The Problem of the State 1138613835, 9781138613836

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The Problem of the State

The Problem of the State provides a new perspective on what the social and political sciences can contribute to understandings of the state and the ambivalent place it occupies in our collective affairs. Distinguishing two broad conceptual and methodological approaches to addressing the problem of how to study the state empirically rather than theoretically – the constitutionalist and constructionist positions – the author reviews the grounds and limits of both to reveal their common assumption: that it is up to the social and political sciences to define what the problem of the state is. Building on insights from Marx, Wittgenstein and Ethnomethodology, this book frees the study of the state from the limiting assumptions of common approaches and advocates a return of the problem to its proper environment, in social and political practice. Michael Mair is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences Series Editor Phil Hutchinson, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Engaging with the recent resurgence of interest in methodological and philosophical issues in the human and social sciences, this series provides an outlet for work that demonstrates both the intellectual import of philosophical and methodological debates within the social sciences and their direct relevance to questions of politics, ethics or policy. Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences welcomes work from sociologists, geographers, philosophers, anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists with broad interest across academic disciplines, that scrutinises contemporary perspectives within the human and social sciences and explores their import for today’s social questions. Titles in this series Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory Taking Concepts Seriously By Leonidas Tsilipakos Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality The Legacy of Westermarck Edited by Olli Lagerspetz, with Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson and Camilla Kronqvist The Constitution of Social Practices By Kevin McMillan Action at a Distance Studies in the Practicalities of Executive Management By R.J. Anderson and W.W. Sharrock The Problem of the State Michael Mair For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Philosophy-and-Method-in-the-Social-Sciences/ book-series/ASHSER1373

The Problem of the State

Michael Mair

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Michael Mair The right of Michael Mair to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-61383-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76994-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46433-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

For my father, Colin, and my daughter, Maja.

Contents

Foreword Acknowledgements

viii xviii

1

The problem of the state in the social and political sciences

2

The matter thereof and the artificer – Hobbes, Weber and the constitutionalist approach

18

The government of men and things – Foucault’s radical critique of constitutionalism

29

Problematising the state – historical and ethnographic studies of state practices

49

The limits of problematisation – historical studies and the divorce of discourse from practice

69

Fictions of practice – anthropological accounts and the fabrication of the real

89

3 4 5 6

1

7

The problem of the state beyond constitution and construction

106

8

What we talk about when we talk about the state

125

Bibliography Index

151 167

Foreword

One of the principal points I want to make in the course of the chapters that follow is that when the social and political sciences take up the problem of the state, they are engaging with that problem as a feature of situated social and political practices and rely on methods of understanding which are part of, and so trace from, those practices. While the rest of the book addresses the tangles of issues that empirical investigations into the problem of the state bring to the fore vis-a-vis those situated practices and methods of understanding, this foreword previews the argument; sets out where I argue social and political scientists begin when they set out to study the state – and where I therefore start in studying them; and clarifies where my contribution stands in relation to studies of the state.

A preview of the argument My focus in what follows is the problem of the state within the social and political sciences. For the social and political sciences, the problem is how the state can be studied empirically, rather than theoretically or philosophically, and what its study might conceivably yield. These questions have proven enduringly controversial; attempts to devise systematic approaches to the study of the state have been dogged by recurring disputes and disagreements about what any such enterprise should involve and what it should focus on. These disputes and disagreements often start with empirical questions but, as Peter Winch (1958) noted in relation to the social sciences more broadly, they quickly become conceptual and methodological in character. In unpicking the sets of conceptual and methodological difficulties thrown up by the problem of studying the state, my aim is to offer suggestions as to how that problem might be, not resolved, but reconceived. Starting with Hobbes and Weber, I trace two broad lines of methodological descent from their work on the kind of problem the problem of the state might be, distinguishing ‘constitutionalist’ from ‘constructionist’ approaches. Incorporating a broad swathe of neo-Weberian, neo-Marxist and (critical) structural-functionalist research as well as their historical precursors, the constitutionalists are those whose inquiries begin with a concern for the

Foreword

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‘what’ of the state; the problem of the state for them is first and foremost a problem of identifying and analysing the elements which make it up and so ‘constitute’ its general forms. The methods they employ in their work are designed to reveal the state’s constitutional make up. Incorporating a broad swathe of post-structuralist, interpretive/processual, historical, ethnographic and phenomenological research as well as various precursors, the constructionists, by contrast, are those whose inquiries begin with a concern for the ‘how’ of the state; the problem of the state for them is first and foremost a matter of the ways in which the ‘what’ is variably assembled, put together or ‘constructed’ in practice. The methods they employ are techniques designed to reveal the work of construction in its historically and practically situated specifics. Having introduced both approaches, I turn to their recent fortunes. While constitutionalism was experiencing a revival in the 1970s and 1980s, its methodological coherence was being questioned. Foucault was one of its most prominent critics and, since Foucault’s death, the constructionist approach he helped elaborate has gained considerable ground. Given the importance of his work to contemporary debates on the state within the social and political sciences, I will spell out the bases of Foucault’s radical critique of constitutionalism and then chart two major strands of empirical research within constructionist studies that have followed the paths he laid out; namely, historical studies of governmentality and ethnographic studies of state practices. These two areas of research are connected by a shared commitment to problematising the very idea of the state as an isolatable, standalone ‘thing’ that exists independently of historically and contextually specific forms of social, political and governmental practice. That commitment is operationalised through methodological strategies designed to reveal those (re/constructive) practices and their ‘effects’ (Mitchell 1991, 1999). In light of that discussion, I suggest Foucault’s central conceptual and methodological insights were correct: the reification of the state by the constitutionalists did indeed invite exactly the sort of dereifying challenge Foucault presented to it. However, as we can see when we begin to review constructionist research and the directions it has moved in subsequently, the proposed resolution constructionism offers generates its own difficulties and challenges. Constructionist studies as practised are vulnerable to conceptual and methodological confusions of their own, including a tendency to reify social and political practice via what might be termed methodological literalism in their treatment of evidence – taking texts, objects and practices at face value rather than contextualising their meaning and significance as well. As I argue, the problem is not, therefore, that constructionist studies of the state are too radical but they have not been radical enough, losing the force of Foucault’s central insights by imposing readings of social and political phenomena on them from the outside, against the grain of their own stated intentions. Rather than returning ‘to the phenomena themselves’, a core methodological commitment within constructionist research, such studies, I argue, get caught up in reproducing their own assumptions about what their phenomena must be and be like.

x

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In the final chapters of the book, having reviewed the grounds of the constitutionalist position, the constructionist challenge to it as well as the central issues which attend both, I argue that the problem of the state should not be seen as a matter of deciding whether it is really after all a question of constitutional matters or methods of construction or of settling on one methodological strategy for accessing either. Instead, it should be seen as a matter of investigating the ways in which the what and the how of the state, as well as indeed the who, the when, the where and the why, are made relevant in social and political practices in particular places and circumstances at particular moments in time. This means recognising, critically, that we ought to pay attention to the ways in which members of society themselves methodically draw attention to issues around the constitution and construction of the state, among other things, and, just as importantly, what they are doing by doing things in those ways. In contrast to the competing methodological ‘monocultures’, to adapt James Scott (1998), that seek to establish their own primacy in the social and political sciences, recognising that we learn of socio-political affairs by studying how people variously make sense of and act within them means giving up on the idea that there could be one single route to understanding them. As Garfinkel (1967a: 31) once put it, “Not a method of understanding, but immensely various methods of understanding are … [our] proper and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena.” That is, practical activities and forms of understanding are both the ground of our inquiries as well as their subject matter, enabling us to locate our phenomena in the first place because of the constitutive role they play in producing them. Offering an alternate reading of Marx’s resolutely anti-theoretical analysis of the state in The Eighteenth Brumaire (2006 [1852] to further foreground these issues, I proceed to argue the task of the social and political sciences cannot be to define the problem of the state but to examine how that problem arises and is dealt with practically and politically in any and all of the ways that it is. Questions about the nature of the state should, in short, be returned to their home environments, social and political practices, and studied as they arise from within them. An orientation to the state as a feature of practical social and political lives is the core of the approach I ultimately advocate. That approach might be thought of as akin to a form of descriptive (rather than normative) Machiavellianism in that, like Machiavelli, it eschews the pursuit of systematicity through generalisation, and treats the problem of the state as a matter of describing how it acquires its force in the context of specific practical political situations and the troubles they concretely give rise to.1 The two most serious intellectual challenges in recent times to the theoretically unprincipled, Machiavellian approach to the study of the state I argue for come from the neo-Marxist state theory of Bob Jessop (e.g. 2016) and the empirical philosophy of Bruno Latour (e.g. 2013a) – challenges which I examine and respond to in the final chapter. While otherwise distinct, even opposed in several ways, not least around the possibility of critique, I argue both share a common aim; the desire to build ever more encompassing

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conceptual and methodological ‘meta’-positions for arriving at understandings of social and political phenomena like the state. In response to the meta projects of both, I argue that attempts of these kinds to provide exhaustive frameworks for inquiries into social and political phenomena – which seek to anticipate the questions it is possible to ask about them – risk misunderstanding not just social and political practices but the role of the social and political sciences with respect to them. In contrast to Jessop and Latour, I argue the social and political sciences enjoy no privilege in such matters and are on strongest ground when they seek to explicate the open-ended plurality of ways in which the problem of the state is posed in practice rather than when they adopt a legislative or adjudicative position on how it may be possible to think about those practices. While Jessop and Latour’s projects have many intellectual merits, no one outside the social and political sciences is under any injunction to take their more proscriptive aspects seriously either as accounts of social and political reality or as guides to programmes of action. The meta-methodological positions of Jessop and Latour can at times lay claim to an authority of vision they could not have; it cannot be their job to define the forms the problem could take. This critical reading of their work sets up the statement of the core proposition of the book: the problem of the state is a problem for the social and political sciences insofar as it is a problem for people in particular practical contexts. The task, therefore, is not to arrive at an encompassing view for ourselves as social and political scientists but to study the specific forms in which that problem practically confronts people. Accepting that proposition, I will argue in conclusion, means orienting studies of the state to actual social and political practices as their recognised grounds.

Social science and political practice I will return several times to Max Weber’s attempts to define the problem of the state in subsequent chapters. Before moving into the discussion proper, however, I want to begin with an insight formulated in ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Weber 1946a [1917]). That text may initially seem only tangentially connected to that problem but, as I will show, it is helpful for thinking through where social and political scientists begin when they set out to study the state. It is also helpful, therefore, for understanding where I begin in turning to study them. In laying out the problem he wishes to address in the lecture, Weber (1946a [1917]: 145–146) has the following to say: To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyse political structures and party positions [for example] is another. When speaking in a political meeting about democracy, one does not hide one’s personal standpoint; indeed, to come out clearly and take a stand is one’s damned duty. The words one uses in such a meeting are not means of scientific analysis but means of canvassing votes and winning over others. They are

xii

Foreword not ploughshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought; they are swords against the enemies: such words are weapons … [It] is one thing [therefore] to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, … it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems. (1946a [1917]: 145–146)

This passage is often treated as an expression of the fact/value distinction as it was taken up and elaborated by Weber – and subsequently re-elaborated by a series of his influential interpreters, such as Parsons and Habermas, over the decades to come (du Gay and Ossandón 2018). However, it can also be read in a different way. With Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in mind (e.g., 1953), as well as the work of the ethnomethodologists Harold Garfinkel (1967a) and Harvey Sacks (1992), Weber’s point here might be cast as follows: analysing cultural or political phenomena and working out how to act in a cultural or political community represent “quite heterogeneous” problems because they are connected up with “quite heterogeneous” practices. The different sorts of issues Weber lists here arise as particular kinds of problems in and for particular kinds of practice; that is, he wants to show us that the social and political scientist’s research problems in studying politics are not the same as the problems members of society encounter, for instance, when attempting to effect political change. What is more, in addressing their distinctive problems, social and political scientists and members of society are not doing the same kinds of things; writing a treatise on cultural values, for example, is a very different form of activity to incorporating a take on those values as part of a political platform in a closely fought election campaign or deciding who to vote for at its end. While they may look alike in some respects, offering a description or analysis at a political meeting and offering a description or analysis of the same meeting in the context of socio-political research are differently grounded and oriented activities; activities which are, accordingly, judged and evaluated using not just different but divergent criteria. While there is exchange across their boundaries, Weber’s point is that politics and scholarly activity typically aim at and do different things and are thus best viewed as separate kinds of “enterprise” (Fish 2016: 159). This is not a question of the presence or absence of values. As he makes clear in ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber saw values as intrinsic to the work of the social and political sciences. It was just that those were different from the values he saw as connected to acting as a member of a socio-political community. Values too for Weber are embedded in practices; they take on their specific character only once we’ve entered into a practice, they don’t stand separately from it. The point Weber is making does not need to be seen, therefore, as about building up a distinction between facts and values, as if ‘science’ had facts and everything else ‘values’. Instead, Weber might be better seen as

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advocating a form of methodological demarcationism with respect to problems, practices and their contextual precincts (cf. Tsilipakos 2018: 106). That is, rather than running them together, he is asking us to distinguish between and thus mark out different kinds of problems as they themselves are marked out within different kinds of practice. The methodological point we can take from Weber is that we should treat problems as problems in and for practices and remember, by corollary, that where the practices change, so too does the nature of the relevant problems. With this in mind, one of the things I want to try to disentangle in what follows is the question of exactly whose problem the problem of the state may be said to be (when, under what conditions and in which terms). Philosophers, social theorists and social and political scientists have spent at least 500 years proceeding on the basis that it is at least in part theirs (Skinner 2009; Jessop 2016: 3–7). Indeed, when we start to delve into the voluminous literatures generated within the social and political sciences over just the past 200 or so years, it can sometimes appear as if the problem of the state enjoys a life independently of social and political practice. Social and political practices may change but the problem of the state intellectually endures and social and political scientists can, so the argument goes, contribute to the systematic pursuit of knowledge about its enduring transhistorical and trans-situational features by working outwards from the contextual specifics. If we accept Weber’s starting point as set out above, however, loosening the analytical connection with the practices of members of social and political communities and the socio-political problems that arise for them in the course of their lives and projects is methodologically and conceptually fraught. More particularly, it has led social and political scientists to confuse what they are studying with the problems they encounter in trying to study it. That is, social and political scientists have all too often been led to confuse a ‘second order’ intellectual problem – how to study the state as a feature of social and political affairs – with the ‘first order’ problems those affairs pose members of social and political communities with as they engage with them first-hand (Schütz 1962). Conceptual and methodological problems generated within the social and political sciences are thus being projected onto social and political worlds. The result, I will argue, is that existing studies not only fail to understand those worlds, they also fail to understand where they stand in relation to them (Winch 1997). Among other things, existing studies frequently fail to grasp the occasioned rather than timeless character of practical political interest in the state. The nature of the state in Britain, for instance, became a particular kind of problem at the start of the twenty-first century in the context of, for instance, a long fought for and fought over referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016 and the subsequent fallout. But that is very different from the sort of problem the British state posed in the context of post-World War II rebuilding, decolonisation and the Cold War, just as it is different from the sort of problem the French state (or the German state or the Indian state, and so on) posed in

xiv Foreword similar circumstances. The huge diversity of ways in which public/private and state/market distinctions become matters of concern, in Latour’s terms (2004), in different societies at different moments in time raises similar issues. The relations between the state and market, public and private in contemporary China, to take one example, pose particular social, political, economic and environmental issues for the Chinese people and their government but, in the context of world trade and geopolitics, they also pose issues for other countries too, just not in the same terms (see, e.g., Schue and Thornton 2017). The relations between the state and market, public and private in the United States, to take another, pose a different set of issues again, both domestically and internationally (see, e.g., Mettler 2011). The emergence of political unrest, new forms of armed conflict, global financial crises and the re-emergence of infectious pandemic diseases, such as the corona viruses and most notably that leading to COVID-19 among them, since the 2000s have further complicated and amplified the difficulties of our situations, posing problems of the state anew across the world. In conditions such as these, even cursory attempts to understand the issues would turn up situated social and political engagements with and inquiries into what the state is or should be and what it does or should do from within the societies in question (and, indeed, across them). We would learn from those engagements and inquiries what it means to talk of the state or treat it as a problem in those contexts (cf. Tsilipakos 2020: 306–308). Attempts to identify, define or call into question the role of the state in practice are part and parcel of – and invariably hotly disputed within – social and political practices themselves. Because they are live issues, questions of state, when they do arise, are also continually posed anew, in circumstantially different ways. The mistake social and political scientists have made is making it their task to come up with general analyses that attempt to say something about what Marx (1975 [1845]) called the “this-sided” character of questions of state, i.e., their contingent specificities, while abstracting away from their ‘thissidedness’. Whether cast as an attempt to define essential features of states themselves or what anyone, anywhere, anytime might be talking of in talking of the state, research which proceeds in that way disembeds the problem of the state from the very situations in which it acquires its concrete significance, “losing the phenomenon” in Harold Garfinkel’s terms (2002: 265–266). Controversially perhaps, accepting this line of argument would suggest we should also accept that to properly explore problems of the state within social and political practices, we should give up on the idea that it is the role of social and political scientists to settle anything in this area themselves. As James Tully has noted (2002, 2008), it cannot be the researcher’s task to propose the correct way of thinking about such questions – as if we found ourselves, as social and political researchers, in possession of a methodological master key that can reliably unlock them. This would assume social and political scientists occupy a vantage point outside those practices and, because of this, are capable of arriving at insights that those who operate within those practices cannot

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(because they are ‘too involved’ to see things clearly) (cf. Celikates 2018). Yet such vantage points are illusory, particularly when it comes to politics, and nothing a researcher can say on the basis of empirical research can compel active participants to accept their accounts as authoritative or final, particularly where those second-order accounts clash with first-order views and understandings. Indeed, where social scientists do advance views on how political matters should be viewed, we have no reason whatsoever for preferring their answers to any of the others we might be presented with.2 The widespread character of the opposite view betrays a profound misunderstanding of the phenomena we seek to understand. The problem of the state in social and political practice is endlessly revisable, revisitable and contestable within social and political practice (cf. Arendt 1958). What it means to engage with it is something the parties involved in such disputes and conflicts settle for their own practical purposes in the course of those disputes and conflicts. Academic authority cannot bring closure to those disputes and conflicts as it is not within the remit of social and political scientists to foreclose them. In their attempts to define how problems of the state ought to be seen, social and political scientists fail to recognise that central to the practices they are attempting to focus on is the ability to reject others’ claims to authoritative ways of seeing. While the problem of the state can no doubt sometimes be seen as researchers suggest, it does not have to be – the ‘ought’ in this context carries no force, as Weber’s remarks above should remind us. If this diagnosis is correct, a key question becomes how we might stop attempts to study the problem of the state from drifting free from the social and political practices that give that problem its form. This can only be done, I will argue, when we abandon attempts to systematise ‘the problem of the state’ and fix it in place because to make any such attempt is already to have got things wrong (cf. Skinner 2002, 2008a; Bevir and Rhodes 2010; Jessop 2016). Giving up preconceived ideas as to what the problem of the state ultimately is (such as would be supplied by a trans-contextual, transhistorical theory or philosophy of the state) forces us to remain alive to the situational complexities and vicissitudes of actually occurring social and political practices (cf. Tully 2002, 2008). Developing this analysis, I will argue that the best way of addressing the problem of the state is thus to keep our intellectual horizons open and treat seriously the practical affairs we are seeking to make sense of as phenomena in their own right.

Where this contribution stands Against the background provided above, my aim in this book is to explore in depth the issues I’ve provisionally sketched here as part of rethinking or, better, ‘respecifying’ (Garfinkel 2002) the problem of the state. In order to get to that point, I will mark out the ways in which that problem is handled within the methodological practices of the social and political sciences and ask how those practices engage with the state as a feature of social and

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political affairs. My study is, therefore, a resolutely third-order, ‘critical’ investigation – a study of the study of the state – that interrogates the assumptions and forms of understanding which characterise the work of social and political scientists when they set off to study the state empirically. What are social and political scientists doing when they study the state? How do they go about making the state researchable? What methods are involved? Might there be alternative ways of proceeding or of conceiving their results? These questions are examined extensively in the chapters to come via particular examples drawn from studies of the state in various disciplines. The ground I will traverse in pursuing answers is not itself new: the work of Max Weber and its relationship to Hobbes’ Leviathan; the call to ‘bring the state back in’ to the social and political sciences of the 1980s; Foucault and Foucauldian critiques of state theory; studies of governmentality and the ethnography of the state; Marx’s account of the political bases of state power; as well as the differently synthetic approaches of Bob Jessop and Bruno Latour to the study of social and political phenomena including the state. However, in interrogating the conceptual and methodological grounds of the constitutionalist and constructionist positions, I want to offer an “alternate” to other treatments (Garfinkel 2002: 103). In tracing how the state as it comes to matter in social and political practice is made methodologically available through our research practices, my aim is to dissolve the putative opposition between constitution and construction – or suggest it is just one opposition among others that at different times can be circumstantially relevant and useful to draw for specific purposes – and offer a series of reminders for social and political studies of the state about the ‘socio-logical’ (Coulter 1989) grounds of their inquiries. The practice-oriented or praxiological3 conception I argue for throughout, inspired by Wittgensteinian philosophy and ethnomethodology, represents a different kind of contribution to debates on how the social and political sciences should best study the state that builds on initial work in that direction (cf. Bevir and Rhodes 2010). In terms of my subject matter and the studies I have chosen to focus my attention on, I want to underline that they are worth critically discussing precisely because they do provide us with valuable insights. One of the benefits of reading studies of the state is exposure to highly compelling, intellectually creative research. I would suggest my arguments should, therefore, be read alongside that research, particularly that of Bob Jessop (e.g., 2016). Over four decades, Jessop has emerged as arguably the world’s foremost authority on the problem of the state in the social and political sciences, creating a theoretical framework that began as a refinement of Poulantzas’ core thesis on the relative autonomy of the state under capitalism but which has grown to incorporate aspects of regulation theory, the work of Foucault, semiotics and notions of autopoiesis drawn from Luhmann to produce a neo-Marxist ‘strategic-relational’ conception of the state. Jessop’s work is worth reading for many reasons, not least its depth of scholarship and knowledge of the field of research to which this book is also addressed.

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So too, albeit on different grounds, is the work of Bruno Latour. As Jessop’s work has become ever more expansive, incorporating more and more elements from seemingly opposed areas of thought in his modified Marxist account, Jessop himself has commented on growing similarities between his work and that of Latour and Actor-Network Theory. Like Jessop, Latour has also been expanding the scope of his theoretical position to make it more encompassing. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013a) is the latest expression of the direction the later Latour has been moving in, setting out Latour’s current thinking on how problems like the problem of the state ought to be entirely reconceived, or “recomposed” as he has it, in ontological terms if we are to grasp them properly. While he does not take up the problem of the state per se in that work, he does deal directly with issues of law, ethics, economics and social and political practice that are typically regarded as constitutive aspects of its fields of activity and its practical political, legal and territorial authority. In Latour’s work, the move to link the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ of problems like the state through an examination of modes of existence, that is, practices and arrangements for composing and distributing the beings of our social and political worlds, is an interesting one. However, while that is the case, one of the points I will make in response, as in relation to Jessop, is that it is not possible to fully specify all the possible ways that it might be necessary to conceive the problem of the state and its composition from ontological first principles. Indeed, I will seek to show that we do not need to read the problem of the state ontologically at all as that is, once again, to confuse practical political problems with abstract philosophical ones. In taking issue with aspects of the work of both Jessop and Latour, two figures from which contemporary studies of the state and social and political practice frequently take their lead, my aim is not to disregard their achievements but to point to ways in which their work serves to pose questions which can help us further clarify the problems we grapple with when we set out to study the state. My hope is that this book is a contribution to achieving that clarity.

Notes 1 A line of inquiry that has affinities with the work of a diverse range of conservative as well as left thinkers, from Michael Oakeshott (e.g., 1962) and Maurice Cowling (e.g., 1963) to Antonio Gramsci (1971), Chantal Mouffe (e.g., 2013) and James Tully (e.g., 2008). 2 Of course, social and political scientists may insist they understand such matters better because they study them so closely, just as a mechanic can claim to understand a car engine better than the customer who drops it off for repairs. However, such analogies are strained, as I will go on to show, because everyday, practical methods of understanding are constitutive of the reality of the state and give life to it as a feature of our social and political worlds. What it means to understand the state, for this reason, is a practically and contextually determined matter which social and political scientists must grapple with in its own terms and not a matter of coming to terms with a stand-alone set of institutional and policy arrangements. 3 Following Coulter (1989: 52), I’m taking ‘praxiological’ to mean: “related to courses of practical … action, whether such action be primarily communicative or instrumental, interactional or object-involving”.

Acknowledgements

This book is indebted to many people. First, my late father, Colin, who talked with me about these and other issues across my adult life and was always willing to test and challenge what I had to say, pushing me to set out as persuasively as I could the positions I argue for here. Second, my long-term colleague, Ciara Kierans, who encouraged me, as a young research assistant, to return to my studies and work towards a PhD on the research that forms the book’s basis and who has discussed the arguments which underpin it with me for more than a decade. By introducing me to new ethnographic work in anthropology and phenomenology, alongside her support more generally, Ciara has helped me widen my intellectual field of vision and get to the point where I could present the research in this book. Third, my PhD supervisor and mentor, Wes Sharrock at the University of Manchester, who introduced me to serious engagement with Wittgensteinian philosophy, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and who continues to inspire people like my peers and I through the weekly reading group sessions he has run since the 1970s. There’s no one quite like Wes and those of us who have been lucky enough to work with him are extremely grateful for that. Insofar as I’m an ethnomethodologist now, Wes is to blame. Fourth, there is the incredible group of colleagues and collaborators I have had the fortune and pleasure of working with as a result of my PhD studies at Manchester. There are too many to name in full but Patrick Watson, Leonidas Tsilipakos, Chris Elsey, Paul Smith, Christian Greiffenhagen, Philippe Sormani, Alex Dennis, Neil Jenkings, Phil Hutchinson and the late David Martin deserve special mention for hearing me out on these and related subjects so often. Their patience and insights have been greatly appreciated. Fifth, I’d like to thank my colleagues at Liverpool, Nicole Vitellone, Paul Jones, Andrew Kirton, Roy Coleman and David Whyte, who have debated and discussed the problem of the state with me many times and have helped me bring new perspectives to bear on that problem. It’s wonderful working with them and I’ve learned a huge amount from them. I’d also like to thank the students who have taken my Politics, Society and the State course over the past few years and whose difficult questions have forced me to be as clear as I can when discussing the problem of the state – an education in itself. Sixth, a number of close friends have

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played a crucial role in seeing me through to this point, in encouraging me and in showing an interest when they did not have to: John-Paul O’Rourke, Daniel Gorevan, Leo Brito-Jeronymo and Scott and Najma Finlay especially. The same is true of my mother, Fiona, her husband, Euan, and my sisters, Kirstin, Eileen and Thea. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my partner, Anke, for all the love she has shown me along the way, with the arrival of our daughter, Maja, helping me see the book through to its finish.

1

The problem of the state in the social and political sciences

In this chapter I set out a broad characterisation of the argument of the book as a whole and a guide to the chapters that follow. I introduce the constitutionalist and constructionist approaches in turn, setting out the broad bases from which they proceed with reference to an example drawn from the work of artist and novelist Alasdair Gray. I then offer initial indications of the limitations of both positions as well as of the core argument of the book: that the problem of the state should be treated as a problem for the social and political sciences by investigating the ways in which it is treated as a problem in and for social and political practice. I will argue that recognising this enables us to move beyond the impasses that have characterised studies of the state certainly for the last 50 years if not much of the century before. Studies of the state have traditionally begun by asking who and what make up the state – the constitutionalist perspective – but have come to ask, more recently, how states come to be made up in the ways that they are – the constructionist perspective. However, while asking who, what and how can be useful, we also need to ask where, when, under what conditions and for whom these questions arise in the context of social and political practices.

Introduction The state is a central – indeed perhaps even historically constitutive – topic of the social and political sciences.1 Although states have never been the sole locus of decision-making or executive authority within societies, where they have existed at all, even in archaic forms,2 they have been among the most important. For good or ill, contemporary states – relatively large-scale, far-reaching and extensive, more or less centralised, predominantly bureaucratic structures with an instrumental-legal-regulatory focus that are typically well equipped, staffed and resourced when compared with most other corporate bodies, national or otherwise and have their own distinctive means of financing, accounting for and differentiating their activities as well as enforcing the order they seek to establish within and beyond particular territories – remain at the centre of collective social and political affairs. Recent world events, from war and military invasion in the Middle East through to the financial crises and

2

The problem of the state

their still unfolding consequences as well as the re-emergence of pandemic disease, have served to underline the continued significance of the state to contemporary social, economic and political life. The state is not just one of the primary administrative engines of contemporary society – something which alone would grant it a special status – it also actively intervenes in the social, economic and (bio)political order, working to shape and reshape it in various ways. As a result of the (often very) different paths taken and decisions made in order to fulfil this double remit, the daily business of social actors has become so intricately interwoven with the daily business and workings of the state, at so many levels and to such great depth, that it is not difficult to see why, in broad terms, Max Weber might have chosen to identify the state as one of the main institutional pillars of contemporary societies. Even where the state is not directly itself in view, it is an integral part of the backdrop against which social life is framed and gets played out. It seems entirely clear, then, why the social and political sciences would want to treat the state as one of their primary concerns (cf. Jessop 2016: 1). Even when they have tried to do away with the concept, the entanglement of the state in social, political and economic affairs remains the place where they have had to begin.3 While the idea that states are important, and in a variety of ways, is unobjectionable, precisely because it represents a commonplace, it is also uninformative: it does not say very much about what it means to talk about the state as part of social and political life. The problem is, however, that when social and political scientists have tried to move beyond the level of general observation, beyond “common-sense knowledge of social structures” as Harold Garfinkel has put it (1967a: 76), they have encountered a thicket of conceptual, methodological and analytical difficulties (cf. Jessop 2016: 15–20). As a consequence, the problem of the state in the social and political sciences – that is, the problem of how to investigate the state – has proven, to the consternation of many, to be an obdurate one. The social and political scientists who have attempted to take up the challenge of finding empirical answers to what had long been seen as philosophical questions concerning the nature of the state and its relationship to society4 continue to grapple with its many sides, offering competing, often mutually exclusive accounts of the problem’s fundamental characteristics. Different interpretations of the problem have given rise to different types of attempted solution, and the broad purpose of this book is to survey some of the main variants from a methodological perspective and to suggest an alternate approach to the sets of topics to which they are addressed. As I will argue, many aspects of the problem of the state as it has been taken up in the social and political sciences are predicated on methodological confusions. Once we recognise much of the problem is misbegotten and cease to look for resolutions to problems primarily of our own making, we can proceed to more fruitful engagement with the problem of the state, treating it not as an intellectual problem amenable to intellectual resolutions but a problem in and for social and political practices only ‘resolvable’ within them. However, before I can reach the point where I can present that case fully, some preliminary groundwork is required and the rest of this chapter is designed to provide it.

The problem of the state

3

A fictional example In the highly influential essay, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, Charles Tilly sets out a neat synoptic account of what the rise of the modern European state involved: In an idealized sequence [state-making across Europe occurred as follows]; a great lord made war so effectively as to become dominant in a substantial territory, but that war-making led to [the need for the] increased extraction of the means of war – men, arms, food, lodging, transportation, supplies, and/or the money to buy them – from the population within that territory. The building up of war-making capacity likewise increased the capacity to extract. The very activity of extraction, if successful, entailed the elimination, neutralization, or cooptation of the great lord’s local rivals; thus, it led to state-making. As a by-product, it created organization in the form of tax-collection agencies, police forces, courts, exchequers, account keepers; thus it again led to state-making. To a lesser extent, warmaking likewise led to state-making through the expansion of military organization itself, as a standing army, war industries, supporting bureaucracies, and (rather later) schools grew up within the state apparatus. All of these structures checked potential rivals and opponents. In the course of making war, extracting resources, and building up the state apparatus, the managers of states formed alliances with specific social classes. The members of those classes loaned resources, provided technical services, or helped ensure the compliance of the rest of the population, all in return for a measure of protection against their own rivals and enemies. As a result of these multiple strategic choices, a distinctive state apparatus grew up within each major section of Europe. (1985: 183) Many roads converge on the state. These visions of the state are not confined to sociology, however, as the passage that follows, a modern allegory which charts the rise of a fictional state power, demonstrates. Conquest is not a difficult thing – most countries have a spell of it – but … [territory] is only kept by careful organization and we were good at that. We taxed the defeated people with the help of their traditional rulers, who wielded more power with our support than they could without, but … [our domain] was mainly held by our talent for large-scale building. Captains in the army were all practical architects, and private soldiers dug ditches and built walls as they attacked the enemy under a good commander. The garrisons on foreign soil were built with stores and markets where local merchants and craftsmen could ply their trades in safety, so they became centres of prosperous new cities. But our most important buildings were roads. All garrison towns and forts were connected by well-founded roads

4

The problem of the state going straight across marsh and river by dyke and viaduct to the capital city. In two centuries these roads, radiating like spokes from a hub, were on the way to embracing the [whole of the lands we had claimed] … It was then that we started calling … [our domain] the great wheel … This rhetorical model became very popular. (Gray 1983: 68–69)

While Tilly’s account repays attention, this allegory does just as well for my purposes here. Like Tilly’s tour of the history of state formation in Europe, it too provides a useful initial way into some of the principal problematics which inform empirical studies of the state within the social and political sciences and which provide the main subject matter for my investigation as a study of the study of the state. It describes the consolidation of that state by telling us something about the way in which the process of consolidation was organisationally underwritten. In the passage, the narrator, like Tilly, sets a scene, linking together a series of developments in order to recount a history – the emergence of systems of taxation, rule, rulers and ruled, territory, command, armies, politics, cities, trade, war-making, peacekeeping and new uses of land and infrastructure – all of which are central themes within the theoretical and research literatures on the state. We have few difficulties understanding that the different developments that the narrator tells us about are part of the same process, and we have few problems with the idea that they are part of the same process because they relate to the same thing; namely, the fictional state whose history is being narrated. The synopsis provides us with a picture of this emerging power and that picture in turn helps to anchor the narrative, allowing us to follow the chain of events the narrator is telling us about, something we see too in the Tilly passage. The questions that have interested social and political scientists in relation to material of this sort include: What enables us to make sense of a story of this kind? What are we picturing when we picture this or any other state, fictional or not? What in effect are these pictures of ? What do these pictures have in common? In order to answer these and related questions, social and political scientists have tended to strike out in well-defined methodological directions. Two paths, two ways of approaching the empirical study of the state, in particular stand out. One way of addressing the question – and perhaps the dominant approach in social and political research for most of the last century, although its dominance has waned considerably – has been to concentrate, at least in the first instance, on who and what states are composed of. Adopting this ‘constitutionalist’ line of reasoning, as I shall term it, states are to be treated as complex organisational structures made up of a diverse range of human and institutional components built up and arranged in various ways. Beginning with the ‘great’ functional characteristics of the state (such as the historically long-emerging capacity to levy and collect taxes and administer a realm), the

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methodological strategy constitutionalists employ is to work outwards to the institutional arrangements or architectures these functions are ‘housed’ within (with respect to taxation, for instance, the various branches of a government’s finance and revenue collection ministries and agencies) and the personnel who carry out those functions (from, for example, tax collectors and adjustors up to finance ministers and other high-ranking functionaries, comprising those who are responsible for administering the tax regime, as well as the legal and military forces in place to ensure that taxes can be collected in the event of local opposition). This methodological approach, with its emphasis on structures and their functional integration, treats what is being referred to in references to the state as a question of the different configurations of components shared by all states, an account of which allows us to identify a particular entity as a state (or not, as the case may be). Thus, when read in the light of this constitutionalist ‘building-block’ view, the descriptions we are given in the passage above rely on an implicit model that underpins and gives meaning to references to the state in any context. On the basis of this model, ‘the state’ might be defined as that set of institutions capable of generating, administering and managing the finances and human resources needed (among other things) to recruit, train and deploy an army, and to plan, build, supply and maintain the garrisons, the stores, the markets, the outlying cities, the roads, the ditches, the viaducts and the dykes which together, the narrator tells us, cemented centralised rule over this fictional land. When setting out to study actual states, as in Tilly’s work, the real equivalents of Gray’s fictional narrative – of the kind Tilly worked with as part of his long-term historical sociological research – provide the data with which social and political scientists can begin to build up synoptic analyses of the organisational composites they provide access to. Those synoptic analyses comprise – ideally exhaustive – lists or catalogues of the constituent parts of the state and the various functions they allow their agents and agencies to perform. When formulated in ideal-typical terms, these classificatory schemas furnish a general theoretical and explanatory model. That model is explanatory in the sense that it defines what needs to be in place for states to exist. In other words, where states do exist, it is because the right constituent elements are in place. Where they do not exist or where they collapse, it is because those elements are not in place or have ceased to be. Studies of particular states or groups of states contribute to the ongoing development of the theoretical model, and that developing model can be used to identify and evaluate further examples. The model can also be used to generate new typologies and allow the researcher to explain the differences between, for instance, strong states and weak states, free market states and social market states, new states and old states. These in turn enable the researcher to refine the central category of the state by examining structural continuities across all its variations. It is a strategy which has a number of obvious virtues, not least clarity.

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The problem of the state

A second major way of approaching these questions, which has come to the fore in social and political studies of the state over the last 50 or so years but has always had some place within them, is founded on a critique of the first. This is a body of, broadly-speaking, practice-focused or ‘constructionist’ research; i.e., research which eschews constitutionalism’s synoptic approach and its pre-established frameworks of explanation in favour of empirical explorations of the situated work of elaboration, building or construction of social, cultural, political and economic phenomena from ‘within’. In it, the suggestion that social and political scientists could arrive at a solution to the problem of the state by formulating it as a matter of investigating structures and functions alone is treated as a misleading oversimplification. Theorists and researchers who adopt the constructionist approach accept that states are indeed complex organisational structures made up of a diverse range of human and institutional components, but, crucially, they stress that questions about the constitution of states are by no means ultimate or exhaustive (nor could they be). In casting the question as ultimately a problem about the materials that go into the machinery and mechanisms of state, as well as the character of the personnel who operate them, constructionists argue that constitutionalists have had to treat important questions, such as what the machinery and mechanisms were designed to do, how the operators get them to work in practice and what they understand themselves to be doing in the process, as essentially secondary and derivative.5 As will be discussed, this reduction of the problem, a reduction to questions of architectures and (infra)structures, has been shown to generate a number of serious conceptual and methodological difficulties. Stated baldly, it is difficult to isolate descriptions of the organisational characteristics of states without abstracting away from, and thus losing sight of, important features of the ways in which states work. If states are constituted in particular ways, in what ways do they come to be so constituted? Without an understanding of the latter, the former is, in important ways, obscured. Rather than trying to correct for these difficulties within the parameters of the constitutionalist approach, those who adopt the constructionist approach suggest that we should look at the plurality of ways in which those structures come to be embedded within the sets of historically, socially and culturally localised practices in and through which state forms are configured and reconfigured in ongoing ways. Where the constitutionalist approach locates the orderly character of state forms in their human and organisational components, the constructionist locates their orderly character in the practices through which various agents and agencies bring order and organisation to the state by establishing structural arrangements in which different components and personnel find a place. The insight which guides the constructionist approach is, in crude terms, that it is not enough to ask who and what states are made of, we must also ask how states come to be made as they are. How are they organised? How are they maintained? How are they governed? How are they administered? How

The problem of the state

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are they managed? How do they operate? How do different systems of belief and bodies of knowledge feed into and shape those activities, making them possible? In answering these questions, constructionist studies have pointed to such things as epochal shifts in patterns of decision-making and modes of governing or governance,6 the political rationalities that inform these historically specific patterns and modes of exercising authority, the “problematics of government” (Rose and Miller 1992, 2013) those exercises are directed towards, and the configuration of endless varieties of technical instruments and apparatuses designed to systematically enable different groups of agents and agencies to practise that authority in the real-world situations they have been tasked with managing. Phrasing this with reference to the passage quoted above, whereas those who adopt the constitutionalist approach put the stress on the human and physical infrastructure the narrator depicts as central to our capacity to make sense of this fictional state, those who adopt the constructionist approach would emphasise the techniques, rationalities and strategies of government the narrator allows us to see as embodied within that infrastructure, thereby treating understandings of the state in praxiological terms rather than as derived from a sense of the particular arrangement of structures that compose states at different moments in time or in different places (often itself difficult to pin down). To invoke ‘the state’, in other words, is not to invoke a thing for the constructionists, but to make use of a conceptual shorthand for a whole series of more or less interconnected ways of doing (and framing the doing of) ‘stately’ or governmental things, including writing and rewriting boundaries which define the state’s relation to, for example, ‘civil society’ or ‘the economy’, themselves both products of that activity. In a passage I shall return to, Foucault, a central figure in the emergence of the constructionist approach, puts things particularly clearly: One governs things. But what does this mean? I do not think this is a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things … [an] imbrication of men and things … What counts essentially is this complex of men and things; property and territory are merely one of its variables … [So with] government it is a question not of imposing laws on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved. (Foucault 1991a: 93–94) Conceiving of states in these terms involves a major shift in methodological footing and hence a shift in the interpretation of the kind of problem that the problem of the state might be. On this reading, if a solution of the problem of the state is to be had at all, it will not be had by investigating the structurefunctional properties of some putatively independent entity that exists apart

8

The problem of the state

from social, cultural, political and economic practices and acts on them from the outside. Instead it will be found by investigating the proliferation of new forms of “careful organisation”, administrative, managerial and governmental practices, the emergence and transmission of the sort of instruction and training the narrator refers us to in the above (not just the drilling of the troops, but the schooling of their commanders to handle war and peacetime operations and all that relies upon), as well as the bodies of knowledge, expertise or, indeed, stories invoked to direct state activity by supplying it with a rationale and purpose. When talking of the state, we are talking precisely of the ways in which these diverse sorts of practices and processes, sites and settings are harnessed, linked together and put to work, and the object of research should be to map out how this is achieved in actual cases. Many of these practices, processes, sites and settings are to be found outside the formal state apparatus as classically defined (in, e.g., the family, the ‘community’, the firm, the human and behavioural sciences, certain powerful ‘objects’ and technologies, and so on, rather than ‘the corridors of power’ narrowly conceived). As a consequence, much of the theory and research in this area touches on a much wider range of analytical concerns than previous work. By tracking the ‘viral’ emergence and consolidation of the fields of activity which shape how a society is governed back to the multiple settings in which they took form and were ‘encoded’ in and by certain configurations of actors and practices, students of the state need to cover more terrain than that surveyed by those who adopt the constitutionalist approach; their problematisation of the state, their way of rendering it studyable, extends much further than an examination of constitutional matters alone. In conducting investigations of this sort, however, researchers work with much the same forms of evidence as those who adopt the constitutionalist approach just according them a different weight. Rather than treat the real equivalents of Gray’s narrator’s story as the surface expressions of an underlying conceptual model of the state as the constitutionalists do, for instance, constructionists take narratives as ordering devices in their own right, ones which deploy their own standards and embody certain beliefs and ways of thinking about social and political realities for the purpose of acting (and evaluating action) upon them. That accounts are not neutral descriptive resources (discursive representations that allow the researcher to accurately recover the internal organisation of states imprinted in them) but function as what the narrator terms “rhetorical” models (models that mobilise familiar “master narratives”7 of the state for particular ends) is what is of analytical interest.8 Rather than trying to build an explanatory framework, the emphasis in such work is on description, including descriptions of the role played by explanations (but also by justifications, disputes, critiques, and so on) in and across the sites and settings where the work of making and maintaining the state is conducted. This treatment of description, narrative and modelling as part of practice paves the way for historical and ethnographic investigations

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of the wider domains of political and governmental activity they form part of and acquire meaning within. There can be little dispute that both the constitutionalist and constructionist approaches have generated important insights into the problem of the state, new ways of thinking about a range of topics within the social and political sciences. That said, there can also be little dispute that the constructionists move beyond many of the problems constitutionalism poses and, as a result, have produced a great deal of innovative scholarship across a variety of disciplines, examples of which I will touch on at length in the course of this book. Just as it is reasonable to allow that states are complex organisational structures made up of a diverse range of human and institutional components, the argument here is that it is also reasonable to concede that those structures have been shaped by the development of new ways of thinking about government and the complex patterns of social action and interaction those forms of thought are embedded within. The claim that, in order to understand the state, social and political studies should pay close attention to all that goes into their making, including how ideas of the state gain whatever coherence they possess by being woven into the fabric of everyday affairs,9 is a persuasive one. States do not stand alone: they are features of social and political worlds. When we lose sight of this, something important about the state is missed. At the same time, however, it is important to be as cautious about the claim that this is all that could or might need to be said about the state. It is easy to overlook the important point that governmental practices do not stand alone either but are bound up with an open-ended range of practical considerations – they spread outwards and are tied into many aspects of social and political life, both the ordinary and extraordinary. Those who adopt the constructionist approach sometimes have a tendency to proceed as if governmental practices are freestanding and thus can be reconstituted solely on the basis of whatever materials they, as researchers, might happen to be working with. Part of the argument to be developed in the chapters that follow is that this represents a danger and that the logic of the approach has been pushed too far whenever vernacular accounting, ordering and modelling practices – the point at which many of the studies within the constructionist tradition begin and end – are treated in isolation from other practices rather than being seen as interwoven with them and thus vernacularly accountable as a result. At the extreme, constructionist analyses can divorce their phenomena of study from the aspects of social and political affairs which drew the researcher to them in the first place, reifying those practices in the process. What we miss here is what anyone might be doing in talking of the state in the ways that they do and how that is assessed and made sense of by those around them. That is, we miss the point that the accounts social and political researchers treat as their materials themselves do different types of work in the contexts within which they are advanced. To assume an equivalence between vernacular and professional accounts is to generalise the investigators’ perspective and pretend that members of society can be treated as if they were

