States in History PDF
Preview States in History
States in History Iniias is a new Blackwell series which makes available in paperback some of the most adventurous writing in the social and humane sciences in recent years, extending the frontiers of research, crossing disciplinary borders and setting new intellectual standards in international scholar- ship. Published and fordicoming titles include: Jean Baechler, john A. Hall and Michael Mann, Europe and the Rise Capitalism Colin Campbell, The Romantéc Ethic anal z*heSpirit 0f/l/lodem Consumerism William Connolly, Political Theory and it/Ioeiewziqy john A- Hall (ed.), States in History Alan Macfarlane, The Culture 0f Capizalism Derek Sayer, The Violence of/*llvstrection Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin, The Capitalist City States in History Edited by John A. Had Basil Blackwell © Basil Blackwell Ltd 1986 First published 1986 First published in the USA 1987 First published in paperback 1989 Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 UF, UK Basil Blackwell Inc. 3 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re- sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Bntflvh Library Cataloguing in Publication Dain: A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Libewjl of Congress Cara forging in Puéficazion Data States in History. Includes index. 1. Constitutional history. 2. Comparative government. 3. State, The. I. I all, john A., 1949- ]F3l.S73 1986 320.1 86-11804 ISBN 0-631_ 14365-3 ISBN 0-631-17136-3 (pack_) Typeset byjoshua Associates Limited Printed in Great Britain by The Camelot Press, Southampton Contents Introduction 1 john A. Hal! 1 Hunter-Gatherers and the Origin of States 22 Clive Gamble 2 The Tribe and the State 48 Patricia Crrmc' 3 Soviets against Wittfogel: or, the Anthropological Preconditions of Mature Marxism 78 Ernest Gellner 4 The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results 109 Michael Mann 5 City-States 137 Peter Hurlee 6 States and Economic Development: Reflections on Adam Smith 154 john A. Hall 7 Sharing Public Space' States and Organized Interests in Western Europe 177 Colin Crouch 8 State and Politics in Developed Socialism: Recent Developments in Soviet Theory 211 Karen Dawisha 9 State-Making and Nation-Building 228 Anthony D. Smllth vi Contents , 10 Patterns of State-Building in Brazil and Argentina 264 1 G. Merquior 11 Supranationals and the State 289 Susan Strange Notes on Contributors 306 Index 307 \ Introduction john A. Hal! It is widely agreed that the state is now at the centre of our attention. Given the importance of coercion and violence as forces affecting the historical record, this can only be welcomed as a wholly beneficial development. Indeed it is, at first sight, highly puzzling that the state was once somehow 'off the agenda' and that its salience needed to be rediscovered. This introduction begins by explaining the 'withering away of the state': of course, the explanation says more about hopes entertained by social theorists than it does about actual patterns of social development. A second section describes and evaluates the character of the recent rediscovery of the state. The argument of the book is, of - course, that ofits title that states must be considered in their historical contexts l and the fin_,1] section of this introduction spells out this position. In those final comments, I have also chosen to highlight the advances, conceptual and substantive, made by the various contributors of this volume to the understanding of the behavior of states. 'The Witherlng Away of the State' To discuss the state is to consider the political. There is, of course, a vast history of 'things political'. Each of the world civilizations, for example, has a particular view of the role and duty of states, such views are occasionally considered in this book. However, the hope that the state would 'wither away' is particularly Western and modern. It would not have been comprehensible to the Greeks who regarded the poleS as the highest expression of communal life. The Greek experi- ence, mediated by the Renaissance, created a tradition of 'civic hurnanisnl', interested in the nature of corruption and the possibility of civic virtue, this is a political theory whose influence is by no means 2 _johnA. Hall finished* But it is fair to say that a rather different and more modern tradition has had greater importance, and it is certainly from this view- point that hopes for the 'widiering away of the state' derive. This modern viewpoint is that of classical liberalism, which sees civil society as die fount of all virtue. It is very likely that this viewpoint derives from the decentred but contractualistic civil society, described in my own chapter, established in North-Western Europe after the Fall of Rome. The liberal viewpoint was not one which was necessarily anti- political? However, it is true that a large part of the liberal interest in politics was negative: the question they asked was how to control political power so that the beneficial workings of civil society could proceed unhindered. But a liberal thinker such as Adam Smith had a lively positive appreciation of the necessity of the state to carry out certain