernau and Maria Montserrat, Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 70.
259
Studying the State
such culture by state officials may lend too rationalist a perspective to this
phenomenon.
Neither Communist states attempts to abolish society nor nationalisms
purported effect of eliminating the state-society distinction have freed the
state from its paradoxical bind. Nowhere, not even in Stalins Soviet
Union, has a society with its own authority disappeared entirely.89 And
the total elimination of the boundary between state and society through
nationalism has been impossible, as well.
Certainly states have reshaped societies with some success, refashion-
ing societal boundaries to conform to the borders of the state (or to its
desired borders). As Michael Schudson wrote, The modern nation-
state self-consciously uses language policy, formal education, collective
rituals, and mass media to integrate citizens and ensure their loyalty.90
Those using a culturalist perspective have pointed out how state leaders
have used ritual and other means to blur the distinction between state
and society and to have individuals develop a stake in the well-being of
the state. Rituals have linked individuals to society and one another,91
and to the state as the putative representation of society.92 David Kertzer,
an anthropologist, sees this connection as essentially nonrational: Politi-
cal reality is defined for us in the first place through ritual, and our beliefs
are subsequently reaffirmed through regular collective expression.93 We
can add that the nonrational dimension may apply to state officials, too;
they may be expressing deeply inculcated cultural mores of their own as
much as a well defined plan to use symbols as the route to effective social
control.
In short, the culturalists from Geertz to those writing on nationalism
provide us with an image of the state as using and representing a master
narrative. This narrative has multiple functions in their formulations.
First, it serves as the basis to hold the state together, to prevent its multi-
ple parts from flying off in different directions. Second, it links citizens to
89
Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), p. 54.
90
Michael Schudson, Culture and the Integration of National Societies, International Social
Science Journal 46 (February 1994): 64.
91
Emile Durkeim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915);
and David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),
p. 10.
92
Wilentz, Rites of Power; Siu, Recycling Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contem-
porary China.
93
Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power, p. 95.
260
Studying the State
one another and to the state, subverting other narratives and thus the
possibility of other autonomous, authoritative structures. And, third, the
master narrative creates the limits and possibilities of the institutions
involved in social control.
This image of the master narrative, however, needs modification. It,
too, looks first and foremost at the state and its construction as stand-
alone phenomena (rather than at the state in society) and consequently
tends to overstate the power of the state or even the appearance of
that power. Master narratives that eliminate other narratives are impossi-
ble to sustain, as Cover has argued.94 At best, at a moment of epiphany,
such uniformity can exist. But that quickly gives way to the creation of
alternative and dissenting narratives. Perhaps in ancient societies, such dis-
sonance could be handled by exile, secession, or death. But modern soci-
eties cannot avoid the existence of multiple narratives; they are irrevocably
multicultural.
Some culturalists have noted this process of the creation of mul-
tiple narratives. They argue that the distinction between state and
society the states aim to stand apart, as the ultimate authority does
quite the opposite from strengthening social control. It creates openings
for opposition and distinction. Nicholas B. Dirks makes this point pow-
erfully: Because of the centrality of authority to the ritual process, ritual
has always been a crucial site of struggle, involving both claims about
authority and struggles against (and within) it. . . . Resistance to authority
can be seen to occur precisely when and where it is least expected.95
He adds, At the same time that representation, in discourse or event,
makes ritual claims about order, representation itself becomes the object
of struggle.96
Dirks writes on India. Others writing theoretically or about different
countries also take issue with the notion of the cultural unity implied in
the works of Durkheim and Shils.97 In Mexico, Gilbert M. Joseph and
Daniel Nugent note, The power of the state, especially the capitalist state,
has been of signal importance in providing some of the idioms in terms of
94
Minow, Ryan, and Sarat, eds., Narrative, Violence and the Law.
95
Nicholas B. Dirks, Rituals and Resistance: Subversions as a Social Fact, in Nicholas B.
Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (eds.), Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 4878.
96
Ibid., p. 502.
97
Archer, The Myth of Cultural Unity; Schudson, Culture and the Integration of
National Societies; and Siu, Recycling Rituals.
261
Studying the State
Conclusion
Returning to my earlier question what makes the modern state
modern? I can now add that it has not been only the sheer magni-
tude of the states claims upon individuals it governs in terms of taxes,
personal and social behavior, and the like. It also has been the effect of
states through their practices to lay claim above all others to collective
consciousness, that is, to the identity of the nation. Again, in Berlants
terms, the state has been at the center of struggles for peoples collectively
held history, its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and
its narratives. In so doing, state leaders and agencies have been at the
center of redrawing societal boundaries to coincide with the actual or
desired political borders, a process as exclusive (in separating out those
outside the physical or metaphorical boundaries) as it is inclusive (in
creating an overarching collective self-consciousness). In short, through
symbols and institutions states have been at the core of the reinvention of
society.
But even where states have successfully sequestered youth for thirty
hours per week, they have by no means guaranteed victory in the ambi-
tious endeavor of defining collective consciousness. Both global factors
outside of the states control and internal elements of the society have
worked to thwart or modify the emergence of a state-drawn collective
consciousness. Because so much of the ability to get people to do what one
98
Joseph and Nugent, Popular Culture and State Formation, p. 13.
99
William Roseberry, Hegemony and the Language of Contention, in Gilbert Joseph and
Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of
the Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 365.
100
Roseberry, Hegemony and the Language of Contention.
262
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