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The problem of the state

proxy social and political scientists when their practical projects diverge from the investigators’ in all manner of typically uninvestigated ways. Unless we grasp the practical relevance of accounts as part and parcel of the very thing we are setting out to investigate, we are likely to misconstrue the practices in question. Unfortunately, few have been alive to this problem (although Bevir and Rhodes (2010), Jessop (2016) and Celikates (2018) do much to open it up). Those who adopt the constitutionalist approach put too heavy an emphasis on the idea that vernacular accounts are ‘really’ (because they depend on or presuppose) representations of state structures (cf. Garfinkel 1967a: 11–18). At the same time, too much emphasis can be put on the idea that vernacular accounts ‘really’ bear the imprint of (because they depend on or presuppose) the practices of rule or ways of thinking which a researcher tells us inform them. The problematic relationship between what is said and what is done, between ways of thinking about and ‘representing’ the state and the organisation of states and state activity, cannot be resolved in a methodologically satisfactory manner by reducing one side of the equation to the other. Collapsing the distinction certainly simplifies the investigative task at hand, but at the cost of denying much of what made the problem important from a social and political perspective in the first place, i.e., its practical importance to people as part of social and political affairs. By way of a crude but perhaps usefully direct summary – and at the risk of giving rise to the misleading impression that they represent two contained, mutually exclusive and easily delineable positions when in fact there are many points of intersection and divergence between the lines of argumentation they advance – it is possible to frame the methodological differences between the positions discussed so far in terms of a dispute between the followers of Weber and Foucault – two of the main protagonists, or claimed protagonists, in this debate – on the role of ideal-types in addressing the problem of the state. The neo-Weberian constitutionalist position,10 often implicit and unstated, is that social and political scientists cannot hope to analytically capture the state without using ideal-typical constructs; the Foucauldian constructionist position is that social and political scientists cannot hope to capture it with them. This is because, for the constructionists, to do so is just to ‘buy into’ representations of the state whose construction, in the course of situated forms of governmental activity, has been guided by particular practices and rationalities of rule. For this reason, ideal-types have themselves to be seen as technologies of government, discursive devices whose deployment enables state actors to exert influence upon and shape the societies in which they intervene, successfully or not, and which they constitute in particular ways through that activity. The problem is, however, that, just as the constitutionalist use of the ideal-type tends to reduce the state to institutional structures by making the practice of governing disappear, the constructionist rejection of ideal-types has also tended to result in a certain form of reductionism, by making what is involved in the work of representing, and crucially its vernacular evaluation, disappear, with the differences between the accounts

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of the state offered in scholarly works, fiction, parliamentary debate or legal rulings, to take just a handful of examples, dropping from view. Neither outcome is particularly desirable. It is possible to avoid the dangers of both forms of methodological reductionism and the reifications they involve, and to examine the interconnections between the who, what and how of states, but it once again requires a shift of analytical focus. In order to see what this shift involves, it is useful to look back at the constitutionalist and constructionist approaches to examine the similarities they share alongside their differences. When the logic of these approaches is laid out, there is a discernible commonality between them: they both turn on modelling exercises, albeit sophisticated ones. The constitutionalist approach involves exercises in modelling state structures while the constructionist one investigates how the variegated discursive formations and systems of belief and activity implicated in the making of those structures come to be modelled. Although the first approach is based on the belief that models constitute a solution to the problem of the state and the second points to the profusion of models as a demonstration that no single solution could exist, both are predicated on the assumption that models of the state should be our proper methodological focus. As a consequence, both attempt to use the models they identify to define what can and cannot meaningfully be said to be true of the state, to demarcate the limits of the concept by stating what the state is and what it is not – the first, once and for all, the second, at particular moments in time in particular contexts. While the constructionist approach also makes some concessions to the primacy of social, political and governmental practice, it nonetheless remains for the researcher to recover ‘hidden’ aspects of the modelling exercises in question from what people say and do that is unavailable to them (cf. Bevir and Rhodes 2010). The professional researcher thus claims an authoritative perspective vis-à-vis what is being studied, the last word remains theirs. The argument I will advance is that the problems they encounter in getting such operationalisations to stick – problems that will be examined in the later chapters of this book – have their origin in this approach to formulating ‘the’ problem. My aim is to “push the question marks deeper” (Wittgenstein 1970: 62) and explore the way in which such approaches move from orientations to the state as an internal, practical feature of social and political affairs to an external analytical orientation to the same. When we do that, I will argue, we come to see that it is only by generalising from the particular problems specific members of society encounter in actual situations and the methods of inquiry they themselves use to resolve them, by methodologically fixing the problem in place, that we could come to see models (global and enduring or local and changing) as solutions to the problem of the state. My counter proposal, borrowing from Wittgenstein, is that rather than operate on the assumption that we are working on a general problem, we should take seriously the idea that it is a problem which acquires its urgency

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The problem of the state

in connection to many different aspects of our social and political practices. There is no single property those engagements share in common, nor do we need to assume such a property exists (or that we need to account for it) to talk intelligibly of or refer to the state.11 Instead of proceeding on that basis, we should concentrate on investigating when, where and how it becomes possible to locate the problem in the first place, and the forms of inquiry and reasoning used in practice to do so. This is because the problem of the state does not belong to the social and political sciences but is embedded within social and political practices. If we are to make sense of what the state is, what role it plays in our lives and how, then, we must begin and end with those practices rather than taking our leave of them. Accepting this point is not to deny that there is any systematicity to different states’ involvements in social and political affairs – patently, and often troublingly, there is. It is to suggest, however, that whatever systematicity can be found in those involvements should be understood in the context of those affairs. If, as is recommended here, we want to “respecify” (Lynch 1993; Garfinkel 2002) the ‘classical’ problem of the state in such a way that the nature of the state’s practical entanglements in social life is foregrounded through our studies, it is crucial to treat problems of the state as situated, practical matters that need to be investigated as such. Refusing to generalise from and, hence, disembed questions of the state from the fields of practice they emerge within, constitutes the first step towards setting out an alternate form of inquiry into those questions. This alternate form of inquiry might be thought of as a species of descriptive Machiavellianism. That is, in it the focus would be on the open-endedness of our practices alongside their contextual embeddedness, on the fact that complete synoptic portrayals of political and institutional activity are in principle unachievable, and that, as a result, decision-makers, office-holders and the citizenry – if they are to deal with problems at all – must come to terms with the necessity of working out what to do with whatever information and resources are available at the point at which they encounter problems in practice (even where they know, for instance, that decisions made under such circumstances may well misfire). Work of this kind would provide room for the possibility of errors, mistakes, failures and ineptitude alongside the undeniable possibility that states, through their agents and agencies, can operate in malign, morally compromised and reprehensible ways. It would allow, in other words, for the idea that things go wrong and that governmental actors can get it wrong as well as be in the wrong. It also goes beyond treatments of states as knowing to a consideration of what Rappert terms “states of ignorance” (Rappert 2012). Given a concern with here-and-now problems and the ways in which the state emerges as an issue in connection to them, the resulting studies would work with the materials at hand – particularistic descriptions, anecdotes and parables mixed up with loose collections of recipes, rules of thumb and temporally and circumstantially limited conditional prescriptions, slogans and

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proverbs (e.g. “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”, “if a ruler wants to survive, they must learn to stop being good”, etc.) – in their own terms. They would have no central, pre-defined problem, but would address themselves to the many, overlapping, hopelessly mutually entangled affairs and activities of state – something all too often left out of consideration by those who undertake empirical studies along either constitutionalist or constructionist lines. References to writers who have adopted anti-foundational approaches to the business of statecraft will be woven through the text of the book as a whole. Suffice it to say at this point that an analysis that proceeds on an antifoundational basis need not be idiosyncratic, unprincipled or ad hoc in character. It would, instead, be attuned to both the limits of what it is meaningful to ask but also the limits of empirical evidence in supplying answers. A form of inquiry oriented on these lines would prevent such things as the decoupling of vernacular accounts from practical (and temporal) considerations and the ascription of ways of thinking about the state to ordinary member of society before we have investigated if and, crucially, how they could actually be said to hold or advance them. In order to do so, it would treat situated inquiries into problems of the state – the ways in which members of societies themselves address the problem of the state – as areas of investigation in their own right. Once we have re-specified our task in these terms, it becomes possible to explore the character of states and governmental arrangements as they are constituted by ordinary social members’ methods of practical socio-political action and reasoning about and within them. Ethnographic research – fieldwork but also contextualising work more broadly when approached with an ethnographic sensibility – has an important role to play here but only when approached in a particular way. Too often characterisations of states’ roles in social life can appear bloodless, a symptom of what might be termed the methodological ‘anaemia’ that social and political research suffers from (Marcus 1998: 44–45). Ethnographic studies, like any other kind of study, can concentrate too much on a single aspect of a problem to the exclusion of others and in overly theorised ways, skewing our view as researchers rather than helping correct our misconceptions. The argument of this book is that conceptualising the problem of the state as primarily a problem of models – implicit or explicit, ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’, as underlying structures or free-standing discursive codifications or ordering practices – skews our view and ethnographic studies have to free themselves of that preconception as much as others do. The state is not a monolithic concern and we need to pay close attention to the openended ways it is made sense of, if we are to understand the sense in which it constitutes a ‘problem’ at all. In the remainder of this book, these matters will be taken up in greater detail. Two final points, however, before continuing. First, many will find the type of study being advocated here unsatisfying. The kind of studies I regard as valuable would not hold out any promise of a general solution to the problem of the state, and would indeed deny the sense of the suggestion that there is any general problem to find a solution to. Second, some may regard

14

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the book as being overly and unnecessarily concentrated on (trivial) conceptual and methodological questions. There are good reasons as to why this is the case. Many readers will be familiar with the approaches that will be discussed, and one of the aims of this book is to open them up to a critical re-examination. This has been done by taking them at face value, in order to focus attention on what, as studies, they actually do (cf. Pleasants 1999: 12–31, 79). One of the central claims that I will put forward is that the portrayals of social and political life they offer are often awkward and forced as a result of imposing limits on what will be treated as relevant from the outset. As a result, they generate conceptual confusion and incoherence, involving, in some cases, assertions of an unsustainable analytical authority grounded in a peculiar form of methodological monomania, namely, the desire to say it all. Rethinking the grounds of our studies on the lines discussed in greater detail in the later chapters is, I argue, a reliable corrective. A remark on accountability may have some value here. My interest is in the ways in which the state becomes an accountable feature of social and political life in Harold Garfinkel’s terms, i.e., an “observable-and-reportable” aspect of it (1967a: 1). Accountability, in this ethnomethodological sense, concerns the availability of the state to ordinary ways of “looking-and-telling” (1967a: 1). Most studies of the state set out to find or locate the state as an aspect of our lives, and yet few interrogate its accountable availability in our lives – indeed, that researchers are able to find the state often says less about their professional methods and more about the “commonsense knowledge of social structures” (Garfinkel 1967a: 36) they can draw upon as members of society. Even the most avowedly anti-foundationalist studies of the state have stopped short of interrogating their reliance on ordinary ways of making the state accountable, i.e., of rendering it visible in its concrete specifics in and through the methodic use of commonsense knowledge. Instead, they take those ordinary ways of looking-and-telling for granted, trading on them in their accounts while leaving them unexplicated. Inquiring into their (ethno)methodological grounds, therefore, may just enable us to move outwards to the shared backgrounds against which our engagements with the state – intellectual and practical, past, present or future – come to make sense. This introduction has set out an overview of the arguments I make in the rest of the book and is thus a guide to what follows. From here the argument moves on, in Chapter 2, to Hobbes and Weber on the state and the manner in which their contributions have informed the constitutionalist approach. In Chapter 3 I review Foucault’s critique of constitutionalism before setting out how Foucault’s work led to the emergence of two main kinds of constructionist studies in Chapter 4; the historical and the ethnographic. As I have indicated above, constructionist studies raise problems of their own and Chapters 5 and 6 offer a critique of historical studies and ethnographic studies in turn. Chapter 7 returns to Marx (along with Weber and Machiavelli) to look beyond constitution and construction. Finally, Chapter 8 examines positions which seek to overcome the problems identified with constitution

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and construction by establishing encompassing, meta-methodological frameworks within which they can be reconciled; those of Bob Jessop (2016) and Bruno Latour (2013b). In that chapter, I shall argue that, whatever their other merits, further distancing our studies from social and political practices through a turn to ontological schemas as explanatory devices does not remedy but rather exacerbates the problems the meta-methodological frameworks were designed to solve. Given that, I shall argue instead for the “rediscovery” (Garfinkel 1967a: 36) of the state as a problem in and for social and political practices as the only way of dissolving rather than resolving the conceptual and methodological problems social and political studies persistently generate.

Notes 1 In the context of this book, the social and political sciences are being taken to include sociology, anthropology, history, archaeology, geography, political science, public administration (and management), economics and law as well as the diverse theoretical literatures they connect to (i.e., the many branches of social, anthropological, historical, political, etc., theory). In other words, the social and political sciences are being treated as those disciplines whose subject matters include the organised character of the analyst’s own, their contemporaries and their historical predecessors’ social and political affairs (both ‘at home’, in the analyst’s society, and ‘abroad’, in a variety of others, past and present). The use of the terms ‘science’ and ‘scientist’ does not indicate any commitment to naturalism and thus a lurking scientism but simply reflects the labels commonly employed to group together work in this area and the people who do it. 2 Interestingly, archaeologists, despite or perhaps because they must work with a much more severely restricted corpus of data than that available to researchers in other areas, have written some of the most clear-sighted commentaries on the sort of methodological problem the problem of the state could be. For a review of changes in archaeological thinking regarding the origins, structure and significance of the ‘archaic’ state, see e.g. Crumley (1995), Routledge (2000, 2004), Yoffee (2005), Chapman (2007) and cf. Jessop 2016. 3 As discussed extensively in Abrams (1988) and Mitchell (1991) for example, Easton is one of the most prominent academics to have publicly expressed disbelief at the continual ‘return’ of the question of the state. According to Easton, the interest in the state “threaten[s] us with a return … to a conceptual morass from which we thought we had but recently escaped” (Mitchell, 1991: 78; see also Abrams 1988: 85). Without wishing to go too deeply into the matter at this stage, the position adopted here is that abolitionism, as advocated by Easton and others, i.e., simply dispensing with the concept of the state altogether, is based on a false premise; just because social and political scientists have been unable to turn it into an objective ‘scientific’ category, that does not mean references to ‘the state’ lack meaning or that ‘the state’ (as opposed to say the ‘economic system’ or ‘political system’, themselves variously formulated) is not a ‘real’ feature of ordinary social and political affairs as commonly understood (see also Jessop 2016: 16–17). 4 The list of prominent philosophers who have influenced the debate on the state include (from the mid sixteenth to late eighteenth century) such figures as Hobbes (Leviathan (2017 [1651])), Locke (Two Treatises on Government (1960 [1689])) and Rousseau (Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1992 [1754]), The Social Contract (2003 [1762])) (in their role as contract theorists), and (from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century) the likes of Paine (The Rights of Man (1984

16

5

6

7

8

9

The problem of the state [1791])), Hegel (The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977 [1807]), The Philosophy of Right (1991 [1820])) and J.S. Mill (On Liberty (1982 [1859]), Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987 [1863])), among others, who wrote on the nature of civil society, the rights of the citizen vis-à-vis the state and the moral scope, role and character of the state. Despite being the spur for much of the philosophy of the state that followed, Machiavelli’s The Prince (2009 [1532]) is in many respects a marginal work in this tradition, as Machiavelli offered no systematic philosophy of the state – a virtue not a vice as I shall argue but often seen the other way round. I have not included Marx on this list because, as I will also argue, like Machiavelli, he did not see the state as a philosophical problem and hence did not present a theoretical account of ‘it’. A fuller list is offered by Skinner (2008a) in a lecture which captures the endlessly cycling game of ‘rock-paper-scissors’ – the state is real, the state is an idea, the state is a fiction – that has helped sustain philosophical debate on the subject since the sixteenth century. Although it arrives at constitution via construction, these criticisms can be levelled at aspects of Actor-Network Theory too, from the early work of Callon and Latour (1981) through to more recent work on the Actor-Network State (Passoth and Rowland 2010, 2016) as is partially conceded in Latour’s late “philosophical turn” where he suggests that treating all things in a network as being of equivalent significance generates “category mistakes” (Latour 2013b: 48). These terms are used in preference to the more ambiguous ‘government’, a term which is frequently employed to denote the institutional architectures of state (i.e., in gross terms, its legislative, judicial and executive branches) as well as the patterns of activity involved in the actual work that the different parts of governments do. Given the interest in approaching the former through a consideration of the latter, ‘governing’ and ‘governance’ are increasingly used instead. See, e.g., Voß and Freeman (2016) for further discussion. Although the terms ‘grand’ or ‘master’ narrative are usually attributed to Lyotard (1984), the use of ‘master’ as a qualifying term can be seen in the much earlier work of Chicago School sociologists like Hughes (e.g., 1945). For recent work on the problem of the state which focuses heavily on narrative and storytelling, see Bevir and Rhodes (2010). It is worth noting that the ‘model’ of state-formation Gray’s narrator is drawing upon is itself historically and culturally specific, probably intentionally so – one most commonly associated with the emergence and decline of the ‘great’ European powers. Alternative “paths to statehood” are discussed in Yoffee (2005) and Routledge (2000, 2004). Interestingly, the ‘thinness’ or ‘flatness’ of what is a fairly brief sketch (albeit one replete with categorisations) and the narrator’s lack of interest in spelling the model out in any greater detail, may well be part of what gives this passage its suggestive, familiar quality. Rounded characterisations in fiction, like thick descriptions in the social sciences, are not necessarily always preferable to flat characterisations and thin descriptions in this regard (cf. Love 2013). Indeed, as Ryle (1968) rather than Geertz (1973) had it, the ‘pairs’ are not really competitors at all but are used to do different things, in different ways, for different practical purposes at different times. For a discussion of the problems created by treating round and flat characterisation in literature as rival forms, as well as the source of the parallel drawn in these remarks, see Wood (2009: 75–106). Corrigan and Sayers (1985: 203) are good here. As they put it, “[The] imagery … of states as objects or instruments, capable of being ‘captured’ and ‘used’ … needs jettisoning … What we are dealing with … is the … complicated, laborious microconstruction and reconstruction of … the routine regulative functioning of state forms themselves … [The] minutiae, [of “legal, ‘administrative’ and ‘constitutional’ history”], show what ‘the State’ materially is … [and to understand them, we need to examine the] mundane, routine, workaday facets of state activity”. While useful

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as a methodological corrective, however, we should not forget that it can be perfectly intelligible to talk of the state as a ‘thing’ in particular contexts. It is when researchers end up being held captive by the picture of the state as a thing that they run into difficulties (Wittgenstein 1953). 10 Although Foucault for one certainly attributes it to Weber, whether this was indeed Weber’s position in any straightforward sense, i.e., in the sense it was later adopted by neo-Weberian theorists, is difficult to determine given his often incompatible pronouncements regarding the nature of the state (cf. Anter 2014; Barbalet 2020). 11 For his famous discussion of “family resemblances”, see Wittgenstein (1953: §§65–88). For an account of the way in which Wittgenstein uses this stretch of the Philosophical Investigations to undermine traditional philosophical notions of the fixity of meaning via a discussion of the ways in which we actually use general terms, like ‘the state’, see Goldfarb (1997). Pleasants (1999: 27–31) discusses a series of related issues.

2

The matter thereof and the artificer – Hobbes, Weber and the constitutionalist approach

At the start of Leviathan (2017 [1651]), Hobbes famously sets out the nature of his inquiry into the state and the problem it must grapple with. He explains it must take into account two things: “the Matter thereof and the Artificer, both which is man”. The state is explicitly recognised as a human creation but Hobbes also treats it as having an independent existence. Inquiries into the state must, therefore, not just examine what the state is, they must also examine how it comes to be constituted as such. While Hobbes’ treatment is philosophical, it sets the stage for the study of the state within the social and political sciences. For much of their histories, they too have treated the state as a human creation, one historically anchored in distinctive social, cultural, political and economic conditions yet nonetheless having an existence over and above them. The state is therefore both socially embedded and a thing unto itself. This duality is found in Weber’s work as much as Hobbes’ but it is Weber’s formulations that have provided one of the principle methodological starting points for empirical studies of the state. Weber’s sociological reworking of the problem as introduced by Hobbes thus helped make the state investigable. Ignoring his more phenomenological pronouncements on the state as an oriented to complex of action and interaction, attention has been focused on Weber’s pithy ideal-typical rendering in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1946b [1919]): the state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. One of the most wellknown ‘definitions’ in the social sciences, it exercises a grip on the imaginations of social and political scientists to this day. Most importantly, and despite representing a misreading of Weber’s nominalism, it provides the basis for the constitutionalist approach which seeks to define what the state is and has to be by exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions of statehood. The basis for the constitutionalist approach is to look at what needs to be in place for a state – or a kind of state, such as a democratic state or capitalist state – to be a state at all. It does not neglect what states do but it treats such matters as constitutionally enabled. The how is, therefore, approached via the what, function via structure or form, and it is the latter which is treated as analytically primitive. Seen constitutionally, an entity cannot be a state unless

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it has such things, for instance, as a standing army: either to maintain law and order, for the neo-Weberians and liberal theorists, or to enforce the demands of capital and enforce domination, for the neo-Marxists and critical theorists. The emphasis on the constitution of the state – the elements upon which it is founded, which together make it up and make it possible for it do certain things – has produced a number of waves of research, including that grouped together under the call to ‘bring the state back in’ in the mid-1980s which involved such figures as Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann. More recently, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, along with research inspired by his The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) on the varieties of capitalist welfare state, has helped reshape understandings not just of the state but of its relationship to society and economy through investigations of the structural role the state plays in different political economic contexts. Constitutionalist work has, undoubtedly, produced real insights. Nonetheless, it has been subjected to sustained critique. The most powerful of those critiques is that presented by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, the constitutionalist position was conceptually and methodologically unstable: one could not access the what of the state if one relegated the how to a secondary position. The chapter ends with an examination of some of the problems that result from this methodological prioritisation, suggesting the constitutionalist approach has proven illuminating not because of its commitments but in spite of them.

Introduction The title-page of Hobbes’ Leviathan, both textually and visually,1 helps set the stage for an examination of social and political inquiry into the nature and organisation of the state.2 Certainly a locus for classical understandings of the problem of social order and discussions of the role of civil and political authority in maintaining the peace,3 Leviathan also, in its opening lines, asks us to pose the question of what we are doing when we set out to describe the state: the “Artificiall Man” that is both formed by and composed of human individuals but which is “of greater stature and strength than the Naturall”.4 Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring, and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent work of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS), which is but an Artificiall Man, though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall,

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The matter thereof and the artificer for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificial Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty every joynt and member is moved to perform his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; the Wealth and Riches of all the particular members are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Laws, an artificiall Reason and Will, Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civil War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation … To describe the Nature of this Artificiall man, I will consider *First, the Matter thereof, and the Artificer, both which is Man. (Hobbes 2017 [1651]: 78)

For Hobbes, as we see, the problem is one of characterising “the Matter thereof, and the Artificer, both which is Man”, as clear an initial statement of methodological constitutionalism as we might seek to have. As I will seek to show by reviewing more recent work in the chapters that follow, it is a characterisation of the problem that continues to prove compelling, providing the impetus for a variety of contemporary social and political studies of the state and governmental practices. In reviewing that literature, however, as discussed in the last chapter, my goal is not so much faithful exegesis as it is to ‘misread’5 the central concerns that animate this body of work (to extend Hobbes’ metaphor), treating them as my phenomena for study, rather than as descriptive resources to be relied upon. A particular focus will be the way in which these studies both find and make whatever the state could be available for analysis in and through the use of empirical research materials. That investigation begins not with Hobbes but with Max Weber, someone who is often taken to have turned Hobbes’ philosophical arguments into subjects for empirical inquiry. Weber offers us various ‘definitions’ of the modern state and while a great deal of criticism has been levelled at Weber, those formulations continue to define the parameters of much of the field of research.6 Even where unsupportive, Weber’s work is used as one of the main take-off points for much of the current research on the problem of the state, with many elements of the theory of the state that Weber is thought to have held ‘problematised’ through historical case-studies and ethnographic examples.7

Defining the state The work of Max Weber provides an important touchstone for those who wish to undertake empirical studies of the state and governmental practices

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for several reasons. Weber’s work has proven so influential because he remains one of the first social scientists to adopt a distinctively sociological approach to the problem Hobbes outlines in relationship to the state (i.e., again, the task of characterising “the Matter thereof, and the Artificer, both which is Man”). Whatever the criticisms suggesting otherwise, that work is also far from straightforward or one-dimensional, and the following remarks do not attempt to unravel its several, varied strands. Instead they make use of competing formulations in Weber’s work as a way of illustrating the difficulties connected with the problem of defining the state for the purpose of social and political study. In Economy and Society, Weber states that; [One] of the important aspects of the “existence” of a modern state, precisely as a complex of social interaction of individual persons, consists in the fact that the action of various individuals is oriented to the belief that it exists or should exist (Weber 1978: 14) This formulation is elaborated further in ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’; The following … should be noted: when we inquire as to what corresponds to the idea of the “state” in empirical reality, we find an infinity of diffuse and discrete human actions, both active and passive, factually and legally regulated relationships, partly unique and partly recurrent in character, all bound together by … the belief in the actual or normative validity of rules and of the authority-relationships of some human beings towards others. (Weber 1904 [1949]: 99, see also Coulter 2000) However, this repeated emphasis on multiple, overlapping complexes of social interaction, which are subjectively oriented in their course to the existence of the state as a feature of social environments known-in-common (Hilbert 1987: 72– 76), stands in seemingly sharp contrast to the formulation of the state found in ‘Politics as a Vocation’; “[The state is] a human community that successfully claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946b [1919]: 78). In conjunction with this formulation, Weber stressed that any analysis of the modern state would also have to provide an account of the complex bureaucratic and administrative structures associated with its operations.8 Thus, to the definition above we can add: [The] bureaucratic state, adjudicating and administering according to rationally established law and regulation, is … closely related to the modern capitalist development, [which] rests primarily on calculation and presupposes a legal and administrative system, whose functioning can be rationally predicted … just like the expected performance of a machine. (Weber 1978: 1394)9

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As possible starting points for empirical investigations of the state, there is a contrast in that the first two more phenomenological formulations and the (expanded) third appear to connect to alternative, and mutually exclusive, methodological strategies. The first two are open-ended and non-prescriptive. They tell us little about the state – indeed could scarcely be said to define very much at all – beyond the fact that it is both the product, and the oriented-to subject, of more or less loosely connected ‘families’ of social action and interaction. On this view, to study the state would be to investigate those actions, interactions and socially situated forms of reasoning. The third formulation, i.e., the ‘definition’, represents a shift, being apparently both formal and prescriptive, in setting out an idealtypical formulation of the state to serve as a conceptual framework for investigations. Aware of possible tensions, Weber argued as follows: The scientific conception of the state, however it is formulated, is naturally always a synthesis which we construct for certain heuristic purposes. But on the other hand, it is also abstracted from the unclear syntheses, which are found in the minds of human beings. The concrete content, however, which the historical “state” assumes … in the minds of those who make up the state, can in its turn only be made explicit through the use of ideal-typical concepts. (Weber 1904 [1949]: 99) Due to his underlying pessimism about the possibility of the investigation of complexes of social interaction delivering a coherent account of the state (in part perhaps because of the epistemological problem posed by investigating an “infinity of diffuse and discrete human actions”), for his particular sociological purposes Weber therefore proposed a resolution of the problem through the qualified use of the ideal-type.10

Ideal-types and the problem of description The adequacy of Weber’s resolution to the problem of describing the state has been questioned. On one reading, Weber’s ideal-type (and the expansion on it offered above) presents a compressed sociological counterpart to the classic liberal conception of the “night-watchman” state:11 the thesis that a political entity can only qualify as a state if it controls sufficient resources to ensure its own territorial and legal integrity over time. Adopted as a conceptual framework for assembling the empirical materials needed to build a general theory of the state, this formulation is translated into the proposal that we systematically investigate the capacity of states to guarantee their own autonomy and survival under different social, cultural, economic and historical conditions. Only through empirical studies of the real structural-organisational bases of the actions taken by states to ensure their own integrity over time, it is argued, is it possible to develop a properly sociological theory and political analysis of the state rather than a speculative, philosophical one.12

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Methodologically, Weber’s formulation is employed as a formal device that allows us to set our knowledge of actual states against an idealised model of any state. It thus provides a benchmark, a conceptual standard of comparison, against which we can begin to assess (through the scrutiny of all manner of materials from territorial maps, public accounts and records, constitutional-legal documentation, population censuses through to land registries and related materials) the resources that states must draw upon to preserve their autonomy and, hence, existence. Rather than study the state in the “unclear” form it appears to members of society, the constitutionalist argument – that is, the argument which takes up Weber’s formal definition of the state – is that we should concentrate instead on refining our core set of ideal-typical categories, where these synthetic devices are understood to isolate certain properties that a state must minimally possess to be a state. When we set out to describe the state, we set out to describe those properties. What is more, a political entity is only recognisable as a state to the degree to which it possesses those properties: they represent the necessary and sufficient conditions under which ‘statehood’ can be secured. Pursuing the logic of this line of inquiry, constitutionalists have attempted to introduce greater specificity to the general framework by compiling ever more detailed lists of those properties; checklists that incorporate such things as ‘has …’ a standing army, border controls and other means for demarcating itself, its territory and its population, a permanent, specially trained and educated administration, a separation of office from office holder, systematic record keeping and accountancy, the capacity to extract resources, an undivided system of sovereignty, mechanisms for maintaining law and order and formalised systems of decision-making. What is listed is frequently itself broken down further to yield new subcategories which are used to generate typologies designed to deliver higher degrees of analytical resolution. In her introduction to the influential collection she co-edited with Evans and Rueschemeyer, also entitled ‘Bringing the State Back In’ (1985: 3–42), Skocpol is absolutely clear about the methodological bases from which constitutionalist accounts of the state ought to proceed. As she explains, while the “structure and activities of the … state as a whole [had] receded from view and analysis” (1985: 4), “[social] scientists are now willing to offer state-centered explanations” (1985: 7) and “to speak of states as actors and as society-shaping institutions” (1985: 6). In doing so, they “are relying anew – with various modifications and extensions to be sure – on the basic understanding of ‘the state’ passed down to contemporary scholarship through the widely known writings of such major German scholars as Max Weber” (1985: 7). Skocpol continues: “Max Weber argued that states are compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people within them. Administrative, legal, extractive and coercive organisations are the core of any state” (1985: 7). She goes on:

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The matter thereof and the artificer The extra-national orientation of states, the challenges they may face in maintaining domestic order, and the organizational resources that collectivities of state officials may be able to draw on and deploy – all of these features of the state … help to explain autonomous state action. (1985: 9)

The “international orientation of states, their domestic order-keeping functions, and the organizational possibilities for official collectivities to formulate and pursue their own policies” (1985: 11) are thus the underlying “structural variables” (1985: 9), “the basic analytical factors” (1985: 11) that must be dealt with by any study of the state.13 Skocpol’s position, which has an ancestor in Aristotle’s Politics (Lord 2013), is, then, that the state is a political unit that can be organised in a variety of ways. Each has to maintain its own territorial integrity (otherwise it would not be there) and that means it has to be able to extract resources, secure its borders, maintain its authority within its territory and stop others from imposing their authority from outside (something made easier if it exists in a particular type of environment). The world is made up of lots of these units, as depicted in a standard political map, and competition both within and between states explains how they are distributed throughout the world.14 The problem with this position is that in this what began life in Weber’s work as a heuristic construct for posing certain questions about particular states, and their similarities and differences, has been turned into a resource for answering them. The conceptual framework has acquired, in Schütz’s phrase, its own “accent of reality” (Schütz 1962: 207–259). It is not just, in a world of “capitalist states”, “welfare states”, “hollow states”, “networked states”, “congested-states”, “narco-states”, “rogue states”, “non-states”, “failed states”, “super-states” or “states-within-states”,15 that the notion of structural-functional integrity is too narrow to capture all of what we ordinarily mean when we talk about groups of ‘states’, ‘the’ or ‘a’ state. Nor would the problem be remedied by expanding the list of state-types or by making Weber’s original definition less specific. Rather than concentrate on partially reconfiguring the conceptual apparatus, contemporary students and theorists of the state argue that the problem can only be addressed by rethinking the whole approach embodied in the use of ideal-typical categories. In the first of his lectures on governmentality to the Collège de France, Foucault explicitly addressed this theme when asked whether he and Weber16 were involved in essentially similar forms of inquiry based on a shared concern with the historic trend towards ever greater rationalisation. His response is worth quoting at length: Schematically one can say that the ‘ideal type’ is a category of historical interpretation; it’s a structure of understanding for the historian who seeks to integrate, after the fact, a certain set of data: it allows him to

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recapture an ‘essence’, working from general principles which are not present in the thought of the individuals whose concrete behaviour is nevertheless to be understood on their basis … [But the] rational schemas of the prison, the hospital or the asylum [and related matters of state] are not general principles which can be rediscovered only through the historian’s retrospective interpretation. They are explicit programmes; we are dealing with sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be reorganised, spaces arranged, behaviours regulated … ‘Discipline’ [for example] isn’t the expression of an ‘ideal type’ (that of ‘disciplined man’); it’s the generalisation and interconnection of different techniques themselves designed in response to localised requirements (schooling; training troops to handle rifles). These programmes don’t take effect in institutions in an integral manner; they are simplified, or some are chosen and not others; and things never work out as planned. But what I wanted to show is that this difference is not one between the purity of an ideal and the disorderly impurity of the real, but that in fact there are different strategies which are mutually opposed, composed and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects which can be perfectly well be understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don’t conform to the initial programming: this is what gives the resulting apparatus (dispositif) its solidity and suppleness … These programmings of behaviour … aren’t abortive schemas for the creation of a reality. They are fragments of reality. (Foucault 1978: 80–82) In an earlier lecture, Foucault included the state within the scope of his argument and urged readers to “eschew the model of Leviathan” (1978 [1983]: 312)17 and pursue, instead, a particular kind of reorientation to the problem of the state. More specifically, Foucault asks us to revisit the bases of the problem that Hobbes set out to explore. Foucault is frequently glossed as arguing that the state “has no essence” but it is important to be cautious in characterising his position in those terms. The point being expressed is more subtle. Foucault is certainly not arguing that there is nothing to the state or that there are no discernible similarities and differences in the ways in which the different states that demonstrably populate the world are organised and governed. Nor is he arguing that what has been documented by constitutionalist scholars is entirely wrong, misguided or irrelevant. Quite the reverse: Foucault devoted a great deal of time to analysing different phases in the genealogy of some of the modern bureaucracies of state, often addressing quite orthodox concerns about their role in contemporary society.18 He himself made this clear in a series of famous remarks in a lecture at the Collège de France in the late 1970s:

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The matter thereof and the artificer You will, of course, put to me the question, or make the objection: Once again you do without a theory of the state. Well, I would reply, yes, I do, I want to, I must do without a theory of the state, as one can and must forgo an indigestible meal. What does doing without a theory of the state mean? If you say that in my analyses I cancel the presence and the effect of state mechanisms, then I would reply: Wrong, you are mistaken or want to deceive yourself, for to tell the truth I do exactly the opposite of this. Whether in the case of madness, of the constitution of that category, that quasi-natural object, mental illness, or of the organization of a clinical medicine, or of the integration of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies within the penal system, what was involved in each case was always the identification of the gradual, piecemeal, but continuous takeover by the state of a number of practices, ways of doing things … However, if, on the other hand, “doing without a theory of the state” means not starting off with an analysis of the nature, structure, and functions of the state in and for itself, if it means not starting from the state considered as a sort of political universal … in our kind of society then I reply: Yes, of course, I am determined to refrain from that kind of analysis. There is no question of deducing this set of practices from a supposed essence of the state in and for itself. We must refrain from this kind of analysis … because … the state does not have an essence. The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape … of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decisionmaking centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior … That is why I propose to [proceed] …by moving outside and questioning the problem of the state … (Foucault 2008 [1979]: 76–77)

Rather than make a substantive point about the empirical phenomena academics have chosen to concentrate their intellectual energies on, Foucault makes a conceptual and methodological one: he is asking us to think carefully about what their analyses account for by re-examining the materials used in their construction. For Foucault, political systems, public policy, the recruitment, training and mobilisation of bureaucratic, military or police personnel and the changing relationship between the public and the private sphere, for instance, are all worth sustained attention. It is how we conceptualise what the study of these areas of social, political and organisational life involves that Foucault wants to address. How he sought to reorient empirical research provides the focus of the next chapter.

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Notes 1 For discussions of the image of the Leviathan that fronted Hobbes’ text see Colley 2008, Skinner 2008b, Prior 2004, Farneti 2001 and Goldsmith 1981. For Galloway (2002), reflecting on a re-worked version, “[we are shown] an enormous man, his corporate body and clothing made of faceless folk, wielding a sword and a crook over the … [territory] he hoped to rule by fear”. Colley offers a more nuanced interpretation: “The point of Leviathan, for instance, is not simply that multitudes of tiny, respectful men and women make up his body, whereas he supplies their crowned and powerful head. No less important is that he is represented with the symbols of both civil and ecclesiastical authority, and as presiding over a prosperous and protected city in a fertile landscape. By contrast, the lower half of the frontispiece contains images of other systems of rule (such as the military) that are linked with far less harmonious human landscapes, thereby driving home Hobbes’ lesson that only those ‘Commonwealths have been long-lived … [which] never did dispute of the Sovereign Power’.” 2 Hobbes drew on biblical sources for his image of the state, that of the dread Leviathan set out, among other places, in Job. The image is an arresting one: “Nothing on earth is his equal – a creature without fear / He looks down on all that are haughty; he is king over all that are proud” (Job 14:14–34), the implication being that, insofar as we are proud, we will be ruled. 3 Garfinkel (1988) argues that the classical understanding is exemplified in the work of Parsons (e.g., 1937) and Foucault uses this orientation to the problem of social order as a discursive motif for his analysis of absolutist regimes (see Foucault 1998: 135–137). 4 For an attempt to use Hobbes’ Leviathan as a generic device for formulating sociological problems see Callon and Latour (1981). Simon Schaffer suggests that Latour’s readings of Hobbes should be treated as “proximate inspiration” for Latour’s work, although he questions how successful Latour has been in working the position through (Schaffer 1991). 5 Lynch (2002) relates how Garfinkel would encourage his students to ‘misread’ the classic texts of phenomenology so as to treat their recommendations as topics for empirical inquiry. I am seeking to extend this policy to social and political studies of the state. The aim is less exegetical than to attempt to pin down how those studies make their phenomenon available. 6 The argument presented here thus offers a contrast to that offered, for example, Joel Migdal and David Nugent, who have characterised Weber’s ideal-typical definition as a “sterile” dead-end (see, e.g., the introduction to Migdal 2001 and Nugent 2004) and instead stands alongside work like Anter’s (2014) in tracing through strands in Weber’s complex thinking on the state. 7 Although it advances an interpretation of Weber’s work as an essentially Hobbesian conception of the state as a composite, internally partitioned structure that is greater than the sum of its parts, and ‘external’ to society, see Dusza (1989) for a comprehensive index to Weber’s fragmentary comments on the state as well as Anter (2014). For an attempt to draw together Weber’s comments on the state alongside those of both Marx and Durkheim, see Corrigan and Sayer (1985). However, as Anter (2014) also suggests, it is important to note that Weber’s comments were never intended to amount to a comprehensive, systematic ‘theory of the state’ (see also Barbalet 2020). Although specifically addressed to the ‘functionalist’ theory of bureaucracy that sociologists have read into Weber’s work, Hilbert (1987: 70–71) is useful on what an alternate reading of Weber’s work might look like. 8 Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 206, 222) explore at length Weber’s treatment of the state as a complex bureaucratic-organisational structure: “a site, or set of sites and personnel” for the “mundane, routine, workaday facets of state activity – … the routines of rule”, an organisational form which monopolises the legitimate use of administrative regulation as well as coercion. Tilly, as we have already seen, also

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10 11 12

13 14

15

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17 18

The matter thereof and the artificer argues that the administrative and coercive capacity of states should be analysed together, and has thus concentrated on: “the place of organized means of violence in the growth and change of those peculiar forms of government we call national states: relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory” (Tilly 1985: 171). Weber’s conception of the state as a sociological phenomenon thus has clear ties to his analysis of bureaucracy. See, for example, the comprehensive list of properties catalogued in Hilbert (1987). Although discussion will be held off until a later stage, it seems reasonable to suggest that, as a result of these ties, altering how we read Weber’s work on bureaucracy might also alter how we read his work on the state. That is, rather than see Weber as attempting to define bureaucracy or the state, we might instead see him as attempting to capture how bureaucracy and the state are made sense of at particular times – his ‘definitions’ being attempts to capture shared ‘(inter-) subjective’ orientations not ‘objective’ realities. See Garfinkel (1988), Rawls (2002: 23) and Sharrock (1970: 138) for critical examinations of the grounds of this methodological pessimism. A conception usually traced back to Locke’s (1960 [1689]) Two Treatises on Government and redeployed in works like Nozick’s (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia. This interpretation of Weber’s formulation is shared by many of its proponents as well as its detractors. For the neo-Weberian constitutionalist position see, e.g., the papers in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol’s influential Bringing the State Back In (1985), with the partial exception of Tilly whose position is more sophisticated. Giddens’ and Mann’s work could also be said to reflect the neo-Weberian position (Giddens 1985; Mann 1984). Mitchell (1991) also broadly accepts this interpretation of Weber, although he argues from a constructionist position (perhaps closer to Weber’s actual position) that it constitutes a misinterpretation of the problems involved. Cf. Bevir and Rhodes 2010: 5–6. I would not wish to deny that Skocpol’s work is frequently penetrating and insightful. What is interesting is that it is often most so when she strays from her methodological strictures and the architectural metaphors which anchor them. After all, a building is just a building: it’s not till we know what goes on in it, how it came to fill that role, what planning was involved, how the building is maintained, and so on, that we learn what makes it significant and under what conditions. A number of very good politics and social policy studies have examined the conditions under which the architecture of states becomes the site of political conflict. However, I would suggest that body of research is most informative when it moves away from strict methodological positions which define what could count as relevant in advance, just as is true of Skocpol’s work too. See, e.g., (in order listed) Jessop (1982), Esping-Andersen (1990), Rhodes (1994), Carnoy and Castells (2001), Collinge and Hall (1997), Skelcher (2000) and Clapham (1998). Comparable lists can be found in Geertz (2004) and Aretxaga (2003). Other modifiers could be added, e.g., from Messick (1993) we have the “calligraphic state” and from Higgs (2004) the “information state”. Yoffee (2005) and Routledge (2004) both turn critical attention to the concept of the “archaic state”, particularly analyses of “primary”, “secondary” and “segmentary” versions of it within contemporary archaeology. That is, once again, one particular version of Weber against which alternative versions might usefully be set. The final sections of this book will take up one such alternative, presenting a third, more phenomenological, if not ethnomethodological, version of Weber whose “problem of the state” differs markedly from its constitutionalist and constructionist counterparts. This is a common refrain within the literature. See also Geertz (2004) and, for a slightly different take, Callon and Latour (1981) and Rose and Miller (1992, 2013). See, e.g., Foucault (1982) and Jessop (2014).

3

The government of men and things – Foucault’s radical critique of constitutionalism

This chapter examines Foucault’s break with the constitutionalist position and how he sought to re-orient research on the state, best viewed as a set of conceptual and methodological proposals rather than substantive points. Foucault notes we talk of the state as a complex of men and things but asks ‘what does that mean?’. For Foucault, it cannot merely be a structure in which certain functions are housed. Not only does the constitutionalist vision offer an over-simplified picture of social and political life, it is conceptually and methodologically impoverished. Against the ontological certainties that characterise the constitutionalist position, that the what of the state is clearly and easily accessed, Foucault raises a series of epistemological objections, variants on the question, ‘how could we possibly know?’. Foucault’s radical insight, one which distinguishes his work from others, was that we can only talk about the state and its structures – we can only know the state – by virtue of arrangements of practices – ways of recording, mapping, documenting, describing, counting, weighing, differentiating, classifying and so on – that enable us to treat the state as an entity in the first place. The structures of the state are not what enable us to talk of the state; rather, we come to know the structures of the state through interwoven complexes of ancillary practices upon which the state rests. Without them, there is no state – it is a product, and we do not understand it unless we understand what it is produced by. This is not to say structures are unimportant, they patently are. But they are not analytically primitive, they are secondary – the constitutionalists, on Foucault’s reading, are wrong. What is more, the sense in which they are secondary can be empirically examined: we can see how the structures of the state come to acquire their form concretely in different contexts and historical periods. The chapter ends by examining what Foucauldian studies of the state and state practices promise by way of new insights.

Introduction In his later work, Foucault began a conceptual and methodological reexamination of the problem of the state. To return to a previously quoted passage, he noted:

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The government of men and things One governs things. But what does this mean? … [What] government has to do with is … a sort of complex composed of men and things … [an] imbrication of men and things … [Government] is a question … of disposing things: that is to say, [a matter] of employing tactics … – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved. (Foucault 1991a: 93–94)

In several of his remarks on the subject, Foucault stressed that the methodological approach to the state employed by constitutionalists had been “over-valued” (see also Rose and Miller 1992: 173–176, 2013). This is because a major consequence of a methodological approach to the description and analysis of states via the construction of ideal-typical categories was that it was too narrowly focused even as a preliminary to more refined forms of investigation (cf. Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 1–10, 123–127, 142, 180, 187–193). Constitutionalists operationalised the problem that Hobbes had given priority to in the opening passage of Leviathan (2017 [1651]), namely “the Matter thereof, and the Artificer”, following in what they saw as Weber’s footsteps by privileging questions relating to the make-up of the state. As a consequence, many matters remained off-stage, outside the investigative field of vision, including how the complexes of “men and things” of which the state may be held to be composed come to be arranged in the specific ways they are and thus acquire the determinate forms constitutionalists set out to analyse. The picture that emerges is, for Foucault, a distorted one. The aim of this chapter is to set out in more detail the bases of Foucault’s critique and how it serves to re-orient research into the problem of the state. Rather than simply describe Foucault’s position, I use an example, drawn from archaeological research to work through his diagnosis of the problems with constitutionalism. If the constitutionalist use of idealisations serves to reify the state, this example is used to illustrate the basis of Foucault’s dereifying move in response to it.