key social functions, most notably those of deface, the estab- lishment and maintenance of the rule of law and the protection of property. Even James and john Mill, the advocates of a new democratic era, did not simply trust society as it actally was; they believed that the rule of the wise would need to continue for some considerable time, and that the state should certainly engage in a great deal of social engineer- ing in order to improve society? Nevertheless, it was the aspect ofliberalisrn that stressed the minimal functions of the state that proved to be most influential, Perhaps this was due to the extraordinary impact of Herbert Spencer, whose thought is relevant here in two ways. First, Spencer entertained in a fully systematic way the notion of the end of the state: as individualism developed and SO gained a sense of social responsibility, it became realistic to envisage that it might be so perfected as to allow social life to be guided merely by contractual relationships between free agents.'* Second, Spencer, as was so often the case, summed up Victorian hopes when he claimed that the spread of commerce would bring in its wake a reign of peace. Wars were created by the remnants of feudal aristo- cracies, overly represented in the Foreign Offices of various countries, whose style of life, being honorific and militaristic, encouraged war. Once such remnants were removed from office, the spread of commerce would unite the nations of the world through specialization and by 1 Recent interest in the tradition has owed much to the work off. G. A. Pocock, and in particular to his The Mach zkweilian Moment, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975. Modern thinkers influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by this tradition include _Iiirgen Haherxnas, Alasdair Maclntyre and Hannah Arendt. 2 I have benefited from the account of liberalism in D. Held, 'Central perspectives on the modem state', in D. Held, j. Anderson, B. Gieben, S. Hall, L. Harris, P. Lewis, N. Parker, B. Tirok, eds, States and Societies, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1983. 3 J- A. Hall, Liberalism, London, Granada, 1987, chapters 2-4. 4 j. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1981. Introduction 3 means of increasing prosperity. The development of social relations would mean that states would be deprived of what was, and what was generally recognized to be, their single most important historic liunction, namely that of preparing for and engaging in war. It is well known that sustained attack on a particular intellectual position is no bar to unconscious acceptance of many of its key pre- suppositions. Karl Marx is a prime example of this. He took society- centred analysis to an extreme similar to that of Spencer when he announced that the state would have no reason to exist once the era of class history had been finished: states, deprived of their function would 'wither away'. Ernest Gellner's chapter makes it clear that the key intel- lectual presupposition at work here is that there is but a single source of evil in human affairs, that of economic exploitation by class, and that there is no ontological basis to political coercion. None of this is, of course, to say that Marx did not offer interesting comments about various states which were in existence, albeit these were fragmentary rather than systematic in nature. But these do not in any way go against the society-centred nature of his general approach. His most important and central point was to reject that part of liberal theory which had seen the state as a source of power in its own right, fit to be controlled so that it could not interfere with the beneficial workings of civil society. He insisted that it was an utter- delusion tO believe that the restrictions of which liberal political theorists were so proud were in any way real, let alone important. The freedoms established by the bourgeois class were merely formal, this was necessarily so since the state was merely the instrument of the bourgeoisie, doing the bidding of the capitalist class. Marx replaced the political problem with the social problem, and his work has been the single most important source of the loss of interest in the state in modern social science. Scholars oflVlarx, keen to make his work more relevant to the modern era, have combed his writings to discover more sophisticated statements about the state. They have been successful. Marxwas aware of differ- ences in patterns of state-buildingbetween various European states, and he had particularly interesting comments to make about the Bonapartist state of Napoleon 111.5 His comments about the latter were sufficiently interesting to allow later theorists to build up a more general Marxist view of the state. A state can, according to this interpretation, gain a measure of autonomy by standing between different social classes. I doubt very much, however, whether this fundamentally challenges the society-centred nature of Marx's general approach. Marx's analysis of 5 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brw:»1azlre of Lwuk Bonaparte, New York, International Publishers, 1963.
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