Bringing the State Back In

1. The Paradigm Shift Back to the State

Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes.

Intellectual sea change. For decades, dominant social science paradigms like pluralism and structural-functionalism treated the state as a mere passive arena or "black box" that registered societal inputs. These society-centered theories assumed that political outcomes were simply the result of interest-group struggles or overarching socioeconomic modernization.

Limitations of old models. Even neo-Marxist theories, which revived interest in the state, remained fundamentally society-centered by viewing the state as an instrument of class rule or an objective guarantor of capital accumulation. These paradigms failed to account for:

• Governmental leaders taking independent policy initiatives
• Variations in state organizations across similar capitalist economies
• The independent causal weight of state structures on historical trajectories

Bringing the state back in. A new comparative-historical approach has emerged, drawing inspiration from Max Weber and Otto Hintze. This perspective treats the state as an organizational structure and potentially autonomous actor that actively shapes social, economic, and political processes.

2. State Autonomy as an Independent Variable

States conceived as organizations claiming control over territories and people may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society.

Defining state autonomy. State autonomy refers to the capacity of state officials to formulate and pursue collective goals that do not merely reflect the immediate interests of dominant social classes or societal groups. This autonomy is not a static, permanent feature of any government but rather a dynamic variable that fluctuates based on historical crises, international pressures, and internal organizational changes.

Insulated state actors. Autonomous goal formulation is most likely to occur when state organizations are insulated from direct societal pressures. Key factors that foster this insulation include:

• A highly professionalized, career-oriented civil service
• Executive agencies shielded from legislative or lobbying interference
• State managers with specialized technocratic training and a distinct corporate identity

The role of crises. Severe domestic or international crises, such as wars, depressions, or foreign threats, often act as catalysts for autonomous state action. During these critical junctures, state elites are frequently forced to bypass traditional class alliances and implement sweeping reforms to preserve national sovereignty and social order.

3. Bureaucracy as the Foundation of State Capacity

The existence of an extensive, internally coherent bureaucratic machinery is the first prerequisite for effective state action.

Weberian state capacity. To implement its chosen policies effectively, a state must possess a well-developed, cohesive bureaucratic apparatus. This capacity is not merely a matter of formal organizational charts or short-term administrative engineering; it requires a long-term process of institution building that reshapes the values, identities, and commitments of state officials.

The role of expertise. Cohesive bureaucracies attract highly skilled, career-oriented personnel who develop a shared esprit de corps and a distinctive technocratic outlook. This professionalization provides the state with:

• Superior information-gathering and analytical capabilities
• Insulation from corrupting personal or class-based ties
• The ability to plan and execute complex, long-term developmental strategies

Historical policy legacies. Because building bureaucratic capacity takes decades, states are often prisoners of their own historical policy legacies. When faced with sudden crises, governments must rely on existing administrative instruments, which are frequently difficult to adapt to entirely new tasks, thereby limiting the range of feasible policy options.

4. The Double-Edged Sword of State Intervention

The contradictions of civil society become more embedded in the state as the state more deeply penetrates civil society, potentially undermining both its coherence as a corporate actor and its autonomy.

The intervention dilemma. As states expand their economic roles to promote capital accumulation or redistribute income, they face a fundamental structural contradiction. Deeply penetrating interventions require the state to decentralize its operations and grant political autonomy to local subunits so they can respond flexibly to varied conditions.

The threat of balkanization. However, this necessary decentralization makes the state highly vulnerable to penetration by outside societal interests. As different state agencies are captured by competing social classes or interest groups, the state's corporate coherence is undermined, leading to:

• The "balkanization" of the state apparatus into competing fiefdoms
• A loss of the state's ability to act on a unified, long-term vision
• The reproduction of civil society's conflicts directly within the state

State-owned enterprises. This tension is clearly illustrated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Third World. While SOEs allow the state to bypass weak private capital markets and drive industrialization, their insertion into the market often integrates them into oligopolistic communities, making them semi-independent actors that resist central bureaucratic coordination.

5. How States Pattern Social Conflict and Class Identity

The meanings of public life and the collective forms through which groups become aware of political goals and work to attain them arise, not from societies alone, but at the meeting points of states and societies.

The Tocquevillian perspective. States do not merely respond to pre-existing social conflicts; their organizational structures and policy legacies actively shape the very identities, capacities, and demands of social groups. The way a state organizes its administration, distributes political rights, and implements public policies determines which social cleavages become politically salient.

Divergent working-class paths. This patterning of conflict is vividly demonstrated by the contrasting histories of working-class formation in nineteenth-century England and the United States. While both countries experienced similar capitalist industrialization, their state structures led to entirely different political outcomes:

• In England, the exclusion of workers from the franchise and state repression of unions forced workers to organize globally around class-based community institutions.
• In the U.S., early democratization and a decentralized federal system integrated workers into local, patronage-oriented party machines, dividing their consciousness between work-place labor struggles and neighborhood-based ethnic politics.

Structuring the political agenda. By providing specific channels for interest representation, states select which issues can be raised in the public sphere. Non-programmatic, patronage-based states encourage divisible, distributive conflicts, whereas centralized, bureaucratic states are more likely to foster collective, class-wide debates.

6. War Making and State Making as Organized Crime

If protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making—quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy—qualify as our largest examples of organized crime.