Moving beyond the ideal-typical As the previous chapter showed, Weber’s ideal-type has come to be treated as a stripped-down conceptual frame for gathering and working up the empirical materials needed to build a general model of the state, a general model based on the categorical rendition of the necessary and sufficient conditions of statehood identified by researchers in the course of frequently painstaking social and historical investigations. Individual studies thus present us with catalogues of the component parts of the state populated with heterogeneous but nonetheless specifiable categories of personnel, expertise, populations, cultural formations, territories, institutions, human and natural resources, infrastructures, powers, functions, decision-making mechanisms, forms of sovereignty, institutional arrangements, international relationships and so on. Descriptions of the

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overarching relationships between these parts are taken to be the building blocks of a theory of the state, where the state is that structure which provides for their integration, an institutional setting or housing within which these “fragments of reality” (Foucault 1979: 82) can be positioned, mosaic-fashion, relative to one another. From the constitutionalist perspective, ideal-types are methodological optics, visualisation devices, which can be used to systematically survey, document and describe the internal structural organisation of individual states. The findings generated using this device can then be used to refine the conceptual frame with which the process began. Does the observed instance conform to the general model? If not, in what ways does it deviate from it? What does the degree of fit say about the validity of the model? How can fit be improved without sacrificing the model’s coverage? Where constitutionalist efforts focus on ontological matters, the elements that together make up the state and indeed make up different kinds of states, different kinds of states, Foucault’s objections to them were epistemological. That is, Foucault sought to raise questions about how we could know what the constitutionalists laid claim to know. As part of this, Foucault argued insufficient attention had been paid to the nature of the empirical materials the constitutionalist analysis of the state was going to process using the ideal-type. He began with the observation that the materials used by constitutionalists to construct their “categories of interpretation” are themselves descriptions culled from vernacular accounts, where a vernacular account is one ‘native’ to the setting under investigation (whatever the activities of that setting may be), rather than one constructed by analysts from positions outside it (see, e.g., Zimmerman and Wieder 1977: 199 or Garfinkel 2002).1 These vernacular accounts are read as providing guides to the various arrangements that underpin the ‘machineries’ of state. In the process of being translated into categories of use within constitutionalist research, vernacular accounts are employed as “word-pictures of the facts” (Wittgenstein 1953: §291), discursive schematics or blueprints that enable the researcher to analytically reconstruct cross-sections of the real historical state.2 These materials, in other words, are treated as providing access to the state because they are reflections of it. As a corollary, this approach also assumes that the descriptions advanced by the constitutionalist and the vernacular accounts upon which those descriptions are based are isomorphic, i.e., that they are ‘shaped up’ according to broadly similar concerns – with the intention of representing whatever aspects of a/the state they are accounts of. Foucault suggests that we have a number of reasons for questioning any such assumption. Insofar as constitutionalists treat accounts like machine-drawings, schematic depictions of the apparatus of the state, they do so without any reference to the uses to which such depictions are put, making them “idle” (Wittgenstein 1953: §291). The sort of question that should be asked is: ‘under what conditions does it make sense to proclaim, for instance, that states are composed of a military, an extractive and an executive arm?’. Such questions are by no means trivial, nor is it particularly easy to answer them – something constitutionalists overlook.

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This methodological approach to the treatment of data is not confined to particular disciplines but can be found across academic literatures in the social and political sciences that adopt a constitutionalist perspective. A single example, which happens to be taken from archaeology, will be used to illustrate the general point. In an article, entitled ‘From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact’, Voss (2005) uses a mixture of archaeological and documentary evidence to elaborate on: (a) the complex role of the settlement, El Presidio de San Francisco, in the emerging colonial state apparatus that developed in the centuries which followed the Spanish invasion of Mexico; (b) the patterns, duration and frequency of the contact between the settlement and the central imperial administration, which was at once a source of power and authority (with local mandates reinforced with important but irregular supplies of personnel, technology, arms and goods), as well as the point from which edicts, instructions and regulations detailing how the colony was to be governed could be issued; and (c) how these ways of administering the colony from afar shaped the identities of colonists and indigenous Mexicans by establishing the need for increased interaction (particularly around the trade in foodstuffs and locally produced “consumer goods”, such as tools, cooking utensils and furniture), which in turn fostered greater cultural and eventually political integration. Leaving the claims made using the data to one side, the following quote offers an insight into the methodological strategy that anchors Voss’s analysis: El Presidio de San Francisco received most of its supplies through annual government issue shipments, severely constraining the settlers’ choices in the material objects they used … [At] present we lack sufficient textual evidence to understand how these goods were distributed. Without more extensive documentation of the settlement’s internal economic structure, a meaningful consideration of consumer choice is not feasible. (Voss 2005: 466) In this passage Voss suggests – taking as read standard ceteris paribus caveats regarding the potential for distortion due to ‘bias’ or ‘manuscript errors’ – that access to vernacular “documentation of the settlement’s internal economic structure” would provide the resources needed to begin the task of describing that structure. Had they been preserved, we could have used such things as dockets, tax receipts, financial accounts, inventories, ledgers, bills of sale, bankers’ drafts, charters, contracts, permits, trading licences and the rest, to build up a composite picture of economic activity within the settlement. In Voss’s hands, then, economic life at El Presidio is divided up into commercial activities on one side, and the documentary traces of those activities on the other – where we are to understand that the degree of ‘correspondence’ between the traces and the activities that left them behind is such that, by gathering collections of them together, one can be more or less accurately recovered from the other (cf. Sacks 1963; Garfinkel 1967a; Meehan 1986).

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Consequently, the existence of a gap in the archaeological and documentary record, the disappearance of the residual traces, means that we can never know how economic activity was really organised at this particular site. The corollary can be seen in cases where researchers did have access to the documentary record, as in the following from Corrigan and Sayer: ‘The greatest result of the Norman Conquest’, according to Plucknett [sic.], ‘was the introduction of precise and orderly methods in the government and law of England’ … Parallel to this institutional development was an immense increase in the keeping of written records … This ‘official documentary system’ is unparalleled in its coverage, continuity and comprehensiveness. It reveals the very weight and shape of ruling – above all the central capability of governance possessed by the English ruling classes from the eleventh century onwards. (1985: 20–21) That “the very weight and shape of ruling” or “the central capability of governance” could be read-off from the documentary record they have examined is treated here as entirely unproblematic. Although Corrigan and Sayer are at pains to criticise this way of reading and using the documentary record at a number of points in their historical narrative, that narrative is inconsistent and has a tendency to slip back into the default analytical mode of portraying vernacular texts as the document of stable, pre-existing arrangements just as Voss’s analysis does. Foucault argues that the conceptual twin-track upon which this way of working from materials is based – the postulation of two parallel but fundamentally distinct orders of activity, ‘doing’ and ‘documenting’, ‘action’ and ‘discourse’ – is deeply unstable. Foucault was as dismissive of the downgrading of discourse, its treatment as ‘mere’ words, as Harvey Sacks (1992) was of those who saw conversational interaction as ‘mere’ talk. As Foucault put it: I have undertaken … [to] end the denegation of discourse in its specific existence … This denegation consists of several aspects: … [including] that of never treating discourse except as … no more than a meagre additive, an almost impalpable fringe surrounding things and thought; a surplus which goes without saying, since it does nothing else except say what is said. (Foucault 1991b: 61–63) Against that denegation, Foucault notes that vernacular accounts are not external to but embedded within the organised settings we are attempting to investigate. Indeed, and this is Foucault’s central point, accounts are not just another feature of settings, they are themselves particular ways of organising, of “programming”, the very activities that analysts’ categories of interpretation use them to display – “internal economic activity”, “the colonial state

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apparatus”, “cultural and political integration”, and so on (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: §23). When constitutionalist researchers treat them as separate, then, they are taking the work that goes into and is done by accounts entirely for granted and, by doing so, render that work invisible. They simply become transparent discursive windows on reality. For Foucault, by contrast, accounts are deeply implicated in the processes by “which institutions … [are] reorganised, spaces arranged, behaviours regulated”. Accounts are therefore ‘writings’ as well as ‘readings’, ways of inscribing order upon situations as much as resources for finding order within them. In that sense, vernacular accounts should be seen as ordering practices – part of an openended array of techniques for making different types of arrangements available in specific ways, for specific ends, in specific circumstances – rather than “docile texts”, one-dimensional textual records of objective states-of-affairs.3 Where constitutionalism had treated constitutional analysis as a specialised method for investigating the founding, structure and organisation of the state, Foucault sought to show such methods were part and parcel of and gave shape to the very phenomena that constitutionalists sought to study. The documentation of economic activity provides a number of illustrations of these practical methods in action. Voss’s complaint, for instance, relies on the idea that economic activities generate the textual equivalent of a running commentary.4 What is more, that economic activities could be self-commentating is seen as unremarkable and is taken-for-granted in the course of the subsequent discussion. Foucault, in contrast, urges us to treat the possibility of activities which come accompanied by a variety of forms of text-based commentary as strange, as a particular sort of innovation, and, as such, in need of further investigation. However, as Foucault’s analyses demonstrate, exploring how individuals come to participate in the collaborative production of these commentaries takes us outside the initial lines of inquiry, and away from a concern with production, consumption, exchange and even the makeup of states in the narrow. While there are examples throughout his work, in Discipline and Punish5 Foucault begins with the observation that the systematic documentation of economic activity is, in large part, an administrative and regulatory phenomenon overseen by state officials. Economic records are not self-generating epiphenomena; no ghostly mechanisms are available for their spontaneous production. Instead, leaving a record is a real-world affair, an activity that actors are obliged to engage in as part of some business at hand. Transactions must be authorised, permissions sought, contracts signed, deliveries certified and documents completed for those involved to be able to proceed with what they are doing. On this point, consider the following from Corrigan and Sayer: On paper the Tudors created a formidable machinery of controls, far outreaching anything known in the medieval period. Over 300 ‘economic’ statutes were passed by the Tudors, some 250 of these penal in their

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provisions. Statutes were supplemented by an unending stream of proclamations and letters of instruction from Council and royal officials. In some cases – customs, grain commissioners – new bureaucratic machinery was established. The Crown also made extensive use of patents, licences and monopolies … Regulation of the corn supply was [particularly] important … [Statutes] limited the export of corn, either by forbidding export unless its price fell below a given threshold, or by licensing exporters. By a statute of 1552 domestic corn merchants had to be licensed by three Justices of the Peace: in 1563 this became an annual requirement. Within this statutory framework Privy Council and local commissioners exercised more direct surveillance and control. In 1565 special commissioners for restraint of the grain trade were appointed, authorised to stop shipments and license exporters. Searches were made by commissioners or Justices of the Peace for grain in bad years. In 1586– 87 Council issued a Book of Orders to Justices of the Peace for controlling the grain market; frequently updated, this became ‘the model for the working of the internal market in grain for the next two centuries’ … (1985: 66, 216) Corrigan and Sayer go on to explore the complex field of legal texts which framed the statutory responsibilities of the English Crown and established the new regulatory and administrative mechanisms under and by which it became possible to intervene in a range of economic and social affairs before, during and after the Norman Conquest, through the Tudor period, Civil War and Reformation and into the Victorian period (see 1985, esp. 15, 18–19, 20–23, 28, 37, 38, 48–50, 66–68, 123–127, 216). Their work is extended by Miller (1990: 315–319) on the emergence of “the complex web of calculative practices” which began “to enmesh and encircle the individual” during the “Colbert period” of French accountancy under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century; by Miller and O’Leary (1987) on similar processes in the late Victorian to early twentieth century; and, from a different perspective, Tilly’s (1990: 25) exploration of the “gearing” of state administrations to the “invasion” of small-scale forms of social life that those state administrations were heavily implicated in establishing and maintaining through those very operations. As these examples show, the state involves ‘paperwork’ in all manner of ways and constitutively so (see also Gupta 2012, Hull 2012 and Kierans 2019 for further examples). In relation to these trails of documentation and paperwork, Foucault pointed out that requiring individuals to leave a record of what they are doing, when, where, how and with whom, is a way of supervising them, in this case, a way of making their transactions and activities visible, opening them up to the scrutiny of those who stand at considerable remove, both spatially and temporally – through the “ceaseless” requirements established by the practices of record-keeping “an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery” (Foucault 1975: 194–196). Those requirements are “ceaseless” in the sense that records are supposed to accompany all activities

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whatsoever, admitting of “no time-outs” (Garfinkel, 1967a: 206). In the English case, come the Tudor period, a system of documentary relays had spread sufficiently across England to mean that the personage of the monarch could be regarded, to adopt a Latourian term, as a “centre of calculation” (Latour 1987: 223). As Corrigan and Sayer put it (1985: 71, but see also 48–49 for Henry VIII): Elizabeth … could rely sufficiently on her burgeoning machinery of government, in [an] increasingly known and integrated state, not to have to travel, in the whole 44 years of her reign, further north or west than Stafford, Shrewsbury or Bristol. Elizabeth’s ability to stay put while staying in charge contrasts sharply with what is known about rulers in archaic states who appear to have been obliged to be constantly active and on the move, partly because the work of writing they had begun to initiate was still all too easily interrupted (see Yoffee 2005: 96–100, Routledge 2000 and Strum and Latour 1987). Records thus make it possible to keep track of, exert control over and link together all manner of previously disconnected activities, both directly and indirectly, and consequentially so. Indeed, increasing the visibility and transparency of different types or aspects of activities, by obliging them to be written out in ever greater detail, increases the level and degree of “power-knowledge” that can be brought to bear and invested in them.6 A ‘power of writing’ was [being] constituted … modelled on the traditional methods of administrative documentation … [It dealt with] the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organisation of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms … [One] must include the procedures of writing that made it possible to integrate data into cumulative systems in such a way that they were not lost; so to arrange things that … [individual items] could be located in the general register … [The whole] apparatus of writing … opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object … secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterisation of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution on a given ‘population’. These small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, of arranging facts in columns and tables that are so familiar to us now, were of decisive importance … one should look into these procedures of writing and registration, one should look into the mechanisms of examination, into the formation of mechanisms of discipline, and of a new type of power over bodies. Is this the birth of the sciences of man? (Foucault 1975: 189–191)

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This “power of writing” did not emerge as a truth or completeness ‘engine’ designed to accurately capture the precise detail of individual transactions; it emerged through the “interconnection of different techniques themselves designed in response to localised requirements” (Foucault 1979: 80–81). Specifically, the pragmatic need was to have access to usable information about different types of activities when required, as cheaply, efficiently and comprehensively as possible (Bowker and Star 2000: 118; Scott 1998: 53–83). Usable records would capture information in standardised formats, and could be gathered together, collated and compared with relative ease. They could be methodically sequenced, processed and manipulated, providing a basis for, among other things, progressively extending the reach, scope and penetration of the wider practices of which the keeping of records was itself part (cf. Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 20–22; Hacking 1983). Together these features of systematic record-keeping made it possible to treat small-scale, localised activity as part of wider social, political, economic and indeed governmental ‘wholes’ – the totalities made available in and through the records at any given moment in time. As well as regulating activities – which we have already seen that Foucault defines as the disposition of assemblages of “men and things” – by situating them within social, political, economic and governmental fields, systematic records also therefore made it possible to think in terms of interventions aimed at a level that had previously escaped formalisation; the level of the field-as-a-whole. The drawing up of tables was one of the great problems of scientific, economic and political technology … how one was to observe, supervise, regularise the circulation of commodities and money and thus build up an economic table that might serve as the principle of the increase of wealth … [Addressing this problem rested on] twin operations in which two elements – distribution and analysis, supervision and intelligibility – are inextricably bound up … [The table is] both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge. It was a question of organising the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and to master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an ‘order’ … [In the form of] disciplinary distribution, the table … allows the characterisation of individual as individual and the ordering of a given multiplicity. It is the first condition for the control and use of an ensemble of distinct elements: the base for a micro-physics of what might be called a ‘cellular’ power. (Foucault 1975: 148–149) It is important to note that this “uninterrupted work of writing” is not unidirectional but multidirectional. It makes the supervisory activities at “the centre” as accountable, as visible, as the activities the records are being used to account for. Indeed, both the generation of the record and the work done on it subsequently are embedded in complex relations of accountability, a “phenomenal field” within which it becomes possible, for all practical

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purposes, to put to the record, and its handling, questions of adequacy, accuracy, validity, reproducibility, correctness of procedure, logic, method, rationality, and more in terms of all that it makes “observable-reportable” (Garfinkel 1967a, 2002). While these are little more than preliminary observations, once we start to explore the notion of documentation and textual commentaries along these lines, we find that the phenomena that Voss wishes to examine cannot be isolated in the way she at first imagines. The neat dividing lines between the economic, social, cultural, political and governmental domains that were to serve as the starting point for the investigation become increasingly hard to draw, from an external analytic perspective, with any certainty. What might seem to be a purely economic phenomenon, the “internal organisation of economic activity at El Presidio”, cannot, in practice, be disentangled from the bureaucratic, administrative and managerial techniques and devices in and through which that organisation could be made tangible. Indeed, for Foucault the notion that a form of activity could be analysed in purely economic terms is itself revealed as a construct, an artifact built up in and through the in situ use of the formal accounting methods and procedures being used to locate that activity in the first place (cf. Smith 1974a). Classifications, measurements, descriptions and ways of relating economic activities to one another are produced by diffuse, multiform and differentiated practices conducted in, through and across a variety of settings at once – making it difficult to hold to the idea that analysis need only take into consideration happenings at one physically bounded, arbitrarily selected site. These ways of making sense of economic activity are internal to, and furnished as part of, the phenomena under investigation, and Foucault suggests that we must carefully look for and describe these methods, and how they are custom-fitted to apply in actual cases – something Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 142) phrase as the need to examine the ways in which artefacts like records “cartographize and condition the relations they help organise”. Rather than presuppose such matters at the outset, researchers should study them as methodically organised phenomena in their own right (cf. Garfinkel 1967a). Turning attention away from economic phenomena to the techniques and devices through which those phenomena are made visible means expanding the scope of investigations to accommodate, at the very least, the formulation, implementation, administration and management of regulatory regimes and systems of governance – however ramshackle – and the detailed examination of everything from the large-scale movement of goods and people, and the ‘great game’ of colonial politics, to the localised practices in and through which these movements and political machinations are mapped out, connected up and made relevant in specific settings (Miller 1990). It is difficult to fully specify in advance what an analysis of this sort should take into account and where it should look. Without actually looking, almost anything connected with the organisational and informational infrastructures (public, private or otherwise) through which economic activities are logged,

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charted and grouped together might be relevant to the analysis Voss, for instance, is seeking to elaborate; the development of more direct, better supported, less vulnerable transport routes, plotted on more sophisticated maps, to facilitate communication across the empire; the introduction of simpler and more easily replicated records in conjunction with new systems of accountancy, financial scrutiny and taxation; the emergence of centralised bureaucratic structures staffed with personnel schooled in new forms of certified administrative expertise; the crystallisation of legal and judicial frameworks around the governance of the colony and the activities of the different categories of person falling within its jurisdiction; as well as all of the ways in which these and related matters were taken into consideration both by those who presided over settlements like El Presidio and those who were affected by their decisions, creating the space for, and scope for transition between, what Foucault would term new “subject positions”, categories of person, of the kind scattered throughout Voss’s text – “castas”, “californios”, “indios”, “mestizos”, “castillianos”, etc. These are, in turn, little more than indexes to phenomena that themselves require further elaboration (cf. Hacking 1986, 1999). Foucault’s underlying point is that researchers should not attempt to impose on the phenomenon an a priori reading of what the phenomenon is, to ‘tell’ the phenomenon, as it were, what it actually is or ought to be seen as.7 What is clear is that, in working towards this form of analysis, we are drawn away from idealised, synoptic portrayals of economic activity distinct from the state (and the approach to reading vernacular descriptions upon which those portrayals are based), towards accounts based on a consideration of the complex configurations of specificities we are presented with in actual cases. That is, to a consideration of the complexes of action and interaction reflexively embedded within intermeshing fields of activity elaborated at a local level that constitute the governmental work, the work of the state, of separating out areas of social life into distinctive domains: the cultural, the political, the economic and so on. Rather than dealing with a reified ‘it’, ‘the state’, and treating it as primary, we find ourselves examining the kinds of work that make it possible to conceive of a primary ‘it’ at all. For Foucault, given these considerations, ideal-typical frameworks are simply not adequate to their analytical task; they fail before they can get off the ground. The mistake made is to assume, on the basis of the ordered character of the clusters of forms of organisation encountered, that the phenomena of interest can be grouped under the same analytical headings because they are fundamentally, context independently, of the ‘same’ sort; i.e., distinguishably economic, social, cultural, political or governmental in character. Foucault argues, in contrast, that the phenomena of interest can only be grouped under such headings because they have been grouped together in practice by those “different strategies which are mutually opposed, composed and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects” (Foucault 1979: 81), strategies among which documentary procedures play a particularly significant role. Where research based on ideal-typical categorisations is prescriptive, reductive

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and serves to reify the problem of the state, Foucault advocates an alternative form of inquiry that is descriptive, pluralistic and dereifying. By so doing, Foucault is, in effect, asking us to question, to problematise, the very idea that there could be any fixed methodological points of departure that operate independently of the settings we are examining, and that could serve as ready-made foundations for our investigative efforts. Instead, we must ask what makes it possible, what has to have been put in place, in any actual case for us to describe what we encounter using decontexualised schematics and evaluative standards. Thus, Foucault would agree with Voss’s conclusion that we will never really know how economic activity was organised at El Presidio but for very different reasons. It is not for a lack of documentation. It is because the idea of the real objective structure of the economic activities that people at El Presidio were involved in is itself an artefact constructed for use within the setting and not a ready-to-hand, detached device for scrutinising it. We may come to know about aspects of life in the Spanish settlement in all manner of ways of course but Foucault’s point is that it is in those ways that it is specifically available and we cannot, therefore, take them for granted.

An archaeological interlude The statement selected from Voss’s work is negative, i.e., a reference to the absence of evidence that goods were distributed in a particular way at El Presidio, rather than positive, i.e., an argument for a given distribution based on whatever evidence might have been available. Nonetheless it exemplifies the ‘default’ methodological position of a great deal of contemporary social and political scientific research and its reliance on taken-for-granted and idealised typifications of activities and institutions. Archaeologists have offered interesting analyses of the assumptions which underpin this methodological approach. Yoffee, for instance, writes: [researchers have] embraced [this methodology] … because it [has] provided them with a series of ready … analogies that could be introduced … without any reservation … [Investigators have thus] engaged in … research to identify and seriate sociocultural “types” in the material and ethnographic record … to devise a trait-list to identify the common characteristics of … the state. (2005: 18–19) He continues: Behind all the fallacies in … logic [implicit in this position is] … the appeal of theory to … [those] seeking to model the organization of … societies from the residues they excavate. If one could posit a series of interlinked traits of one type and then identify one of those key traits in

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the material [and documentary] record, one could then flesh out the material … by extrapolating whole congeries of traits thought to characterize the type … The very act of categorization turned researchers towards the goal of finding an ideal type in the material [and documentary] record – is it or is it not … [a state or part of one]? – and to construct a shortcut for identifying an entire set of differences (as well as similarities) among … societies … [Their accounts] thus retrojected ethnographic types … into the … record. (2005: 19–20) Routledge offers a concrete example from his own research: More than one hundred and thirty years after its discovery, the Mesha Inscription … remains the longest and most informative Iron Age (1200–550 B.C.E.) document known from the southern Levant (Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories). For this reason, the inscription has a certain importance defined by the absence of rivals. On its own terms, however, it is also a text that rewards careful reading; one that provides a unique glimpse into political discourse at a key turning point in the historical development of the Levant … [an example of] political discourse … [that] reveals much about political identity and nascent state-formation [in the Moabite kingdom]. (2000: 221–224) Routledge acknowledges that the Mesha Inscription is generally recognised as posing “interpretative dilemmas” and generating “tensions” based on readings of it as a straightforward account of “political authority, territory, and national identity” (2000: 222), but suggests deeper problems remain: Line 10 [of the Mesha Inscription], where the men of Gad are said to have lived in “Ataroth since of old”, [is used for instance to] suggest that Mesha [the Moabite kingdom’s ruler and ‘author’ of the text] faced a complex ethno-political landscape. (2000: 222) Rejecting the idea that the Mesha Inscription represents a transparent medium through which the Moabite state can be viewed, Routledge argues that the archaeologist’s capacity to recover a “complex ethno-political landscape” from the text is itself a literary accomplishment or “effect” of the text. Routledge argues, in contrast to other accounts, that the Mesha Inscription cannot be treated as an “isolated message” but was instead “one of many intellectual products” (2000: 226), including a wide corpus of texts incorporating highly derogatory and dismissive commentaries by Jewish contemporaries available through the Old Testament that the Mesha Inscription should be seen as both responding to and drawing on. According to Routledge:

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The government of men and things [The] M[esha] I[nscription] makes a case for the legitimacy of Mesha’s rule over an enlarged geographic territory … [and] in making this case, the M[esha] I[nscription] both incorporates, and attempts to transform, a pre-existing model of political identity based on social segmentation and local affinity. Indeed, I argue that it is the embedding of Mesha’s political program in this indigenous model that makes it effective. (2000: 227)

In this sense, the M[esha] I[nscription] draws from, and transforms, local cultural resources as the ‘tools’ and ‘raw materials’ of its narration. As such the M[esha] I[nscription] is not about the narration or falsification of an event-based history, rather the M[esha] I[nscription] is about historymaking; bringing into being a certain understanding of the world by the context and manner in which it recounts events. (2000: 227) The Mesha Inscription is, in other words, a move in the self-same political scenarios it describes. There is a great deal to commend Routledge’s approach and his analysis of the Mesha Inscription is illuminating precisely because of the care he takes around such matters. That said, it is important to note the methodological dangers that can accompany this particular shift in emphasis. Once the move has been made away from the idea that texts can be used to recover facts, “event-based histories”, there is a temptation to treat them as if they can be used to recover what Routledge terms a “larger system of signification”, the world-views of those who authored the texts or at whom they were aimed. The danger can be seen in the following: “Evidence for the existence of a ‘mental map’ in the M[esha] I[nscription], predicated on a north-south division of Moab, lies in word choice” (Routledge 2000: 230). The ascription of beliefs or “mental maps” to those studied, on the basis of the investigator’s evaluations of the presuppositions apparently present in their accounts, can become the default position instead, one that is widespread in constructionist social and political science. The conceptual confusion this implicit mentalism generates is examined in greater depth in later chapters. Suffice to say at this point that part of the problem lies in the idea that stepping back to the “systems of thought” of those studied could somehow resolve the difficulties around uses of data that Voss’s statement highlights. In fact, interiorising the object of inquiry – placing it ‘in the mind’ – merely relocates the point at which those difficulties are encountered.8

Returning to the state Picking up the main thread of the argument again, it is now possible to be clearer about the precise nature of the critique that Foucault mounts against

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constitutionalism in the social and political sciences and the ideal-typical framework in which it is grounded. The basis of the charge he levels at them is this: while constitutionalists acknowledge that states are complex, composite administrative structures, the ideal-typical frameworks they employ are simply too inflexible to accommodate any meaningful investigation of how those structures are administered, managed and governed, of how they are held together in practice. Addressing their remarks to Hobbes, Callon and Latour have the following to say on this point: Hobbes omits to say that no promise, however solemn, could frighten the contracting parties enough to force them to obey. He omits to say that what makes the sovereign formidable and the contract solemn are the palace from which he speaks, the well-equipped armies that surround him, the scribes and the recording equipment that serve him … a whole gamut of tools, regulations, walls and objects … bodies, materials, discourses, techniques, feelings, laws, organisations. (1981: 284–285) They continue: “Through the interplay of equivalences [that this form of ‘sovereignty’ rests on], hitherto scattered elements can be incorporated into a whole, and thus help to stabilise other elements” (1981: 293). It is a consideration of the multiplicity of these practical ‘transactions’, as Callon and Latour term them, which allow for this process of incorporation – or construction, as many would have it – that is missing from constitutionalist accounts. Instead, constitutionalists take for granted the work of administering those structures, of making them available as structures of the state, choosing instead to focus on questions of what is being administered and by whom – as discussed above, a narrow reading of Hobbes’s problem of “the Matter thereof, and the Artificer” (Hobbes 2017 [1651]: 7–8). They then define the ties between the different component parts of the state in terms of the integrative role of the ‘meta-powers’ possessed by Leviathan: the power to repress and coerce, the power to extract resources, the power to reproduce itself and the power to ‘legitimate’ its own operations; that is, to pacify and draw into its jurisdiction all those who fall under its rule (cf. Jessop 2016: 3). However, in so doing, like Voss, constitutionalist studies simultaneously underestimate the complexity of what they are trying to account for, while overestimating their capacity to account for that complexity within the frameworks they have chosen to operate within. As a result, whenever we try to apply the framework in actual cases, we encounter specific difficulties. The subject matter is shown to be more nebulous, elusive and hard to define than pithy ideal-typical renditions would lead us to believe. Most troublingly, as Navaro-Yashin puts it, in actual circumstances the “state appears in many guises and constantly transfigures itself” before researchers’ eyes. She uses the following example to make the point:

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The government of men and things Imagine a public square in the centre of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in identical uniforms, chanting slogans to demand more “rights” from “the state” to use their authority over “the people”. Imagine this taking place in Taksim Square, Istanbul, a site often selected for public demonstrations in critique of the state … built around the memorial monument for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular/modernist founder of modern Turkey. Imagine a group of mothers and a father throwing themselves in front of the rushing cars in Taksim Square traffic, or another group sitting on the main street and waving their banners at hurried drivers blowing their horns. Picture the banners reading “Our children are dying on hunger strikes in prison” … Imagine, then, the police approaching to force the parents out of the traffic and to threaten them with arrest. Picture, too, journalists running about, cameras clicking, their flashes encircling the incidents. Figure the stories produced by street dwellers and their rumour, as well as the TV news coverage of the latest events in the city centre … The public square, so imagined by social theorists as symbol par excellence for the public sphere or for civil society, is a site, here, for the production of the political … [In] this exemplary and emblematic public square, there is no space that is not arrested with one or another face of the state. (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 1–2)

In asking “who, what, and where is ‘the state’ in the incidents just described?”, Navaro-Yashin poses a challenge to those who propose ideal-typical, categorybased (re-)descriptions of the state.9 This is not simply a question about how, in practice, we can disentangle the state from society, or public from private, in this particular scene. It is a question about whether any such schema could ever be used to arrive at a description that adequately captures what is happening within it (cf. Callon and Latour 1981: 295–296). Following Foucault, Navaro-Yashin’s point is not that it is impossible to salvage an analytically driven account of these events – by, for example, simply imposing the schema by methodological fiat while ignoring any incongruence this might produce – but that, after performing any such rescue job, the account we would have would no longer constitute a description of the scene. It would instead be, for instance, a description of repression, reproduction and legitimation refracted through “ideological state apparatuses” as evidenced by a public demonstration, rather than a description of the actual demonstration itself. An account of this sort uses theoretical categories to generate an artificial and premature form of methodological closure, one that raises serious questions about the degree to which the recovered description could be said to be about the event (as opposed to some other) in any meaningful sense. The very phenomena the methodological approach was designed to illuminate, in Navaro-Yashin’s case the state in Turkey and its connection to the political practices of various sections of Turkish society, would drop from view, becoming the unexamined foundation from which model building could proceed.

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It is important to clarify the force of this point. The level at which states-of-affairs could be said to be the warrant for descriptions is the source of much controversy within the philosophy of the social sciences, and attempts to resolve that philosophical issue can quickly lead into questions about the epistemological and ontological status of knowledge claims. The line of critique Foucault offers is of a more direct character. The charge made is that phenomena of these sorts warrant, in general, a more careful, less cursory treatment and that more needs to be said about the way in which what gets treated as data comes to constitute ‘data’. That constitutionalist accounts undermine the sense in which their descriptions are ‘about’ the data they draw upon is connected to the idea that their analytical characterisations are insensitive to the particularities of the social situations that provide the basis for their accounts. While constitutionalist analyses demonstrate that this sort of data can be handled using their ideal-typical frameworks, this does not show us whether doing so actually improves our understanding. As Foucault and Navaro-Yashin following him argue, constitutionalist analyses pose as many problems as they resolve (see also Pleasants 1999: 64–65). Foucault’s critique is thus directed at the ways in which constitutionalists have chosen to conceptualise and, from there, methodologically operationalise the problem of the state, rather than at the problem per se. The specific charge Foucault levels is that there is more to the problem of the state than the constitutionalist approach can allow. The constitutionalists have elaborated an ideal-typical framework that is both a guide to, and product of, their studies of states and the practices of a range of governmental and non-governmental actors in terms of the structures they work within. But this framework, established to facilitate empirical investigations, gets in the way of an explication of the various kinds of phenomena those investigations were designed to describe and explain. This is because constitutionalists try to treat propositions about the state as if they were ultimately reducible to propositions about the constitutional make-up of the state. The make-up of the state poses important questions in some circumstances but certainly not all. Moreover, lots of things have to be in place for anyone to conceive of the make-up of the state as a problem and the constitutionalists are simply silent on what they might be. For Foucault, constitution has to be seen alongside the work of constituting, make-up alongside making up, and it is the absence of the latter half of the pair that is problematic in constitutional accounts. These issues arise because, in crude terms, contemporary constitutionalists tend to look upon the state as a kind of modular structure, and their studies try to identify the different elements that need to be in place for any particular structure to be a state (as opposed to some other type of thing). This leads to the predominance of what might be termed ‘the catalogue method’ of studying the state in constitutionalist research. The problem with the catalogue method is that catalogues are not meaningful when treated in isolation from a context of use. Attempting to reconstruct states on the basis of a constitutionalist catalogue is, to use an analogy, like trying to build a car from

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scratch by consulting a list of its component parts. We can imagine circumstances under which someone could work out how to get from the list to the car, but it would be extremely difficult. Importantly, if someone were to take up the challenge, success would hinge on such things as whether they knew what a car was, their knowledge of how engines, chassis and body parts operate, how they are put together and where they go, whether they had received mechanical training, the amount of time set aside for trial and error, how imaginative they were in their solution, whether we supplied them with a manual or other instructional materials, etc. The point is that catalogues acquire their meaning because they have a clear practical function when used in conjunction with spare parts, instruction manuals, background knowledge, technical expertise, additional training and whatever other resources might be available first or second-hand. Because of the way in which the ideal-typical framework has been configured, constitutionalist analyses, when taken at face-value, filter out all these considerations – the very stuff of the state – in ways that make it difficult to ever bring them back in again. Making sense of the descriptions generated by the catalogue method requires us to draw on background knowledge of the sets of practices we know the description must be speaking of and to. In other words, the scenarios they depict are recognisable because we are able to use what we already know about how states work in order to see what they are made up of. The accounts, therefore, trade on our common-sense understandings of such matters (Schütz 1962; Garfinkel 1967a; Sacks 1992). This need not necessarily constitute a problem, it doesn’t in our ordinary practices, for example, but the constitutionalist’s use of background knowledge is unprincipled because the theoretical frameworks being employed deny such knowledge has a primary relevance. The basis of Foucault’s argument is that these additional aspects of the problem need to be investigated, that we need to expand the scope of our inquiries to include a consideration of the how as well as the what of the state, and that we can only do this by developing a methodological position capable of examining these questions together. Foucault argues that this reorientation cannot be achieved within the constitutionalist framework because it has been specifically configured to accord methodological primacy to ‘what’ questions (i.e., structural or compositional ones) over ‘how’ questions (i.e. processual, practical or epistemic ones). For Foucault, we cannot, therefore, build on constitutionalism, we have to dismantle it and start from a different position, one which does not assign primacy a priori. The problem with the constitutionalist position – the issue which gives rise to the difficulties outlined above – can be traced back to the attempt to define the object of analysis in advance of the investigation, to pre-specify what should be included within the account, and what can be safely ignored. While this makes the analytical task of describing the state much more manageable, simplification comes at a significant cost. By focusing narrowly on the problem of providing a definition of the state that is designed to work independently of the contexts in which it is empirically grounded, the ideal-type

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blocks off attempts to explore the idea that the ‘meta-power’ they attribute to the state might “only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the greater negative forms of power”. Thus, for instance, when we ask what exactly is being invoked by references to the great ‘prohibitive’ or ‘deductive’ functions of the state that were listed above (Foucault 1978: 312, 136), it is difficult to arrive at anything other than an unsatisfactorily programmatic and general answer. Rather than being presented with demonstrations, we are referred back to non-specific assertions about massified, global and highly abstract forms of power with only the most fuzzy and tenuous connections to any definite situations or courses of practical action. For instance, to refer to ‘bodies of armed men’ when asked to define the ‘coercive state apparatus’ at its best does little more than append a promissory note: on its own all it does is restate the question in a different form. Note again the inherent problems with a strategy in which the answers to ‘how’ questions are treated as derivable from the answers to ‘what’ questions. Were we to ask someone what they meant by the claim that states have a repressive role, answering that question by pointing to collections of people and things would not be particularly helpful. We would need to know why those things might be relevant to an answer before we could see that this was a possible answer. Pointing out that states have armies and police forces does not help us to understand what role they play and how they play it (cf. Callon and Latour 1981; Jessop 2016: 56–57). In other words, by adopting this methodological approach to the study of the state, constitutionalists can only gain purchase on their targets by treating the practices through which the state might acquire a shape and character for individuals in actual circumstances as being a secondary, even trivial concern. This is a move which involves, among other things, abortive attempts to restrict language to a purely referential or denotative role within analysis, as was discussed using the example of Voss’s work. If we want, as Foucault does, to reorient to these considerations, to track the manner in which states are assembled through disparate complexes of socially organised practical activity (activities that include a multitude of specific ways of using and doing things with language), we must change the terms on which those problems are addressed. In particular, we must abandon the idea that the purpose of analysis is to definitively settle questions about the ultimate nature and composition of ‘the state’ and what the state really is, after all. As Callon and Latour put it, such exercises, in the final analysis, prove “nothing about the latter’s own nature” (1981: 299). Rather than build the sort of analytical devices that would enable us to construct and test different accounts ourselves, Foucault recommends that we examine instead how accounts are worked up and worked with, mobilised and deployed in the course of the work of defining the problem of the state – wherever that work is undertaken, and whatever it involves. The task is not, then, to decide questions of state on behalf of others, but to find out when, where and under

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what rubrics those questions arise, and to describe how and with what means they are settled in practice. Studies which have taken up that methodological challenge are the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1 The use of ‘vernacular’ is not, therefore, meant here, or subsequently, to suggest an implied contrast between ‘official’ (specialised and technical) and ‘unofficial’ (generic and nontechnical) accounts, or between authorised, sanctioned or precise usages and idiomatic, colloquial or imprecise turns of phrase. Official accounts are simply those worked up in the official vernacular. 2 For more on the use of vernacular accounts as discursively framed ‘picture-thoughts’, structurally equivalent to a travelogue or guidebook, see Wieder 1974: 151–152. Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 165) quote George Eliot on the “picture-writing of the mind” that links together “the images … associated with abstract or collective terms”, to make a related point; as do Hardt and Negri (2000: 291) with the example of Muybridge’s famous “zoopraxiscopic”’ photographs of human and animal bodies in motion. 3 The phrase “docile text” is Garfinkel’s (Garfinkel 1967a, 2002) and appears in Garfinkel, Livingston and Lynch (1981). There is perhaps a link to Foucault’s work in that a “docile text”, like a “docile body”, is one which has been “disciplined”, that is, rendered more manageable, through the application of a variety of “compliance procedures” (see again Garfinkel 1967a and Foucault 1975). 4 And see again here Sacks (1963) and Suchman (1987). 5 E.g. Foucault 1975: 148–149, 190–191, 194–196, and see also Foucault 1998: 133–159. 6 Related considerations about the institutional ‘matrices’ within which official records come to have both direct and indirect effects on what Foucault frequently refers to as the “distributing of bodies in spaces” are raised in Goffman (1961: 13–116). 7 For an engaging critique of this strategy see Robinson’s (2000) The Obvious Elephant, a children’s story in which a group of people, confronted with an elephant, engage in a series of attempts to define what it had to be without due consideration of the particularities of the case. In social and political studies, the state appears to be, in many respects, an obvious elephant. 8 See here Hutchinson and Read (2005) and Mulhall (2002) for accounts of this problem based on their readings of the opening sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) as well as Ryle (1949). 9 Although, it is important to note, there is some ambiguity here. The question concerning how social and political scientists could identify the state in this example is designed to highlight their methodological confusions. However, it is unclear whether Navarro-Yashin also attributes those confusions to the people in the scene. I will argue in later chapters that studies of the state often tend to do just that – read their own methodological shortcomings into the phenomena they investigate. As a result, they generate misunderstandings. We have no reason whatsoever, for example, to accept the idea that those Navarro-Yashin depicts in Taksim Square would have any difficulty in telling us about the Turkish state or what was happening if asked.

4

Problematising the state – historical and ethnographic studies of state practices

Following Foucault’s methodological critique of the constitutionalist position through, this chapter discusses a body of social and political research which is organised around a different way of approaching empirical studies of states and governmental practices. That body of work methodologically foregrounds construction not constitution. Within it, the state remains a significant focus of social and political inquiry but this is a state that is recognised as possessing no unambiguous centre, no clearly identifiable loci of control, no core architectures, no permanent, fixed boundaries, territorially or organisationally, no settled modes of operation, no clear functional characteristics and no ultimately definable purpose or telos. Instead of treating Weber’s ideal-type as a methodological solution (the constitutionalist position), the ideal-type is treated as posing the problem. Rather than use the ideal-type as a definition of the state, the aim is to deconstruct the models of statehood it projects. This is achieved by bracketing representations (or perhaps better, various acts of representation) of the state as, following Weber, the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946b [1919]: 78), the foremost political institution of civil society, and exploring the conditions of their success. In doing so, researchers problematise these idealised representations to demonstrate that they represent the outcome of, and are made possible by, historically, socially and culturally contingent processes and practices in and through which the territoriality, legitimacy, authority and power of the state – Leviathan’s dread properties – have taken shape, found voice and been given material form. There are two main variants within the field of studies which take this approach: those which examine the historical emergence of fields of state practices and those which ethnographically examine the workings of the state in the present. In the first camp we have studies of governmentality, the state effect and legibility projects, such as those undertaken by Philip Corrigan, Derek Sayer, Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller, Timothy Mitchell and James Scott (and paralleled by historical-conceptual work in philosophy such as that of Quentin Skinner among others), and in the second we have a diverse body of work by anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Begoña Aretxaga, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Veena Das and Matthew Hull as well as ‘ethnographic’ works

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by archaeologists such as Bruce Routledge and Norman Yoffee and the political scientists Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes. I will argue these can be separated methodologically and not just by focus. The first kind of study begins with specific claims advanced by the state and tracks backwards, tracing them to the diffuse sets of sites, personnel, bodies of knowledge and objects and technologies from which they originated. The second kind of study begins with specific claims and tracks forwards, following the social and cultural careers, trajectories, ‘biographies’, etc., of those claims once they have been formulated and advanced. Whereas the purpose of the first kind of study is to find out how various acts of naming the state as impersonal power, Hobbes’s “Mortall God”, are made possible and to investigate what configurations they rest on, the purpose of the second is to find out what happens once the state has been accepted as such. These contrasting methodological strategies are used to determine what it means to talk of the state in particular socio-political contexts.

Introduction Following the discussion of the methodological insights that provided the ground for Foucault’s move to treat ideal-types and catalogues of the constituents of statehood as part of the phenomenon of the state rather than representations of it, this chapter introduces a body of social and political research organised around a different way of approaching empirical studies of states and governmental practices. Work of this kind accepts the need to approach the study of the state in terms equivalent to those outlined at the end of the last chapter, i.e., along what might be broadly termed ‘constructionist’ lines. Before assessing the methodological strategies that connect what can otherwise seem rather unrelated and dissimilar types of investigation, however, it is important to re-examine some of the points of departure they share. Within this group of theorists and researchers, Foucault’s work has a pivotal status, even where studies attempt to move past it, and references to Foucault have been used to anchor claims about the coherence of what has been described as a distinctive field in its own right (cf. Rose and Miller 1992, 2013). Foucault’s work thus provides a set of coordinates from which to survey the logic of that field. For that reason, before moving on, it is worth revisiting what has been said about that work so far. This makes it possible to outline how constructionist studies, of the kind Rose and Miller (2013) for instance are associated with, methodologically reconceive the problem of the state. Put simply, constructionist studies reject theories of the state in favour of empirical studies which employ methodologies to problematise the state, particularly the constitutionalist understanding of the state embodied in the ‘Westphalian model’, discussed below. There are, I argue, two broad types of constructionist study: studies of the historical emergence of fields of state practices and those which ethnographically examine the workings of the state in the present. Each kind of study methodologically problematises the state in a different way.

