Essay on State ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Few concepts are as central to social analysis and political practice as the state. Many assume that the state is synonymous with the elected government. All the non-elected state administrators, coercive apparatuses, and sociocultural institutions that constitute modern states are often ignored. Despite the crucial nature of state power, major political and methodological disputes remain over the nature and role of the state and how to acquire and maintain state power. Some argue that state institutions are interwoven with social and economic relations in society. Others view the state as distinct from non-state institutions because they perform coercive, taxing, judicial, and other administrative roles that private institutions cannot perform. Despite the privatization of various state industries and services, there is little prospect that the state (and millions of state employees) will be abolished and that all its current roles will be performed by private businesses. Sociologically and politically, Marxists argue that class and power relations in society hold the key to understanding state institutions and the way states maintain ruling-class power, ideology, and cultural practices. Conversely, liberals, conservatives and Weberians either reject the existence of a ruling class or see the state as independent of class divisions in society. Many radicals, liberals, and conservatives simplistically reduce complex state institutions to mere instruments, or to a homogenous actor or subject, like Machiavelli’s Prince, capable of moral, immoral or amoral behavior and having a ”collective mind” or political will. Others stress the historical uniqueness of each state and ignore those numerous aspects shared by contemporary states.

Without a notion of state institutions it is difficult to explain how stateless societies (such as indigenous communities) differ from societies with elaborate forms of military, fiscal, and administrative state power. Revolutions, imperialism, world wars, welfare states, and numerous other developments would be unintelligible if the vital roles played by state institutions were ignored. State theory has always been intimately related to particular historical and political developments. Political philosophers from Aristotle to Machiavelli analyzed political power in city-states and empires. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, religious conflict and secular opposition to religious authority led to a redefinition of church-state relations. Absolutism gave rise to liberal ideas about state sovereignty and property rights, constitutional checks on tyranny, and the belief in a ”social contract” between rulers and citizens. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel produced differing conceptions of the relationship between civil society and state institutions. States were either conceived as embodying the highest spiritual, legal, and political values, or as a constant threat to the freedom and privileges of citizens. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists – from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and J. S. Mill – helped lay the foundations of contemporary liberal and Marxist analyses of the role of states in developing capitalist societies.

The 1920s Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci analyzed the complex relationship between capitalist states and civil society. Capitalist hegemony required both coercion and consent via an elaborate set of cultural and educational practices, values, and socioeconomic relations. The visible state in the industrial capitalist west, Gramsci argued, could not be captured by revolutionaries (as Lenin had done in the largely agrarian Russia of 1917) if the less obvious ”earth-works” (shoring up the state) of cultural and social hegemony remained largely intact. Fifty years later, neo-Marxist state theorists used Gramsci’s work to reconceptualize contemporary state-civil society relations.

State coercion and consent were also central in the work of Weber. He differentiated between traditional forms of spiritual and princely authority or legitimacy and the development of an impersonal legal-rational authority that underpinned modern organizations – especially bureaucracies of the modern state. Weber defined the modern state as an organization that has ”a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” Although state authorities do not like sharing armed power with other groups in nation-states, Weber’s definition is limited in that many state officials tolerate both non-state criminal organizations and illegitimate coercion and corruption within state armed forces and police. Various state administrations and secret police have practiced state terrorism and illegal torture without the knowledge of citizens or other branches of government, thus mocking the notion of a monopoly of ”legitimate violence.”

Between the 1930s and 1960s liberals became increasingly divided over theories of democracy and the modern state. Conservative liberals continued to favor a laissez faire, ”minimal state” that primarily defended private property rights against demands for social equality. The Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by the defeat of fascism in 1945, led various Keynesian liberals and ”social market” liberals to champion new interventionist welfare states and international steering bodies such as the International Monetary Fund or supra-states like the European Union. Nevertheless, most liberals believe parties or individuals in government might pursue sectional interests, but view the state as neutral, serving all citizens impartially. Marxists, however, argued that it was impossible for the state to be a neutral umpire in a class-divided society. The 1970s neo-Marxist renaissance in state theory also stimulated interest in the state by feminists who focused on the patriarchal state which reproduced male dominance and worked against the interests of women in all spheres of social policy and power relations (Chappell 2003). Environmentalists also analyzed the absence of a green state or an ecological state (Eckersley 2004).

Despite their differences, Marxists, feminists and greens agreed that without state institutions private market forces would be unable to manage society, sustain profitability, or, equally importantly, defend capitalism against working-class and other social movement opposition.

Bibliography:

Chappell, L. (2003) Gendering Government. UCB, Vancouver.
Eckersley, R. (2004) The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Frankel, B. (1983) Beyond the State? Macmillan, London.
Jessop, B. (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Polity, Cambridge.