The protection racket analogy. National states are essentially coercive enterprises that monopolize the concentrated means of violence within a territory. Like neighborhood racketeers, would-be state makers historically created threats of external violence and internal disorder, and then charged their subject populations "protection rents" and taxes to mitigate those very dangers.

Four interdependent activities. The historical formation of European states was driven by the competitive pursuit of power, which forced rulers to engage in four closely linked activities:

• War making: Eliminating external rivals to secure territorial control
• State making: Eliminating internal rivals and pacifying the domestic population
• Protection: Shielding the state's allies and clients from their enemies
• Extraction: Acquiring the fiscal means (taxes, loans) to fund the other three activities

The organizational residue. The immense cost of waging war and extracting resources left a permanent organizational residue that became the modern state apparatus. Rulers who successfully built standing armies and extensive tax-collection bureaucracies survived, while those who failed were swallowed up by their more efficient, predatory neighbors.

7. Transnational Linkages and the Expansion of Third World States

The challenge of dealing with transnational linkages, whether flows of goods or capital, may lead the state to expand the scope of its economic role, generating new organizational capacity within the state bureaucracy...

The dependency paradox. Traditional dependency and world-system theories argue that intense penetration by transnational capital inevitably weakens peripheral states. However, the historical reality of the post-World War II period reveals a more complex, double-edged relationship where transnational linkages often stimulate the expansion of the state's economic role and bureaucratic capacity.

Obsolescing bargains. In extractive and manufacturing sectors, the presence of powerful transnational corporations (TNCs) forces Third World states to develop sophisticated monitoring and negotiating agencies. Over time, this interaction moves the state along an organizational learning curve, leading to:

• The creation of powerful state-owned enterprises to capture resource rents
• The nationalization of key sectors to protect national sovereignty
• The state acting as a crucial intermediary between local capital and global markets

The role of foreign debt. Similarly, the flood of transnational loan capital in the 1970s reinforced the state's domestic power. Because international banks required state guarantees, state managers became the ultimate gatekeepers of credit, giving them immense leverage to direct domestic industrialization and discipline the local bourgeoisie.

8. Capital Exports and the Inhibition of Core State Intervention

...having a bourgeoisie in which locally based transnational capital is the dominant fraction may inhibit the expansion of the state's role.

The core state constraint. While vulnerability to international markets encourages state expansion in host countries, the opposite logic applies to core countries that act as major capital exporters. In nations like the United States and Great Britain, the dominance of transnationally oriented industrial and financial capital actively discourages the development of strong domestic state intervention.

Divergent class interests. Transnational corporations and international banks based in core countries have little interest in a strong, interventionist domestic state. Their global profitability depends on the preservation of a liberal, unregulated international economic order, which leads to:

• Opposition to domestic industrial planning and state-directed credit allocation
• The sacrifice of domestic industrial growth to maintain international financial credibility
• The decoupling of the fortunes of transnational capital from the domestic economy

The British disease. This dynamic is clearly visible in postwar Great Britain, where the state consistently prioritized the interests of the City of London's financial network over domestic industrial regeneration. By defending the international role of sterling through deflationary domestic policies, the British state severely weakened its own domestic productive base.

9. Small States and the Corporatist Compensation for Openness

The small European states have compensated for economic openness and dependence on world markets through political efforts at home...

Vulnerability and compensation. Small industrialized democracies like Switzerland and Austria are highly exposed to the volatile shifts of the international economy. Lacking the scale to preempt global market changes or engage in massive unilateral industrial reorganization, these nations have developed unique corporatist arrangements that combine international openness with domestic compensation.

Social partnership. The essence of this small-state corporatism is a deeply institutionalized system of social partnership linking the state, business, and organized labor. This collaborative network facilitates:

• Continuous, non-confrontational wage and price negotiations
• Flexible, reactive policies of industrial adjustment to maintain competitiveness
• The maintenance of social peace and full employment through public subsidies or welfare

Divergent state structures. Despite their similar economic strategies, Switzerland and Austria achieve this consensus through different state structures. Austria relies on a strong, centralized state with vast public ownership, while Switzerland operates through a highly decentralized, weak state that delegates administrative authority to powerful private peak associations.

10. The Dialectical Balance of State Power and Civil Society

The power of the state as an actor and institution cannot be analyzed in isolation from an understanding of the nature of the cleavages that rend civil society, on the one hand, or the growth of horizontal ties that bring different sectors of civil society together, on the other hand.

Non-zero-sum dynamics. The relationship between the power of the state and the strength of civil society is not a simple zero-sum game where one can grow only at the absolute expense of the other. In bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, the state's very success in executing its economic and political projects can unintentionally generate new capacities for collective action within civil society.

Unintended consequences. This dialectical process is clearly illustrated by the contrasting trajectories of Brazil and Chile under military rule. While both regimes initially dismantled working-class organizations, their subsequent strategies led to divergent outcomes:

• In Brazil, the state-led "economic miracle" expanded and concentrated the industrial working class, while state-crafted corporatist structures inadvertently provided resources for a new, autonomous union movement.
• In Chile, the state's radical market project deliberately shrank and fragmented the working class, successfully preventing the recomposition of oppositional collectivities.

Horizontal ties in civil society. The ultimate capacity of civil society to challenge an authoritarian state depends on the development of horizontal linkages among diverse social sectors. When autonomous institutions like the church, professional associations, and trade unions coordinate their efforts, they can effectively erode the state's hegemony and force a transition to democracy.

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