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The state reconceived It is possible to briefly summarise the argument discussed at length in the last few chapters as follows: crudely, constitutionalist studies of the state have proceeded as if it were possible to use vernacular accounts as the basis for a theoretical investigation of the invariant properties of the state – the properties that make states what they are, and serve to mark them off, ideal-typically, from other forms of social, cultural, economic and political organisation. Those would include the properties which enable us, for example, to distinguish states from gangs, militias, organised criminal enterprises (like racketeering) or war-bands, or indeed from banks, corporations, cooperatives, mutual assurance societies, charitable institutions or religious groups, as discussed in Tilly (1985: 169–171), Rodgers (2006) and Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 138), among others.1 However, insofar as the constitutionalist strategy involves treating accounts as representations which offer perspicuous guides to the machinery of state, this over-simplifies the task of studying the state while over-valuing a particular type of solution to it; that embodied in catalogues of its various infrastructural components, catalogues often themselves generated as part of the work of the state as constructionist studies show. Foucault’s critique of that position was introduced via the argument that ‘the data’, typically records and documentation of various sorts, are distorted by the constitutionalist’s methodological strategy. For Foucault, vernacular accounts – records, documents, reports, etc. – are not simply ways of telling, narrating, describing or depicting states-of-affairs, importantly they are also ‘doings’, methodic forms of activity that are both features of, and ways of organising, breaking down and reorganising, the states of affairs they comment upon. Where the constitutionalists analysed these materials in terms of their representational content, Foucault argued the scope of our analyses had to be expanded to incorporate not only what any account said but also what it was doing or being used to do, i.e., its constructive role (cf. Skinner 2002: 7, 86–89). In terms of the state, according to Foucault, this meant the objective should be to investigate how vernacular accounting practices both establish and become enmeshed in the wider ensembles of (bureaucratic, administrative and managerial, in short, governmental) activity, and the forms of reasoning they embody, in and through which the state is constituted as a feature of social and political life. In the process, it would be possible to investigate how the state comes to ‘take on’ a discernible life of its own.2 In arguing this, Foucault echoes Marx’s dictum that the state is a “product” (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 3), but with the emphasis squarely on the diversity of the work involved in its production. What Foucault argued, perhaps more consistently than many of the others who have written on this general topic in recent times, was that talk of the persistence over time of a unified, monolithic entity called ‘the state’ – whose criteria of identity could be captured in neatly bounded ideal-typical formulations – is highly misleading.3 When we set out to find that entity, as we

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draw closer to the action, we encounter an explosion of fragmentary details. Foucault, like others before and since, observed that ‘the state’ has a tendency to decompose before our eyes, revealing motley collections of people, places, practices, institutions, objects, functions, rituals, routines, events, spaces, processes, bodies of knowledge, forms of conduct and more (cf. Jessop 2016). Quentin Skinner, for instance, cites Bolingbroke’s lament, from the eighteenth century, that “the state is become, under ancient and known forms, an undefinable monster” (Skinner 1989: 19). Corrigan and Sayers (1985: 187–190) similarly cite Engels’ observation that the “logical incongruities” that characterised the messy relationships between the different parts of the British state were such that the question as to how they hung together at all represented “a sore trial to the reasoning mind”. From the 1940s on, structure-functional ‘abolitionists’ in various fields argued that the vocabulary of the state was so plagued by inconsistency, confusion, ambiguity and vagueness that it possessed no worth analytically, and proposed that it should be abolished and replaced with an alternative vocabulary, that of ‘political systems’, ‘political culture’ and ‘political institutions’, and their integration with other functional sub-systems within the overall social structure.4 However, Foucault does not treat the sorts of details we encounter when we go looking for the state as extraneous, as distracting surface reflections that prevent us from seeing how the state is really internally organised, or might lead us to give the whole thing up as an irreconcilable mess as the abolitionists urged. Rather, Foucault asks us to think about the disparate ways in which these collections are assembled and managed in and across different locales, and the techniques, strategies and devices – “the arts of government” – used to arrange them so as to put affairs of state in some kind of working order. In other words, instead of trying to construct an apparatus that would allow us, as researchers, to systematically handle this level of detail, Foucault is recommending that we should look to see how such apparatuses are/were constructed by governmental actors and their allies (both inside and outside the formally defined institutions of state) in order to make their tasks more manageable and their concerns more tractable as a key part of the work of the state (cf. Ferguson 1990). In this, a key concern should be investigations of the multiplicity of practical solutions to the problem of how to govern (as well the auspices under which those problems arose), not simply documenting what is governed and by whom. The point that catalogues, inventories and manuals detailing the structure and composition of the state have an existence outside social scientific accounts is particularly relevant here. That is because they are resources that are drawn upon ‘in the wild’ by members of socio-political communities in a variety of ways. This can be seen in, e.g., Corrigan and Sayer’s (1985: 48–50) descriptions of the pragmatic political uses of extensive surveys and legal formulations of ‘the realm’ at different stages in English state-formation; Aretxaga’s (1997, 2001) descriptions of the occasioned invocation of the proper jurisdiction and application of British law by female IRA prisoners in

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UK prisons in the 1980s; or in Hull (2012), Gupta (2012) and Kieran’s (2019) studies of paperwork and red-tape as state-making phenomena. Yet, beyond a small body of research, social and political studies have barely begun to acknowledge, let alone systematically describe, the consequential uses to which resources of these kinds can be put in ordinary situations. For the most part, instead, such usages go unremarked. Weber’s observations regarding the normative character of adherence to the rules in bureaucratic contexts are suggestive of what an alternative might look like in this regard, highlighting as they do one possible way in which an overall conception of an organisation (what it can properly be said to be, what it can properly be said to do and who can be said to be properly placed to do it) might be used to assess and evaluate actual courses of action by personnel within that organisation (Bittner 1965). Ethnomethodological studies, studies which seek to investigate practical action and reasoning from within (Garfinkel 1967a: 36), also provide insights into the ways in which “defensible bureaucratic document[s]” are worked up in ways that “anticipate” potential uses which are not themselves formally set out in or recoverable from those documents (cf. Herzfeld 2005: 373 on the work of James Scott) and thus point in similar directions to Foucault’s work. Foucault’s own proposed conceptual and methodological reorientation to the problem of the state has affinities with Weber’s (often elliptic) statements regarding its socially embedded character, and steers the researcher back towards similar methodological concerns. That is, Foucault’s aim was to prepare the way for studies of routine, ordinary practices of governing – covering the use of rules and other ‘action-templates’ for doing such things as documentation, compilation, classification, calculation, simplification, abstraction, standardisation, modelling, planning, administration and regulation – and their elaboration in a variety of complex, locally organised combinations of which the different faces of the modern state provide some, but by no means all, of the most visible and extensive examples (cf. Lynch 1993: 203–264). These studies would help establish an “analytics” of the cellular, productive forms of power whose diffusion Foucault’s “histories of the present” were designed to make visible.5 For Foucault, it is the way in which this type of power has come to invest the state form that has stabilised, over time, the dispositifs or practically structured arrangements within which discourses and acts of state acquire their meaning. Foucault’s work has been highly influential, and his methodological proposal has had a major impact both directly and indirectly on the paths taken by and shape of social and political studies of the state and governmental practices in the period since. However, while influential in its own right, the proposal is also indicative of a wider shift, and marks a more general movement away from more theoretically oriented towards more empirically oriented research into the social and political construction of the state and the practices which variously underpin it. Although it is possible to point to clusters, the research is not straightforwardly, for example, (neo)Marxist, (neo)Weberian, (neo)Durkheimian, (post)structuralist, Foucauldian or psychoanalytic in character, but tends

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to cannibalise aspects of all of them. This expanding body of constructionist literature contains a great deal that is of interest, but it spans work in a number of disciplinary areas and, reflecting its subject matter, eschews a narrow focus on any central ‘object’. It is, therefore, relatively hard to pin down. Nonetheless, commonalities do exist and these can be defined negatively and positively. Negatively, this literature takes an anti-theoretical stance, setting itself against the theoretical cul-de-sacs of the main social and political scientific approaches to the state of the 1950s through to the 1980s. Even among sympathisers6 there is a general sense that the neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist debates of the time7 on the theory of the state had effectively exhausted themselves. The bulk of current research is predicated on the idea that states, as historically situated socio-political phenomena, elude general theoretical treatments and, as a consequence, the pursuit of a general theory of the state has largely been abandoned. A general theory of the state is now seen as neither necessary, possible nor even desirable.8 The turn against theory was partially reinforced by a political turn against the state. From the 1970s onwards, voices within both the left and right of political opinion have become more audible in their condemnation of the nature, scope and activities of national governments.9 These critics see the state’s sphere of operations as suspect, as potentially if not actually illegitimate, and treat its claims to be otherwise as bogus. According to writers like Zygmunt Bauman (1988) and James Scott (1998) among others, when seen in conjunction with wider public disaffection with organised mass politics more broadly, this is evidence of the disintegration of the (dangerously misguided) “high modernist” vision of the emancipatory potential of nation-states, i.e., their capacity to engineer genuine social (and moral) improvement in the populations they govern using the technical resources and expert knowledge at their command.10 In place of what is now seen as grandly theoretical, essentialist, technocratic modernism, contemporary researchers have tended to adopt what might be described as anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist and anti-modernist approaches to the study of the state (see, e.g., Bevir and Rhodes 2010). A major part of this shift has involved establishing an alternative starting point to methodological positions predicated on a picture of a world populated by clearly defined, “relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory” (Tilly 1985: 170, emphasis added). The idea that research could proceed on the basis that states can be unproblematically ‘differentiated’ from the social, cultural and economic ‘environments’ in which they operate has been continually challenged by researchers working in this area following Foucault. Rather than taking those ‘differences’ as a given, the precise ways in which the state comes to be differentiated from society, among other things, is viewed as an achieved outcome and one that needs to be investigated, not assumed.

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The following sequence of quotes is intended to underline the logic of the positions just outlined. The series begins with a statement outlining the main tenets of what has been termed the Westphalian model (Mason 2004 and for critical discussion see Biggs 1999; Bevir and Rhodes 2010: 1; Jessop 2016; Latour 2016: 311), the canonical constitutionalist view of the state, but ends with a statement of programmatic aspirations based on a contemporary constructionist outlook. Through these quotes we can chart the methodological move constructionists have made in breaking with constitutionalism: Exclusive authority is the bedrock of the territorial state … Shared recognition among sovereign actors – that there is no authority superior to that of the state – demarcates global political space into discrete, selfenclosed domains, constituting the decentralized international arrangement. This mutual restriction of ‘outside’ authorities from ‘inside’ sovereign boundaries buttresses domestic claims to exclusive political authority at the same time as delegitimizing non-sovereign alternatives. (Mason 2004: 1) According to modernist political sensibilities, as every foundational college course in Political Science teaches, there can only ever be one state in a territory … Even when, as in some historical contexts, the term describes a largely unconnected set of administrative practices and institutions. Or, in extreme situations, almost none at all. Insofar as the state – the singular, definite imagined article – is the sine qua non of modernist politics, it exists, alike at the metropole and the colonial margin, as a narrated and enacted description of order: order … in the double sense of regularity and regulation, of convention and control, of civility and sovereign command over a land mass and all who dwell within … [It is this] among other things, that makes it impossible to arrive at a point of closure by (re)formulating a neat ideal-typification of ‘the … state’. Or of its historical physics … [The] beast resists two-dimensional representation; … its variabilities, fluidities, hybridities, limits, and disarticulations over time and space … [are] an over-determined expression of its inner workings and its dealings with significant ‘others’ … [As] an immanent structure of diverse possibilities … [its] concrete political, material, and cultural forms … [are] made, remade, and sometimes unmade in historical practice. (Comaroff 1998: 340–342) At this stage in our argument we wish to register, simply, the centrality within the social theories we have considered [those of Marx, Durkheim and Weber] of state formation … [as the regulation of ordered] sets of social forms of life … These theoretical models are undoubtedly illuminating – providing they are read as critique, not putative historical descriptions, as orientations to historical inquiry, not substitutes for it. They grasp significant and far from obvious features … But regarded

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Problematising the state from a historical viewpoint, as depictions of any particular [state] … such ideal-types are obviously inadequate; this is not their analytic function. Construction … and formation of the political state was nowhere, empirically speaking, ‘one and the same act’ … The political state – ‘the State’ in the modern sense – was … very long in the making. This is true in two senses. First, those agencies and institutions which ultimately came to be identifiable as ‘the’ state in many cases had a long … pedigree. Second, the organization of these agencies into the kind of polity Weber describes as ‘rational-bureaucratic’ or Marx contrasts with feudal forms of rule, was protracted, and indeed in many instances remains – in terms of the models’ expectations – no more than partial … Outside theoreticians’ models, there is no such thing as … [‘the State’ in general; actual states] only exist as particular, historical forms … These particularities should not be dismissed as a set of irritating disturbances to be put on one side. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 187–190) Those for whom ‘the state’ appears an unproblematic term in analysis … will inevitably be disappointed by the current literature on government and governmentality. One of the principal aims … [of that literature is] to draw attention to a variety of studies which have shown the value of posing the question of … the constitutive role of an array of authorities, forms of knowledge, and technologies of conduct that are fundamental to the activity of politics … ‘Government’, as deployed in this literature, is less a concept defined in advance than a field of investigation, within which a multiplicity of questions can be posed concerning the ways in which the lives of individuals are acted upon under different regimes of authority. Analytics of government and governmentality do not offer a theory of the state, politics or modernity, nor even a new ‘theory of power’. Rather they address the operation of power, and political power … [concern] the dimension of our history composed by the invention, contestation, operationalization and transformation of more or less rationalized schemes, programmes, techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct so as to achieve certain ends … [and examine how] rulers, statesmen and politicians came to see their tasks in terms of government, and to ask who can govern, what is the justification for government, what or who should be governed and how … [They] have produced an array of rigorous and innovative studies of specific strategies, techniques and practices for the conduct of conduct, and elucidated the constitutive role of expertise in problematizing, inventing and regulating particular domains of individual and collective behaviour … It would not be too much to suggest that this constitutes a progressive ‘research programme’ [in Lakatos’ terms]. (Miller and Rose 1995: 590–592)

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Positively, then, this progressive research programme incorporates studies that have two features in common. Firstly, there is the insistence, contra abolitionism, that the state remains a significant topic for social and political inquiry.11 The call to ‘bring the state back in’ has thus been heeded, though the terms of its re-admittance to the analytical stage are quite unlike those set-out by prominent constitutionalists like Theda Skocpol. Despite the surge in interest in empirical studies of ‘the state’, it is a state that is recognised as possessing, topos ouranios (Derrida 1978), no unambiguous centre, no clearly identifiable loci of control, no core architectures, no permanent, fixed boundaries, territorially or organisationally, no settled modes of operation, no clear functional characteristics and no ultimately definable purpose or telos.12 Thus, in a Foucauldian move, Comaroff, Corrigan and Sayer and Miller and Rose, quoted above, would not accept that the Westphalian model – which enshrines the state as the sovereign political institution of civil society de facto and de jure, home and abroad – has been ‘falsified’ by the construction of alternative sources of political authority both ‘inside and outside’ national-states; i.e., by the increasing strength of supra-national bodies like the European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), etc., or by the multiplication of infra-national structures like local decision-making fora, regional or devolved governments or any other form of subsidiary authority. They would argue, instead, that the entire picture expressed in the model Mason outlines is itself a projection, a conceptual artefact (see, e.g., Biggs 1999). From this perspective, the model was never ‘true’ to begin with: it was always an effect, a “mythic abstraction”, produced by specific “tactics of power”. As those tactics have changed, so has the picture. The Westphalian model is based on a misconception: the point is to describe the tactics (and the knowledge/power which shaped them), not the various images they give rise to over time of which this model is just one example (cf. Jessop 2016). Secondly, researchers operating within this field would join Miller and Rose in proclaiming the programmatic character of the research they are engaged in. Although they have abandoned the pursuit of a general theory of the state, they have not abandoned a commitment to the idea that the historically contingent arrangements captured by the concept of the state could be investigated in a systematic manner – that there could be, in other words, a solution to the problem of the state within the social and political sciences. It is just that the solution would reside less in the topics such studies might take up, than in the nature of the investigative practice itself. What ties these studies together as a group is, in other words, a commitment to a shared methodology that defines how they approach their subject-matter, and hence, go about providing that solution. They do not reject the concept of the state, but nor do they seek to use it. Instead, the aim is to explore its applicability, to critically interrogate it and investigate how it is, and can be, intelligibly employed in the first place. The rationale is neatly framed by Corrigan and Sayer:

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Problematising the state From Weber we have taken much, not least … his significant suggestions about ‘the State’ being the self-defined site, or set of sites and personnel, of claims – successful claims – to the legitimate use of force. State formation always returns to such a project of monopolization. ‘The State’ seeks to stand alone in its authority claims to be the only legitimate agency equally for this or that form of knowledge, provision, regulation or – that wonderfully neutral word – ‘administration’. This is as much a part of the sinews of legitimated power as monopoly of the means of physical force … In a sense it is the growing success of such claims that enables ‘the State’ to be named, as impersonal power, Hobbes’s ‘Mortall God’, in the first place. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 222)

They continue: Of course, institutions of government are real enough. But ‘the’ state is in large part an ideological construct, a fiction … The idea of the state, as Weber stresses, is a claim, a means by which politically organised subjection is simultaneously accomplished and concealed, and is constituted in large part by the activities of institutions of government themselves … We aim to go behind the ‘idea of the state’, to show it as a construction, to decode its message … [by focusing] on the intricate machinery of state formation and moral regulation, … [and by examining] the apparent coherence, the systematic, ‘solid’ features of that image. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 7–10) Corrigan and Sayer subsequently argue, in the case of the English state, that the first such successful acts of ‘naming’ can be traced back with a fair degree of precision to the 1530s and 1640s (1985: 166). However, it is the general case they make for seeking those acts out that is of interest. In their work, as well as that of others I have quoted, we have come full-circle, arriving back at Weber’s first set of formulations via a reconsideration of his second, the ideal-type. However, the emphasis has shifted: instead of treating the ideal-type as a methodological solution (the constitutionalist position), it is treated as posing the problem. Rather than begin with a ready-made formulation and work forwards, the aim is to work backwards from it by deconstructing the model of statehood it projects to arrive at descriptive accounts of ‘states-in-the-making’. This process of deconstruction is achieved by bracketing presentations (or perhaps better, various acts of presentation) of the state as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”, the foremost political institution of civil society, and exploring the conditions of their success. Foucault, in particular, was always plain on the need to explore the conditions of the possibility of ‘veridical discourse’:

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To put the matter clearly: my problem is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth (I repeat once again that by production of truth I mean not the production of true utterances, but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent). (Foucault 1979: 79) Following Foucault’s lead, researchers have, then, sought to problematise those idealised representations, to demonstrate how they represent the outcome of, and are made possible by, historically, socially and culturally contingent processes of construction in and through which the territoriality, legitimacy, authority and power of the state – Leviathan’s dread properties – have taken shape, found voice and been given material form. For Rose and Miller, for instance, this involves examinations of the complex processes that empower particular agents and force them to speak and act in the name of a territory. These establish the limits and coherence of the domains of political authority, demarcate the geographical and conceptual spaces of political rule, constitute certain authorities as able to speak for a population, and place them in particular ‘external’ configurations with other ‘states’ and internal relations with events in particular locales. A ‘geo-political’ field is established, embodying diplomacy, envoys, treaties, agreements, borders, customs and the like, at the same time as the writ of authorities is claimed over the subjects and activities composing a ‘nation’. (1992: 178) In broad terms, the purpose of conducting investigations along these lines is to re-embed the state in Weber’s overlapping complexes of interactions, to undercut its claim to privileged status as something which stands over and above or differentiated from various domains of practice and organisation – and which, as a consequence, is able to claim a capacity to govern impartially as an arbiter or broker between partial, narrow-sighted sectional interests because of its uniquely, doubly impersonal constitution, being neither the ruler nor the ruled (Skinner 2008a). This is done by illuminating the processes through which that status is achieved and maintained in and through situated, i.e., spatially and historically locatable, practices. By exposing states’ inner workings to the light in this way, these investigations are argued to have a demystifying, demythologising, defetishising effect. Within an approach that puts such stress on exploring the unfolding social construction of the state both at and across places and times, detailed historical and contemporary case-studies and analyses acquire particular significance: they allow the researcher to undertake their expository work, directing attention back to the forms of practical action and reasoning involved in promulgating and consolidating any of the given sets of presentations of statehood the researcher has chosen to concentrate their attention on.

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Although the (multi)local organisation of the state is a consistent theme, it is important to note, however, that not all investigations conducted using what is being referred to here as problematisation are methodologically alike. In fact, this method encompasses two complementary strategies, reflecting the ‘directionality’ of the investigation of the processes under consideration (i.e., whether the investigators are tracking forwards or backwards from some more or less determinate moment in time). The notion of ‘acts of claiming’, introduced above, is helpful in teasing out the nature of the differences between them and will be examined further below. However, the simplest way of thinking about the methodological differences is that the first kind of study typically begins at the point before the state or governmental reach has fully formed or gained dominion over some area of social life, while the second is undertaken in contexts where state authority has been stabilised and the state can, therefore, be said to already exist or exercise that dominion. These methods give rise to studies of the historical emergence of fields of state practices, on the one hand, and studies which ethnographically examine the work and workings of the state in the present, on the other. Though complementary, these are distinct methodological approaches to problematising the state.

Strategy one: contrastive juxtaposition The first strategy adopted by researchers has been to begin with specific claims advanced by the state and to track backwards, tracing them to the sets of sites, personnel, knowledge and objects in which they originated (see, e.g., Miller and O’Leary 1987: 237–238). By strategically focusing on the birth and subsequent aetiology of various state programmes and projects, the aim is to produce descriptions of the changing social organisation of government (and governmentality) over time. As part of this, researchers examine: how the state is constituted as a multidimensional, disjointed field of practice and power; how new ‘regimes of control’ form around moral, social, technical and pragmatic imperatives; and how these new considerations and extended capabilities come to work their way more deeply into, and define the parameters of, the ordinary activities and routines of state and non-state actors alike. Comaroff’s suggestion is that this way of investigating the state involves putting to one side “its rhetoric of universalizing modernity” and looking instead for “the practical management, often the production, of difference” (1998: 329). In this, the task is to locate the development of new “problematics of government”, in terms of the multiple, diffuse ‘rationalities’ which informed them and the arrays of administrative ‘technologies’ (both materialisations of relations of power/knowledge) used to construct the (frequently simplified) fields of vision within which what was ‘problematic’ could be marked out and acted upon at different times. At the same time, by marking out a problematic, these programmes also pre-structure the possibilities for action available within those delimited fields, and so define new “subject positions” by acting “on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future”,

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and hence on “the conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1982: 789; Rose and Miller 1992: 175; Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989). Given the emphasis on capturing the changing nature of the governmental, disciplinary, organisational and epistemic practices which underpin the state’s operations and support the success of its claims over periods of time, studies based on this historicising strategy necessarily tend to be rather broad brush in their methodological approach, with an interest in identifying the discontinuities, schisms and sharp contrasts between different ‘regimes’ rather than in conducting particularly detailed research within them. This strategy, which might be defined as problematisation by contrastive juxtaposition, finds no stronger expression than within Foucault’s own historical studies. It works by taking examples of two very different types of social organisation, relatively far apart in time, setting them alongside one another for inspection (i.e., first this – the “ship of fools”, public torture ending in execution, the medieval Christian confessional, rapacious, vindictive monarchs and warlords – then that – the modern asylum, the regimented prison day, psychoanalytic therapy, ‘caring’ biopolitical welfare states13) and asking how the transition from one to the other was effected, how we arrived at a recognisable, ‘normal’ state-of-affairs from an unrecognisably ‘alien’ one. Within such studies, this is widely used as a technique for distancing the reader from their current setting – the pasts presented in the text are designed to engineer a break with the present, making what is commonplace seem “anthropologically strange” (Garfinkel 1967a). Historical examples are thus used as textual devices for bringing ‘our’ taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘the ways things are’ to the fore, for demonstrating the artifice involved in what ‘we’ have come to regard as natural, normal or timeless features of our actually highly historically specific, constructed forms of social life – of which the multiple presences and involvements of government and the state in what we are and do provide just one set of examples.14

Strategy two: practical disruption The second strategy is to begin with specific claims and to track forwards, following the social and cultural careers, trajectories, ‘biographies’, etc., of those claims as they are being formulated and advanced. Where the purpose of the first strategy is to find out how various acts of naming the state “as impersonal power, Hobbes’s ‘Mortall God’” (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 222) are made possible, what configurations they rest on, the purpose of the second is to find out what happens after these “primal baptisms” have taken place.15 That is, to investigate the conditions of the successful construction and maintenance of an ‘imagined state’ by looking at how ideas of the state are made thinkable, stabilised, packaged and sold on; how they are taken up or taken for granted by some, altered, resisted and contested by others; how they are able to travel, to migrate outwards, progressively bringing new objects, individuals, locations and activities within the ambit of a pervasive ‘state imaginary’.16

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Philip Abrams’s contention that “the state is the distinctive collective misrepresentation of capitalist societies” (Abrams 1988: 75) provides another way of framing the rationale behind this strategy (cf. Jessop 2016: 16–20). The puzzle for those who adopt this approach is as follows: given that at an experiential, phenomenological level all social members ever encounter are tangled, over-layered, messy, local political interests, institutional arrangements and scenarios (of the sort revealed by studies based on the first strategy), how do they come to believe in the existence of a highly integrated, rationally organised, unified, centralised bureaucratic state working on or against their or others’ behalf ? Given that “the state is factually not the unity it is claimed to be” (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 198), how, to return to Weber again, can “the action of various individuals [be] oriented to the belief that [the state] exists or should exist”? How do ideas of the state work to structure how ordinary individuals and state functionaries alike see governmental settings? How is a state order recovered from “a Harlequin world of … non-totalizable fragments” (Deleuze 2004: 163)? When compared with the first, this strategy has a more obviously ethnographic character and gives rise to detailed investigations within specific governmental regimes with a pronounced normative, ideational and ideological focus: the main objective is to document the ways in which various “masks” (Abrams 1988), “fetishes” (Taussig 1992) or “fantasies” (Aretxaga 2003)17 of the state are conjured up and imbued with sovereign authority across a range of social and cultural settings and how, in turn, they are drawn upon and redeployed by members of society when making sense of the state as a feature of their everyday lives. Comaroff suggests that here the investigator focuses on “the ideological work of manufacturing sameness, engendering a horizontal sense of fraternity [in being governed]” (Comaroff 1998: 329), a measure of commonality that continues to work independently of whether the individuals concerned take a critical stance towards it or not. These ideological practices are argued to work, however, at a number of levels and anthropologists in particular have been interested in the emotive manner in which different groups respond to ideas of state. The choice of imagery of the mask, the fetish and the fantasy, is therefore quite deliberate. It is meant to capture the strange power, the perverse fascination, both alluring and repulsive, and the “magical” capacity to animate, exerted by those ideas – as is argued to be reflected, for instance, in the highly sexualised, death-obsessed, state-centric symbolic practices of Fascism, and, in a rather different way, in stories like The Trial and The Castle by Kafka. It is also meant to capture the ritualistic way in which specific objects are used to channel and direct that power, as well as the ways in which ideas of state come to be personified – one example being the ‘head of state’, who undergoes ceremonial transformation so as to be able to embody the nation and the state, another, the ‘enemy of state’ who is transformed to represent what the nation and state are not. Additional examples can be found in archaeology. Yoffee, for instance, in his examination of the construction of the Shang state, notes the following:

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In the first cities and states in the early second millennium in China, rulers worked to control the technology of constructing bronze ritual vessels. These vessels, which were in the shape of mythological beings that communicated with the spirit world, allowed rulers to claim privileged access to the ancestors. In this context, political power was derived through a “monopoly on high shamanism”, forged by restricting access to bronzes, concentrating the means of access to the gods in the hands of the rulers … Over time the shamans, diviners, oracle bone scribes, and priests who conducted ceremonies became bureaucratized and the process of divination routinized, with the channels of communication prepared and read by specialists in the service of the kings … The divination records these rites produced were used to tell the future, and this reconfiguration … resulted in the creation of a class of what we may call “knowledgeables”. Their role was to present a comprehensive view of the world, not merely of any particular group, and argue that the main task of government is to remake present reality, corrupt and imperfect as it is, in accordance with the dictates of a higher moral order. These knowledgeables redefined the Mandate of Heaven and how kings merited their positions by following the high principles of governance. They were carriers of dynastic legitimacy, and they safeguarded the form and structure of the state. When dynasties fell, as they inevitably did, they could be remade in accordance with the principles of Chinese statecraft that were interpreted by this new class of officials. (2005: 97–99) That is, at least, at the official level. The interest is not just in how ritualistic practices reproduce and legitimise the ideological project of the state as well as cementing administrative orders and control, but also how ideas and fantasies of the state are taken up and redirected by those who oppose the state, through the creation of symbolic forms that work as ideological counterpoints, in turn fuelling the creation of new ideas and fantasies centred on new masks and fetishes. As is routinely observed, those whom the state designates as enemies are often symbolically recast as political heroes and freedom fighters by ‘subaltern’ groups (see, e.g., Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 30–31, 64; Aretxaga 1997, 2000, 2003; Doordan 1997; Taussig 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2002). Here, however, difficulties arise. Ideas of the state, for the most part, constitute a background of “seen-but-unnoticed” (Garfinkel 1967a: 38–44) relevancies that are folded into everyday routine. Unlike the dramatic discontinuities, schisms and contrasts utilised by those who adopt the first strategy, the imagined state is, generally speaking, less obvious to the external analytical gaze. For that reason, juxtaposition cannot be employed to make these dispositifs visible in a comparable way. Rather, then, than trying to manufacture breaches using the historicalarchival resources available to them as investigators, the aim in this type of study is to look for practical settings where ‘breaches’ are manufactured or made

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available by ordinary members of society themselves. This strategy, which might be defined as the problematisation of the state through the practical disruption of its already claimed authority, involves searching for instances where one or other of the classically defined properties of the state comes to be questioned or suspended in and through the political practices of members of the society in question. The literature provides numerous examples of moments where ‘the veil is lifted’; for example, challenges to the secular authority of the Turkish state due to the rising popularity of religious parties and the cross-border movement of people;18 to the territorial claims of states (Britain, Spain, the US, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina to name but a few) via challenges to their attempted monopolisations of the legitimate use of violence within their territories (both peacefully and by violent means);19 to the legitimacy of Soviet-style public institutions in the post-Soviet era;20 resistance to state-channelled ‘governance arrangements’ across Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America more generally;21 but also challenges (direct and indirect) that emerge from ‘inside’ and around the edges of government and are instigated by service providers like the police, doctors, academics, civil servants and various other professional bodies, as well as a range of intersecting interest groups.22 As well as examining the overt ways in which the authoritative claims made by states are contested, the concept of ‘disruption’ can also be extended to cover more mundane cases where new claims have only recently been advanced, where new practices and policies have been initiated by state actors – or indeed where new state actors have emerged – and have yet to become fully integrated features of ‘normal’ politics under the jurisdiction of state.23

The methodologies of construction We are now in a position to see that the problematisation of the state, the link between the many different studies that have sought or been extended membership within this field of research, involves two separate kinds of methodological operation. Although these can span the same temporal range, the difference lies in the aspect of the events and practices they choose to concentrate on (crudely, historical/processual or normative/ideological) and the overall temporal direction of inquiry (backwards or forwards, either arriving at or beginning from some determinate point in time) employed to foreground the construction of the state. As has been shown, this duality is reflected within the literature. While both kinds of operation are found in work conducted within this field, specific studies will tend to give priority to one over the other – on ‘panoramic’ views of historical change, or on more detailed ‘dioramic’ displays of the localised construction of authority or challenges to it. Latour introduces the “panorama” as a way of discussing studies that produce the illusion of great breadth of scope (Latour 2005: 203–211). The notion of the “diorama”, one of the panorama’s Victorian competitors, by

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contrast, can help to highlight studies that generate the illusion of great depth of detail, as discussed by Law and Lynch for example (Law and Lynch 1988). Law and Lynch take up work which uses “the analogy of museum dioramas to describe a typical style … where realist depiction … is combined with … [a] synthesis of paradigmatic views, surroundings, and apparent ‘activities’” (1988: 300). Accordingly, dioramas “suggest a natural situation by detailing [individuals] … in an appropriate habitat … shown in the midst of characteristic activity” (1988: 288). The pictorial dioramas they are examining, however, as in museum displays, remain “discretely framed synthetic schemes … While evoking the detail of a photograph, the frame includes an organization of such detail that would be extraordinary if found in any single one” (1988: 288–290). Despite their manipulability, the fact that they provide scope for such things as uniformity of presentation, thematic coherence, parsimonious selection of detail, basic tabulations and greater scope for comparisons and contrasts between objects in the display means carefully crafted dioramas achieve this while avoiding the impression that the objects on display are more than just so many strategically posed “cardboard cutouts” (1988: 290). While this is so, Law and Lynch add “whether this makes them more ‘realistic’ is questionable” (1988: 290). Parallels can be drawn between the construction of dioramas and the construction of set-piece descriptions within the literary language games of fiction as discussed by the critic James Wood (2009). Wood begins by listing some characteristic features of realist narration, conventions he says have become “almost too familiar to be visible”. These are: “that it favours telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw … from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally” (2009: 32). Commenting on a passage from Flaubert he says: Flaubert seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera … [We] no longer notice that what the writer has selected is not of course casually scanned but … chosen, that each detail is almost frozen … [and] magnificently isolate … [This is linked to] a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, [in a given passage] …, women cannot [for instance] be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert’s details belong to different timesignatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously. The effect is lifelike – in a beautifully artificial way. (Wood 2009: 33–35) Later, Wood notes that this “procession of strung details, … of noticings … is sometimes an obstruction to seeing, not an aid” (2009: 50).

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Awareness that, in the artful composition of realistically lifelike portraits of subjects, description can come to be more of a barrier to understanding than a facilitator, should serve as a standing warning to researchers and theorists in the social and political sciences. Unfortunately it does not. Instead, as Lynch puts it, in contemporary studies: [a] literary assemblage of signs … becomes the medium through which the analyst ranges freely across a landscape … in order to gather together the elements of a modelled social order that stands for an actual system … [an] analytic movement from singular expressions to delocalized semiotic schemas … [that] fetishize[s] the sign by disregarding the embodied production and interactional use of textual renderings. (1993: 297) It is one thing for the novel or field guide to present us with “hypothetically constructed actors in a hypothetically constructed world” (Wieder 1980: 100), quite another for histories and ethnographies, for example, to routinely do so. Particular ‘panoramic’ and ‘dioramic’ studies, and the manner in which they build up the illusion of vitality through the application of techniques borrowed from photography and literary realism, will be examined in the next chapter. Given these issues with both panoramic scale and dioramic detail, many researchers strive to give them as equal a weighting as possible,24 perhaps as a way of balancing their effects out. Nonetheless, the argument here is that the point at which the emphasis is placed – on one or the other – can nonetheless serve as a device for categorising studies on the basis of whether they ultimately prioritise one or the other area of investigation. However, it is important not to over-exaggerate the degree of difference. Not only are these studies based on common insights and interests, and involve a generic appeal to breakdowns, disruptions and difficulties as a way of problematising political scenarios, governmental practices and the state, the analyses they generate can fall foul of similar types of difficulty and conceptual confusions. So far, the discussion of this field of research has been conducted in a fairly abstract register with little or no reference to actual studies and their substantive findings. Unfortunately, abstraction is difficult to avoid, due in large part to the nature of the discussions which have informed research of this kind over a 50-year period, from the late 1970s up to today. Moreover, given the wealth of scholarship produced under the umbrella of this ‘progressive research programme’, it would be impossible to describe the studies without resorting to highly truncated (and effectively worthless) summaries, and no attempt has or will be made to do so. Instead the aim is to examine the adequacy of the methodological strategies described. In the following chapter the adequacy of problematisation will be examined using exemplars of both variants of this methodological policy of problematisation in turn.

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Notes 1 Although addressed to a very different set of issues, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion (1988: 229, 417) of the differences between “nomadic war-machines” and the stateapparatus, and the ongoing attempts at incorporation of the elusive former within the latter, raises similar issues. 2 On the processes through which states acquire a social, cultural, economic, political and administrative ‘life’ see, inter alia, the historical and ethnographic studies of Corrigan and Sayer (1985), Abrams (1988), Miller (1990), Mitchell (1991, 1999), Taussig (1992), Aretxaga (1997, 2000, 2001, 2003), Trouillot (2001), Navaro-Yashin (2002, 2006, 2007), Ssorin-Chaikov (2002), Hull (2012), Gupta (2012) and Kierans (2019). 3 It is important to note here that Foucault is pointing to a conceptual and methodological confusion within social and political studies of the state. We should be wary, however, in ascribing that confusion more widely as we have no reason to assume it extends beyond the academic domain. 4 Abrams (1988) and Mitchell (1991) put forward lengthy critiques of the ‘abolitionist’ position of leading political scientists like David Easton and Gabriel Almond; Abrams also traces many of the conceptual difficulties to the later work of Parsons, and see also Jessop (2016). As a measure of some of the confusion within this field, ethnographers like Trouillot (2001) and Yang (2005), and historians like Davies (2002), despite explicitly claiming to share Abrams’ and Mitchell’s position, approvingly cite Radcliff-Brown’s preface to Evans-Pritchard and Fortes (1940) edited collection African Political Systems in which Radcliff-Brown argued much the same as Parsons, Easton and Almond from an anthropological perspective. 5 See ‘The Deployment of Sexuality’, pp. 75–131 in Foucault (1998) for further discussion of this “analytics of power”. 6 E.g., Abrams (1988), Corrigan and Sayer (1985), Jessop (2001), Trouillot (2001), Rodgers (2006), Bratsis (2016). 7 For the neo-Weberian debate see the papers in Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol (1985). For an outline of the prospective positions staked out by the main protagonists in the neo-Marxist debate, Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, see Miliband (1973), Poulantzas (1973) and their contributions, from 1969–1976, to the New Left Review (as discussed in Abrams 1988). 8 By most though not all, see, e.g., Bratsis 2016; for a defence of not theory but meta-theory see Jessop 2016. 9 For one of the most interesting precursors to right-critiques of social and political studies of the state, see Maurice Cowling’s (1963) The Nature and Limits of Political Science. 10 While directed at different targets, Latour’s (1991) We Have Never Been Modern and (2013b) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence arguably deal with related preoccupations. 11 Indeed, Mitchell (1991) argues that abolitonist attempts to eliminate references to the state were themselves implicated, as bodies of expertise, in extending a field of governmental practices under the aegis of a totalising ‘political’ science. 12 As, for example, is attributed to Hegel who is said to have abandoned the more philosophically and socially radical position presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977 [1807]) for the conservative position espoused in his The Philosophy of Right (1991 [1820]), in which the state becomes the institutional objectification of Geist, our collective ethical being for-itself and in-itself (für-Sich and an-Sich). For a challenge to this established reading see Andrew Cole’s (2014) The Birth of Theory. 13 Examples taken from, in order, Madness and Civilization (Foucault 1988), Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1975) and the History of Sexuality (Foucault 1998).

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14 The constructionist approach can lend itself to ironic readings – where the perspectives of ordinary social members are unfavourably positioned vis-à-vis that of the researcher – suggestive of a closer relationship with critical theory. The bracketing of ‘our’ and ‘we’ in the sentences above, as in “‘our’ taken-for-granted assumptions”, is meant to indicate that it remains an open question as to whether those who adopt this strategy could more accurately be described as constructing the category of ‘us’ so as to leverage such readings, than as excavating the construction of the governmental arrangements on which they report. 15 Zizek (1989: 89–95) and Kripke (1970: 94–98). Elaborate rituals and ceremonies in which the state comes to be named or announced (such as those surrounding, for instance, the greetings accorded to travelling assize courts at the gates of medieval English towns) are discussed in Corrigan and Sayer’s account of the historical construction of the British state, a discussion underpinned by a reading of Durkheim’s description of “collective representations” and the “effervescent ceremonies” through which they are renewed (in The Division of Labour in Society (1997 [1893]) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912])). Yoffee’s (2005) analysis of the interpenetration of religion, ceremony and rule in archaic states is of great interest in this regard too. 16 The ‘imagined state’ is, seen from one direction, the counterpart to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”, which together form the principal building blocks of many anthropological accounts of the formation of nation-states (Anderson 1983). For discussions of the ‘imagined state’, the centrepiece of a ‘state imaginary’ within which it becomes possible to conceive of, and orient to, ‘state activities’ and ‘state spaces’ see, for instance, Ferguson (1990), Taussig (1992), Gupta (1995), Scott (1998), Biggs (1999), the collected papers in Steinmetz (1999), the collected papers in Hansen and Stepputat (2001), Ferguson and Gupta (2002), the collected papers in Das and Poole (2004), Hull (2012), Gupta (2012) and Jessop (2016). 17 This is a recurrent concept in Aretxaga’s work, and she takes it from Zizek’s (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. 18 E.g., Navaro-Yashin 2002, 2003. 19 E.g., Taylor (1993), Wacquant (1996), Aretxaga (1997, 2000, 2001), Hunt (2006), Rodgers (2006) and Auyero (2007). 20 Ssorin-Chaikov (2002, 2003), Rogers (2006). 21 E.g., (elements of) Corrigan and Sayer (1985), Ferguson (1990), Taussig (1992), Nugent (1994), Gupta (1995), Comaroff and Comaroff (2001), Mitchell (2001), Pieke (2004), Gupta (2005), Yang (2005) and Thornton (2007). 22 E.g., Pressman and Wildavsky (1973), Lipsky (1980), Sabatier (1986), Hilbert (1987), Thompson, Frances, Levacic and Mitchell (1991), Herzfeld (1992), Marsh and Rhodes (1992), Kooiman (1993) Rhodes (1994), Rhodes (1996), Strathern (2000), Hay and Richards (2000), Abram and Cowell (2004), Kooiman (2005), Rhodes (2005), Hupe and Hill (2007), Rhodes, Hart and Noordegraaf (2007) and Wessells (2007). 23 E.g., Ferguson and Gupta (2002), the discussion in Geertz (2004), some interesting recent studies of public sector accountancy in the UK (see Shaoul 2005a, 2005b) as well as Li (2007) and Navaro-Yashin (2007). Many aspects of the studies referenced above could also be included in this category, something which is indicative of the fine conceptual line these studies draw between everyday ‘resistance’ to the state and the ‘normal troubles’ of statecraft that ordinary members of a society and bureaucratic, administrative and managerial personnel must routinely deal with. As well as contemporary studies, it should be mentioned that a great deal of historical and archaeological research is devoted to reconstructing the emergence and consolidation of ‘new’ state forms. See, e.g., Bauer (1996), Smith (2003) and Yoffee (2005). 24 Corrigan and Sayer’s The Great Arch (1985) being a notable example of this.

5

The limits of problematisation – historical studies and the divorce of discourse from practice

As I will begin to show in this chapter by concentrating on historical studies in the first instance, the constructionist methodological strategies described in the last chapter have their own internal limits and generate conceptual problems of their own. A general goal of constructionist studies of the state is to open up the analytical room needed to inspect the form, substance, origins and subsequent aetiology of the very idea of the state and the claims made about ‘it’ – in terms of the loosely woven complexes of social and political practices they are connected to and anchored in – at different moments in time and space. The purpose of this chapter is to turn a critical eye to the ways in which particular constructionist studies effect their problematisation of the state. In a context where the investigator cannot employ formal means of designating their phenomena in advance – in this case, because definitions of the state are held to be problematic – the examples they use come to take on a particularly important role. Rather than trying to define – in the sense of ‘writing-out’ or ‘telling’ us – what their phenomena are, these studies attempt to show their phenomena – to exhibit or display how they were recovered in and through their analyses. Although no single, unified set of ‘state phenomena’ can be specified, the implication is that the phenomena these studies describe – these things and other things like them – exemplify what we should be looking for when we address the problem of the state. The success of the demonstrations thus hinges on the adequacy of the examples. This chapter argues there are several reasons for questioning their adequacy on these grounds. Based on five cases drawn from historical research, from Foucault, Corrigan and Sayer, Scott, Miller and O’Leary and Rose and Miller respectively, I show that the use of examples in constructionist research generates a range of internal methodological difficulties, problems and paradoxes. These in turn are argued to be indicative of a deeper homology with the constitutionalist position.

Introduction The previous chapter described the emergence and principal concerns of a growing field of constructionist studies of states and governmental practices,

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identifying major contributors and outlining the complementary methodological strategies which tie different studies together and which are invoked to give this body of literature its coherence. The argument was that a general goal of those strategies was to open up the methodological room needed to inspect the form, substance, origins and subsequent aetiology of the very idea of the state and the claims made on ‘its’ behalf – in terms of the loosely woven complexes of governmental activity and discursive ensembles they connect to and are anchored in – at different moments in time and space. The goal, in using these techniques, is to foreground how fields of state activity are constructed and maintained. The focus of this chapter and the next is rather different; to turn attention to the claims put forward by or on behalf of these studies and how they construct their phenomena. As was discussed at length in previous chapters, the methodological rationale for these studies partly derived from a desire to undermine a theoretically driven reliance on the sort of externalised, formal analytic optics exemplified by the constitutionalist use of ideal-types. Rather than attempt to develop metrics of their own, researchers sought to describe the configuration of the diverse range of standards deployed by governmental actors to orient to, analyse, assess and intervene in social, economic and political practices. As we might expect, the literature is accordingly replete with descriptions of the configuration of many such standards, and proposals concerning their relations to routine, ordinary forms of governmental practice and activity as part of the construction of states. However, conspicuous by its absence is any account of a logically prior task; namely, accounts of the way in which researchers locate those configurations, i. e., of the methods and materials employed in order to find their subject matter, whether that be particular “problematics of government” or the many and varied manifestations of the “imagined state”. What we are missing, in other words, is any real description of how these studies make the state available for description in the first place and thus an account of the starting point of their investigative practices. As a consequence, it is difficult to assess whether constructionist studies of the state have succeeded in their own terms, and have been able to show they can evade the conceptual and methodological problems associated with the positions they emerged in opposition to. At one level this is unproblematic: the idea that researchers require no formal statement of method in order to conduct their studies is entirely consistent with researchers’ statements about the kinds of study they wish to conduct. The point of departure for these studies is the fact that there is ‘after all’ no one thing to find: the state does not exist outside of socially and historically specific complexes of political, administrative and governmental activity. The phenomena they are interested in are polymorphous and multidimensional fields of practice and power, and the methods employed are tailored to the study of such things, not dictated by disembodied ideals of social scientific rigour formulated with no reference to the specificities and particularities of the phenomena under investigation.

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Additionally, like Foucault, researchers working within this field argue that inquiry should not be constrained by ontological-epistemological frameworks a priori, and reject the idea that they are – or ‘should’ think of themselves as being – committed to a single view of the state and government. The purpose of such studies is to examine the ontological-epistemological frameworks mobilised by those they are studying and to afford those frameworks the same treatment they would any other by treating them as areas to be investigated and not ready-made tools for conducting those investigations. Accepting this does not mean, however, that we must give up on the possibility of inquiring into the adequacy of the claims put forward by these studies. While we may not be able to ask how, in general, these researchers identify their methodological targets, we can still meaningfully ask how, in any actual case, individual researchers go about doing so. In an investigative context where the analyst cannot employ formal means of designating their phenomena in advance – in this case, because definitions of the state are held to be systematically “referentially opaque” (Coulter 1989: 47–49) – the examples they use come to take on a particularly critical role. Rather than trying to define – in the sense of ‘writing-out’ or ‘telling’ us – what their phenomena are, these studies attempt to show their phenomena – to exhibit or display how they were recovered in and through their analyses. Although no single, unified set of state phenomena can be specified, the implication is that the phenomena these studies pick out and describe – these things and other things like them – exemplify what we should be looking for when we go looking for the state. In principle, an analysis conducted on these lines should look more like a demonstration than an explanation, and make more use of the textual counterparts of ostensive definition (encompassing the literary equivalents of ‘pointing out’ or ‘directing attention towards’) than pre-formed, theoretically determined classificatory grids or catalogues. As demonstrations of how to make the state and governmental practices available for analysis, these studies therefore have to be seen as grounded in the examples through which those demonstrations are made. The success of the demonstration hinges in large part on the adequacy of the examples and their treatment. In order to evaluate these studies, then, pertinent questions include, how are examples being used and how are they identified by the investigator in the first place? In the rest of this chapter, I turn attention to the identification and use of examples in studies based on the first methodological strategy outlined in the last chapter in order to answer these questions in relation to the methods they employ.

