On the state
- States have not always existed (relatively new)
- Rival forms: city states, traditional kingdoms, empires
- State model proved superior after 1500
- State model is now universal
- Will we always have states?
Hegelian Idealism
- Development: family (particular altruism), civil society (universal egoism), state (universal altruism)
- State as the end of history
Woodrow Wilson
State idealist
Functionalism
- You get what you need
- State as a provider of order and stability
- What threatens order? For Marxists = class conflict (state resolves it)
- Problem; the state is whatever does this work (circular reasoning)
Organizational approach to the state
1) State as a specific set of institutions: bureaucracy, military, courts, police, etc.
2) Why treat these collectively as “the state”
3) After Hegel, political scientists rejected the concept as abstract and unnecessary
Organizational features of the state
1) Territory – demarcated area, defensible borders
2) People – community defined by territorial boundaries
3) Sovereignty – final and absolute authority within a territory
4) Public institutions and roles
5) Domination (Max Weber) – monopoly of coercion within a given territory
6) Legitimacy – makes domination easier to swallow
International approach adds:
- Effective government
- Relations with other states
-The state is all international and internal
The duality of the state
- Protects its people from each other and also from external threats
- Borders define what is internal and external in the first place
Emergence of the dual state
With the intensification of:
1) Military conflict
- War made the state
2) Religious conflict
- Protestant reformation
- Peace of Wesphalia 1648: state controls religion within territory
Dualism’s distinctions
-State from internal society, for which it provides rules and order
AND
-State from the international sphere, in which it competes with other states, in the absence of order
Comparative Politics
- States as units of analysis
- Compares units
- Studies politics amidst state-provided order
International relations
- Begins with the concept of anarchy
- Examines state interactions in the absence of rules and enforcement
The triumph of the state model
- Global extension: a world of states
- States are formally equal
- Highly unequal in power and capacity
Controversies of the state - pluralist state
- Social power is widely and evenly dispersed
- The elected government leads the way
- Therefore, the state is neutral
Controversies of the state - capitalist state
- Social power is unequal and concentrated
- Economy generates a hierarchy of classes
- Therefore, there is a state bias in favour of the dominant class
- Uses power to maintain the class system
Controversies of the state - patriarchal state
- Social power is unequal and concentrated
- Not class but gender
- Therefore, state bias in favour of men
- Some feminists are pluralists
What explains the behaviour of the capitalist and patriarchal state?
- Instrumentalism: the state is made up of business owners or men
- Structuralism: the state is tied to a system of favouring business owners (men)
Controversies of the state - leviathan state
- States have interests of their own
- Society demands expensive state programs
- Politicians make big promises to get elected
- State actors want the state to grow
What should the state do?
- Minimal: just provide essential basic public goods – roads, police, defence
- Developmental: promote national economic development
- Social democratic: redistribute wealth, advance social justice
- Collectivized: exercise total control over the economy
- Totalitarian: use the state to engineer complete social transformation
- Religious: exercise power in the pursuit of spiritual purity