Finding order in Foucault’s plenum: “congenitally failing machines” and residual categories Extended readings of the first type of constructionist studies – studies which attempt to problematise the state by pointing to the constructed character of current governmental regimes using comparisons with antecedent states of

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affairs – reveal a number of variations on a common methodological theme. This includes the care they take to delineate their proper subject matter and the sort of evidence they draw on in their studies. By using a cross-section of passages taken from the work of some of the most influential researchers in this area, we can arrive at a better understanding of the importance of deliberations on that theme and, through that, examine how the researchers in question attempt to warrant their analytical claims. While these studies are not comparable in a strict sense – they deal with different times, places and areas of activity – in what follows possible grounds will be presented for treating the techniques which inform them as such (cf. Miller and O’Leary 1987: 239). By way of introduction to these examples, it is worth remembering that, unlike studies which attempt to analyse the “imagined state”, the stated focus of these studies is governmental practice, and only secondarily the fields of “state effects” specific practices make possible. Indeed, in chronological terms, the panoramic, historically focused studies I’m initially focusing on here were among an initial wave of studies of this kind (roughly from the late 1970s to the early 1990s) and provided much of the impetus and intellectual foundations for the growing number of more dioramic, ethnographically focused studies that have become a major feature of the second wave of constructionist research in the state (from the early 1990s on). As we shall see, however, while they may have an interest in “practices”, that interest is manifested in a peculiar way. Italics have been added to highlight sections of interest. Example one: Foucault on governmental programmes The rational schemas of the prison, the hospital or the asylum are not general principles … [they] are explicit programmes; we are dealing with sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions … [Discipline is] the generalisation and interconnection of different techniques … These programmes … never work out as planned. But what I wanted to show is that this difference is not one between the purity of an ideal and the disorderly impurity of the real … even though they don’t conform to the initial programming. (Foucault 1979: 80–82)

Example two: Corrigan and Sayer on the historical construction of Tudor statehood By the end of 1536 … the intrusive presence of the central government … was manifested in various ways … Cromwell’s new revenue courts may or may not have embodied a new, ‘departmental’ form of financial organization; what is beyond contention is that they ‘covered the country with a new network of royal officials, Surveyors, Receivers, Auditors and others … [which] added a new dimension to the Crown’s patronage and created many additional sources of information and agents of control’ … [For instance,] Cromwell’s second set of Injunctions for the Clergy, of September 1538, required … the keeping of registers, in every parish, of all baptisms, marriages and burials … The registers

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were being instituted he said, ‘for the avoiding of sundry strifes, processes and contentions rising upon age, lineal descents, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy, and for knowledge of whether any person is our subject or no’; ‘and also’, he added, ‘for sundry other causes’ … Registers are not merely a technical device, they materialize new sorts of claims of a state over its subjects … In turn these concretized and contributed to changing, more ‘modern’, conceptions of the state and of subject’s relations to it, of political community and loyalty, so that for instance it became possible to speak of ‘the State’ impersonally. The reforms were systematic in quality, they move in particular directions – an observation that can be made without entering the murky waters of who drafted which clauses or the murkier waters of intention and ‘planning’. In the long run we would regard this as more important for the history of state formation in England than the fine details … Certainly we can see, from the 1530s on, a regularization … though the system of government as whole remained haphazard in many ways … Too much stress on the intermittent effectiveness of Tudor policy-enforcement can obscure this point. It is not so much the fine detail of enforcement of this or that statute or proclamation that matters, as the steady, exemplary and cumulative weight of growing state regulation. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 48–50, 71)

Example three: Scott on legibility projects The more I examined these efforts at sedentarisation, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “translate” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often very crude and self-defeating … How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardisation of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardisation of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organisation of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored … [Much] of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalising and standardising what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format … These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realise, rather like abridged maps … [even though they] did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted. (Scott 1998: 2–3)

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The limits of problematisation State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing “project of legibility”, a project that is never fully realised. The data from which state simplifications arise are, to varying degrees, riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, faulty aggregations, fraud, negligence, political distortion, and so on. A project of legibility is immanent in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society, but it is undermined by intra-state rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above all, the resistance of its subjects. (Scott 1998: 80)

Example four: Miller and O’Leary on calculative practices Our attempt in this paper [is] to understand one particular important period in accounting’s history … to locate accounting within a wider set of calculative techniques … [where] discipline comes to be seen to reside not in the will … [but] in the norms and standards from which the … [individual] can be seen to depart. Accounting is, we argue, an important aspect of this development of a range of calculative programmes and techniques which come to regulate the lives of individuals at work in the early twentieth century … We have placed greatest emphasis on what we might call programmatic discourses as opposed to accounting as it was practised in particular firms. This is not because we regard the latter as unimportant. Nor is it because we view our concerns as entirely independent from this more technical level of analysis. To clarify our views it may help to identify what we see to be two distinct orders of events and the interrelation between them. The one we have concentrated on in this paper can be called the discursive programmes for the administration and calculation of activities within … society as a whole. The other we would call technological and concerns the actual operation of accounting practices, their elaboration through particular procedures and techniques. Our point is that these two levels are distinct. (Miller and O’Leary 1987: 239–240)

Example five: Rose and Miller on problematics of government The problematics of government offer a different perspective on the political phenomena conventionally addressed in terms of the State. The discursive, legislative, fiscal, organizational and other resources of the public powers have come to be linked in varying ways into networks of rule. Mobile divisions and relations have been established between political rule and other projects and techniques for the calculated administration of life. Diverse parts are played in technologies of rule by the political actors who hold elected office, make authoritative pronouncements as to policy and priorities, create legislation and get it enacted, calculate national budgets, raise taxes and adjust their levels and incidence, disburse benefits, give grants to industry and charities, command and direct bureaucratic staffs, set up regulatory bodies and organizations of all sorts, and, in certain cases, set in action the legitimate use of violence. (Rose and Miller 1992: 189)

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Our studies of government eschew sociological realism and its burdens of explanation and causation. We do not try to characterise how social life really was and why. We do not seek to penetrate the surfaces of what people said to discover what they meant, what their real motives or interests were. Rather, we attend to the ways in which authorities in the past have posed themselves these questions: what is our power; to what ends should it be exercised; what effects has it produced; how can we know what we need to know, and do what we need to do in order to govern?

(Rose and Miller 1992: 177) Government is a congenitally failing operation: the sublime image of a perfect regulatory machine is internal to the mind of the programmers. The world of programmes is heterogeneous, and rivalrous. Programmes complexify the real, so solutions for one programme tend to be the problems for another. Things, persons or events always appear to escape the knowledges that inform governmental programmes, to refuse to respond according to the programmatic logic that seeks to govern them. Technologies produce unexpected problems, are utilised for their own ends by those who are supposed to merely operate them, are hampered by under-funding, professional rivalries, and the impossibility of producing the technical conditions that would make them work – reliable statistics, efficient communication systems, clear lines of command, properly designed buildings, well framed regulations or whatever. Unplanned outcomes emerge from the intersection of one technology with another, or from the unexpected consequences of putting a technique to work. Contrariwise, techniques invented for one purpose may find their governmental role for another, and the unplanned conjunction of techniques and conditions arising from very different aspirations may allow something to work without or despite its explicit rationale. Whilst we inhabit a world of programmes, that world is not itself programmed. We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the ‘will to govern’, fuelled by the constant registration of ‘failure’, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time.

(Rose and Miller 1992: 190–191)

Depicting governmental arrangements Of note in the passages above is the way in which the writers provide us with instructions about how to correctly read their analyses. This involves three steps. First, in each case we are presented with a very general statement about the domains of activity that the analysis will pick out: what the analysts argue constitute distinct areas of practice – ‘governmental programmes’, ‘the historical construction of statehood’, ‘legibility projects’, ‘calculative practices’ and ‘problematics of government’ respectively. Secondly, in each case we are then presented with a qualifying statement setting out those aspects of the phenomenon that will be dealt with in the analysis; what would be termed, in other contexts, the inclusion and exclusion criteria with which they are operating. An orthodox social scientific move,

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this defines the parameters, the limits, of the investigation by drawing a boundary line beyond which the analysis will not go. Thirdly, although the terms in which it is undertaken are not explicitly set out, we are given some indication of the general processes involved in locating and handling the data used in the analyses. Again, in fairly orthodox social scientific fashion, this means, presumably, gathering possible materials together, sorting through them, identifying similarities and differences and selecting illustrative cases to use as the basis of a demonstration of the distinctiveness (and import) of the domain of activity the analysts wish to bring to light. It is worth examining the latter steps in more detail because, while the first is uncontroversial, the second and the third, despite or perhaps due to their orthodox character, are potentially problematic. The question is, what exactly are we being asked to accept here? To reiterate, we are initially told that the researchers are interested in exploring what they claim can be treated as specifiably distinct domains of governmental activity: roughly, the particular sets of discursive and practical resources governmental actors draw upon when devising various technical means for working on (rendering ‘problematic’) the political realities they are confronted with. However, via the second step, the analysts explain that no attempt has been made to engage with those domains of activity in their entirety. That is, we are not going to be shown how these technical schemes and instruments, the construction of statehood, legibility projects, calculative practices, problematics of government and so on, actually work ‘in practice’. Indeed, the accounts these analysts will give of different types of governmental arrangement may well bear only a passing resemblance to any account contemporary with the actual historical occurrences and sequences of events the analysts have chosen to concentrate on. This is because the sorts of projects, policies and programmes they will be describing never work out as planned; they run into snags and difficulties, they break down, they fail to deliver for one or another reason. And, despite their acknowledged ubiquity, we are told that break downs and failures are not going to be treated as relevant to the analysis, that the study can be adequately conducted without taking this real-worldly feature of the activity into consideration. In that sense, we are being asked to accept their accounts of state practices as those practices have been recounted or told. Indeed, the argument is that concentrating on the real-world execution of these projects, policies and programmes would be a mistake as this would obscure important features of the problematics these investigators wish to bring to our attention. That is, if we just looked at the activities being described, we’d quickly lose sight of the phenomena their studies seek to disclose: again, ‘governmental programmes’, ‘the historical construction of statehood’, ‘legibility projects’, ‘calculative practices’ and ‘problematics of government’. We need to look instead at how it became possible for governmental actors themselves to

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step-back from “the fine detail” in order to put together systematic programmes of action, to “translate” messy real-world situations into features of the “paper landscapes” (Andrews 1975) those actors drew up to chart their future courses of action; to look at the bodies of expertise, the power/ knowledge, the political rationalities, the technologies of rule, the techniques, tactics and strategies, the dictates of statecraft that were utilised by them to impose some sort of order on “the disorderly impurity of the real” (Foucault 1979: 80–82). The sets of governmental practices the investigators above want to explore are thus the disparate elements that coalesce around certain types of programmatic attempt to make real-world situations more manageable – not their real-world applications. However, it is one thing to claim that governmental actors manage their activities in the manner suggested – that is, by the introduction of different technical means for stepping back from the action and thereby attempting to gain a measure of control over it – it is quite another to demonstrate that they in fact do so. It remains to be shown how we could know that this is indeed how governmental actors operate, how we can recover the organised character of their practices from the examples the analyst is working with. Securing that requires an extra step. It is important to note the structure of the argument at this point. The claim put forward by these studies is that the phenomena which are made visible by their investigations of these domains of governmental activity are not their own newly minted intellectual products, but constructions of state that have been worked up in practice by the governmental actors whose activities they have examined. What they are describing are not, therefore, their own ideal-typical schemas, but the ideal-typical schemas said to be definitive of these domains of practice and fields of activity. This is true whether we are examining Scott’s “state simplifications”, for instance, or Rose and Miller’s account of the production of “congenitally failing [governmental] machines”. As these investigations show us the problem of the state in a new light, they constitute discoveries. However, when we ask about how those discoveries have been arrived at, about the kinds of evidence being appealed to in support of this claim, the investigators become more reticent, their remarks sketchy and incomplete. It is difficult to know exactly how they conducted their investigations but, pieced together from the texts from which the passages above were taken, the following represents one way of reconstructing the methods involved. It needs to be remembered that these are studies of discursive practices. Their raw materials are texts, the vernacular accounts and descriptions found in the documents that relate to such matters within the historical record: technical commentaries of various sorts, written by different kinds of state functionaries, dealing with many of the legal, financial, logistical and administrative, as well as moral and political, issues of the day. In working across these heterogeneous collections, as James Scott makes particularly clear above, the constructionist researcher is in a position to see more or less

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systematic connections emerging between commentaries on a whole range of different matters. This process involves sifting through the records in a search for patterns or “regularities” (Rose and Miller 1992: 178–179) in those accounts, focusing on the recurrent use of certain tropes, narratives, combinations of words, idiomatic expressions, references to systems of knowledge and the like. As Rose and Miller argue in their text, those regularities can be treated as informed by, and hence evidence of, particular governmental practices. And, once the analyst has located evidence of the existence of a particular practice, they are then in a position to search for further evidence using their developing understanding of that practice as a guide. Pattern and particular are thus mutually elaborated through iterated cycles of evidence and explication, showing this to be a canonical use of what Garfinkel termed the “documentary method of interpretation” (1967a: 76–103, see also Lynch 2009). However, to be used as part of this analytical process, vernacular accounts have to be handled in a particular way. They have to be treated as if the governmental ‘logics’ that inform them can be identified in their ‘surface’ forms. That the vernacular accounts the investigator is working with have been formatted in appreciably similar ways, that they rely on similar vocabularies, that they discuss similar problems and describe similar states of affairs, is taken to mean, for all intents and purposes, that they are expressions of and, hence, guides to the same underlying logics; logics that can be recovered on their basis. However, just because two accounts look the same, does not necessarily mean that they are the same or are doing similar things (Ryle 1949: 140, Garfinkel 1967a: 4). That we could use their similarity to show their ties to distinct domains of governmental activity was what the investigators were supposed to be providing us with evidence for – where that evidence could comprise, for example, an appeal to some standard by which it would be possible to judge whether they were in fact formulated in appreciably similar ways for appreciably similar ends, rather than merely apparently so. Yet as Peter Winch for one argues, the “investigation of regularities” in the social and political sciences requires the researcher not to “arbitrarily impose his own standards [of identity] from without. In so far as he does, the events he is studying lose altogether their character” (Winch 1958: 86–88, 108). Coulter summarises the problem thus: [Commonality] of form can easily suggest [the grounds for] a misassimilation of otherwise quite diverse kinds of expression to one type, where the error is to consider the meanings of the expressions apart from their (greatly differing) contexts of possible use, as if commonality of form was an invariant key to commonality of sense. (1989: 90) To further turn the screw, as Goffman has pointed out (1981: 11), the “normatively residual ambiguity” that the circumstantially determined properties of meaning introduce cannot be dealt with by appealing to the ‘literal’

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meaning of a particular account, because it is unclear what it would mean to talk about an account’s unambiguously literal meaning in the first place (see also Wittgenstein 1953: §22, Fish 1978 and Derrida 1989: 873). Given that there is little room for manoeuvre here, the researchers need to assure us that these reconstructed logics are not artefacts of their own methods, that they have not just validated their own analyses by retrospectively reading a programmatic order that was not there to begin with back into the arrangements they are commenting upon. Failure to do so would raise the issue of circularity because it would appear that while different accounts are to be linked by treating them as expressions of the same logic, we could only recover that logic by treating those accounts as the same to begin with. It is important to remind ourselves at this point that the claim being made in these studies is that the discursive constructs they identify are produced within the situations being investigated. On that premise, however, problems emerge when we start to assume that because, for example, a policy document tells us something about the way in which it should be used or thought of then that indeed is how it was used or thought of. A priori, we have no good reason to rule that possibility out, but neither, a priori, do we have any good reason to rule that possibility in. The connection between what governmental actors may say and what they actually do cannot be settled from the outside, just as no rule determines its own applications, being silent on what will count as having followed the rule correctly under different conditions. Although it is by no means easy to do so, analysts need to demonstrate their grounds for taking this particular position on these methodological and analytical matters. Yet at no stage are we given that demonstration. In its absence, there is a real danger that this position might be seen as a disguised return to the constitutionalist’s methodological resolution to Hobbes’ problem; namely, the institution of a distillation process whereby the “unclear syntheses” (Weber 1904 [1949]: 99) found in vernacular accounts can be conceptually purified and used to develop the intellectual models, the optics, that best approximate what the analyst regards as their underlying ‘logical’ structure. Having to admit to this charge would be unfortunate as it would collapse the boundaries which separate this approach from others and dilute much of the promise of constructionist studies. That is far from unavoidable. However, to deflect this critique, we need further assurance that this approach to analysis has indeed escaped its reliance on the reifying formal analytic devices that were singled out for criticism in constitutionalist accounts. Providing such reassurance would be harder in some cases than others. Rose and Miller, for instance, in what seems to be an almost deliberate parody of their own stated position, frequently seem intent on generating precisely the sort of disengaged, synoptic idealisations of governmental practices they repeatedly criticise as opposed to the sorts of descriptions of those schemas they initially hold out the possibility of. While Rose and Miller may not be treating the descriptive content of vernacular accounts as the building materials for developing a general theory of the state, it appears that they are

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treating them as if they unproblematically furnished the materials for developing programmatic characterisations of specific types of governmental arrangements. In particular, their ‘definitions’ of liberalism, welfarism and neoliberalism are difficult to see as anything other than paradigmatic ideal-typical constructs. Thus: Liberalism … marks the moment when the dystopian dream of a totally administered society was abandoned, and government was confronted with a domain that had its own naturalness, its own rules and processes, and its own internal forms of self-regulation … The objects, instruments and tasks of government had to be reformulated with reference to this domain of civil society with the aim of promoting its maximal functioning … This does not mean that liberalism was an ideology, disguising a State annexation of freedom … The elaboration of liberal doctrines of freedom went hand in hand with projects to make liberalism operable by producing the ‘subjective’ conditions under which its contractual notions of the mutual relations between citizen and society could work. (Rose and Miller 1992: 179–180) Welfarism is not so much a matter of the rise of an interventionist state as the assembling of diverse mechanisms and arguments through which political forces seek to secure social and economic objectives by linking up a plethora of networks with aspirations to know, programme and transform the social field … As a political rationality, welfarism is structured by the wish to encourage national growth and wellbeing through the promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk. (Rose and Miller 1992: 192) And, Neo-liberalism re-codes the locus of the State in the discourse of politics. The State must be strong to defend the interests of the nation in the international sphere and must ensure order by providing a legal framework for social and economic life … A rhetoric of the nation, the family, the traditional greatness of [e.g.] Britain, the virtues of law and order, and the respect for tradition provides a translatability between neo-liberalism and traditional right wing values, and simultaneously opens a complex space for the elaboration of governmental programmes … Whatever its rhetoric, within the problematics of government, neo-liberalism is not rendered intelligible by counterposing a non-interventionist to an interventionist state. Rather, it should be seen as a re-organization of political rationalities that brings them into a kind of alignment with contemporary technologies of government. (Rose and Miller 1992: 199)

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Replacing idealised accounts of state structures with idealised accounts of the logics of governmental programmes does not seem like great progress. Despite the undoubted sophistication of much of this work, then, it is prone to a discursive reductionism that has close parallels with the structural reductionism of the constitutionalist position. As was argued with respect to constitutionalism, the analyses presented above are also based on establishing a privileged God’s-eye view of the phenomena in question, a vantage point “outside and above” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) social life, from which the researcher can peer down and begin the work of discerning systematically enacted connections between the different parts of the governmental arrangements thus laid out before them. The question remains whether this artificially engineered viewpoint corresponds in any meaningful way to the viewpoints made possible within the practices and arrangements these studies were set up as an attempt to elucidate. In many respects, the most damaging move is the introduction of the relatively innocuous observation that governmental arrangements frequently fail to work out as planned, that they are “congenitally failing machines” as Rose and Miller put it. While this enables the investigator to bring their subject matter more sharply into focus, to distinguish what they want to talk about from what they do not want to talk about, it simultaneously decouples the work being done by vernacular accounts from the commonplace organisations of practical affairs those accounts come attached to. Accounts need no longer (indeed, as mentioned above, should not) be reconciled with the nexus of practices they describe from within. Instead, they can be analysed independently of them, as if they stood alone. It is not that these studies have an inadequate account of failure, then, but that they have no account at all. There is simply a void where an account should be. Although failure is discussed, it is treated as beyond analysis, a collision between different orders of things, something which is taken into account within but is not itself part of the way in which governmental actors systematically organise their activities. But, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, governmental machines constructed on paper cannot break down (Wittgenstein 1956: §102). The argument I am offering here is that the introduction of this particular concept of failure thus performs a key role; it assumes the status of a residuum, an order-less ‘plenum’ that the organisational practices of governmental actors (as discursively ‘represented’ in their accounts) can then be treated as attempts to rescue an order from and into which awkward details can be safely consigned. Failure, as a category of residua (and a residual category), thus belongs to the ‘logical darkness’ that Parsons suggests is a general feature of ‘positive’ social theory and research: Every system, including both its theoretical propositions and its main relevant empirical insights, may be visualised as an illuminated spot

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The limits of problematisation enveloped by darkness. The logical name for the darkness is, in general, “residual categories”. Their role may be deduced from the inherent necessity of a system to become logically closed. On whatever level it operates, a theoretical system must involve the positive definition of certain empirically identifiable variables or other general categories. The very fact that they are defined at all implies that they are distinguished from others and that the facts which constitute their empirical reference are thereby, in certain aspects at least, specifically differentiated from others … If, as is almost always the case, not all the actually observable facts of the field, or those which have been observed, fit into the sharply, positively defined categories, they tend to be given one or more blanket names which refer to categories negatively defined, that is, of facts known to exist, which are even more or less adequately described, but are defined theoretically by their failure to fit into the positively defined categories of the system. The only theoretically significant statements that can be made about these facts are negative statements – they are not so and so. (1937: 17–18)

But in historically oriented constructionist studies of the state this dichotomising move is too abrupt, the contrast too severe. It introduces too clean a break between how governmental actors devise technical means for transforming political realities and how they actually go about the task of doing so as well as the difficulties they encounter and circumstantial constraints upon their ability to see courses of action through. In theory, governmental actors may well try to insulate these different aspects of their activities from one another, but it cannot and should not be taken as a given. The analyst must show how they go about doing that insulation work in practice. That is, if indeed they do at all. In order to elaborate further on what is going on (and going wrong) within these studies, it is worth looking again at the particular picture of governmental practice these studies present us with. Few would object to the idea that governmental actors try to grapple as systematically with affairs of state as circumstances and capacities allow, nor to the idea that it is possible to describe their efforts in those terms. I am arguing, however, that we should also accept the further point that the circumstantial character of their activities is itself taken into consideration as part of the problems that those governmental actors are attempting to systematically grapple with. By way of contrast, in the examples we have been examining in this chapter, it seems that we are being asked to accept the idea that governmental actors first formulate their schemes, models and instruments, and, once they have been set in motion, only then look to see whether and how they might work (or fail to work) in practice. This is an entirely unrealistic picture of the relationship between the discourse and practice of state activity which can only work if we assume that the formulation of solutions can somehow be separated off from understandings of the circumstances within which those solutions will have to be implemented.

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Clearly the analysts we have been looking at are more interested in the constitution of ways of thinking about government and the state than they are in the ways in which these affect the daily business of government. That, in and of itself, is unproblematic. However, the claim that on its own an analysis of those ways of thinking could deliver an understanding of all other aspects of governmental practice, and that those aspects of governmental practices which could not be so captured could be treated as residual or trivial (as in the case of ‘failures’), is a deeply misleading oversimplification. On the one hand, as symbolic interactionists have pointed out, it is illegitimate to assume a one-to-one correspondence between law-making and law-enforcing because there is a distinction between what law-makers and law-enforcers do with laws in practice (Becker 1963: 61–63). Laws, again like rules more broadly, do not describe their own applications or interpret themselves, so we can only know how laws find application by looking at (collections of) actual cases. The textual codification of the law itself cannot be treated as a guide to, or proxy description for, its use in practice. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to take certain types of documents and analyse them in their own right, by, e.g., examining relations between them or how the language used in them changes over time (as in, e.g., Bowker and Star 2000). It is when a second step is taken and the analyst begins to treat the document as the imprint left behind by something beyond the text, as corresponding to either governmental arrangements or to the ways of thinking about how to govern that informed those arrangements, that problems start to arise. As Hunter notes: The whole point of approaching forms of thought as activities or disciplined ensembles of arts – arts of calculation and thinking, rhetorics of persuasion and demonstration, techniques of observation and experiment, exercises in self-transformation and self-cultivation – is to constitute as a topic for historical investigation the multiple ways in which human beings have used their intellect … It is misguided and misleading [however] to unify such diverse deployments of arts [and technologies] of reasoning as so many expressions of … a level of social materiality that supposedly makes them all possible. (2008: 88–89) Yoffee (2005) offers an interesting illustration of the general point. In an analysis of the code of Hammurabi, Yoffee begins with the familiar idea that Hammurabi represented a great “lawgiver” and that his laws were an attempt at systematic “codification and reform” (2005: 106). Despite its stated purpose, however, there is no mention of the code of Hammurabi in the thousands of legal documents that date to his reign and those of his immediate successors.

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The limits of problematisation This is true even when the ruling in a case happens to coincide with a rule in the so-called code. (Yoffee 2005: 107)

Yoffee points out, however, that “many of the rules were copied verbatim from earlier sets of laws that were part of the curriculum of Babylonian scribes” (2005: 106). Moreover, the laws themselves are organised along the same lines as other “scribal” products (2005: 145). Yoffee continues: “That the laws of Hammurabi were copied in Mesopotamian schools for over a millennium after Hammurabi’s death [when the laws were entirely redundant] attests to the literary success of the composition”, but allows little scope for secure inferences to statements about the code’s “juridical applicability” (2005: 106–107). He concludes: This does not mean that we must reject investigation of his casuistic formulations as reflections of [that is, as possibly connected to] actual legal activities, but it does require that Hammurabi’s laws be examined in the context of the legal praxis of the land [where evidence of that context exists]. (Yoffee 2005: 109) The caution that Yoffee displays here is often missing from the work of the researchers whose studies have been examined in this chapter so far. Linking Hunter and Yoffee’s points, what we have access to in the code of Hammurabi is a text that contributed to the long, slow consolidation of a particular genre or format of writing, familiarity with which was required of those involved in administering the Babylonian state. It may even, slightly more speculatively, show how the development of large-scale administrative structures, such as those connected with the Babylonian state, have been important innovators in the history of “technologies of the intellect” (Goody 1973, 1977). That individual texts employed or referenced that format, however, says little on its own about how that text mapped onto legal, administrative and governmental practices or the programmes which informed them. As Yoffee’s example shows, a given instance might be an exam requirement as much as a political statement. The theorists above are liable to confuse the two because they refuse to allow that researchers, examining documents after the fact, require ways of discriminating between them that must of necessity go beyond the similarities in the terminology, phrasing, formats and graphic devices they make use of. That new things could be done with them says nothing about what and, more particularly, how new things were done with them, if indeed at all. Just as problematically, when it comes to practical enactments, this position also ignores the fact that bad policy, like bad planning, is precisely that which has been formulated without due consideration as to how it might work in practice. Decision-makers do not simply come up with ‘possible’ models or programmes for action and then wait to see what happens. Neither are they

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generally speaking, ‘surprised’ that they encounter difficulties (although they may of course be surprised by particular obstacles) when trying to implement their favoured schemes. This is because models are formulated with known limits and restrictions on the scope of their application in mind. There is, in other words, no sharp distinction in practice between means, ends and the conditions within which action is undertaken – they are co-elaborated.1 Basing an analysis on the existence of sharp distinctions between intention and failure is therefore distorting. In terms of how we conduct research, one thing we might take from such observations is the need to reconsider the possibility that the degree of fit between a schema and the states of affairs it relates to (i.e., its ‘success’) might be an achieved fit, an accomplishment, something that has to be managed as a central part of political practice. In terms of the studies of the historical construction of the state examined in this chapter, that means asking some pointed questions. Why, for instance, should we accept with Corrigan and Sayer that “the fine details of Tudor policy enforcement” were irrelevant to the historical construction of the Tudor state? Why do we need to accept Rose and Miller’s claim that governmental “programmers” are working on the basis of anything like “a sublime image of a perfect regulatory machine” that is “internal” to their minds? If Liberal regimes were designed to promote the “maximal functioning” of the individual, as they also claim, why was it of no importance that they were, generally speaking, so bad at it? If the webs of calculative practices and state simplifications being woven around individuals using new forms of power/knowledge are so pervasive according to Foucault, Scott and others, why do governmental actors find it so hard to make them work and the non-governmental actors targeted by them so easy to ignore? These are by no means trivial questions in the context of the studies we have been examining, but, in the absence of any attempt to demonstrate how the governmental and non-governmental actors whose activities are being described themselves dealt practically with the matters they raise, they cannot be answered. Nor do the analytical procedures the analysts have restricted themselves to provide much of a way out. A focus on practicalities may well be an obstacle to an understanding of the emergence of consequential new ways of discursively framing the state and governmental activity. However, while removing these ‘obstacles’ may well help us to get a clearer view of what the analyst wants to show through their analysis, contra the stated aim of these studies, there is no way of knowing whether the view obtained is anything other than the analyst’s own “mythic abstraction”.2 Their analyses may well hold up but to ascertain this much more detail is required. Again, following Yoffee’s example of the code of Hammurabi, one of the possibilities ruled out on principle is that a given set of policies may not deliver because they were actually formulated with a different set of (political, economic, military, aspirational, opportunistic, strategic, administrative, educational, etc.) objectives in mind. That a given government has an official policy in a particular area says very little in practice about the nature of its

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designs in practice. Care needs to be taken if we are to avoid the sort of simplistic and fallacious inference that would have us searching for the governmental ‘logic’ of programmes set-out in documents which may well demonstrate ‘a commitment’ and ‘plans’ but which are not being seriously entertained. Sometimes we are dealing with rhetorical statements from which little or no practical action follows, positions being advanced for the sake of being seen to have advanced a position. The reverse can also be true in situations where action is being taken but with no formal position announced. To say that a policy has been formulated primarily to satisfy a domestic audience, for instance, is not necessarily a cynical move, it is just to note that we cannot always take the import of such things at face value. Governments rarely intend their statements to be taken that way, nor do their audiences typically make the mistake of treating them that way. However, in the rarefied governmental realms described by the theorists above – despite their interest in ‘contingency’ – there is no room for such things as political fixes, electioneering, politicking, pragmatism, opportunism, aspirational statements of intent, bad-decision making, luck, loss of political nerve, the political volte face or ‘U-turn’, and so on. In short, they make no allowance for many of the features of governmental activity on display in an average election campaign anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is impossible to recover the fact that there actually were things like politics in the ‘regimes’ analysed in the studies I have examined, let alone that they may have been consequential – as part of the practice – for the direction taken by governmental and non-governmental actors alike. They are simply dismissed out of hand as trivial sideshows. The claim that these analysts are presenting descriptions is somewhat hard to reconcile with this methodological practice. Tellingly, studies of this kind are generally at their most illuminating, as in the case of Foucault’s work, where they are least constrained by their commitment to the restrictions imposed by their adopted methodological apparatus.3 This is just one more indication of the need to rethink the conceptual and methodological starting point, the particular method of ‘problematisation’, that studies working within this area of the research programme have opted to begin from. As a preliminary to that rethink, it may well be helpful to keep the following remarks from Bittner in mind: In order to free ourselves progressively from the encumbrance of presumptive understanding we shall [have to] take two preliminary measures. First, the author of … [a] rational scheme, typically the managerial technician who deals with organization in the “technical sense”, will not be treated as having some sort of privileged position for understanding its meaning. By denying him the status of authoritative interpreter we do not propose to tamper with the results of his work in the least. From our point of view he is merely the toolsmith. It seems reasonable that if one were to investigate the meaning and typical use of some tool, one would not want to be confined to what the toolmaker had in mind.

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Second, we will not look to the obvious or conspicuous meaning of the expressions used in the scheme to direct us to objects and events which they identify. Rather, we will look for the way in which the scheme is brought to bear on whatever happens within its jurisdiction. The consequence of this step is that the question of what the scheme selects and neglects is approached by asking how certain objects and events meet, or are made to meet, the specifications contained in the scheme … If one suspends the presumptive notion … there is no telling what determinations a formal organizational scheme contains prior to the time that questions are actually and seriously addressed to it.4 Ways of thinking about, framing and accounting for the management of social and political affairs, and the ways in which states and governmental practices impact upon them, do not exist in isolation, no more than states do. If too much emphasis is placed upon the independence of particular schemas, severing consideration of their properties from the range of considerations that might arise in connection to them in practice, it becomes more difficult to resolve the underlying analytical problems that Bittner points to; namely, how such schemas actually generate friction and so gain whatever purchase they may have on the world (Wittgenstein 1953: §107). We can accept the value of what was earlier characterised as Foucault’s programmatic attempt to develop characterisations of the disparate types of governmental practices that give life to state forms, but we should not allow that programmatic aspiration to blind us to the ways in which descriptions of those governmental practices are themselves given life by virtue of their “open-textured” (Waismann 1945) connections with disparate aspects of the ongoing business of social and political life. This is a topic pursued in the next chapter in a discussion of ethnographic studies of the state. In it, rather than focus on a range of studies as I have done here, I will focus on one exemplary study in particular in order to raise questions about the problems posed by the methodological strategies which ethnographically oriented constructionist studies adopt.

Notes 1 On different aspects of this point see, e.g., Lindblom (1959, 1979), Garfinkel (1967b), Pressman and Wildavsky (1973), Lipsky (1980) and Suchman (1983). 2 The investigator is, thus, in an analogous position to the person who decides to remove the walls of the house in order to see what is holding the roof up (see Garfinkel 1967a but also Sharrock 1989, where there is an extended discussion of these problems). 3 As Bittner (1973: 116) remarks: “It appears that the more disciplined, the more rigorous the effort to apply the standard of scientific objectivity in sociological research becomes, the more tenuous grows the connection between the theoretical ideas and interests that motivate the research, and its execution. Thus, paradoxically, it is the violation of outward stringencies of formalized research technique, not compliance with them, that betrays the researcher who feels responsibility

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for doing justice to the object of their inquiry.” Burrow (2009: 48–49) argues similarly for history, suggesting that historians “have generally done better than their own programmatic formulations of their task have suggested”, i.e., when they ignore the programmatic formulations and get on with the business of writing histories. 4 This is taken from Bittner’s ‘The Concept of Organisation’ (1965: 249), from which much of the argument developed here derives.

6

Fictions of practice – anthropological accounts and the fabrication of the real

This chapter further explores the limits of problematisation as a method in constructionist studies of the state with a focus on a single case-study analysed by James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002). As I will argue, their treatment of that case-study exemplifies many of the conceptual and methodological difficulties with ethnographically oriented constructionist studies. The aim, ultimately, in discussing this particular study is to show that constructionist and constitutionalist studies share a conviction that models represent solutions to the problem of the state. There are, of course, differences. Constitutionalist analyses operate on the premise that we require a general model to study the state. By contrast, constructionist studies argue that we can only study the state by describing how models of the state are implicated in the state-making and state-maintaining work of local actors in local circumstances – work brought to the fore in constructionist studies. The plurality of such models is taken to show that there are many possible approaches to handling the problem of the state, an insight that led to the investigation of how questions alongside an investigation of the what of the state. Where constitutionalists try to keep model building in-house as the preserve of the analyst, therefore, constructionists outsource the analytical work to those being studied. However, it is only when we generalise from the specific problems members of society encounter in actual situations, when we attempt to analytically fix the problem of the state in place, that we are tempted to think of models of any sort as a solution. If, on the other hand, we deny that there is any single, monolithic problem of the state, if we resist what Wittgenstein termed the “craving for generality” and the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” he argued it displays, the path is open for investigations of a different sort, investigations that do not accord authority to models and so avoid the accompanying conceptual and methodological snares and traps. The point of such investigations would not be to deny that models can be useful (recognising that they are useful under some circumstances, not all). They would, however, undercut attempts to treat the use of models as if it were somehow independent of the nexus of social practices and circumstantial considerations within which models acquire whatever utility they can sometimes have. The critical analysis presented in this chapter sets up the focus of the next chapter where an alternative approach to the problem of the state will be outlined.

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Introduction Historically oriented constructionist studies of the state were critically explored at length in the last chapter. In this chapter the coherence of the methodological strategies that underpin the second type of constructionist study, ethnographically oriented studies, will be examined; i.e., those that seek to problematise the state by exploring the construction of a state ‘imaginary’, across a variety of social and cultural settings, using examples of situations in which that process has been rendered visible by members of the social and cultural groups being investigated. One of the first things to note about ethnographic studies of the state is that they involve a subtle sort of analytical reversal. Whereas historical studies were motivated by an interest in governmental practices, but actually focused on the discourses those practices were said to embody, the second type of study, though motivated by an interest in the normative and ideological construction of ‘ideas of the state’, involves descriptions of real-world activities, events and practices. Where the first are based primarily on analyses of (historical) texts, the second involves analyses based on documented observations, discussions and collections of visuo-textual and material artefacts gathered in the course of periods of fieldwork. These ethnographic researchers use a wide range of strategies for handling these more diverse sets of data, and, as a result, it is more difficult to group them together as the studies are themselves quite diverse. Nonetheless, as was the case with historical constructionist studies, despite differences in the kinds of evidence they work with, the topics they explore and the analytical interests of the researchers, it is possible to point to methodological continuities between constructionist ethnographic studies of the state. Most importantly, these studies do not seek to disembed our understanding of the state and governmental practices, but to use fieldwork materials to demonstrate the embedded character of the processes at work and show that they are oriented to features of the settings within which they play out. In what follows, rather than explore several examples at once as in the last chapter, a single case-study analysed by James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) will be used to assess how researchers locate and make their subject matter available in and through those demonstrations. As I will show, the article, ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), exemplifies the conceptual and methodological difficulties thrown up by the ethnographically oriented constructionist approach. ‘Spatializing States’ examines “vertical encompassment”, a key feature of what the authors identify as the contemporary spatial practices of “neoliberal governmentality”. Simply put, vertical encompassment refers to the processes by which states come to be understood (metaphorically) as exerting control ‘over’ a territory and its populations, and hence come to be seen as located ‘above’ them. At the same time, states are also understood to progressively envelop ‘non-state’ spaces, actors and entities within their fields of operation, and so the concept also refers to the processes by which states come to be

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seen as exercising forms of control that pervade those spaces and encircle those actors and entities. The state being imagined here is, therefore, one that is ‘vertically’ separated from the societies it controls while simultaneously ‘encompassing’ them; one that from its privileged vantage point can train an ever-watchful eye on ordinary members of society but of whom they only have a limited, partial and circumscribed view. The formulation of this concept allows the authors to make an interesting move. Instead of working on the assumption that states are actually vertically integrated while horizontally diffuse, the concept of “vertical encompassment” is used as a device for treating the spatial/territorial properties of the state (a key component of Weber’s ideal-type) as problems that state-actors must devise practical solutions to. In other words, ‘vertical encompassment’ is being used to ask how state actors go about ‘doing being spatial’, to adapt a formulation of Harvey Sacks (1992: Vol. 2, 215–221); i.e., how they exercise their authority in such a way that they can be seen to exercise control both over and throughout a territory. The discussion of this ‘problematic’ is tackled in two sections by Ferguson and Gupta. The first half of the article, which is reconstructed from ethnographic observation and fieldnotes, describes some of the mundane “spatial practices” that were built into the administration and management of a government-led development project in rural India (see also Gupta 2012). The second half, which is less detailed, uses case-note summaries taken from research conducted in South Africa to describe how related types of spatial practice are increasingly being employed beyond the state by non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The argument is that NGO involvement in the work of the state through these practices has: (1) reinforced their claims to authoritative status, (2) thereby facilitated their acceptance as significant political ‘stakeholders’ with substantive roles to play in a range of intersecting domestic and international governmental processes, while (3) simultaneously subverting elements of the claims advanced by the South African state regarding its own authoritative status and proper jurisdictions and mandates. As the examples used in the first half of the article lay the foundations for the argument in the second half, I will focus on that first section to assess the coherence of the methodological strategy that Ferguson and Gupta have chosen to adopt. In describing the “multiple, mundane domains of routinized bureaucratic practice by which states reproduce spatial orders and scalar hierarchies” that were employed in the Indian government’s Anganwadi Programme (known more formally as the Integrated Child Development Service or ICDS), Ferguson and Gupta draw our attention to the “panoply of spatial practices” embedded in its internal organisational and administrative characteristics (2002: 984). These include the “pyramid-shaped” organisation of the bureaucratic chain of command, the manner in which personnel were instructed about their position within that chain of command (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 984–985) and the length and number of the tours of duty that civil servants had to complete before being reassigned to different regions and being promoted “up” the chain of

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command (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 987–988). Each stage of the “bureaucratic pilgrimage”, a term Ferguson and Gupta take from Anderson (1983), takes the office holder closer to the administrative centre of power within the state. The civil servant’s projected career, schematically depicted in standardised organisational charts, therefore resembles a spiralling movement “inwards” from the periphery and “upwards” through the ranks. The implication of their argument is that civil servants could make use of various spatial metaphors in order to situate themselves and others within the organisation as a whole. Using these metaphors it becomes possible, for instance, to talk about those ‘above’ and ‘below’, the ‘higher-ups’ and the ‘lower-downs’, or to contrast those ‘closer’ to ‘centres’ of power with those on the ‘periphery’. At a more material and practical level, however, it also includes the choice and nature of the sites at which regional headquarters, district and local offices, and “block-level Anganwadi centres” were located (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 988). “Block-level Anganwadis” were the actual centres, based in the Indian administrative equivalent of the local neighbourhood level (a unit covering 15,000–25,000 people), from which services were delivered by programme workers. As Ferguson and Gupta note, the different terminologies used (centre, office, headquarters) again reflect the spatial manifestation of a hierarchical demarcation between the worksites of ‘front-line’ staff and ‘backoffice’ administrative and supervisory personnel. These forms of demarcation extended out to the markings on and physical lay-out of the various buildings through which the programme was administered and delivered (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 985); and to the ways in which (scheduled and unscheduled) inspections, and the collection and checking of registers, were used by supervisors to establish a system of surveillance that would enable them to monitor the often geographically dispersed development workers whose activities they were responsible for overseeing (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 985–988). In the article, surprise inspections receive particular attention, and the two such visits that the ethnographer involved was able to shadow are recounted, in the manner of the diorama, in some detail. The following passages are illustrative: [Superior] officers at “higher” levels travelled in jeeps … [and] Asha [the Child Development Project Officer (CDPO) who was accompanied on her rounds] complained that Workers who ran Anganwadi Centers in their homes often brought in additional children when they saw the dust of the approaching jeep in the distance. Thus, by the time the CDPO actually reached the Center, there were many children there even if the Anganwadi had not been operating; however, she [Asha] managed to catch the Worker’s “deception” in such cases by checking the names of the children present against the names (if any) entered in the Attendance Register. The CDPO’s ability to swoop down on the space of the Anganwadi Worker was thus mediated by the semiotic of dust, a smoke signal delivered by that very device – the jeep – that enabled her to suddenly enter the professional space of the local Anganwadi Worker.

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The surprise inspection was a ritual of control that established and demonstrated hierarchy, but the mode of conducting the inspection, the sudden swooping “down” into the geographical space of the Anganwadi Worker, was [also] a demonstration of the inequality of spaces. Anganwadi Workers went to the main ICDS office at a prescribed time each month; their ability to enter the space of the superior officer was limited and circumscribed, a sharp contrast to the surprise inspection. The ability to transgress space (the prerogative of “higher” officers) was also a device of encompassment, as it was their position in the vertical hierarchy that gave officers the privilege of a particular kind of spatial mobility, a mobility whose function and goal was to regulate and discipline. (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 987) The authors argue that these “rituals of surveillance”, which they suggest had no direct functional or pragmatic purpose, were designed solely “to represent and to embody state hierarchy and encompassment” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 985).1 This is, the authors suggest, how some of those involved in delivering the Anganwadi Programme went about the work of ‘being territorial’, how they could make themselves become, for all practical purposes, ‘multi-sited’, present in multiple locales, and thus how they contributed to the fantasy of the omnipresent, all-seeing state by providing it with the ability to appear at a moment’s notice, through those who personified its authority, in order to ritualistically reassert ‘downward’ lines of authority, regulation and control. They conclude that it is through these and a host of related mundane spatial practices that a significant feature of the “idea of the state” is made thinkable as a feature of these and other everyday situations, constituting widely practised ways in which the state can come to be “imagined” as a supervenient body and oriented to as such. With reference to Foucault’s account of governmentality and “the conduct of conduct”, concepts used in numerous equivalent studies, Ferguson and Gupta argue that, as a result, the construction of this state imaginary establishes a delimited field of possibilities for action that shapes what it means to be an agent of the state in practice, i.e., an ‘Anganwadi Worker’ or a ‘Child Development Project Officer’, as those subject to or responsible for maintaining hierarchically organised systems of spatial relations (2002: 989). There is much that is of interest in the analysis Ferguson and Gupta present, and it seems that studies that adopt this analytical strategy would be well positioned to meet a central requirement of the “research programme” defined by Rose and Miller: namely, the requirement to develop analyses that problematise the claims of states using thorough, thoughtful, empirically grounded research. However, it pays to examine the techniques used to engineer the room for such readings of the arts and practices of government. As before, the opening analytical moves are critical. One of the central implications of this analysis is that we should accept the idea that states (and the ‘faces’ they present in their localised manifestations as governmental programmes) are not really spatial entities, but are only

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imagined or believed to be so. Their apparent spatiality is a fiction, an illusion projected by the mundane organisational practices engaged in by large numbers of state actors across many different social, cultural and organisational settings. That fiction effectively disguises or masks the spatial practices through which it was produced and so contributes to a systematic ideological fabrication of the real bases of state authority and the operation, not to mention the projection, of systems of power. The question arises, however, as to whose ‘imaginings’ are being talked about here. Whose ‘fictions of practice’ are we being asked to consider? There is no suggestion that the CDPO or her staff conceived the purpose of their activities, the context of their relationships or the organisation of the programme, in the terms Ferguson and Gupta do. Nor do the authors treat “vertical encompassment” as if the concept was itself part of the way in which authority relations within the state were typically ‘imagined’ by those involved. It is instead, they suggest, a useful way of analytically capturing (some of) the processes and practices that give rise to different ways of thinking about the state. As we can see in the passage below, the authors are therefore (in part) using ‘vertical encompassment’ to construct an account of governmental actors’ spatial practices that will enable them to problematise certain unexamined assumptions about the state held by the specialist audience they are writing for: An imagined topography of stacked, vertical levels … structures many taken-for-granted images of political struggle, which are readily imagined as coming “from below,” as “grounded” in rooted and authentic lives, experiences, and communities. The state itself, meanwhile, can be imagined as reaching down into communities, intervening, in a “top down” manner, to manipulate or plan society. Civil society, in this vertical topography, appears as the middle latitude, the zone of contact between the “up there” state and the “on the ground” people, snug in their communities. Whether this contact zone is conceived as the domain of pressure groups and pluralist politics (as in liberal political theory) or of class struggle in a war of position (as in Gramscian Marxism), the [image of the] vertical topography of power has been … enormously consequential. (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 983) That ‘vertical encompassment’ is the authors’ own disciplinary fiction of practice, an artifice used to help them to organise their findings, is, at one level, unproblematic. All ethnographic research has to find some way of packaging first-hand observations of a setting into accounts that can be understood by readers whose knowledge of that setting is restricted to those accounts (Sacks 1999; Smith 1981), and readers can use the introduction of themes like ‘vertical encompassment’ to organise the information they are presented with. It is also perfectly legitimate to use examples drawn from ethnographic research in order to highlight the ways in which certain

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problems have been misleadingly conceptualised within the social and political sciences. Thus, here, Ferguson and Gupta’s insistence that governmental programmes must be organised in particular ways, if they are to be seen as ‘having’ a spatial presence, and that those forms of organisation are grounded in an array of work practices represents a useful corrective to the confused idea that state authority in itself somehow ‘extends over’, ‘occupies’ or ‘permeates’ physical space, something constitutionalist studies take for granted (cf. Jessop 2016: 33). Although Ferguson and Gupta draw upon empirical examples to make the point, then, it may be best thought of as furnishing a conceptual and methodological reminder. We are not being presented with news, so to speak, when we are told that governmental actors need to move about to do their jobs. It is something researchers know but have ignored or conspired to overlook. In that sense, we could formulate their point as a warning or admonition to other researchers not to ignore or overlook such things as they are constitutive of state work. Extending Ferguson and Gupta’s argument, the article may also provide an occasion for reminding researchers that spatial concepts can be used in many ways. As Wittgenstein observes: We easily forget that the word “locality” is used in many different senses and that there are many different kinds of statements about a thing which in a particular case, in accordance with general usage, we may call specifications of the locality of a thing. (Wittgenstein 1958: 8) We cannot, in other words, be too restrictive. Harvey Sacks, with typical flair, dealt with spatial terms at a number of points in his Lectures on Conversation, looking at “specifications of the locality of a thing”, inter alia, as indexing temporal considerations (1992: Vol. 1, 519); as displays of a mutual orientation to topic, and, through topic, to setting, the shared context of action (1992: Vol. 1, 754); as a means of interactionally aligning memory and biography through the invocation of ‘common’ knowledge (1992: Vol. 1, 760); as a way of binding the elements of a story together in a coherent narrative consisting of a sequence of seeably connected events (1992: Vol. 2, 179); and as a device for developing and maintaining consistent characterisations in and over the course of an interaction (1992: Vol. 2, 396). Sacks developed these analyses because: the idea that these [spatial] terms are, in the first instance, directed to doing … reference – in the sense that, say, ‘chair’ refers to a chair, etc. – is at least open to reconsideration … [The] aim, in characterizing how they work, might not be to find the ways in which … the sentences in which they occur can be fiddled around with so as to find that they are referential sentences [but to instead look at their consequentiality]. (1992: Vol. 1, 519, see also Schegloff 1972)

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Ferguson and Gupta open up related considerations here in relation to the consequential administrative use of spatial or location terms and the work those terms are made to do in specific sites of governmental activity. However, it is one thing to use examples to point to problems with the way in which social and political scientists have typically imagined (or mis-imagined) states operate, it is quite another to do so by imputing such mistaken ways of thinking to those being studied.2 It is not always easy to tell whether the authors are pursuing the former or the latter strategy as the text is frequently equivocal, oscillating between the two. Nonetheless, there is some evidence to suggest that Ferguson and Gupta are claiming that their analysis is an explication of the way in which the Indian state was imagined to work by the Indian civil servants whose work practices they studied. Vernacular accounts of what is involved need not be treated as faulty for analyses such as Ferguson and Gupta’s to work as empirically grounded conceptual arguments but it seems they are being treated in that way, i.e., as misconceptions. If that is the particular methodological route being taken, it raises a number of serious questions about the validity of their argument. For a start, we are given no basis for ascribing such views to those being studied. Instead, we are given a description of (some aspects of) their work practices and relationships that is designed to flag up the ways in which the local implementation of the programme in question was organised, administered and managed across (and in travel between) a number of physical locations. The additional claim that those work practices and relationships rested on a belief in a spatial idea of the state is a different order of argument entirely, one for which, prima facie, there is little empirical support in the text. No attempt is made, for instance, to explore how the civil servants and fieldworkers the authors studied thought about these issues in practice. Troublingly, however, claims of that sort need not be based on an analysis of what those involved might have reported they were doing. Rather, it involves the claim that their practices only make sense when set against a particular way of imagining the state. If we are to correctly understand those practices, if we are to see ‘beneath’ the governmental mask and ‘beyond’ the fiction, we need to use Ferguson and Gupta’s account of that way of imagining the state as a guide to what is really going on. Any alternative account that, for example, Asha (the CDPO) might have given of how and why she organised her inspections in the way that she did would be beside the point. On this reading, the analysis shows us that and how Asha’s work practices embody a commitment to a certain ideologically saturated view of the state independently of anything she herself might have to say on the matter. For this analytical strategy to work, we must accept that the analyst is in a position to see what the parties involved cannot: the underlying organisation and consequences of their actions. The parties cannot be aware of the true organisation and consequences of their actions because, for the ideological mask to remain in place, they have to believe in the fictions of practice that are reproduced through their activities and relationships with one another – a standard ‘critical’ move (cf. Latour 2004; Celikates 2018).

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One consequence of this is that an analysis framed in these terms involves a thoroughgoing scepticism concerning the knowledge-claims of those being studied. What Indian civil servants might reasonably claim to know about the way in which the Indian state operates (like the fact that civil service positions in Delhi typically pay more because they involve more responsibility but you can only get invited to apply for them after building up a career in more junior posts) is systematically recast as a matter of how they imagine, believe or think it operates. As Sacks and Coulter have pointed out, to suggest that someone imagined, believed or thought that something was the case carries the implication that they did not know, were unclear as to whether it was in fact the case or have since found out that it was not (see, e.g., Sacks 1992: Vol. 2 and Coulter 1989: 40–44).3 Beliefs are (intersubjectively) defeasible in ways that knowledge-claims are not. For this reason, the generic translation of knowledge-claims into the vocabulary of belief and imagination within this analytical framework involves an across-the-board form of epistemic downgrading by the backdoor. As Sacks in particular shows (1992: Vol. 2, 237), a generic translation procedure of that kind plays havoc with the sense of ordinary accounts and what they are designed to do. There is a world of difference, for instance, between “We asked them how they ran the Anganwadi programme. They told us it was run in the following way” and “We asked them how they ran their programme. They believed (thought, imagined) it was run in the following way”. The inference is that what the civil servants might claim to know, they actually only (falsely) believe or think they know but do not really know. And, as Coulter (1989) shows, this problematically alters the nature of the questions we can legitimately raise. We can ask how someone knows, but we cannot ask how they believe. We can ask why they believe and seek an account of the reasons, but we do not seek reasons for knowing in the same way. By focusing on the reasons for belief, we are drawn towards forms of explanation that locate those reasons in factors (often causal factors) outside the control, awareness or understanding of the individual. By trading on the asymmetry engineered by this tacit downgrading procedure, the constructionist researcher’s viewpoint is privileged while those studied are presented as systematically ignorant of the origin, situation and implications of their ‘beliefs’ and actions. In moving away from the methodological framework supplied by the ideal-typical schema, researchers have gone from believing in the existence of ‘the state’ themselves to attributing that belief (a belief they will subsequently mercilessly debunk) to everyone else (cf. Latour 2004). The sense in which this could be said to constitute ‘progress’ is unclear. If this strong interpretation is indeed the position Ferguson and Gupta are advocating, and the article is ambiguous on that score, we are perfectly entitled to ask some rather pointed questions at this point. Is, for example, the spatial model of the ‘imagined state’ the product of the localisation of state authority through the Anganwadi Programme or a product of Ferguson and Gupta’s analysis of it? What does it mean to talk of a way of thinking about

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the state that underpins practice but which nobody, apart from the authors, consciously entertains? Just whose ‘systematic ideological fabrication of the real bases of state authority’ are we dealing with here? Smith, for one, argues that this form of analysis “looks uncomfortably like [a] recipe for making ideology” (1974b: 41). She suggests that the recipe, the “ideological method”, is one which involves beginning with a concept which is constituted as a traditional piece of sociological currency. The theoretical provenance of the concept which validates its use may be well understood. Its phenomenal provenance remains wholly unexamined. The concept is then embodied in the ‘real world’ by making happen certain special kinds of events which then stand as its signs. A real world is constituted which points back to and validates the sociological currency. (Smith 1974b: 43) It is therefore moot as to whether the ideology resides in the practices or in the treatment of them. That issues of this sort arise at all is deeply problematic in a form of research predicated on locating and describing circumstances in which the state is made visible by ordinary members of the societies being investigated. If the strong reading of their arguments is correct, the state being made visible here looks very much like Ferguson and Gupta’s own construct with very little, if anything, to do with those being studied, except where they are needed to set up an ironic comparison between their beliefs and the researchers’ knowledge. As Wacquant has put it, this is troubling because such an approach reduces individuals or groups to the status of passive supports of a “code” that works out its independent … logic “behind their backs”; it cannot grasp practice other than as the mere execution of a … model that negates the … capacities of agents and the open-endedness of situations, thereby freezing dynamic relations into eternal replicas of a single blueprint. (Wacquant 2002: 1493) – here, ‘vertical encompassment’. The analysis works, in other words, by casting those whose activities are being portrayed as ‘political dopes’ (cf. Garfinkel 1967a: 66–75), the unwitting agents of pervasive forms of neoliberal governmentality that are realised in and through their actions but of which they are unaware.4 This represents a form of what might be termed politicism, a position that has close parallels with the scientism attributed to classical anthropological accounts of the ‘faulty’ belief systems of so-called primitive peoples (Winch 1964, 1997). The difference is that, where scientism is now seen as unacceptable, the politicism that lurks within many contemporary constructionist studies of the state has yet to be subject to a thorough critical interrogation.

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Although there is insufficient space to deliver that interrogation here, it is important to note that there are very few good reasons as to why we should accept any such portrayal of political beliefs, and good reasons as to why we should reject it. In rejecting that characterisation, however, we do not need to go as far as to claim that, for instance, Indian civil servants do not believe in the existence of the Indian state (or for that matter, do not have an understanding of how it operates), just that we cannot attribute such beliefs before we have investigated the sense in which they might be held, the form they might take, or the manner in which they might find expression (be avowed to) in ordinary contexts. With reference to the scepticist interpretation of Ferguson and Gupta’s account, rather than proceeding on the basis that ‘spatiality’ represents a general problem, local solutions to which can only be understood with reference to the unconscious model of the state that they ‘embody’, this would mean asking if, when and how a nest of issues around spatial organisation (such as those connected with how to effectively implement an ongoing aid programme across a number of dispersed geographical locations that are difficult to travel to and between) are dealt with in practice by Anganwadi workers and their supervisors. While Ferguson and Gupta’s analysis could be interpreted as an interrogation of a mistaken view of the state advanced within social and political science, the scepticist interpretation seems to have a firm and problematic grip on the imagination of many of those whose studies are predicated on identifying the ‘masks’, ‘fetishes’ and ‘fantasies’ that are central to the ‘imaginings’ which ‘legitimate’ the practices of ‘real states’. By way of illustration, we find the following passage in Abrams: The state, then, is not an object akin to the human ear. Nor is it even an object akin to human marriage. It is a third-order object, an ideological project. It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation – and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination. Why else all the legitimation-work? The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely, legitimate, disinterested domination. The study of the state, seen thus, would begin with the cardinal activity involved in the serious presentation of the state: the legitimation of the illegitimate. The immediately present institutions of the ‘state system’ – and in particular their coercive functions – are the principal object of that task. The crux of the task is to over-accredit them as an integrated expression of common interest cleanly dissociated from all sectional interests and the structures – class, church, race and so forth – associated with them. The agencies in question, especially administrative and judicial and educational agencies, are made into state agencies as part of some historically specific process of subjection; and made precisely as an alternative reading and cover for that process … Not to see

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It is instructive to compare what Abrams has to say with Wittgenstein’s remarks in the following: How strange if logic were concerned with an “ideal” language and not with ours. For what should this ideal language express? Presumably what we are now expressing; in that case, this is the language … [we] must investigate … [Analysis] is analysis of something which we have, not of something which we do not have. It is the analysis of sentences as they are. (It would be strange if human society had spoken until now without succeeding in uttering a single correct sentence.) (Wittgenstein 1964: 52) As was discussed at length in the previous chapter, one of the goals of the analyses presented by Abrams and Ferguson and Gupta is to problematise the state. However, there are residual ambiguities about the way in which that term can be used. On the one hand, ‘to problematise the state can be understood as an attempt to highlight our conceptual reliance as researchers on certain problematic ways of thinking about the state and governmental practices. This sense of ‘problematisation’ informs the non-scepticist interpretation of Ferguson and Gupta’s analysis. On the other hand, ‘to problematise the state’ can be understood as an attempt to show how members of different societies come to falsely ‘believe in’ regimes that are, from the researcher’s perspective, entirely invalid. This sense of ‘problematisation’ informs the scepticist interpretation of Ferguson and Gupta’s claims and is clearly the position held by Abrams. However, if we start by defining the state as “a third-order object, an ideological project … an exercise in legitimation … a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable”, as Abrams does in the remarks above, it becomes difficult to see anything but ‘legitimation work’ in everything that governmental actors do, or to treat members of those societies as if they were being anything other than systematically deceived by the governmental regimes in place. It is on the basis of this definition, therefore, that constructionists feel entitled to ascribe beliefs in the state to those being studied before they have investigated whether anyone actually holds that belief: by definition they can be treated as if they do. However, because of this move, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, while we could say that these studies describe the logic of a belief system, it is difficult to claim that it is demonstrably that of those studied or indeed anyone else’s. The political beliefs those studied actually hold, as opposed to those they might be said to hold, have not been investigated here at all.

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In so far as the task of research is conceived as being that of correcting ‘our’6 (i.e., the researcher’s) conception of ‘our’ practices, of opening ‘our’ eyes to the presence of the state in ‘our’ (i.e., the researcher’s version of ‘our’) lives – a presence that can only be made visible by studying various actual practical entanglements with the state, not by imposing a scepticist interpretation of them from the outset – it is difficult to see how this type of research, and the scepticist interpretation of the problematisation procedure on which it is based, can escape the problem outlined above. What is needed is an approach that does not begin with the attribution of ‘beliefs’ in the state to members of different groups independently of what they may or may not actually be said to think or know. Coulter goes some way to describing what such an approach might involve: [Serious] attention [should] be given to the observation that agents’ reasongiving practices are themselves kinds of social actions along with the actions for which the reason may be given. Instead of seeking to adjudicate the rightness or wrongness of agents’ reasons for some decontextualized purposes, we should attend instead to the elucidation of ‘reason-giving’ as comprising varieties of … practices in which we participate. In focusing upon ‘reason-giving-and-receiving’ as kinds of social praxis in their own right, we can delineate the ways in which, for agents themselves (or, better, for agents ourselves) operating with a particular language and cultural resources, the manifold distinctions between a ‘real’ and an ‘apparent’ reason, between a good reason and a mere rationalization, between an acceptable reason and a poor reason, are effected within social circumstances of identifiable sorts and comprise practical devices of reasoning and judgement whose validity is variously decided [in situations] where decisions of that kind are intelligible and appropriate. (Coulter 1989: 5, emphasis in original) It is a study of precisely this sort that is ruled out by a commitment to a methodological position based on Abrams’ sense of ‘problematisation’. As soon as we start to look at the “manifold” ways in which ideas of the state themselves constitute “devices of reasoning and judgement”, the valid use of which could only be decided on the basis of an understanding of the particular circumstances within which they are intelligibly and appropriately employed and mutually understood, we begin to lose the temptation to treat them (for our own decontextualised analytical purposes) as expressions of the (illegitimate) systems of belief, the (mystified) ‘imaginaries’, that underpin the operations of the (fetishised) state. We also, it is suggested, get closer to the manner in which the state actually appears to members of society as a feature of their everyday lives.

Moving beyond problematisation The arguments advanced in this chapter and the last have been designed to show that the use of problematisation as a generic methodological procedure –

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within the two principal strands of research that together make up the contemporary field of constructionist studies of states and governmental practices – can generate a range of internal methodological difficulties, problems and paradoxes. With these difficulties, problems and paradoxes squarely in view, we can now see the full extent of the reversals initially raised earlier. Those involved in the first type of constructionist research, i.e., historical studies, set off in search of complexes of governmental activity, but end up attempting to analyse texts – historical documents and records – as if they were unproblematic representations of those complexes. Those involved in the second type of research, i.e., ethnographic studies, set off in search of ideas of state embodied in practices, but end up attempting to systematically rewrite those practices in order to impose the very ideas they were supposed to be searching for. The first methodological strategy requires the researcher to take vernacular accounts at face value, the second requires them to refuse to do so (Winch 1958: 86–88). In both cases it is as a result of the adoption of certain methodological strictures on an in-principle basis that the investigative enterprise starts to lead in directions that seem to clash with the original terms in which it was set out. Unfortunately, much of the power, insight and promise of the original insights which led to these studies dissipates in the process of forcing them down these methodological channels. There are many possible answers as to why this might be the case. At a very general level, the suggestion here is that the problem resides in the nature of the methodological apparatus being used. Until now the approaches built into these two ‘types’ of constructionist study have been examined separately. However, in order to review and close the arguments of the last two chapters, it is helpful to look at both together again so that we can see more clearly what lies at the root of the issues that have been raised. It is important to diagnose the methodological impulses within constructionist research which lead to the problems I have outlined. What each type of study shares as a result of their reliance on the method of problematisation is that they remain, at base, modelling exercises. Those involved in studies of the first type examined begin by using surface-level terminological regularities in order to model the discursive practices that shape those regularities. This is the source of the first mistake: the decoupling of accounting practices from the situations in which they acquire their meaning. As Coulter (1989: 124) so appositely puts it given present purposes: “Again, we [here] encounter a common, but false, assumption that a commonality of (surface-)grammatical form among varieties of expression entails a singular pattern of application of usage.” Wittgenstein himself drew a radical conclusion from such mistakes: “[There is a] tendency to look for something common to all the entities we commonly subsume under a general term … I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything” (Wittgenstein 1958: 17–18). Having read-off these ‘discursive models’ – rendered as formulaically rendered turns of phrase – from collections of vernacular accounts, those involved in studies of the second type use these ‘findings’ to model the

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systems of belief that explain why those being studied employ those ways of talking. This is the source of the second mistake: the attribution of beliefs to members of society before we have ascertained the circumstances (if any) in which they could be said to hold them. As a direct result of the mistakes that are exhibited in this ‘will to model’, the analysis can take us further away from an understanding than we were at the point where the analysis began. Widening this point out, my argument here is that the recurrence of these mistakes within contemporary constructionist studies is indicative of a deeper homology with the constitutionalist position examined in earlier chapters. In specific terms, what the constructionist studies examined in this and the previous chapter share with their constitutionalist counterparts is the conviction that models represent solutions to the problem of the state. There are, of course, differences. Constitutionalist analyses work on the premise that researchers require a general theoretical model of the state to study the state. By contrast, constructionist studies argue that we can only study the state by describing how models of the state are implicated in attempts to solve the problem by actors in specific socio-historical circumstances. Here, the plurality of such models is taken to show that there are irreducibly many possible solutions to the problem. It was this insight that led to the investigation of how questions alongside an investigation of the who and the what of the state. Where constitutionalists try to keep model building in-house as the preserve of the analyst, constructionists outsource the analytical work to those being studied. Nonetheless, the many differences between ideal-typical methodologies and the two variants of the problematisation method we have looked at should not blind us to various points of similarity. Both give priority to models (global or local, theoretical or descriptive, synoptic or panoramic/dioramic) and they treat those models as encapsulating definitions of the state, or its modes of operation. As a result, both approaches end up in the business of telling us what can and cannot be thought, said or done with respect to the state. The suggestion here is that the problems generated by these methods have their origin in the way in which they formulate ‘the’ problem, i.e., as the sort of problem that can only be solved with reference to the use of models. From this, we can see perhaps the most important connection between constitutionalism and constructionism; the fact that they share a common point of departure, namely, a belief that there is a general, recurring problem to which solutions can be found. However, it is only when we generalise from the specific problems ordinary members of society encounter in actual situations, when we attempt to analytically fix the problem of the state in place, that we are tempted to think of models, whether ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’, as general solutions. If, on the other hand, we deny that there is any single, monolithic problem of the state, if we resist this “craving for generality” and the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” (Wittgenstein 1958: 18) it displays, including the temptation to project it onto others when we have disavowed it ourselves, the path is open for investigations of a different sort, investigations that do not accord universal authority to models and so avoid

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many of these conceptual traps. The point of such investigations would not be to deny that models can be useful (recognising that they are useful under some circumstances, not all).7 They would, however, undercut attempts to treat the use of models as if it were somehow independent of the nexus of social practices and circumstantial considerations within which models acquire whatever circumstantial utility they may be found to have – the dichotomising moves that generated such trouble in the above.8 To frame this point slightly differently, it is possible to argue that the source of the problems with attempts to problematise the state lies in the fact that they move far too abruptly from the level of everyday encounters with the state and governmental practices to formal, analytically disembedded models of the discursive formations, problematics of government and systems of belief which ‘order’ them. In this sense, problematisation emerges as an oppositional strategy. That is, it works by positing oppositions, by pitting theorisation against countertheorisation. However, in pitting different (models of) ways of thinking and talking about the state against each other – whether that is the ordinary versus the technical, past versus present, mystified versus demystified – the contrasts generated are treated as cut and dried, black and white, as self-evidently present. As Foucault observed, however, there is every reason to question the assumption that the researcher’s theoretical concerns and the ordinary member of society’s practical concerns can be treated as ‘about’ the same things: to see them as actual or potential ‘rivals’ is to make a fundamental ascription error. Once that ascription error has been made, the researcher is free to read new orientations into everyday concerns in ways that bypass the problem of having to account for how such systematic features might arise and become visible in practice. These problems are by no means insurmountable, however. There are ways out, but to take them we must abandon the programmatic commitment to problematisation. While it is important to recognise the value of the idea that we should look to ways in which the state is localised in and through complexes of social action and interaction, on its own it is not enough. As well as paying attention to the ways in which fields of governmental activity are organised at the local level, we should also attempt to investigate the local organisation of inquiries into those activities. In the following chapter an alternative approach that attempts to build on this proposal will be sketched using the example of Marx’s treatment of The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Notes 1 Authors’ italics. Although it is not remarked upon by the authors, following the discussion in Chapter 4, it may be argued that these visits were attended to precisely because they constituted visible instances of a species of routine infra-organisational trouble-making by managers. 2 Biggs (1999) offers a historical account of the way states have come to be imagined cartographically as having spatial properties (such as inhabiting delimitable space) which treads a similarly fine line between conceptual clarification and the ascription of error to those who generated the material he uses to develop that clarification.

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3 See Sacks (1992: Vol. 2, 237) and Coulter (1989: 40–44). 4 Garfinkel (1967a) introduces the cultural, the psychological dope and the judgemental dope, all of whom are persons in the “social scientist’s society” who are cast, by theoretical caveat, as being unaware of the import and significance of their actions. Pleasants devotes an entire chapter in his book to a critique of Garfinkel’s use of these concepts (1999: 121–148): what Pleasants objects to is the claim that agents never do anything unknowingly, that they are always reflexive. However, this criticism is wide of the mark. Garfinkel, as is also being argued here, is not saying that people never do anything idiotic, are never mislead, are always in possession of the facts, are in charge of their lives, etc. The concept of, here, the ‘political dope’ is not meant as a substantive thesis about people at all but a critique of particular social scientific ways of talking (ideal-typically) about them (just as talk of ‘members’ is not talk of persons as Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) note). Garfinkel’s point, one which he develops from Schutz, is that social scientists may claim to be describing what people do but all too often are merely putting on their own theoretically staged “puppet shows” which they then proceed to treat as descriptions (see Schütz 1962: 3–47 and Garfinkel and Rawls 2006). Puppets are manipulable in ways which people are not and people are manipulable in ways puppets are not, a point that comes through quite strongly in Pleasants’ discussion of Milgram’s experiments. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from both Garfinkel and Milgram’s ‘performative’ experiments, à la Pleasants, is that we would be wrong to read either as support for generalised models of the actions of human individuals – that is certainly not what Garfinkel was aiming for, quite the reverse. See Celikates 2018 for further discussion. 5 The same passage, part of a paper originally presented in 1977, is discussed in Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 7–9) and the position as a whole is elaborated on by Jessop (2016). 6 ‘Our’ here is being used in the sense of ‘anyone’s’. 7 On this see Wittgenstein’s following remarks on the use of models in the definition of words (1958: 6, 16): “[A] model[’s] … advantage may be that it is seen at a glance and easily held in the mind … If on the other hand you wish to give a definition [with, e.g., reference to such a model] … i.e., to draw a sharp boundary, then you are free to draw it as you like; and this boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary.” 8 For more on the trouble with dichotomies see Ryle (1954) and Coulter (1989: 128).

7

The problem of the state beyond constitution and construction

What would an approach to the problem of the state that did not repeat the problems of constitutionalism and constructionism look like? In many respects, it would be an approach that took Foucault’s radical insights seriously and did not try to reserve a position of authority for the researcher. It would instead look to social and political practices and attempt to grapple with the sense in which the problem of the state is a problem for anyone. There is a precursor: Marx’s lengthy exposition of the circumstances that led up to the collapse of French parliamentary democracy in 1851, following the 1848 Revolution, and allowed Louis-Napoleon, the then President of the French Second Republic, to reclaim the Imperial throne his uncle (Napoleon) had been forced to abdicate – The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx has often been castigated for not offering a general theory of the state in his work. The argument here is that this was precisely the point. In framing his analysis in the way he did Marx is asking us, as readers, to treat what it might mean to describe the state as itself a phenomenon for investigation, a problem within political practice, and a problem, moreover, to which his own text is explicitly addressed. It is this feature of Marx’s description of the French state that is worth concentrating on; namely, its insistence on treating the problem of the state in practical political terms. What is most significant about Marx’s treatment is that he does not allow us to move from his description to a generalised problem of the state, and so blocks attempts to treat the former as a manifestation of the latter. Indeed, one of the lessons of the account is that there is no general, transcontextual problem of the state because the idea lacks content and thus an identifiable sense. One of the most striking things about The Eighteenth Brumaire is that it is made up of unrelentingly detailed descriptions of complex sequences of events, where the analytical emphasis continually re-centres on a consideration of what was happening at each step within unfolding sequences of practical political action. The significance of any one episode within a longer sequence, such as the question of who did what when (‘details’ of the sort that are frequently dismissed as trivial by many constitutionalists and constructionists alike), can only be determined with respect to the manner in which it was seen in practice, by the parties involved, as connected to what came before and their orientation

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to what might come after. In other words, to draw on conversation analytic terminology, Marx is showing us that some possible next political move by any one of the protagonists became intelligible in the context of some identifiably prior move by another. When we read The Eighteenth Brumaire as a specifically interactional account of collaboratively produced ‘chains’ of political activity, it becomes easier to see why Marx would resist the idea that there could be a general problem of the state: to generalise the problem would be to divorce it from the environments within which the state could come to be a problem for those involved in the political scenarios he is examining. Marx’s method of analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire works to prevent the severing of contextual ties by building on the observation that determinations about the state (its proper scope, role, character, structure, powers, activities, jurisdictions, failures and so on) are made within social and political practices. Approached in this way, the objective in Marx’s account then becomes to see how such determinations acquire their sense in, through and as part of practical courses of action. Marx shows us why we should not try to specify in advance what form those determinations will take, where we will find them or what import they will or can have, but instead look to see if, when and how they become relevant in a given situation. It is in this sense that the account points us in a very different direction to the other forms of investigation that have been examined so far. Marx, like Machiavelli before him, shows us that general problems of the state cannot be identified independently of members of society’s specific practical concerns, projects and activities and urges us to explicate the ties between them. For this reason, it is not enough to look into the imbrications of structures, functions and socio-historical processes that are implicated in the ways in which members of society pose questions of the state, we must also address the circumstances within which these questions become meaningful, significant, consequential in the specific ways that they do. Rather than treat the problem of the state as having a timeless validity, or trans-historical relevance, investigations would concentrate on looking at the implications of raising particular questions at the specific moments in time and the specific places in which they were raised. Proceeding in this way the ground is thus prepared for a respecification of the ‘classical’ problem of the state in and through empirical investigations of social and political practices. The central contention advanced in this book is that it is in this sense that ‘the problem of the state’ can best be addressed, i.e., by returning ‘the problem’ to its home environment, namely our practices, including the disputes and conflicts that both surround and arise out of them.

Introduction The last two chapters critically examined two principal methodological variants of the method of problematisation used within constructionist studies of the state. Rather than explain manifestations of the state with reference to an

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overarching organisational structure which exists independently of the society ‘it’ governs, those studies sought to treat states as both embedded within, and elaborated by, historically specific social, cultural, economic and political practices (see here, e.g., Herzfeld 2005: 369, 374). In that, the proper goal of research was seen as being to examine what has been called “the social life of the state” (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003) as conducted within and across a variety of settings. In rejecting the adequacy of constitutionalist accounts of the state, constructionists tended to go in one of two ways: first, towards the typically historical study of the managerial, administrative and bureaucratic activities – “the arts of government” in Foucault’s phrase – that together make up the state as a multidimensional, disjointed field of practice and ‘power’ (Foucault 1991a: 87–104); or second, towards more ethnographic studies of the ideological construction of the idea of a unified entity called ‘the state’, the “state effect”,1 across different social, cultural and institutional settings. Both types of study seek to examine the ways in which the state is constituted at a local level, i.e., the variously dis/located manifestations of the state produced in and through social practice, as a central area of interest. As discussed, many aspects of these types of study are of interest, particularly the critique of normative social and political theory, and the attempt to develop empirical treatments of states as ‘(multi-)sited’ phenomena.2 However, in problematising decontextualised accounts of the state, both types of constructionist study had to generate alternative metrics to evaluate and report on the social arrangements they sought to explore. In the case of the first, technical managerial and administrative discourses were treated as a starting point from which to investigate “technologies” and “rationalities” of government and their imbrications with subjectivities and social arrangements of power/knowledge (Rose and Miller 1992). In the case of the second, ethnographic data in the form of collections of talk, text and visuo-material artefacts that reference alternating “faces of the state” (Navaro-Yashin 2002) were treated in a similar way. It was argued that a major failing of these strategies was their reliance on artificial contrasts – past versus present, ‘our’ understanding versus ‘theirs’ – that detached the analysis from the social and political states of affairs they were designed to explicate (cf. Smith 1981: 321). The argument was that the methodological commitment to problematisation was the source of the troubles generated by dichotomising contrasts of this kind, troubles that centred on the attempt to treat vernacular accounting practices as responses to Hobbes’ philosophical characterisation of the problem of the state. Hunter (2006, 2008) has noted similar issues with problematisation as a method, arguing it is best viewed as one particular way of conducting investigations among others that involves attending to things while simultaneously disengaging from them. As Hunter puts it, while these studies focus on structures of practices with “variety and historical density … there is a strong tendency to treat these structures as self-enclosed epochal orders … [whose] historical

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existence … [is the product of] rupture and “discontinuist” transformation[s]” (2006: 101). Treating these methods as “concrete activities” in their own right, he also points to problematisation as involving “skeptical suspension or bracketing” of phenomena (Hunter 2008: 586–587). As argued in the last chapter, this scepticism with respect to knowledge of the state leads researchers to treat members of society as if they believe in the very models that constructionists seek to debunk. Under these circumstances, as Latour (2004: 239) has put it, the researcher is “always right”, those studied always wrong. If we want to develop studies that address the problem of the state in ways that avoid these troubles, an alternative approach is clearly needed. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to move beyond the methodological orbits traced by constitutionalist and constructionist studies in order to explore what that alternative approach might look like. As part of that, Marx’s analysis of the politics of the French state in the Eighteenth Brumaire will be treated as an exemplar. Turning to Marx for methodological succour may strike many as an odd choice. Not only is Marx readable and read as a grand theorist, even were that not the case he is certainly seen as one of the originators of the sort of ‘false consciousness’ argument whose use as a methodological device was criticised in the last chapter. However, if Marx is advancing grand theory on the basis of such arguments he is doing so from a very different starting point to constitutionalists and constructionists. It is the distinctiveness of Marx’s position which makes his work on the state of particular interest here.

Lessons from Marx Perhaps Marx’s most well-known statement on the state is the following with Engels in The Communist Manifesto: Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class … [The] bourgeoisie has at last … conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. (Marx and Engels 1976 [1848]: §1) For Marx and Engels, then, the nature of the state appears to be that it has no nature of its own: it is a creature of class power and hence, under capitalism, a political and managerial front for the domination of bourgeois socio-economic interests and exploitative class relations. To look at the activities and organisation of the state is thus to look at a series of refractions of class control of the means of production. It is against such attempts to analyse away the particularities and specificities of states and governmental practices, to reduce the analysis of the state to the analysis of political economy alone, that much of the research discussed in the previous chapters was set up in opposition to, whether constitutionalist or constructionist in character. Indeed, particularly within

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Foucauldian circles, Marx, as a ‘theorist of domination’, is often viewed with something approaching disdain: [There is] a certain noticeable parallelism, cutting across … liberal-conservative and revolutionary Marxian attacks on a French state perceived … as a crushing, alien burden on the social body … From the 18th Brumaire to the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the language of Marx’s treatment of the state is consistent in its violence (a violence which is, perhaps, the major distinctive feature of Marx’s views in this matter): a ‘supernaturalist abortion’, a ‘parasitic body’, an ‘incubus’, an ‘excrescence of civil society’ which illicitly strives to detach itself from its social basis. Marx not only abstains from, but expressly prohibits, any generalized theory of existing states: unlike capitalist society, which can be analyzed as a universal form variously actualized in all civilized societies, ‘the “present state” changes with each country’s border … “The present state” is thus a fiction’ … Marx’s language … powerfully expresses … [his] sense of the perversity, the intrinsic irrationality, of the state. (Gordon 1991: 29, emphasis in original) Despite some clear parallels between Marx’s position as glossed here and those of the researchers examined in the previous two chapters, the last in particular, it is the attempt to examine governing practices in terms of their primitive connections to economic relations of production that is chiefly being used by Gordon to differentiate Marx’s approach from that of constructionist researchers. However, from Gordon’s remarks we can see that the reasons for this disdainful attitude are at least twofold: it is not just that Marx appears to be a proponent of the sort of grand theoretical narrative that constructionism regards as incoherent, he is (worse) simultaneously enthralled by an ‘idea of the state’ (evidenced by the ‘violence’ of his characterisation of it), a “state phobia” (Foucault 2008 [1979]; Dean and Villadsen 2016), that constructionists’ genealogies were designed to calmly dispel. Marx is, therefore, himself in the hold of a dangerous fetish, a magical conception of the state that serves as the misguided focus of his angry denunciations of bourgeois politics. Both points are, however, wide of the mark and mischaracterise Marx’s writings by attempting to evaluate them (anachronistically) against the standards subscribed to by those advancing the critique. To put it bluntly, Marx does not adopt a constructionist conception of the state because he was not attempting to analyse the state from a constructionist perspective (or a constitutionalist one for that matter). His is a different kind of enterprise entirely. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, for instance, Marx gives a lengthy exposition of the circumstances that led up to the collapse of French parliamentary democracy in 1851, following the 1848 Revolution, and allowed LouisNapoleon, the then President of the French Second Republic, to reclaim the Imperial throne his uncle (Napoleon Bonaparte) had been forced to abdicate. Marx’s choice of title deliberately refers back to the date upon which the first

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Napoleon seized power in a coup d’etat (The Eighteenth Brumaire is 9 November) and informs the (knowledgeable) reader at the outset that he sees the current situation as a replay of that original sequence of events. This is further reinforced in the introduction when he describes the tragicomedy inherent within this historical loop; namely, our farcically tragic inability to learn from the mistakes of the past. Among Marx’s writings it is one of the most sustained interrogations of the nature and significance of the state, but it is also a polemical piece, full of wit and invective, that is thick with a level of detail that makes it difficult to frame in overview without losing a great deal of the sense and direction of the narrative. The French Second Republic, as portrayed by Marx, seethes with discontent, plotting and political unrest, and in the text we are introduced to tangled webs of intrigue, illegalities and internecine rivalries, embedded within complex sequences of variously wrought political manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring. Marx also introduces the long and varied cast of characters who contributed to this particular piece of political theatre, and the crucial roles played by mistiming, misunderstanding, strategic mistakes, moral failure and “amoebic factionalism”3 at different stages in the events he recounts. It would be highly misleading, therefore, to treat Marx’s account of the state as ‘merely’ reductive as he spends a great deal of time elaborating upon aspects of political events that could have been dealt with in summary terms had that been his intention. That Marx’s position is not as easy to stereotype as some commentators have argued is shown in the following passages, which concentrate on the strategic importance attached to control of the machinery of the French state in the period immediately prior to Louis-Napoleon’s palace coup of 1851: The “play of constitutional powers” as Guizot styled the clapper-clawing between the legislative and the executive powers … [counter-posed on] the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last instance over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the power to grant amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually maintains the foreground on the stage; on the other, a President, clad with all the attributes of royalty, with the right to appoint and remove his ministers independently from the National Assembly, holding in his hands all the means of Executive power, the dispenser of all posts, and thereby the arbiter of at least one and a half million existences in France, so many being dependent upon the 500,000 civil employees and upon the officers of all grades. He has the whole armed power behind him. He enjoys the privilege of granting pardons to individual criminals; suspending the National Guards; of removing with the consent of the Council of State the general, cantonal and municipal Councilmen, elected by the citizens themselves …

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Marx’s commentary on the ins and outs of French post-revolutionary power politics, as well as his treatment of the state as a key site of struggle within this charged political scenario, contrasts sharply with the sorts of analyses offered by many contemporary students of states and governmental practices. Marx is neither disinterested nor dispassionate. Nor is this merely a reflection of a difference in style or tone; it is a reflection of a difference in the underlying methodological purposes informing the account. To ask, as Gordon does, whether Marx’s analysis here amounts to, or could inform, a coherent general theory of the state is to miss the point. Marx certainly was interested in describing the French state from a certain theoretical perspective – to show among other things how its operations in practice came to be bound up with bourgeois class interests (as expressed, crucially, at particular moments in time) – but not to resolve general theoretical questions. Setting up a theoretical critique in opposition to this account would have been regarded by Marx as

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trivial. Indeed, for Marx, the appeal to theorisation implicit in Gordon’s critique could itself be treated as indicative of a philosophical mistake. Indeed, this type of critique fails to appreciate how radical Marx’s proposals for social theory actually are. Marx is not suggesting a way of improving orthodox social theorising; he is attempting to set up a systematic alternative to it. Marx is indifferent to the central concerns of social theory. Gordon’s critique presumes that the methodological framework that allows him to formulate the critique constitutes a shared point of departure, an opening move that Marx would refuse to allow him to make. Without that move, Gordon’s critique does not get off the ground. From Marx’s perspective, all critiques of the kind Gordon advances succeed in doing is to raise questions about their own methodological assumptions. Against the Gordonian critique, Smith puts it well when she says that it is possible to learn something from the manner in which Marx proceeded, something “which is relevant to the problems with which we are concerned” (Smith 1981: 318). What Smith is pointing to is the fact that, for Marx, analytical questions were inseparable from questions of practice. Marx is not presenting a detached or detachable analysis. Instead, his analysis responds to the events it reconstructs and is an attempt to draw lessons from this historical episode and to influence how that episode was seen. As a way of framing the significance of the episode, Marx’s account acquires its meaning in the context of a political practice. It is designed to speak to the same political scenarios it describes and Marx is attempting to direct our reading of the events he draws our attention to. By making the role of the French state within the contested domain of French social and political affairs transparent, he is providing us with resources that make it possible for us to see the French state in particular ways. Seen thus, Marx’s account gives the state a determinate historical sense and reference tied to locatable (and, hence, analysable) courses of practical action, a sense and reference that we can recover using his analysis as a guide. In framing his analysis in this way, Marx is asking us, as readers, to treat what it might mean to describe the state as itself a topic, a problem within political practice, and a problem, moreover, to which his own text, as an “instructed reading” (Livingston 1995), is itself reflexively addressed. It is this feature of Marx’s description of the French state that is worthwhile concentrating on; namely, its insistence on treating the problem of the state in practical social and political terms. Marx thus provides us with a situated method, a way of making sense of the state in and through its connection to ongoing political activities that are framed, as he sees it, by developing capitalist social relations. What is most interesting about Marx’s treatment is that he does not allow us to move from his description to a generalised problem of the state, and so blocks attempts to treat the former as a manifestation of the latter. Indeed, one of the general lessons of the account is that the idea of a general problem of the state lacks a specifiable sense. As Marx makes clear, the state is, generally speaking, no sort of problem at all. Moreover, when we do try to

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specify a problem, we quickly find that likely candidates for that role decompose into specific problems that arise at specific moments in time, for specific reasons for specific people under specific conditions. These concern specific aspects of the state and their connection to particular ways of managing social and political affairs, often where they run into trouble and generate crises of one form or another. On this point, returning to the text, it is notable that one of the most striking things about The Eighteenth Brumaire is that it is made up of unrelentingly detailed descriptions of complex sequences of events, where the analytical emphasis continually re-centres on a consideration of what was happening at each step within those unfolding sequences. The significance of any one episode within a longer sequence, such as the question of who drafted what clause of which act and when (‘details’ of the sort that are dismissed as trivial by many ‘problematisation’ theorists), can only be understood with respect to the manner in which it was seen in practice, by the parties involved, as connected to what came before and their orientation to what might come after. Simon Schaffer suggests a similar reading: Marx decompose[s] Bonaparte’s efficacy through an intelligent redistribution of the chronology of the Second Republic. His periods are not of equal duration, but they are dramatically arranged so as to highlight the partition of forces in conflict and alliance. Furthermore, Marx spotlights … the attribution of strength to … [‘significant’] actors in the course of conflict. ‘Significance’, on Marx’s showing, … [is decided on within these] historical process[es]. (1991: 179–180) Compare this with Burrow’s summary of the lesson of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War: Narrative is the primary way in which … [history is] shown to us [by Thucydides] … At first, in his account, the two great powers, Athens and Sparta, were edged towards war by the behaviour of their satellites and by the internal instability endemic in many Greek city states, divided by factions, whose inclinations to democracy or oligarchy led them to seek help respectively against their political rivals or neighbouring states. A successful coup or local conflict could transform the local balance of power alarmingly for either Athens or Sparta, bringing the risk of intervention. The same situation tended to nullify attempts during the war to patch together a lasting peace … The allies had their own interests, fears and ambitions and their policies were liable to change and manipulation. The result was an unstable cat’s cradle of alliances, obligations and resentments which had to be negotiated. Each stage … tended to add a fresh layer of complexity, of wrongs inflicted and undertakings unfulfilled. (2009: 33–34)

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The common thread in Marx’s and Thucydides’ accounts is an orientation to the implicativeness of preceding for proceeding courses of political action. In other words, to draw on conversation analytic terminology, Marx, like Thucydides and indeed Machiavelli before him, is showing us that some possible next political move by any one of the protagonists becomes intelligible in the context of some identifiably prior move by another (Sacks 1992). When we read The Eighteenth Brumaire as a specifically interactional account of collaboratively produced ‘chains’ of political activity, it becomes easier to see why Marx would deny the idea that there could be a general problem of the state: to generalise the problem would be to divorce it from the environments within which the state could come to be a problem for those involved in the specific ways it did within the political scenarios he is examining. Control of “the handle of Executive power” as discussed in the passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire above represents a case in point. Marx notes that the ceding of executive control was a critical incident in the collapse of the Second Republic. However (and note, this is merely a rough sketch of a narrative skeleton to which Marx adds a great deal more contextual detail), he also makes sure to stress that we can only make sense of the idea that it was a critical incident because of the “extraordinary centralization” of the French state apparatus; whose significance in turn hinges on the large numbers of people supported by paid employment within that apparatus; whose significance in turn hinges on the Parliamentary acts passed by the Party of Order as a way of out-manoeuvring the democratic opposition by concentrating the distribution of privileges in their hands; whose significance in turn hinges on the fact that the very success of the institutionalisation of privilege meant it was politically impossible for them to dissolve those structures without alienating their natural supporters, i.e., those who had benefitted most from the system by receiving positions within the governmental machine; whose significance in turn hinges on the fact that this left them no room to resist Louis-Napoleon’s machinations from his position at the apex of that privilege system; which finally, in turn, led to a situation where the Party of Order could not but underwrite its own removal from power because it had nowhere else left to go politically. Marx is thus attempting to demonstrate how, at a practical level, each event is connected to many others and in many different ways. What is more, it is only by virtue of the specific ways in which these events were spread out and connected with different aspects of the affairs of French society at the time, that they could come to have the significance they did for those involved. We can now see another sense in which Gordon has misread Marx’s intentions when he suggests that Marx dismissed ‘the state’ in general as a “body of parasites”. Rather, as we can see from the above, Marx sees the parasitism of the French state as a problem whose status as a problem could only become clear in light of Louis-Bonaparte’s attempt to undermine the Second Republic and the Party of Order’s inability to do anything about it. Far from being a generalised accusation, Marx’s description (albeit framed for maximum rhetorical and sardonic impact) is based on a contextualising observation.

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To learn something, as Dorothy Smith (1981) puts it, from Marx’s approach, then, it is important to see that Marx is not simply negatively denying the existence of a general problem of the state. Instead, he is attempting to show positively that and how questions of the state acquire their force, their relevance for those involved, within the unfolding sequences of social action and interaction in which they arise and to which they are oriented. As a result, he shows us why we risk seriously mischaracterising those questions, what we lose, when we choose to start off by (a) decoupling ‘what happened’ from the context it was seen to happen within or (b) invoking overarching patterns of belief and systems of thought as a way of explaining them from the outside.

The problem of the state in social and political practice Marx’s method of approaching the analysis of The Eighteenth Brumaire works to prevent these ways of severing contextual ties by building on the observation that determinations about the state (its proper scope, role, character, structure, powers, activities, jurisdictions, failures and so on) are made within social and political practices. The objective then becomes to see how those determinations acquire their sense in, through and as part of practical courses of action. Marx shows us why we should not try to specify in advance what form those determinations will take, where we will find them or what import they will or can have, but instead look to see if, when and how they are made available as aspects of ongoing social and political affairs. This involves detailed examinations of the “occasioned” (Garfinkel 1967b)4 character of vernacular descriptions of the state and governmental arrangements and the manner in which they are embedded within the settings they elaborate upon. It is in this sense that the account points us in a very different direction to the other forms of investigation that have been examined so far. Marx shows us that general problems of the state cannot be identified independently of members of society’s specific practical concerns and urges us to explicate the ties between the two. For this reason, it is not enough to look into the imbrications of structures, functions and socio-historical processes that are implicated in the ways in which members of society ‘think’ about questions of the state, we must also address the circumstances within which these questions become relevant, urgent and significant in practice. As Marx’s own analysis subtly demonstrates, raising problems of the state is itself an occasioned practice and any approach that attempted to build on Marx’s insight would be one in which such concerns were at the fore. Within that a concern for who, what and how questions would be tempered by an interest in their local and temporal consequentiality.5 Rather than treat those questions as having a timeless validity, investigations would concentrate on looking at the implications of raising particular questions at the specific moments in time and the specific places in which they are raised. One way in which that can be done is by attending to the ways in which those being studied themselves orient to the exemplary ethnomethodological question, “Why

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that (here) now?”; that is, by asking how members of society themselves make sense of these problems when they arise and what resources and methods they rely upon when responding to them. However, it should also be noted that merely pointing to the occasioned character of investigations into the state and governmental practice, to suggest that they acquire their sense within unfolding sequences of practical action, is not to say very much. On its own that does not constitute a ‘discovery’ but has the status of what Wittgenstein would have termed a “reminder” (Wittgenstein 1953: §127). We have not learned anything when we learn that practices are occasioned until we have learnt what they are occasioned by, and it is on this point that Marx’s proposal – that there is no contextindependent problem of the state – leads us back to Weber for the third and final time, and a reappraisal of his formulations concerning the nature of the modern state. If we accept the idea that Hobbes was wrong, that there is no general problem connected with properly characterising the state, then we no longer need to see Weber’s formulations as necessarily in conflict with one another. That is, rather than counter-posing the investigation of the multiple, overlapping complexes of social action and interaction oriented in their course to the existence of the state with investigations into human communities “that (successfully) claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946b [1919]), as we saw being done in other studies, it is possible to treat both formulations together. As Hilbert (1987) and Anter (2014) cogently argue, the idea that Weber ever intended the ideal-type to be read as a description of the state has never been particularly persuasive. Instead, Weber’s interest was in offering a preliminary description of the understanding that members of society draw upon in order to frame certain aspects of their collective social and political affairs in the course of their dealings with one another. On this reading, the ideal-type thus represents Weber’s attempt to capture a system of relevancies that is available to members of society as a way of making sense of and acting within some relationships, settings, events or interactions within a whole series of the complexes of social action he saw at the centre of social and political life. Read this way, Weber’s ideal-type can be treated as a way of opening up a domain of practices for investigation rather than finally resolving the problem of the true nature of the modern bureaucratic capitalist state. Those practices consist in the ways in which the formal schemas that define, for example, the rights and responsibilities of various governmental and non-governmental actors, are used to find, formulate, scrutinise, justify, ratify, undermine, and so on, a variety of different courses of action. As was mentioned earlier, by treating the degree of fit between the generalised schemas that members of society have at their disposal and the structured settings they work within as a practical matter, the ground is thus prepared for a respecification of the ‘classical’ problem of the state in and through empirical investigations of those practices. The central argument advanced in the course of this book is that it is in this sense that ‘the problem

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of the state’ can be addressed conceptually and methodologically (cf., e.g., Coulter 1982, 2000 and Berard 2005). The late Begoña Aretxaga consistently managed to focus on these problems in these terms. In the context of this discussion, perhaps her most interesting work is her study of a mass strip search of female Irish Republican Army prisoners in Maghaberry Prison in Northern Ireland in 1992 at the latter end of ‘the Troubles’, i.e., the country’s long running, low intensity civil war (Aretxaga 2001). In the article Aretxaga begins by relating how her analysis was itself occasioned by the manner in which those subject to the strip search made those events ‘observable-reportable’ – she only became aware of the event because those who had been subject to the strip search were in the process of compiling a dossier that was to form the basis of a legal action being taken against the prison governor whom they were accusing, as a state official, of rape as an instrument of war against political prisoners. Aretxaga points out that the materials upon which her analysis is based – verbal and written testimony – were themselves part of the judicial formulation of the charge of state-directed rape and could not be treated meaningfully without seeing how the materials were themselves “intrinsically political”. That is, how, through their testimony, it was possible for the women to publicly assert their rights as political prisoners under the jurisdiction of the British state by highlighting the state’s ‘illegal’ refusal to recognise their political status as the cause of systematic and violent contraventions of those rights. The testimony (and its analysis) thus represents a perspicuous example of (and practical reliance upon) the occasioned properties of investigations into the nature of a contemporary state, its governmental arrangements and situated claims to authority via a monopoly on the use of violence within a territory – a claim the women, through their involvement in armed conflict, rendered deeply unstable. Aretxaga argues that these “narratives of collective violence” were “formalized within local systems of social and political referentiality”. She suggests that “in talking of strip searches as rape, republican women were challenging legal definitions”. She continues: The political genre in which these reports were coded was, however, a subject of confrontation between prisoners and [the] civil rights organizations [who were also] contesting strip searches … [This] confrontation was not about the sexual nature of the assault, but rather about the political identities as “prisoners of war” adopted by prisoners in their descriptions. (Aretxaga 2001: 14–15) That is, while using their status as women as the basis for the charges they were attempting to bring against the governor and thus, by proxy, the British state, they were simultaneously engaged in qualifying those charges by relating them back to their status not as female prisoners (which would have established a connection between them and prisoner’s rights groups

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campaigning against the practice of strip searching women), but as female Republican prisoners, prisoners of war. The goal was to engineer a doublebind based on their awareness that any official recognition of the legitimacy of their claims would have conceded the point that the British authorities were dealing with ‘soldiers’ engaged in a ‘war’ and not ‘criminals’ engaged in ‘terrorist activities’: a concession that would have meant recognising the contingency of the British state’s own territorial claims to Northern Ireland. Aretxaga makes it clear that she is in no way casting doubt on the veracity of the testimony she reports on by highlighting its specifically political character. What she is doing, instead, is exploring how the women’s testimony came to topicalise ‘what happened’ by topicalising the characterisation of the structures within which ‘what happened’ could properly be said to have taken place. Such characterisations were consequential, as the prisoners’ testimony shows. In this sense, the narratives of the female prisoners themselves treated the correspondence between a description and the events it describes as a practical problem to be managed as part of their engagement in ongoing courses of, here, political action; in their terms a justified armed campaign against the British state and its occupying army. However, it is a measure of the contingent complexity of these matters that when political prisons were eventually established this did not mean the collapse of the British state’s territorial claims to Northern Ireland. Rather, it was the start of a renegotiation of the political settlement as a whole in Northern Ireland, a renegotiation that has introduced new (and unforeseen) problems such as those surrounding the status of the Northern Ireland Assembly vis-à-vis the EU with which it shares a land border as a result of the 2016 Brexit vote. Disappointing as it may be for those looking for a quick analytical fix, as Aretxaga’s study among others shows,6, there can be no single correct way of reconstructing particular fields of governmental activity because there can be no single correct way of accounting for that activity. Like it or not, investigations into ‘the state’ have to engage with the overlapping complexes of action and interaction within which different accounts are embedded. This is brought out in the following quote from Yoffee: [In] the political sense of the state, historians and archaeologists are well aware that the term “Mesopotamia” is by no means easy to define and even has the disconcerting ability to dematerialize entirely. Mesopotamia existed predominantly as a cellular pattern of city-states that rarely acted in political concert. In contrast to questions of origin, both the collapse of the Mesopotamian state and the collapse of Mesopotamian civilization have been discussed and their dates ascertained. Thus, no one could argue, after the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC, that a Mesopotamian political system was ever again autonomous and dominant in the land, that the rulers of Mesopotamia thought of themselves as Mesopotamian, or that Mesopotamia existed in any way apart from a

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Yoffee does not suggest a rivalry here between academic and vernacular accounts of the collapse of the Mesopotamian state because he recognises that different accounts are put together for different practical purposes. As descriptions of the state, they acquire their meaning within different circumstances, they are not extricable from them. Rather than treat them as competitors squaring off with respect to the merits of different ‘theories’ of the state, Yoffee’s point is that we need to investigate the role those descriptions play within (not ‘outside’) particular practices. It is only by doing so that we can come to see how questions of the state come to acquire whatever relevance may be ascribed to them at particular moments in time and in particular places. In line with the interpretation of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire offered above, Yoffee, in other words, is suggesting that we need to ask why these matters might come to be raised: why does the problem of the state arise in this way (here) now? It is interesting in relation to the point raised above that Yoffee, following Crumley, starts to talk about the state as a ‘heterarchical’ system. In mathematics, a heterarchical system, unlike a hierarchy, is a system in which elements cannot be ranked in a stable order. How the elements will turn out to be ranked cannot be decided in advance of investigations into the ways in which they are in fact ranked, nor can it be decided without taking the circumstances within which the investigation was initiated into account. Different investigations of the properties of a heterarchical system reveal different patterns of organisation

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because those investigations start from different places. Differently occasioned searches thus turn up different results, and decisions regarding the validity of those results cannot be made without reference to the procedures which produced the description. Garfinkel’s remarks in the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology are relevant here. As he puts it; [Investigative procedures may be] treated as collections of prescriptions with which to imagine, in a real setting, … the relevant features of that setting that the prescriptions would help locate. What features can be used to find your way around in a setting as guides to action? What features can be used as a way of treating some translations or reconstitutions of the actual display so as to detect what is relevant and connected? (Hill and Stones-Crittenden 1968: 211–212) That is, in the course of practical inquiries, those who address the problem of the state employ different methods for arriving at what is relevant and connected in the situations to which their inquiries are addressed. What is more, those situated inquiries are part and parcel of the self-same phenomena they make visible. It is when we approach the issues in this way that we might think of alternate studies of the state as embodying a descriptive Machiavellianism. This is not just because Machiavelli in The Prince (2009 [1532]), like Marx as recounted above, was interested in and emphasised the unfolding contingency and sequential conditionality of the problem of how “to seize and maintain states”. Machiavelli is often thought of as morally unprincipled and various scholars oscillate on the question as to whether his work is to be celebrated or rebuked, Quentin Skinner, for instance, taking various stances on that question across his career (see Skinner 2009). Whatever stance we take on Machiavelli’s morality or lack thereof, however, of much more interest is the fact that he was methodologically unprincipled. That is, he didn’t seek to tame his subject matter by imposing frameworks upon it, but sought out materials that might enable him to get a better understanding of political practices and communicate that understanding. While ‘messy’, that lack of guiding principle means Machiavelli exemplifies how to bring the problem of the state to life by endowing it with the significance it has in particular circumstances – in the cases he examines, often a life and death matter. As Clegg (1989: 30) puts it, for Machiavelli “the stress is on [describing politics] … rather than on legislating … [its] form; on following the moves actually made” (cf. Callon, Law and Rip 1986: 4–8). Berlin elaborates: [Machiavelli] … tell[s] us that his path has never before been trodden by any man, and this, in his case, is no mere cliché: there is … something extraordinary in the fact that he completely ignores the concepts and categories –

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Beyond constitution and construction the routine paraphernalia – in terms of which the best-known thinkers and scholars of his day were accustomed to express themselves … The absence of Christian psychology and theology – sin, grace, redemption, salvation – [is one thing] … But, and this is more noteworthy, there is no trace of Platonic or Aristotelian teleology, no reference to any ideal order, to any doctrine of man’s place in nature in the great chain of being, with which the Renaissance thinkers were deeply concerned … There is nothing here of ‘essentialism’, a priori certainty directly revealed to reason or intuition about the unalterable development of men or social groups in certain directions, in pursuit of goals implanted in them by God or by nature. The method and the tone are empirical … Machiavelli’s [analyses are] … not metaphysically guaranteed … There is no serious assumption of the existence of God and divine law; whatever our author’s private convictions, an atheist can read Machiavelli with perfect intellectual comfort. Nor is there piety towards authority, or prescription – nor any interest in the role of the individual conscience, or in any other metaphysical or theological issue … Machiavelli believed … we can achieve what we want only if we understand firstly ourselves … This, for Machiavelli, was … sociological … [For Machiavelli,] there is no hidden hand which brings … human activities into natural harmony… There is no a priori route to the knowledge of the … material with which [politics] … must deal. (1979: 36–39)

When we cease to think in methodologically principled terms, following Machiavelli’s example, we cease to think of constitution and construction as opposed. Nor will we prioritise our own specialised methods for accessing them as these carry no special ‘guarantees’. Questions of constitution are frequently central to practical politics, as Machiavelli and Marx after him show, but so are questions of construction and indeed many other kinds of questions besides. As social and political scientists, we do not, therefore, need to decide in advance what will be relevant, those we are studying show us in what they do what is relevant and in what terms.7 It is their methods of getting at matters of constitution and construction, history and practice and whatever else may become relevant that we should take our lead from. Studies conducted on this basis could claim no methodologically privileged starting points but would begin where “anyone … must begin”, namely, in “the midst” of things (Lynch, Livingston and Garfinkel 1983: 20). Instead of developing our own accounts of the state, we should examine the ways in which those matters are topicalised in and through social and political practices in the ways that they are as and when they are.8 In short, we should return the problem of the state to its home environment, social and political practices, and study it in the specific terms in which it arises there. I am aware that is not an uncontroversial proposal, however, and I will explore the issues this approach raises further in the final chapter with reference to two of the

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main rivals to this approach, namely the synthesising, meta-methodological projects of Bob Jessop and Bruno Latour.

Notes 1 Mitchell (1991) defines a “state effect” as the culmination of the sense that there is a pervasive entity “that somehow stands apart from individuals, precedes them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives”. Trouillot (2001) offers an expanded list of “state effects”. 2 The term ‘multi-sited’ here does no more than index an interest in activities which take place in more than one location at once, like e.g., auditing, accounting or regulation, and their relationship to more specifically location-bound or sited activities, like, e.g., certain types of service provision. For anthropological treatments see, e.g., Marcus (1998) and Gupta (1995). Geertz’s “exemplary centre”, a concept implicated in his later analysis of the “theatre state” in Bali, leads into similar considerations. See, e.g., Geertz (1973: 131–134, 255–310). 3 To use Navaro-Yashin’s memorable phrase (2002: 227). 4 And, on this point, with specific reference to the state, see Coulter (2000). 5 See also Pleasants’ critique of Bhaskar’s problematically atemporal appropriation of Marx (1999: 119). 6 Rubenstein (2007), for instance, is another fascinating study in this regard as is the work of Ferguson (1990), Gupta (2012), Hull (2012), Kierans (2019) among others. 7 The work of Bevir and Rhodes (2010) provides a salutary example of the knots researchers can tis themselves in when they do attempt to take and maintain a principled approach in advance, in their case by committing to turn all reified structural accounts into processual ones. At the start of the book (2010: iv), for instance, they note their aim is “to develop a novel theory of the state as ‘meaning in action’ … We argue for anti-foundational analysis, ethnographic and historical methods, and a decentred approach that rejects any essentialist definition of the state and espouses the idea of politics as cultural practice. To decentre is to focus on the social construction of a practice through the ability of individuals to create, and act on, meanings.” Later (2010: 198), they argue this new theory is needed because “dominant theories of the state are reifications. They abstract the state from meaningful activity, presenting it as … an institution or structure that determines practices and explains outcomes. Our emphasis on situated agency precludes such reification. The state is merely an aggregate descriptive term for a vast array of meaningful actions that coalesce into contingent, shifting, and contested practices. The state is stateless, therefore, in that it has no essence, no structural quality, and no power to determine the actions of which it consists.” However, when it comes to setting the stage for a discussion of their study of ministerial work in UK government in accordance with their theoretical strictures, they give us this contextualising description (2010: 107): “Ministers are members of Cabinet, the fulcrum committee of British government, although its role and importance vary with the whims and wishes of each prime minister. The other key coordinating central bodies are the Treasury, which holds sway on all matters financial, and the Cabinet Office, which is home to a ragbag of central functions, and unkindly referred to as the rest home for the pet projects of past prime ministers. Private Offices support both Ministers and permanent secretaries. Civil servants staff both offices.” References to structural qualities can, then, make perfect sense and, moreover, be useful, one of the reasons they find it so difficult not to use them in their own work. Confusion arises because Bevir and Rhodes conflate first-order and second-order problems, leaving them to deny the in situ roles that structural characterisations have in the practices they are studying. Yet

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while their theory tells them such characterisations can play no part in those practices, their fieldwork shows them the opposite is true. Instead of working through what the part they might be playing could be, they pass over such characterisations in silence or recast them in their preferred terminology, thereby distorting their situatedly meaningful character. Neither option is particularly desirable. 8 For a discussion of topicalisation see Lynch (1993: 281–282).

8

What we talk about when we talk about the state

As a way of concluding my third-order study of the study of the state, in this, the final chapter of the book, I return to a question initially raised in its opening chapters: namely, what are we talking about when we talk about the state? The arguments up to this point have been geared to showing that we will not find an answer to that question in constitution or construction treated in isolation because the problem of the state resists narrow treatment in those terms. A focus on either can be illuminating but can also be misleading, depending on the circumstances. Crucially, however, it is the circumstances which determine which is the case. The work of Marx and Machiavelli, and indeed Weber when freed from neo-Weberian interpretations, encourages us to examine the ways in which the problem of the state arises in and as part of social and political affairs for those engaged in them. In so doing, that work allows us to dissolve the problems of constitution and construction by reminding us that we do not need to extend primacy to either, or indeed anything else. Our task on this view is to see how the problem of the state acquires whatever practical relevance and urgency it has in concrete socio-political circumstances and take our lead from that. By taking that lead, I have argued, we can re-ground our studies and acquire a clarity on the problem of the state that it is all too easy to otherwise lose. However, I am not the only voice arguing for the need to re-ground our inquiries into the problem of the state and in this chapter I turn my attention to recent work by two of the most prominent figures in this field on that front: Bob Jessop and Bruno Latour. This involves a shift in focus away from empirical research because their work, like mine, is also of the third order. While they do not offer studies of the state per se, they do offer meta-methodological frameworks designed to guide such studies, albeit in Latour’s case indirectly so. Taking up the question of what we talk about when we talk about the state from a different angle, I highlight the points at which the work of both aligns with the position I have argued for in previous chapters as well as where they depart from it. The key issue of contention concerns ontology, our commitment to theories of what there is and what there can be, and whether we need to take a stance on it – Jessop and Latour both believe we do, I believe we do not. Treated as methodologists on a weak reading which brackets out and ignores the ontological aspects of their positions, I

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argue it is possible to learn much from the work of both; but when read on the basis of the strong ontological claims they advance, however, their frameworks raise many problems. This is primarily because those frameworks disguise the crucial point that we learn from members of social and political communities what we could be talking about in talking about the problem of the state – and hence of the kind of problem the problem of the state could be – not from metaphysical schemas designed to define the forms that problem does or could possibly take. We are not nor could we be legislators in this domain and we need to avoid subordinating our phenomena to our intellectual preoccupations or treating what we find in the world as reflecting our investigative orientation to it for that very reason. The problem of the state isn’t ours as social and political scientists; it belongs to social and political practice and ought to be studied in those practices’ own terms.

Introduction Based on a review of the constitutionalist position, the constructionist challenge to it as well as the conceptual and methodological issues which bedevil both, I have argued that the problem of the state should not be seen as a matter of deciding if it is a question of constitutional matters or methods of construction or of settling on one methodological strategy for exploring either once and for all. The problem of the state should instead be seen as a matter of investigating the manner in which the what and the how of the state, as well as indeed the who, the when, the where and the why, are made relevant in social and political practices in particular places and circumstances at particular moments in time. Grasping such matters means paying attention to the ways in which members of society themselves methodically draw attention in practice to issues around the constitution and construction of the state, among other things, alongside, just as importantly, what they are doing by doing things in those ways. Offering an alternate reading of Marx’s anti-theory of the state and linking it to the work of Machiavelli and Weber, I argued in the last chapter that the task of the social and political sciences cannot be to define the problem of the state but to examine how that problem arises, is defined and is dealt with practically and politically in any and all of the ways that it is. Questions about the nature of the state should thus be returned to their home environments, social and political practices, and studied from within them. An orientation to the state as a feature of our social and political lives is the core of the approach I have advocated. That approach treats the problem of the state as a matter of describing how it acquires its force, to the extent it does, in the context of specific socio-political situations and the troubles they concretely give rise to. The two most serious intellectual challenges in recent times to the approach to the study of the state I have presented come from the state theory of Bob Jessop and the empirical philosophy of Bruno Latour – challenges which I

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examine and respond to in this final chapter. While otherwise distinct, even opposed in several ways, not least around the possibility of critique (e.g., Latour 2004; Jessop 2016: 3, 18, 51), both share a common aim: the desire to build ever more encompassing conceptual and methodological ‘meta’-positions for arriving at understandings of social and political phenomena. In response to the meta-projects of both, I argue that attempts of these kinds to provide exhaustive frameworks for inquiries into social and political phenomena like the state – frameworks which seek to anticipate the questions it is possible to ask about them – risk misunderstanding not just social and political practices but the role of social and political research with respect to them. Against their positions, I argue the social and political sciences enjoy no privilege or special insight into such matters and are on strongest ground when they seek to explicate the open-ended plurality of ways in which the problem of the state is posed in practice rather than when they adopt a legislative or adjudicative position on how it may be possible to think about what might be involved. While Jessop and Latour’s projects have many intellectual merits when read methodologically, no one outside the social and political sciences is under any injunction to take their proscriptions seriously either as accounts of social and political reality or as guides to programmes of action. The meta-methodological positions of Jessop and Latour can at times lay claim to an authority they could not have; it cannot be our job as researchers to define the forms the problem could take or the political realities the problem speaks to. As Berlin puts it, reflecting on Machiavelli: If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption … namely that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist, or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how … [we] live. If this is false …, not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent … [following Machiavelli’s lead, we would therefore become] sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs [in academic theory as much as political practice]. (1979: 76) I suggest the ontological aspects of Jessop and Latour’s work, where they seek to define what the problem of the state must be as a problem, fail on this Machiavellian test. This critical reading of Jessop and Latour sets up the statement of the core proposition of the book: the problem of the state is a problem for the social and political sciences insofar as it is a problem for people in particular practical contexts. The task, therefore, is not to arrive at an encompassing view for ourselves, as set out for example in the terms of abstract meta-methodological schemas, but to study the specific forms that problem practically confronts

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people in. Accepting that proposition, I will argue in conclusion, means orienting studies of the state to social and political practices at their roots.

Talking of the state with Jessop and Latour Writing in the Guardian, on 27 March 2020, as COVID-19, the first infectious disease to be declared a global pandemic in the twenty-first century, was taking firm hold in the UK, David Runciman, one of the UK’s most prominent public academic commentators, gave his view on the emerging government response in an article entitled ‘Coronavirus [COVID-19] has not suspended politics – it has revealed the nature of power’, an article which ran with the strapline, “In a lockdown, we can see the essence of politics is still what Hobbes described”. The departure from politics as normal embodied in government attempts to contain the spread of the disease, Runciman argued, was not really a departure at all but a reversion to politics in its pure form. The need for extraordinary measures curtailing citizens’ rights such as lockdowns and curfews, while planning who to take care of, how and to what degree – questions of who would live and who die faced by governments and the medical services under their direction around the world at the time – had underlined the power of Leviathan as the determining reality of our political lives. For Runciman, this “political world” would be one “Hobbes would recognise”. Underpinning Runciman’s comments was the view that the problem of the state is transhistorical and transcontextual in character, essentially the same in any of the circumstances in which it comes to be posed with the truth of Hobbes’ vision of the state endlessly reasserted every time we engage with it again. What we’re talking about when talk about the state on this view is Leviathan, the constituted sovereign power. I have examined this constitutionalist view of the state in great depth already and will not do so again, except to underline the tenacity of its hold on the academic imagination. The constructionist view, by contrast, might be said to have been visible in public debates, for instance, on the global supply chains implicated in the availability of medical equipment and the networks they traced, raising issues of production, provenance and entanglement played out on national news broadcasts devoted to the testing capacity of different states, among other things, and why it was more developed in some states than others as part of a material, embodied and multi-sited political economy of knowledge, scientific practice and governmental action. Yet constructionist approaches have their limitations too, including an artificial narrowing of the field of concern and a consequent tendency towards discursive literalism – also discussed at length in earlier chapters. Suffice to note here that whatever the character of governmental discourses around COVID-19, it is clear publics around the world were often very clear-sighted about when they were being lied to or let down, cutting through the seemingly authoritative claims to know and be in control made by state bureaucracies and public health experts via vernacularly

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leveraged forms of critique and deconstruction. Presented with a variety of discursively constructed pictures of the state, members of the socio-political communities to whom government messaging was addressed had many ways of critically assessing them, even where governments persisted in holding to them. Appeals to state imaginaries rarely achieved much on their own no matter how carefully wrought. This underlines the point that when talking about the state, to put it simply, we are talking about more than the internal logics of its discursive representations treated in isolation, we are talking about what people do with those representations and what others then do in response, something constructionist accounts have a problematic tendency to bracket out. When it comes to the state, however, I am far from alone in identifying the need to move past the conceptual and methodological impasses of constitution and construction, whether in relation to COVID-19 or any other issue of the present or the past. It is a problem many have taken up. Two of the most prominent figures to have done so in recent times, directly and indirectly, are Bob Jessop and Bruno Latour. At first glance, Jessop and Latour make an unlikely pairing. In terms of the theses they advance, their work is frequently opposed, potentially even mutually exclusive. Where they do align, both would probably regard the other’s work as occupied with a subset of the concerns their own research addresses, making each, for the other, a footnote to their work. Stylistically they are worlds apart too, with Jessop’s austere and scholastic prose standing in sharp contrast to Latour’s figurative, metaphorladen and highly ornamented writing style. Although their politics will not be examined here, they are opposed there as well: with Jessop on the Marxist left and Latour somewhere between the eco-conservative right and the progressive, technocratic middle. More relevant to my concerns is another point of differentiation: while Jessop is arguably the foremost state theorist alive today, in Latour’s work the problem of the state is a far more marginal concern, and he has been dismissive of the standard issues taken up by the social and political sciences including traditional conceptions of the problem of the state. As I will show, however, Latour’s research has significant implications when it comes to thinking about how that problem ought to be approached and I address his work on that basis as a result. The initial contrasts between Jessop and Latour are clear, therefore. Yet while their influences, interests and orientations diverge and they arrive at quite different destinations, their ways of proceeding are similar in certain respects. For one thing, Jessop and Latour are both alive to the problems that beset constitutionalism and constructionism diagnosed in this book. While Jessop might be more readily identified with constitutionalism and Latour with constructionism, both are critical of each approach for similar reasons to those outlined in previous chapters and seek to advance beyond them in their work. How they do so is of particular interest. Rather than reject constitutionalist or constructionist work outright, both set out meta-positions in which those approaches can be recast and accommodated, with tensions and

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contradictions ironed out by being worked into more general and encompassing systems. Thus, Jessop’s project isn’t theoretical but explicitly metatheoretical and Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (hereafter Inquiry) is predicated on providing a new “meta-language” for understanding the making of our worlds, thereby “counter[ing] … metaphysical machine[s] with a bigger metaphysical machine” as he puts it (2013a: 22). Reflecting back on lessons learned in the process of scholarly journeys covering four decades of research if not more in each case, as part of their most recent summative works their meta-methodological projects lead them both to questions of ontology, a commitment to realism (‘critical’ and ‘pragmatic’ respectively) and what might be called a synthetic ‘incorporativism’. That is, both build onto and outwards from constitutionalist and constructionist work, progressively incorporating more and more elements from that work to elaborate what have become, over the decades, increasingly complex and elaborated intellectual architectures. The result in both cases is a kind of methodological monumentalism with Jessop’s The State: Past, Present, Future (2016) and Latour’s Inquiry (2013a) coming replete with tables, charts, diagrams, bullet-pointed lists of points and sub-points – not to mention hyperlinks in Latour’s case – and formidably extensive bibliographies reflecting lifetimes of inquiry into the topics they discuss. Given how much of it there is and how many moving parts each project has, few among even their most ardent supporters would suggest it is easy to neatly precis Jessop and Latour’s later writings or work out exactly what the implications of their positions might be. The exegetical problems are not made any more tractable by the fact that their projects are themselves designed to be built on and added to in open-ended ways rather than treated as finished products. Nonetheless, there are places we can begin. We can learn a lot from critically examining the positions of both on the kind of problem the problem of the state could be but the terms of possible engagements with their work need to be properly established first. Jessop and Latour present us with hugely intellectually ambitious projects and I cannot, and therefore will not, try to engage with those projects as a whole. Instead, I want to proceed as I have done in relation to constitutionalist and constructionist work up to this point, by asking about the starting points of their analyses. In other words, I will focus on the initial analytical moves which define their (meta)conceptual and (meta)methodological approaches not the substantive claims and stances nor the fully elaborated systems which follow from them. What makes those initial moves so interesting and worth examining here is that both treat the problem of the state as a situated historico-material phenomenon to be examined and accounted for and not something that can be drawn on as an explanatory resource for making sense of the political (as Runciman, for instance, does), a stance very much in line with that I have argued for (cf. Jessop 2016: 96; Latour, Schaffer and Gagliardi 2020). Neither presupposes the state nor takes it for granted, therefore, but opts to explore the manner in which questions of state become issues for people, “matters of concern” in Latour’s (2004) useful phrase, under specific conditions.

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In my earlier examination of the problems generated by ethnographically -oriented constructionist studies, I distinguished between weak and strong versions of the analyses they advance. That distinction is one which, as I will show, applies to the meta-methodological projects of Jessop and Latour too. On a ‘weak’ reading, their work furnishes us with reminders about conceptual and methodological mistakes within the social and political sciences; errors we, as researchers, are prone to make. Here the emphasis is on how our work ought to be approached with the focus on avoiding more or less common misunderstandings. On a ‘strong’ ontological reading, however, they are advancing theses about our social and political worlds and how they ought to be understood not our investigations into them. As a consequence, if we are thinking about what we might be talking about in talking about the state, a lot hinges on whether the ‘we’ in question is social and political scientists or members of social and political communities. If we take Jessop and Latour as speaking to the first group, they have a lot to say. If we take them as speaking to the latter, as making statements about what the state is or could be, or how it is thought to be, could be thought to be or should be thought to be, their work is much more problematic. I shall argue that the ontological versions of their theses fail because they try to re-define social and political practices from the outside in the image of the social and political researcher’s concerns. Meta-methodologies are an attempt to overcome the deficiencies of prior approaches within one all-encompassing position but, when it comes to the problem of the state, such projects can run into trouble when extended too far because it is not within the remit of the social and political sciences to anticipate the forms that problem has to take in the context of social and political practice. When we apply criteria relevant to the assessment of one set of activities to activities in another domain in which other criteria normally apply, from our academic to others’ social and political practices for example, misunderstandings proliferate due to what Latour himself, adapting Ryle, calls “category mistakes” (2013a: 7–8). If we are to adequately address the problem of the state, we need to heed that lesson well and remain alive to what I earlier described as the demarcation of practices, problems and their precincts, avoiding the mistakes which arise when we do not. Our aim should not be to define the possible terms in which the state could ever be a problem in social and political life – how could we? – but to understand the terms in which it does come to be a problem when it does.

Jessop: meta-theoretical engagements with the problem of the state Jessop’s (2016) The State: Past, Present, Future summarises his investigations into the state from the early 1970s onward (see, e.g., Jessop 1977, 1982, 1990, 2002, 2007). In it, Jessop advances a synthetic meta-theory organised around the kernel of a Marxist relational conception of the state, which he adapts from Poulantzas and Gramsci, augmented by engagements with regulation theory, the work of Foucault (and the constructionist work it has inspired), social semiosis

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and autopoiesis (in dialogue with the revised structure-functionalism of Luhmann among others) as well as debates within the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of the social sciences. Expansive as that already is, however, it does not quite do justice to the breadth of Jessop’s concerns. As he himself puts it in the preface: [Rather] than focusing on postwar capitalist states or states in capitalist societies, … [this work] comments on the genealogy of the state, the periodization of state formation, contemporary states, and likely future trends … [Reflecting] this broader scope, it offers a conceptual framework for studying the state that can be used in more contexts, integrated with more theoretical approaches, and applied from several standpoints … [While] it draws on diverse theoretical positions and occasionally provides brief critiques, it is concerned, not to draw sharp dividing lines between them, but to synthesize them – where this is both possible and productive … [with] none … privileged on a priori grounds but only in terms of … [their] explanatory power for particular problems in particular contexts. (Jessop 2016: viii) Combining insights from existing approaches “to exploit their respective strengths”, Jessop suggests (2016: 1) his work “supports … (meta)theoretical, epistemological, and methodological pluralism in analysing the state”. Elaborating on this theme, Jessop tells us pluralism is crucial because: [There] can be no general, let alone transhistorical, theory of the state – especially if this is understood as a single theory that aspires to comprehend and explain the origins, development, and determinations of the state without reference to other kinds of inquiry … [As] a complex political association, apparatus, dispositif, ensemble, or assemblage (language varies) linked to a wider set of social relations, the state system can be studied from many theoretical entry points and political standpoints … Indeed there is intellectual value in analysing the state idea, the state and interstate system, and state power from different, albeit commensurable, theoretical perspectives – as well as in studying the phenomenology of state power as experienced from different subject positions … [Despite] tendencies to reify the state system as standing outside and above society, this system must be related sooner or later to the world society in which states are embedded. (2016: 6–7) We do not start from scratch in taking up these issues as there are some general things we can say about the state as an embedded feature of our lives. At the most general level, Jessop repeatedly describes it as a ‘polymorphic’, ‘polymorphous’, ‘polyvalent’ and ‘polycontextual’ ensemble (e.g. Jessop 2016: 7, 10) and, as a preliminary outline, he offers the following formulation of what the state is:

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[The state] is a complex ensemble (or, as some scholars put it, assemblage) of institutions, organizations, and interactions involved in the exercise of political leadership and in the implementation of decisions that are, in principle, collectively binding on its political subjects. These institutions, organizations, and interactions have varying spatiotemporal extensions and horizons of action and mobilize a range of state capacities and other resources in pursuit of state objectives. (Jessop 2016: 17) This initial outline is then further developed: [A] theoretically sound account of the state must address far more than the state as an institutional ensemble … [including] state discourse or political imaginaries … alongside the [more] conventionally identified … components of the state. This is my suggestion: The core of the state apparatus comprises a relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized, and strategically selective institutions and organizations (Staatsgewalt) whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society (Staatsvolk) in a given territorial area (Staatsgebiet) in the name of the common interest or general will of an imagined political community identified with that territory (Staatsidee) … This definition identifies the state in terms of its generic features as a specific form of macropolitical organization with a specific type of political orientation; it also indicates its links to the political sphere, and indeed to the wider society. It can guide research on specific states and political regimes as well as on the conditions in which states emerge, evolve, enter into crisis, and are transformed. It also puts the contradictions and dilemmas involved in political discourse at the heart of work on the state. This is because claims about the general will or common interest are a key feature of the state system and distinguish it from straightforward political domination or violent oppression. (Jessop 2016: 49–50) Jessop’s synthetic meta-theory thus incorporates key aspects of constitutionalism combined with Weber’s experienced dimension of the state as an oriented-to institutional structure: with constitutionalist themes of the territorialisation of political authority, state apparatuses, personnel and population interwoven with constructionist themes connected with their contestation in discourse and practice. However, in line with his view that the state is a relation, typically of dynamic antagonistic forces, those dimensions are revealed to be domains or foci of historically situated conflict, struggle, crisis and change. For Jessop, then, the problem of the state is a permanently historically and situationally modulating one. The important point about this definition is that it does not lay down necessary and sufficient conditions of statehood, but provides “heuristics”, in

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Jessop’s terms, designed to help us as researchers find and make visible the many different ways in which the problem of the state happens to have contingently taken form over time in particular, concrete socio-political conditions, including our own. That is, by drawing attention to areas of social and political affairs in relation to which the problem of the state has historically been raised into salience and made a matter of concern, Jessop provides us with a set of starting points for exploring it further. Jessop is not offering a static catalogue of the constituent elements of the state, therefore, but entry points for producing processual and contextualised accounts of it. This passage can thus be read less as a definition than a mode of orientation; in this case an orientation to the ways in which the state becomes a problem in and for social and political practices (see, e.g., Monedero 2019 here), leaving room to explore other ways in which that has been, is or could be the case – with Jessop’s incorporation over several decades of insights from emerging fields of research beyond Marxist state theory, where he began, showing his openness in that regard. In this way, Jessop helps rehabilitate constitutional questions by treating the concerns they raise as historically and comparatively relational and thus variable matters, reworking constitutionalism along constructionist lines. The above holds, however, only when we read Jessop as a (meta)methodologist. There are tensions in his work. While Jessop can be read as orienting us to the open-ended ways in which the state becomes a problem for people at particular historical moments, what I’m terming the weak interpretation of his project, there is ambiguity in his approach and at many points he seems to be arguing for altogether stronger, more prescriptive positions on what the problem of the state could ultimately be taken to be. Although he sometimes seems to want to guide us towards social and political practices as our critical phenomena, at other times he strikes a rather different stance towards them. Everyday language is of little help [in our inquiries] … It sometimes depicts the state as a subject – not in a specific juridical sense, for example as a persona ficta (artificial person), personne morale, enduring ‘corporation sole’, and so forth – but in an interpellative sense, that is, in terms of how the state is ‘hailed’: addressed or discussed as if it were an individual person or a collective subject endowed with consciousness, will, and agency … Thus it is said that the state does, or should do, this or that – or should stop doing it … as if it had a mind and interests of its own … Equally, the state is sometimes discussed as a thing-like instrument, machine, engine, ship (of state), cybernetic or regulatory device – to be used, driven, activated, steered, monitored, or modulated by a given economic class, social stratum, political party, official caste, or other agents, with a view to advancing its own projects, interests, or values. Yet how, if at all, could the state act as if it were a unified subject, and what could constitute its unity as a ‘thing’? Coherent answers are hard to find because the state’s referents vary so widely across times, places, and

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contexts as well as with the forces acting towards the state, the situations in which ‘it’ acts, and so on. (Jessop 2016: 21) If there are confused and incorrect ways of thinking about the state, as a unified subject for instance, there are potentially correct ways which dispel those confusions and Jessop offers proposals as to what those correct ways would be: To make this analysis more specific, a hierarchy of concepts can be developed: this would move from the abstract, formal concept of statehood down to ever more highly specified types of political regime. The most abstract level requires an account that establishes the generic elements of the state as a form of political organization … This can inform both the history of state formation and comparative analyses. Beneath the concept of statehood come different types of state, associated with different types of social formation – the latter being distinguished, for example, in terms of their dominant modes of production or their main axial principle of societal organization. Next we could delineate typical variant historical forms and, at the next level, distinguish between normal and exceptional types of state and their variant forms … A further step might be to differentiate types of regime in terms of the specific articulation of their modes of representation, internal architecture, forms of intervention, social bases, state projects, and hegemonic visions … Such a conceptual hierarchy also enables critique of the state, state idea, and state power to be conducted at different levels of generality, which can range from a transhistorical anarchist critique of the state as a machine of domination rather than embodiment of a society’s general will down to, say, a specific critique of the policies pursued in an ‘economic emergency’ that rescues large financial institutions and imposes austerity on the population in the name of the state’s responsibility for maintaining sound finance, in the national interest. A conceptual hierarchy such as this also gives a far better basis for analysing the state than a single definition would. (Jessop 2016: 52) In these passages we are moved towards a much more fixed position than Jessop’s initial remarks on the need for methodological pluralism at the beginning of his book might have led us to expect. The systematic aspect of Jessop’s enterprise asserts itself here and it is clear we are no longer dealing with a set of loosely related heuristics for exploring contingently related matters but a framework of hierarchically integrated concepts in which the will to model is clearly on display. In these moves to ever greater specificity and granularity at the conceptual and methodological level, the system starts to look like something designed to tell us how we are to recover the sense of the

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problem of the state and not guide us to explore how those confronted with it do. Rather than helping us to locate situations in which we might gain an understanding of the forms the problem of the state can take, does take and has taken for people in practice, this imposes a ready-made, pre-prepared meta-theoretical scaffold on those forms and the sense they could have from the outside. In the process, the sense of who Jessop’s work is addressed to – social and political scientists or members of social and political communities – becomes less clear. The thrust of the above remarks, I would argue, is that he is not just telling researchers about how they ought to approach their work but how anyone ought to think about the problem of the state, with Jessop’s system a substitute for the confused perspectives he detects in ordinary ways of talking about the state. There is a great deal that could be taken up and subjected to critical examination in the passages I have cited above. However, I am interested in exploring why Jessop seems to want to enter into a competitive relationship with vernacular understandings of the problem of the state, seeking to displace and supplant them. I suggest it is an implication of the way in which he sets out his project. For that reason, I want to focus on the claim that “everyday language is of little help” when it comes to understanding the problem of the state. Apart from problematically separating language off from the rest of our practices rather than seeing it as part of them, something perhaps related to Jessop’s interest in semiotics, in which language is cast as a system of signs, rather than Wittgenstein, in whose work language is shown to be woven into our activities and forms of life, the problem Jessop seems to find in ordinary ways of talking about the state is that, within them, the state can be presented in all manner of what appear to be contradictory ways when viewed from an analytical perspective. As Jessop notes, the state can be presented as a unified subject, a thing-like mechanism and many other guises besides in ordinary talk. Methodologically, the notion of the state as unified is particularly problematic because, as ethnographic and historical work attests, actual states as organisational ensembles are typically highly internally differentiated, unstable and fragmented along one or all of the dimensions Jessop identifies in his definition, i.e., institutionally, territorially, politically and ideationally. However, while that is the case, it is a problem for us, as researchers, speaking to our misunderstandings, rather than an immediately identifiable problem for members of socio-political communities. Indeed, the very fact that the ordinary ways of talking about the state Jessop criticises are so widespread and persistent might lead us to question the claim that everyone who engages in them is somehow confused and, from there, to examinations of the kinds of work those ways of talking might be doing in concrete situations. Yet Jessop proceeds on the basis that when people in general are talking about the state, they do so in the same ways and to the same ends as he does, and he does that despite making no effort to inquire into those ways and ends to find out if that could reasonably be said to be the case. Ordinary

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understandings embodied in talk thus emerge as competitor theories, rivals to Jessop’s meta-theoretical framework, as they are putatively about the same things, and when treated as rivals on that basis, ordinary understandings come off as confused in comparison with Jessop’s scholarly insights. But why would we accept the terms of this comparison? Why should we accept that everyday language and Jessop’s system are in competition and that we need to choose one over the other? I suggest we have no reason to do so. Alfred Schütz long ago demonstrated that the logics of everyday practices and forms of reasoning operate in very different ways to those of detached ‘scientific’ rationalities (e.g., Schütz 1944) of the kind Jessop’s work exemplifies. When we treat members of socio-political communities as if their utterances are a species of theorising in the wild about what the state is and can be, therefore, we elide those differences and distort the practices we are examining by treating them as so many faulty versions of our own analytical practices – the very danger I suggested Weber alerts us to in the Foreword to this book. Just as importantly, however, Jessop himself has no reason to establish this invidious comparison as it is not strictly required by his framework and he does not need it to secure his meta-methodological arguments. The question remains, then, as to why he advances in this direction. One source of this tension in Jessop’s work stems from the fact that he reads ontological commitments into language. On this view, talk of the state doing things commits the speaker to the existence of an agency capable of acting in such ways. As no stable unified actor can be empirically identified as the referent of that talk, that talk amounts to a mystifying, ideological fabrication of reality. For Jessop, because such talk is false, those commitments have to be identified and critiqued. Jessop thus has to move into ontological territory in addressing the problem of the state in our lives because he feels that problem has ontological dimensions. If everyday talk seems to present the state as a unified agent, everyday talk has to be corrected because the state is not a unified agent and entities in the world cannot be two contradictory things at once. The issue is, however, that Jessop is working with an understanding of language in which its primary function, as discussed before, is reference: picking out entities like the state in the world via linguistic ‘signs’ and rendering them knowable in specific ways as a result. On this view, our ways of talking about the state embody what we take it at core to be. While Jessop deals with the problem in its most general form, he is far from alone in treating language in that way. Corrigan and Sayer, for instance, in a passage I cited in an earlier chapter, have something very similar to say: [The] imagery … of states as objects or instruments, capable of being ‘captured’ and ‘used’ … needs jettisoning … The capacity of … rule rests neither on … control of some neutral set of state instruments … [but] resides in the routine regulative functioning of state forms themselves, in their day-to-day enforcing, as much as by what they are as in any

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What talk of the state is about particular policies they carry out, of a particular social order as ‘normality’, the boundaries of the possible. (1985: 203)

Corrigan and Sayer’s point, just like Jessop’s, is made in the context of an argument about how social and political scientists, in the context of our practices as researchers, ought and ought not to approach the problem of the state. That is, we as researchers should not treat the state as a unified subject, when our studies never turn any such subject up, nor should we treat it as if it is an object, instrument or stable institutional architecture. As methodological warnings in a research context, there is much to these observations. What they neglect, however, is that it can be perfectly reasonable for anyone to talk in those and other ways about the state outside of a research context. If I hear on the news that the plotters of an attempted revolution or military coup sought to seize control of key aspects of the machinery and organs of state, that statement would be perfectly meaningful, just as it can be perfectly meaningful to find out that a state has mobilised substantial resources in the face of a particular crisis it faces. These are not merely ways of speaking either but ways of making sense of the world for specific kinds of practical purposes – something we could learn more about, for instance, by studying successful and unsuccessful revolutions or coup attempts and how well or badly they established exploitable weaknesses within the state apparatus ahead of time (cf. Monedero 2019). Recasting them as disguised philosophical statements involving ontological commitments is entirely unnecessary, however, and does not help us understand anything better. It is entirely possible to interpret the statements of revolutionaries, coup plotters, government planners or anyone else as taking positions on the state’s ways of being but that obscures rather than clarifies the issue of what people are doing in speaking and making sense of things in those specific ways. It is that aspect of our practices, what we achieve in concrete settings through our ways of talking, which slips from view when we adopt an ontological stance on ordinary language and treat it as faulty and in need of repair when compared to understandings arrived at in the course of social and political research. Similar issues can be found in the challenge laid down by Navaro-Yashin in relation to her description of citizen versus police protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square: that of specifying “who, what, and where is ‘the state’ in the incidents … described?” (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 2). Navaro-Yashin’s answer is that the state is present in many different aspects of such incidents at once and that there is no feature of them “that is not arrested with one or another face of the state”. The state is not just Janus-faced (cf. Skocpol 1985: 350), gazing warily inwards at its subjects and warily outwards at its rivals, it has, as Navaro-Yashin puts it, “[countless] many guises and constantly transfigures itself” (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 2). It is not finally present in any one location, embodied in any one set of decision-making or administrative structures or invested in the authority of any one set of officials. In the context of a

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discussion of our research practices, that much is unproblematic. But what Navaro-Yashin misses, as do Jessop and Corrigan and Sayer , is that there are different ways of answering the question “who, what, and where is ‘the state’ in the incidents … described?” for different practical purposes. The social and political scientist’s ways are just one set among many and by no means the most significant. As a result, using criteria internal to our practices as the yardstick for assessing other kinds of practices means we lose our sense of them as practices: they are not doing the same things and to proceed as if they are betrays and promulgates deep misunderstandings. Stanley Fish sums up the lesson to be drawn well (2014: 29): “Metaphysical pictures … do not generate or govern our practices; … [they] are accountable to our practices, rather than our practices being accountable to them”. Jessop’s project as a meta-methodological intervention designed to address debates within the social and political sciences about how researchers ought to address the problem of the state has much to commend it, not least in guiding the attention of researchers back to investigations of the concrete senses in which that problem becomes a problem within social and political practice. On the other hand, the more ontologically oriented aspects of his project create considerable tension within it as they render vernacular understandings grounded in social and political practice faulty and in need of correction because of the ‘false’ ontological positions they are read as entailing commitments to. Treating ordinary members of society, in the course of what they do, as if they are participating in philosophical debates pulls Jessop in contrary directions. This understanding of ontological commitment is the source of his worries about ways of speaking that seem to presuppose the state exists, worries which lead him to attempt to rebuild the world inside his system rather than remaining content with providing ways of proceeding that enable us to remain sensitive to the lessons we might learn from that world when we leave it where it is. Those worries dissolve, however, when we cease to assess ordinary language and the practices in which it is embedded against the (meta)methodological criteria internal to our practices as researchers, not least because doing so tells us little about what people are doing in speaking and acting in the ways they do in their own terms rather than ours. What I labelled the weak, heuristic version of Jessop’s project therefore stands up better when the strong ontological dimension is stripped out of his work because these ontological pictures, again, “do not … govern our practices” but are accountable to and follow from them. Drawing on James Tully (2002: 217), our role with respect to the problem of the state cannot be “to reflect on practices … from … [an] allegedly higher-order perspective” as “[we] are on a par with [others] … and in dialogue with them”. While Jessop’s methodologically-oriented arguments offer ways of engaging with and reflecting on that dialogue constructively and can themselves be engaged with on that basis, his ontologically oriented arguments stifle that possibility, something which should lead us to question the sense in which a specifically ontological rendering adds anything here at all except unnecessary confusion. As we shall see in the next section, similar tensions also arise in Bruno Latour’s work.

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Latour: towards a recomposition of the problem of the state While Jessop may be the foremost state theorist in the world today, Bruno Latour is arguably the most famous figure in the arts, humanities and social and political sciences taken together. Most associated with science studies through now canonical works such as Laboratory Life (1986 [1979]), Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), and the establishment of Actor-Network Theory, ANT, with his colleagues Michel Callon, John Law and Isabelle Stengers among others (see, e.g., Latour 2005), Latour has over time shifted his gaze and extended his analytical field of vision to accommodate a wider range of issues including the politics of climate via recent works such as Facing Gaia (2017) – developments which have seen him become an increasingly public intellectual involved in all manner of things from political commentary (Latour 2016), fictional European treaty preambles (Latour 2020) to touring experimental theatre productions (Todd 2020). The nature of that shift is set out in his Inquiry, a book which marks out the intellectual trajectory his work has traced since his We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Building outwards from ANT, a move signalled in earlier ‘post-ANT’ works like Reassembling the Social (2005), in the Inquiry Latour offers an expanded framework for guiding investigations into what Nelson Goodman (1978) once labelled “ways of worldmaking”. Latour’s Inquiry, funded by a large European Research Council (ERC) grant (ERC 2017), is not a work that is at all easy to summarise, not least because Latour tells us it summarises 30 years of reflection on science, politics, religion, the law, the environment and more based on empirical studies which have themselves traversed sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy as well as the various disciplined practices those studies were focused on. Latour’s status as an ethnographer may have been a fairly consistent thread through that work across time but in the Inquiry he identifies his goals as philosophical in character, with the Inquiry presented as a work of empirical philosophy exploring all that goes into “how … we compose a common world” (Latour 2013a). The task of getting to grips with the Inquiry is further complicated because, as a digital humanities project, it exists as much online through its website, http://modesofexistence.org, with Latour’s written text augmented and expanded by the content made available not just by Latour but by those who took up his invitation to be co-inquirers on the project as well. The written text, in other words, acts as a gateway to that digital platform and the extended inquiries conducted there. As Latour himself puts it: For a philosophy that is empirical and not simply empiricist, investigation offers the only way to ferret out its concepts and put them to the test before proposing a version that can be submitted to critique by one’s peers. And yet even though inquiry as a genre benefits from a distinguished and intimidating prestige in philosophy, it is fairly unusual for an author to propose to carry out an investigation with the participation

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of his readers. This is nevertheless what I propose to do in publishing a book titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns … alongside a digital site that allows its visitors, who will have become coinvestigators, to inspect its arguments and go on to suggest other fields to study, other proofs, and other accounts. By means of this arrangement, I invite my coinvestigators to help me find the guiding thread of the experience by becoming attentive to several regimes of truth, which I call modes of existence … My hypothesis is that each of these modes makes it possible to respect, in the empirical areas I have pursued up to now … a specific ontology. In fact, each mode requires us to encounter distinct beings that must be addressed in their own languages. The classic question of philosophy, ‘What is the essence of technology, science, religion, and so on?’ then becomes, ‘What are the beings appropriate to technology, science, religion, and how … [might we better] approach them?’ (2013b: 287–288) Given Latour’s fame and influence and the complexity of the project, it is unsurprising that a huge amount has already been written on the Inquiry, whether supportive, critical or simply trying to determine the nature of the position Latour is laying out, with Harman’s (2014) and de Vries’ (2016) book-length treatments, for instance, only among the more extended examples in that regard. As academic communities are still absorbing this work and reflecting on what it might mean, no interpretation of Latour’s project in the Inquiry can pretend to offer the final word, therefore, but my engagement with it is perhaps more eccentric than most. This is because the problem of the state is at best a marginal concern in Latour’s work, one he has tackled directly only very rarely. Recovering a position on the problem of the state from Latour’s work is thus a tricky proposition requiring some extrapolative detective work. If allowed some exegetical leeway to undertake that work, however, I believe it is possible to draw out interesting aspects of the Inquiry in relation to that problem and consequently the concerns which drive my discussion. If Bob Jessop wants to offer a meta-theory which establishes the methodological bases for valid investigations of the state past, present and future, Latour, while only partially interested in the state per se, wants to reconfigure our understandings of what might be involved in politics and the making or ‘composition’ of the collectives that the state is implicated in, along with many other ‘Leviathans’ besides (cf. Callon and Latour 1981 for an early discussion of this). By decentring the problem of the state, among many others, in this fashion, a move familiar from constructionist research, Latour aims to help us rethink that problem from the ground up. That reconfiguration of understandings is written into the project from the outset. The aim of the Inquiry, as noted above, is to open up the question of “how … we compose a common world”, the realm of the “cosmopolitical” as it is termed in Latour’s broader body of work. The concept of “cosmopolitics”,

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which Latour tell us he adapts from Stengers, widens the scope of his inquiries far beyond the conventional concerns of politics. That is, Latour wants to examine everything that participates in and contributes to the collaborative composition of our worlds, including non-humans, in the specific terms in which they do so. His goal is to help us ensure we are properly intellectually equipped to describe this cosmopolitical realm, and that we accurately and fully attribute, his term is “distribute”, the active roles or agencies played by everything involved in that compositional work leaving nothing out nor underplaying or distorting anything’s role. As Latour put the point in two earlier works: By politics, I do not mean conversations on explicitly political topics, such as parliamentary elections, corruption among elected representatives or laws that need to be passed. Nor do I limit the term to the statements of men and women called politicians, as if there were a particular sphere or domain distinct from economics, society, law, etc.; nor to all the ingredients comprising politics as an institution, as defined in the corridors of political science departments, that is, international relations, constitutional law, power struggles, etc. (2003: 144) [Instead] politics is something entirely different … it is the building of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive composition of the common world … What is common to this vast transformation is that politics is now defined as the agonizing sorting out of conflicting cosmograms … [via] cosmopolitics, meaning, literally, the politics of the cosmos … The radical departure [here] … is proposing that ‘political’ is not an adjective that defines a profession, a sphere, an activity, a calling, a site, or a procedure, but what qualifies a type of situation. (2007a: 813–814) The big danger facing an inquiry predicated on an understanding of politics in this very broad sense is what he calls Double Click or [DC]: this might be thought of as akin to the drive found in the most overtly scientistic versions of logical positivism and analytical philosophy where the aim is to specify a single set of criteria or logical formulae against which all statements about the constituents of the world are to be assessed, reducing what can be said about the world to that which can be captured in putatively pure, objective observation languages purged of the non-scientific in which all things can be rendered equivalent – the kind of project set out in Quine’s (1948) ‘On What There Is’, for example. For Latour, this flattening out operation in which the cosmopolitical register comes to be restricted to a handful of scientifically validated entities dangerously distorts the heterogeneity and variety of the world, what is in it and how it comes to be so. Consequently, the Inquiry is partly designed to help us counter the temptation to ontologically reduce things in this way; with

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Quine’s ontologically austere vision countered by Latour’s ontologically expansive one. At the same time, Latour wants to counter another equally damaging tendency: and that is the subordination of any one way of composing the world with any other (rather than decomposing it, as [DC] does), something he initially demonstrates with reference to his own body of work, recasting what has come to be called ANT, Actor-Network Theory. While ANT remains useful for Latour in highlighting the sheer diversity of entities associated in the making of common worlds, it treats their associations as all of a kind. But, notes Latour, in linking a legal ruling to religious doctrine to a scientific process – as we might find in legal debates around reproductive rights, for instance – the things being connected are not all the same and how they associate is itself varied. Without attending to those differences, treating everything as a matter of networked associations also has a tendency to flatten out the various constitutive modes by which the world is variably composed. As a result, alongside [NET] work, the term that defines the “mode of existence” ANT takes up, Latour adds 13 more modes or ways of composing the constituent “beings” of the world, from partially more familiar things such as [LAW], [REL]igion, [POL] itics, [ORG]anisation, [REP]roduction, [MOR]ality, [ATT]achment, [REF] erence, [TEC]hnique, [HAB]it and [FIC]tion to less familiar things such as [PRE]position and [MET]amorphosis. These take their place alongside [DC] whose negative, reductionist potential as an “anti-mode” Latour sees as a standing presence within the cosmopolitical domain, yielding 15 modes of existence in total. Each of these modes can “cross” dyadically with any of the 14 others, for instance [NET] with [POL] or [LAW] with [REL], providing 105 potential “crosses” as part of an expanded ontological table of ways of enacting being, with many more possibilities arising through triadic, quadratic, pent, hex and n-adic “crossings” were those to be pursued, which they haven’t systematically been to date. Given the scale of the combinatorial possibilities established by the Inquiry, the need to host the wider project on an online platform capable of accommodating it becomes clearer. It is very easy to get lost in the Inquiry so even though I realise schematic overview accounts of the nature of the project of the kind I have offered here can read more like puzzle statements than descriptions, I do not want to enter into discussion of the various modes and their precise relations per se. Instead, as part of relating the Inquiry to the problem of the state, I want to draw out some of the methodological insights which have informed it. The first point to note here is that the Inquiry extends the kind of methodological demarcationism discussed in the Foreword in relation to Weber’s work to the ontological domain. That is, under what we might call Latour’s ontological demarcationism it makes no sense to take standards of assessment used to judge and make sense of phenomena in one practical domain – “the beings”, as he terms them, of science, religion or the law, say – and apply them to the others, as this misses the distinctive ways in which they contribute to the composition of common worlds.

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Where modes of existence do come into contact, and the beings or categories of existence they generate are competitively positioned against one another, this produces cosmopolitical struggles and controversies, “iconoclashes” in Latour’s terms. Latour’s aim is to dissolve the terms of those antagonistic oppositions by treating the terms of each mode’s involvements in worldmaking seriously in themselves as well as looking at the productive ways in which they can interact via their crossings, with “important practices … composed of multiple modes of being … [such as] is the case in matters of ‘the economy’ which integrates [at least] three different modes of existence: [ATT]achment, [ORG]anization and [MOR]ality” (Fischer 2014: 111). In casting the Inquiry in these terms, Latour seeks to help us identify, undo and in future avoid what he calls category mistakes, adapting Ryle for his ontological purposes – the assessment of one mode of existence via the standards internal to another (Latour 2013a, 2014). As Maniglier frames things: [Latour’s aim] is not to propose an ontology, but rather to exhibit the ontological singularity of technical objects, economic values, ordinary things, and so on. To each of these domains corresponds a different table of categories. ‘To be’ does not mean the same thing for a Higgs boson as it does for the Argentinian peso, but both equally are, and the task of the metaphysician is to exhibit that equality and that diversity. A new task, a new method. Metaphysics shall … proceed by … what we could call contrastive recategorization. The point is to learn not to confuse two different modes of existence, so that we can refine our categorial understanding of ourselves. The method, again, is anthropological … [and] sets out from misunderstandings …. (2014: 42, emphasis in original) This compositionalist – or constitutionally oriented constructionist – approach is designed to enable the social and political sciences to reorient their inquiries, to engage with the world anew, something in which cosmopolitics is key. Insofar as our inquiries engage with the cosmopolitical make-up of the world, we must recognise it is made up of a plurality of ways of doing the work of composition, i.e., the modes of existence, in which many different kinds of differently constituted and so differently cosmopolitical entities are involved. Bringing things back to the problem of the state, we can see it cannot be a privileged one for Latour, but is something to be recomposed, just like the economy, the political system, society and so on, with reference to its variable cosmopolitical significance. As Harman (2014: 11) notes, “we find no detailed theory of government in his [Latour’s] writings”. This is because, I would suggest, Latour doesn’t want to develop a theory of social and political phenomena like the state, he wants to redefine the terms in which such problems are taken up. In one of the few places where he has taken the state up explicitly as a topic, we start to see how he might seek to concretely recompose the problem:

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As John Dewey [once] said … “The State must always be rediscovered” … How can we come about rediscovering the State …? First, we should leave aside the idea that the State will wither and become irrelevant … Contrary to all expectations of its progressive obsolescence, never was the rediscovery of the State more important than today. We all know the reason: Never was the State so busy, so overburdened than now. Every day we discover to our great dismay more elements to take into account and to throw into the melting pot of public life, instead of less. Not only law and order, not only commerce and war, not only industry and class struggles, not only city life and health, but also, or so it seems, the entire environment; from the quality of the air to the redirection of rivers, from the quotas of herrings in the North Sea to the slow disappearance of bees and thus of pollinated flowers … What the nightmares of the darkest totalitarianism could not even anticipate, that a day would come when the State would have to manipulate the climate itself, the unfortunate, the unprepared, the fragile … States of today now have to take in charge – in addition to all the rest. Because of the various ecological crises, the State is now burdened with the destiny of the entire Umwelt. (Latour 2007b: 19–20) By placing the problem of the state at the centre of cosmopolitical struggles, controversies and iconoclashes at the meeting or perhaps collision points between various modes of existence, Latour provides us with a sense of how that problem acquires its urgency in the world and hence of what might be at stake when it is raised. Using the categories of the Inquiry as a “provisional” guide (Latour 2013a: xix), then, we can begin to explore how specific matters of concern come to be contingently bound up with and so constitute or compose the problem of the state at particular moments in time – as in situations where, for instance, specific disputes break out around what the proper relationships between state and Church, state and market, state and science, state and environment, state and individual, and so on, should be – rather than engage in the fruitless task of trying to specify the potential shape of the issues in advance. When we talk about the problem of the state we are thus talking about these struggles, controversies and clashes and their animating concerns as well as the wider ways of worldmaking they are implicated in and arise from. When read alongside his anti-reductionism and pluralism, there is therefore a great deal to take from Latour’s Inquiry – with much of it close to the kinds of proposals we find in Jessop’s work too. We get a further flavour of the kinds of things Latour is seeking to alert us to in a typically vividly sketched passage from the Inquiry: The natural gas that lets the Russians keep their empire going does circulate continuously from gas fields in the Caucasus to gas stoves in France, but it would be a big mistake to confuse the continuity of this circulation with what makes circulation possible in the first place. In

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What talk of the state is about other words, gas pipelines are not made “of gas” but rather of steel tubing, pumping stations, international treatises, Russian mafiosi, pylons anchored in the permafrost, frostbitten technicians, Ukrainian politicians. The first [the transported gas] is a product; the second [the networks that product is entangled in] a real John Le Carré-style novel. Everyone notices this, moreover, when some geopolitical crisis interrupts gas deliveries. In the case of a crisis, … [everyone] sets out to explore … the set of elements that have to be knitted together if there is to be a “resumption of deliveries.” Had you anticipated that link between the Ukraine and cooking your risotto? No. But you are discovering it now. If this happens to you, you will perhaps notice with some surprise that for gas to get to your stove it had to pass through the moods of the Ukrainian president. (Latour 2013a: 32–33)

Operating within a world in which the geopolitics of energy and energy security are increasingly global matters of concern, states have to negotiate these entangled fields of interactivity and come to terms with all that compose them. It is in such circumstances that, in methodological terms, we can treat the problem of the state as acquiring a specific character and we can seek to describe things from there; a useful guiding observation. However, when assessing Latour’s proposals for social and political inquiry, as with Jessop’s work, we need to differentiate the methodological Latour from the metaphysical Latour – and as a metaphysical project there are some rather pronounced peculiarities in the Inquiry. As is the case with Jessop too, what is often presented as a guide, an aide to study which is open-ended and revisable, comes to look much more like a closed system by the end of the book. As the workshop blogs on the website demonstrate, Latour was often unhappy about the way in which his “co-inquirers” were interpreting the Inquiry and was keen to point them back to a more fixed and constraining interpretation of what he had in mind.1 Beyond this tendency to closure, there is the issue pinpointed by Michael Fischer in his review of the Inquiry. As he notes: “[like] all multidimensional and tabular systems (one thinks of Talcott Parsons … or Niklas Luhmann …), everything can be accommodated” (2014: 337). That is to say, as I have attempted to show above, it is possible to translate the problem of the state as encountered in concrete circumstances into terms compatible with Latour’s system. The question we must ask, however, is what we gain by that accommodation, whether we have deepened our understanding or arrived at new insights in the process and whether we need to accept the metaphysical aspects of the argument alongside the rest. I would suggest the latter in particular is moot. The Inquiry sticks with one of the methodological principles outlined in Reassembling the Social, namely that we have to “follow the natives, no matter which metaphysical imbroglios they lead us into” (Latour 2005: 62). But in systematically recasting what the natives have to say in Latour’s

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preferred analytical idiom of modes of existence, it becomes difficult to say we are following them rather than diverging from them, as modes of existence are surely not vernacular categories. Moreover, it is not the natives who typically speak of metaphysical imbroglios; metaphysics is rarely an issue that exercises anyone, and, as I argued above in relation to Jessop, we mischaracterise worldly practices when we treat them as so many species of philosophy in the wild. Rather than anyone’s vernacular characterisation, we are clearly dealing here with Latour’s rendering of the problems their practices, their ways of worldmaking, pose to the social and political researcher seeking to understand them. We have to ask, therefore, whether that rendering is useful or necessary for understanding. On that question, once you start to allow for ontological translations, or indeed transformations, of practices and situations, unforeseen sources of troubles start to arise. These are rather the opposite of those associated with the ontological dimensions of Jessop’s scheme. Where Jessop’s ontological proposals were narrow and constraining, imposing restrictions on the senses in which the state could be a problem for anyone due to his fear of ungrounded ontological commitments, Latour’s is intended to be large and accommodating, big enough to house whatever kinds of modes of being there may be said to be. Given this is a deliberately inflationary ontology characterised by the multiplication of modes of being, it is perhaps unsurprising that Latour seeks to defend himself against Occam’s razor – the injunction not to multiply kinds of entities beyond necessity within theories and explanatory schemas – which he guardedly interprets as a reductionist ontological doctrine designed to “empty the world” (Latour 2013a: 19). However, we can offer an alternative methodological rather than ontological reading of Occam’s razor. As Quine (1948), for instance, has it, Occam’s razor was originally formulated in response to problems generated by the theories of one of the earliest proponents of ontological inflation in the Western philosophical canon, Plato. That is, the point of Occam’s razor was to shave what Quine called “Plato’s beard”, the uncontrollable proliferation of hypothetical entities unleashed by Plato’s theory of forms, in which the reality of every empirical existent is guaranteed and thus explained by an ideal form which governs it and of which the empirical instance is merely a transitory manifestation. Plato intended the form to be understood as preceding and giving sense and character to the empirical existents which instantiated it and he had in mind such things as the ideal forms we encounter in mathematics – triangles, squares, right angles, and so on – or in the definition of the virtues – strength, courage, wisdom, and so on. However, the need to posit an ideal form for every existent means the universe of such entities swells and swells. Rather than explaining what we encounter empirically, ideal forms are postulated once we have knowledge of it, following from rather than determining our engagements with the world. What makes this particularly difficult to manage is that there is nothing in the theory of forms itself which can serve as a brake on uncontrolled inflation – except post hoc modifications, auxiliary

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hypotheses and the drawing of arbitrary lines of exclusion. Ideal forms lose all analytical value as a result. Rather than helping us get closer to understanding things, the theory of forms merely inserts a layer of unnecessary metaphysical entities in the way. Plato’s beard is thus Plato’s, not the world’s, and Occam’s razor, in cutting through that beard by imposing a methodological restriction on the theory of forms by barring analytically unnecessary entities from the outset (something Plato’s theory cannot do), is not saying something about the world, as Latour has it, but ways of approaching and trying to make sense of it. This methodological rather than ontological reading of Occam is relevant to the Inquiry because in it Latour invites us to recast the problem of the state, like the problems of the economy, the market, the environment or anything else besides, in terms of the 15 modes of existence and the 105 dyadic crossings he has initially identified. These options are equivalent to Plato’s preferred forms. Yet, if none of them do the trick on their own or in combination, if the matters of concern implicated in the posing of those problems are sufficiently differentiated by their situated expression, then new modes of existence would need to be introduced to accommodate these new situations – and with every new situation thereafter. This leaves us having to manage the proliferation of modes of existence – Latour’s own tangled beard of unnecessary ontological postulates – at the same time as we are trying to make sense of these new situations. Once again, the claimed ontological ground of those situations in modes of existence becomes a post hoc characterisation reliant upon understandings we already have. The danger with the kind of “metaphysical machine” Latour has constructed is, then, that it gets in the way of connecting with the making of our worlds, taking us further away rather than facilitating an engagement with what’s involved. Although Latour would no doubt disagree, given this I would suggest Latour, like Jessop, is best read methodologically, with the ontological claims in his work treated as metaphoric rather than substantive. That is, modes of existence should not be seen as the building blocks of our social and political worlds but heuristic devices designed to help us get closer to those worlds and highlight issues and problems as they arise within them, heuristic devices which may well prove useful in some circumstances as starting points but certainly not in all. Happily, however, as with Jessop, we can acknowledge the insights it is possible to locate in Latour’s work without having to accept the metaphysical machinery they supposedly rest on.

Conclusion To go back to the introduction to this chapter, I hope to have shown that Jessop and Latour, while alive to the limitations of constitutionalism and constructionism and the reductive tendencies of each, have nonetheless proceeded as if there are definitive ways of thinking about social and political realities or at least their constituent ontological grounds.2 I have wanted to

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engage with both because I see the value in their work for helping us, as researchers, think through the problem of the state but at the same time I want to reject the idea that we need to take up ontological problems when doing so. As I hope to have shown, the ontological claims they make are unnecessary for securing their (meta)methodological insights. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is true: taken at face value the ontological dimension in their work renders their methodological insights less secure. Drawing the discussion together, it is important therefore to distinguish what sense we can make of the problem of the state versus what sense is made of that problem in practice. Reflecting on this distinction, I would suggest anyone seeking to take up the state and study it empirically must not lose sight of Ingold’s point that “the world and its inhabitants … are our teachers, mentors and interlocutors” (Ingold 2008: 69), something Jessop and Latour are distracted from in their quest to secure their projects at the ontological level. The schemas they produce are potentially useful in some circumstances, not all, and members of social and political communities, when their work turns legislative, are under no injunction to accept it, because the political implications are for them to determine not social and political scientists or philosophers. Meta-positions are thus problematic because they can lead us into establishing a rivalrous or competitive relationship with the forms of understanding internal to the practices we seek to make sense of. Where our understandings are pitted against those understandings, we lose our phenomena, to use Garfinkel’s phrase again, because it is via those understandings and the practices they are embedded in that our phenomena become available to us. We do not need meta-theories, meta-languages or metaphysical machines: not only do they add little to what we already know, supervening on it instead, they get in the way of understanding by leading us to give priority to our systems and their internal coherence not that which they were intended to help us get to grips with. Metaphysical machines too often come to take on lives of their own once we set them in motion. The point, therefore, is this: we do not need to define anything before we get going; finding out how these things get defined in practice is precisely the challenge, especially in relation to the problem of the state. The conceptual and methodological problems of the constitutionalist and constructionist approaches are clear, as the work of Jessop and Latour as well as this book show, and the broad character of the paths we can chart through their impasses is well understood. However, linking that to an ontological programme is not a progression but a regression, threatening to embroil us in new sets of self-created conceptual and methodological difficulties. Hobbes’ problem of description has dominated the social and political sciences, as it dominated social and political philosophy before them, whether those involved have broadly accepted Hobbes’ characterisation or have reacted against it. We have seen this in the case of constitutionalism, constructionism and now in the case of more recent ontologically oriented writing on the problem of the state. My aim has been to suggest we need to reject Hobbes’

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problem, not so much as another historically situated account of the problem of the state at a moment in time, but as a problem for us as researchers. We do not need to resolve the problem of the state, that is, because the problem of the state is not ours to resolve – it belongs to social and political practices and it is always within and in relation to such practices that we should study that problem because it is within and in relation to those practices that it acquires its form and relevance. It is the problem cast in those terms that we as researchers talk about when we talk about the state.

Notes 1 See, e.g., David Moats’ ‘The Issue of Politics: A Report on Bruno Latour’s Politics Workshop’, http://modesofexistence.org/the-issue-of-politics-a-report-on-bruno-la tour%27s-politics-workshop and Latour’s rather sharp response in return: http://m odesofexistence.org/a-brief-report-on-the-pol-meeting-in-london-by-bl 2 Much like characters in the 1981 Raymond Carver short story, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, which the title and focus of this chapter draw loose inspiration from.

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Index

1848 Revolution 106, 110 abolitionism 15, 57 abolitionists 52 Abrams, Philip 15n3, 62, 67n7, 99–100 academics xv, 26, 32, 67, 127–8, 131, 141; authority of xv; concentrating intellectual energies on empirical phenomena 26; and the position of David Easton expressing disbelief at the continual ‘return’ of the question of the state 15n3; prominent 15; and rivalry over accounts of the collapse of the Mesopotamian state 120 accountability (of the state) 14, 37 accounts 8–10, 17–18, 31, 33–4, 37–9, 41–8, 51, 70, 76, 78–9, 81, 94, 96–7, 112–14, 119–20; anthropological 68, 89; constitutionalist 23, 43, 45, 79, 108; constructionist 129; contextualised 134; decontextualised 108; descriptive 58; idealised 81; interactional 107, 115; social scientific 52 Actor-Network state 16n5 Actor-Network theory 143 actors 8, 23, 34, 77, 90–1, 103, 114, 152; local 89; non-governmental 45, 85–6, 117; non-state 60; political 74; social 2; sovereign 55 administrative structures (of the state) 21, 43, 84, 138 agencies 5–7, 12, 56, 58, 99, 123, 134, 137, 142, 161, 166; educational 99; state 99; tax-collection 3 agents 5, 7, 12, 72, 98, 101, 105, 134; bringing order and organisation to the state 6; capacities of 98; forced to speak and act in the name of a territory 59; of the state 93; unified 137

analysts 15n1, 31, 33, 66, 71, 75–9, 82–3, 85–6, 89, 96, 103 Anganwadi Programme 91, 93, 97 Anganwadi workers 92–3, 99 ANT see Actor-Network theory anthropology (social science) 15n1, 140–1 architecture 5–6, 16, 28, 49, 57, 130; core 49, 57; institutional 16, 138; intellectual 130; internal 135 Aretxaga, Begoña 49, 52, 62, 68n17, 118 armies 3–5, 19, 23, 43, 47, 112, 118–19; occupying 119; standing 3, 19, 23; well-equipped 43 arrangements xvii, 7, 29, 31, 34, 79, 81, 83, 141; contingent 57; decentralized international 55; establishing structural 6; governmental 13, 68, 75–6, 80–1, 83, 116, 118; institutional 5, 30, 62; pre-existing 33; social 108; structured 53 artefacts 38, 40, 79, 90; conceptual 57; visuo-material 108 artificers 18, 18n2, 19–28, 30, 43 “Artificiall Man” 19; see also “artificial person” persona ficta “artificial person” (persona ficta) 134 authority xi, xvi, 7, 21, 24, 44, 49, 55–6, 59, 64, 91, 93, 118, 122, 127; analytical 14; central 26; ecclesiastical 27; executive 1; secular 64; sovereign 62; territorial xvii; universal 103 authors 41, 86, 90–1, 93–4, 96, 98, 104, 122, 140 autonomy of the state xvi, 22–3 autopoiesis (notions of) xvi, 132 Babylonian state 84 baptisms 61, 72

168

Index

beliefs 8, 11, 21, 42, 62, 96–101, 103, 116, 153, 157; ascribing 100; political 99–100; systems of 7, 11, 98, 101, 103–4 Berlin, I 121, 127 Bevir, Mark xv–xvi, 10–11, 16n7, 28, 50, 54–5, 123, 123n7, 123 Bittner, E. 87n3, 88n4 bodies 6–7, 19–20, 27, 36, 43, 49–50, 70, 112; corporate 1, 27; of knowledge 8, 50, 52; parasitic 110; professional 64; regulatory 74; social 110 Bonaparte, Napoleon 110, 112 borders (Brexit) 119 ‘Bringing the State Back In’ 23 bureaucracy 3, 27–8, 156–7 bureaucratic structures 1, 39 bureaucrats 64, 91–2, 96–7, 99, 123; see also civil servants businesses 2, 13, 34, 83, 87–8, 103 “californios” (Voss) 39 Callon, Michel 16n5, 27n4, 28n17, 43–4, 47, 121, 140–1 campaigning xii, 86, 119 canvassing votes xi capacity 3, 7, 22–3, 43, 54, 59, 82, 98, 128, 137; archaeologist’s 41; coercive 28; long-emerging 4; war-making 3 capitalism xvi, 19, 109 capitalist societies 62, 110, 132, 160 capitalist states 18, 24 careers 92, 97, 121 Carver, Raymond 150n2 case-studies 20 “castas” (Voss) 39 “castillianos” (Voss) 39 The Castle 62 CDPO see Child Development Project Officer ceremonies 52, 62–3, 68, 93, 151; see also rituals character xii, xv, 13, 16, 21, 47, 53, 107, 109, 111, 116, 128, 140, 146–7, 150; broad 149; circumstantial 82; constructed 71; embedded 53, 90; ethnographic 62; meaningful 124; orderly 6; organised 15, 77 characterisations 1, 36–7, 87, 99, 110, 119, 124; analytical 45; consistent 95; flat 16; programmatic 80 Child Development Project Officer 92–4, 96 children 44, 48, 91–3

civil servants 64, 91–2, 96–7, 99, 123; see also bureaucrats civil society 7, 44, 80, 94, 153; excrescence of 110; political institution of 49, 57–8; and the rights of the citizen vis-à-vis the state 16 claims xv, xvii, 9, 31–2, 49–50, 58–61, 69–71, 76–7, 85–6, 91, 96–7, 99–100, 105, 117–19, 136; analytical 72; authoritative 64, 128; domestic 55; substantive 130; territorial 64, 119 class power 109; see also power Code of Hammurabi 83–5 Cold War xiii Collège de France 24–5 Colley, L. 27n1 colonies 32, 39 Comaroff, J.L. 57, 60, 62 commitments ix, 15, 19, 57, 86, 96, 101, 125, 130, 137, 139; methodological ix, 108; ontological 137–9, 147; programmatic 104; shared ix communities xii, 8, 18, 21, 49, 58, 68, 73, 94, 133, 159; academic 141; cultural xii; human 18, 21, 49, 58, 117; political xii–xiii, 73, 126, 131, 133, 136, 149; socio-political xii, 52, 129, 136–7 components 4–6, 9, 30, 43, 46, 51, 91, 133; infrastructural 51; institutional 4, 6, 9; organisational 6 conception xvi, 28, 53, 73, 101, 110; liberal 22; relational 131; strategic-relational xvi; traditional 129 conceptual, frame 30–1 conditions xiii–xiv, 1, 28, 31, 38, 49, 58, 61, 75, 79, 85, 114, 130, 133, 163; economic 18; historical 22; sociopolitical 134; of statehood 18, 30, 133; subjective 80; technical 75 conflicts xiv–xv, 28, 107, 114, 117–18, 133, 142; armed xiv, 118; local 114; political 28 constitution 6, 14, 16, 19, 26, 36, 45, 49, 106–26, 129; analysis of 34; and the construction of the state x, 19; of the individual 36; and putative opposition with construction xvi; of ways of thinking about government and the state 83 constitutional-legal documents 23, 32, 34–5, 38, 40, 51, 53 constitutional questions 134 constitutionalism ix, 14, 29–30, 34, 43, 46, 55, 81, 103, 106, 129, 133, 148–9;

Index beset by problems 9, 129; methodological 20; reworking 134; synoptic approach 6 constitutionalists ix–x, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 28–31, 43, 45–7, 49, 51, 103, 109–10, 126, 128, 130; analyses 31, 45–6, 89; approach 6–8, 10–11, 14, 18–19, 45; arguments 23; canonical 55; contemporary 45; efforts focusing on ontological matters 31; framework 46; neo-Weberian position 10, 28; perspective 1, 31–2; researchers 31, 34, 45; scholars 25; strategies 51; themes 133; understanding of the state 50; use of background knowledge 46; vision 29 construction ix–x, 6, 10, 14–16, 56–9, 61–2, 64–5, 68, 70, 76–7, 90, 93, 106–26, 129, 159–60; ideological 90, 108; localised 64; political 53; of statehood 68, 72, 75–6, 85 constructionism ix, 103, 106, 110, 129, 148–9 constructionists ix–x, 6–8, 10–11, 42, 50, 55, 89, 100, 103, 106, 108–10, 126, 128, 144; research ix, 69, 72, 102, 141; researchers 77, 97, 110; studies ix, 7, 14, 43, 50–1, 69–71, 79, 82, 87, 89–90, 95, 98, 102–3, 107–9, 131; traditions 9; workings 129–31 contracts 32, 34, 43 controversies 45, 144–5 Corrigan, Philip 16n9, 33–6, 38, 49, 52, 57–8, 68n24, 138 cosmopolitical struggles 144–5 “cosmopolitics” (concept) 141–2, 144 Coulter, J. 97, 101–2, 118 COVID-19 xiv, 128–9 critique 6, 8, 14, 19, 42, 44, 48–9, 105, 108, 110, 113, 127, 129, 132, 135; radical ix, 29; sustained 19; theoretical 112; transhistorical anarchist 135 cultural resources 42, 101 culture xii, 151, 154–5, 164, 166 curfews 128 demonstrations 11, 44, 47, 69, 71, 76, 79, 83, 90, 93 descriptions xii, 5–6, 8, 30–1, 36, 38, 44– 6, 52, 70, 77, 79, 86–7, 90, 105–6, 117– 21; contextualising 123; enacted 55; preliminary 117; set-piece 65 descriptive resources 8, 20

169

devices 8, 31, 38, 52, 56, 66, 91–3, 95, 101; analytic 79; formal 23; heuristic 148 Dewey, John 145 dioramas 64–5, 92 dioramic studies 66 discourse 33, 43, 53, 69, 80, 82, 90, 133, 154, 156, 162; administrative 108; governmental 128; legal 73; political 41, 133; programmatic 74; veridical 58 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 15n4 disputes xv, 8–10, 27, 107, 145 “docile texts” 34, 48n3 documents 31, 33–5, 36, 41, 51, 53, 62, 77, 83, 86; constitutional-legal 23, 32, 34–5, 38, 40, 51, 53; historical 102; of record 33 domains 3–4, 56, 59, 76–7, 80, 94, 117, 126, 131, 133, 142, 144; academic 67; of activity 75–6; contested 113; cosmopolitical 143; governmental 38; ontological 143; practical 143; self-enclosed 55 Durkheim, E. 27n7, 55, 68n15 Easton, David 15n3, 15, 67n4 economic activities 32–4, 38–40 economic objectives 80 economic phenomena 6, 38 economy 7, 19, 21, 144, 159; multi-sited 128; political 109; problems of the 148 The Eighteenth Brumaire x, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 114–15 El Presidio de San Francisco 32, 38–40 Eliot, George 48n2 empirical investigations 22, 45, 107, 117 empirical studies 4, 13, 18, 20, 22, 50, 57, 140; and the formulations of Max Weber 18; of states and governmental practices 4, 49–50 Engels, Friedrich 109 epistemological objections 29 ERC see European Research Council essays 3, 16; Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 15n4; The Leviathan 15, 18–19, 27, 30; On Liberty 16n4; The Phenomenology of Spirit 16n4, 67n12; The Philosophy of Right 16n4; The Prince 16n4; The Rights of Man 15n4; The Social Contract 15n4; Two Treatises on Government 15n4; Utilitarianism and Other Essays 16n4; War

170

Index

Making and State Making as Organized Crime 3 ethnographic ix, 14, 49, 123, 136, 156; data 108; investigations 8; records 40; research 13, 90; researchers 90; studies ix, 13–14, 49, 67, 87, 90, 102, 108, 159, 166 ethnographies 66 Europe 3–4, 64 European Research Council 140, 154 Evans, P. B. 23, 28n12, 67n7 events 4–5, 44, 52, 59, 64, 74–6, 78, 87, 90, 98, 111, 113, 115, 117–19; connected 95; descriptions of complex sequences of 106, 114; political 111 evidence ix, 8, 40, 42, 54, 72, 77–8, 84, 90, 96, 155; documentary 32; empirical 13; of a particular practice 78; textual 32 executive powers 111–12 existence xvii, 18, 23, 97, 99, 109, 111– 12, 116–17, 137, 141, 143–5, 147–8, 154, 158, 160; of a gap in the archaeological and documentary record 33; independent 18; of a modern state 21; of the state as a feature of social environments 21 failures 12, 75–6, 79, 81–3, 85, 107, 116; extraordinary 120; moral 111; treated as being beyond analysis 81 female prisoners 118–19 Ferguson, James 49, 52, 68n16, 89–90, 96–100, 123n6 fetishes 62–3, 99 fiction 4–5, 11, 16, 58, 65, 94, 96, 110, 140, 153 fieldwork 13, 90; see also ethnographic research fieldworkers 96 Fischer, Michael 144, 146 force ix–x, xv, 43–5, 58–9, 114, 116, 126, 135; physical 18, 21, 49, 58, 117; political 80 formulations 20–2, 38, 58, 82, 91, 117; casuistic 84; competing 21; ideal-typical 22; judicial 118; legal 52; of Max Weber 18, 23; neatly bounded idealtypical 51; phenomenological 22; programmatic 88 Foucault, Michel ix, 17n10, 19, 24–6, 27n3, 29–31, 33–5, 37–40, 45–7, 50–3, 61, 69, 71, 104, 106; attempts to develop characterisations of the

disparate types of governmental practices 87; and the Collège de France 24–5; critique of constitutionalism 14, 30, 45, 51; death of ix; and Foucauldian critiques of state theory xvi; on governmental programmes 72; “histories of the present” 53; plenum 71; studies of the state 29; works of xvi, 131 frameworks 43, 45, 71, 121, 123, 126–7, 135, 137; conceptual 22, 24, 132; meta-methodological 15, 125; meta-theoretical 137; ontologicalepistemological 71; theoretical xvi, 46 France 24–5, 140, 145, 155, 158, 164; post-revolutionary politics 112; and the Second Republic 106, 110–11; society 115; state xiii, 109–13, 115; where the Executive disposes over an army of more than half a million office-holders 112 freedom 63, 80 freedom fighters 63 ‘From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact’ 32 Garfinkel, Harold x, xii, 2, 27n3, 27n5, 78, 98, 105, 121 garrisons 3, 5 gas fields 145; see also natural gas Geertz, C. 16n8, 28n15, 28n17, 68n23, 123n2 geopolitics xiv, 146 Giddens, Anthony 19 God 20, 58, 122 Goffman, E. 48n6, 78 Goodman, Nelson 140 Gordon, C. 110, 112–13, 115 governance 7, 16, 155, 158, 160, 162, 164; arrangements 64; central capability of 33; of the colony 39; high principles of 63; systems of 38 government 5, 7, 9–10, 15–16, 28–48, 56, 60–1, 64, 71, 73–6, 80, 83, 86, 112, 128–9; actors 12, 52, 70, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 85, 94–5, 100; the arts of 52, 108; central 72; devolved 57; institutions of 58; machines 81, 112, 115; national 54; planners 138; practices 8–9, 11, 20, 49–50, 53, 66–7, 69–72, 77–9, 82–4, 87, 90, 100, 102, 104, 109; programmes 72, 75–6, 80–1, 93, 95; salaries 112; tasks of 63, 80

Index governmental arrangements 13, 68, 75–6, 80–1, 83, 116, 118 Gramsci, Antonio xviin1, 131 groups 5, 7, 15, 24, 36, 44, 48, 50, 57, 62–3, 90, 98, 101; cultural 90; intersecting interest 64; pressure 94; prisoner’s rights 118; religious 51; social 122; subaltern 63 Guardian 128 Gupta, A. 35, 53, 61, 67–8, 90–8, 100, 123; account of imagining the state as a guide to what is happening 96; analysis interpreted as an interrogation of a mistaken view of the state 97, 99–100; and the non-scepticist interpretation of the analysis of 100; scepticist interpretation of the account of 99; and the spatial model of the ‘imagined state’ 97

171

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns xvii, 67, 130, 140–1, 143–5, 147–8 institutional architecture 16, 138 institutions 5, 25, 30, 34, 40, 52, 55–6, 79, 123, 133, 142; charitable 51; large financial 135; political 52; public 64; selective 133; society-shaping 23 integration 26, 31, 52 interest 14–16, 39, 57–8, 61, 63, 72, 86–7, 90, 108–9, 112, 114, 116, 121–3, 129, 134; analytical 8, 90; bourgeois class 112; common 99, 133; material 112; national 135; political xiii; socio-economic 109 International Monetary Fund 57, 156 interpretation 2, 7, 27–8, 78, 120, 141, 155; historical 24; neo-Weberian 125; scepticist 99, 101 investigations 17, 19–20, 22, 30–1, 38, 45–6, 59–60, 70–1, 76–7, 89, 103–4, 106–8, 116–21, 131, 139–40; guiding 140; meaningful 43; reject 84; theoretical 51; valid 141 investigators 9–10, 40, 60, 62–3, 69, 71, 76–8, 81

Hammurabi (code and laws) 83–5 Hegel, Georg 16, 67n12 heterarchical systems 120 heterogeneous problems xii heuristics 24, 133, 135 Hilbert, R. 21, 27, 28n9, 117 historians 24–5, 67, 88, 119 historical case-studies 20 histories 66 history 152, 159–60, 162–3; event-based 42; important periods in 74; of state formation 4, 73, 135 Hobbes, Thomas 14–15, 18, 20, 27n2, 27n4, 30, 43, 50, 58, 61, 117, 128, 149; conception of the state as a composite 27; and The Leviathan 15, 18–19, 27, 30; problem of the institution of a distillation process whereby the “unclear syntheses” 79; problem of “the matter thereof and the artificers” 43; treatment of the state 18; vision of the state 128 Hull, Matthew 49 human beings 21–2, 83 human landscapes 27 Hunter, I 83, 108–9

Jessop, Bob x–xi, xiii, xv–xvii, 2, 10, 15, 28, 43, 47, 52, 55, 57, 127, 129–41, 146–8; austere and scholastic prose 129; and Bruno Latour’s projects xi, xvii, 125, 127–31, 148–9; enterprise of 135; interest in semiotics 136; projects seen as a meta-methodological intervention 139; works of xvi–xvii, 136–7, 145–6 jurisdictions 39, 43, 52, 64, 87, 91, 107, 116, 118 justice 35, 88, 132

images 27, 48, 57–8, 94, 131, 159; of the state by Hobbes 27n2; sublime 75, 85; taken-for-granted 94 IMF see International Monetary Fund India xiii, 91–2, 96–7, 99 “indios” (Voss) 39 Ingold, T. 149

land borders (Brexit) 119 landscape 27, 41, 66, 77, 151, 164; complex ethno-political 41; fertile 27; human 27 language 47, 73, 83, 100–1, 110, 120, 132, 136–7, 141; games 65; objective observation 142; ordinary 138–9

Kafka, Franz 62; The Castle 62; The Trial 46, 62 knowledge xiii, xvi, 37, 46, 56, 58, 60, 73, 75, 77–8, 94, 98, 122, 128, 132; background 46; claims 45, 97; commonsense 2, 14; expert 54

172

Index

Latour, Bruno x–xi, xvi–xvii, 15–16, 27, 27n4, 36, 43–4, 47, 64, 96–7, 125–31, 139–50, 152–4, 158–60, 163–5; and the Actor-Network theory xvii; anti-mode 143; constructs the “metaphysical machine” 146, 148; and his “philosophical turn” 16n5; An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns xvii, 67, 130, 140–1, 143–5, 147–8; metaphysical 146; methodological approach to political inquiry 146; “philosophical turn” 16n5 Law, John 140 laws xvii, 7, 15, 19–21, 33, 43, 65, 80, 83–4, 140, 142–3, 145, 152, 156, 159; constitutional 142; divine 122; maintaining 23 lectures 16, 24–5, 95, 155 legibility projects 49, 73–6 legitimation 44, 73, 99–100, 120; divine 120; of work 100 lessons 27, 105–6, 109, 113–14, 130–1, 139 The Leviathan 15, 18–19, 27, 30 liberal regimes 85 liberalism 80 literature xiii, 4, 15–16, 20, 28, 54, 56, 64, 70, 120 lockdowns 128 Locke, John 15, 28n11 Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III) 106, 110 Luhmann, Niklas xvi, 132, 146 Lynch, M. 27n5, 48n3, 65–6, 122, 124n8 Machiavelli, Niccolò x, 14, 16, 107, 115, 121–2, 125–7, 151, 160 Machiavellianism x, 12, 121, 127 machines, metaphysical 130, 149 Maghaberry Prison (Northern Ireland) 118 Mann, Michael 19, 28 maps 8, 23, 39, 42, 73, 152; abridged 73; mental 42; political 24; territorial 23 markets xiv, 3, 5, 35, 145, 148, 164 Marx, Karl 104, 106, 110, 113–14; analysis of the politics of the French state 109, 112; choice of title of The Eighteenth Brumaire 110; commentary on the ins and outs of French postrevolutionary power politics 112; description of the French state 106, 113, 115; dictum that the state is a “product” 51; and the intrinsic irrationality of the state. 110, 116;

introduces the tragicomedy 111; and Marxists x, xvi–xvii, 19, 53–4, 67, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 114–16, 126, 129, 131, 134; method analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire x, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 114–16, 134; shows how questions of the state acquire their force 116; as a ‘theorist of domination’ 110; writings of 110 mechanical training 46 members xii–xiii, 3, 11, 13, 20, 100–1, 105, 107, 116, 123, 126, 129, 131, 133, 136; ordinary 13, 64, 68, 91, 98, 103–4, 139; social 13, 60–2, 68; of society x, xii, 9, 14, 23, 62, 101, 103, 107, 109, 116–17, 126; of socio-political communities 52, 136–7 Mesha Inscription 41–2 “Mesopotamia” 119–20 “mestizos” (Voss) 39 meta-theories 67, 131, 133, 141, 149 metaphysical machines 130, 149 methodological xi, 2, 13, 17, 26, 48, 53, 79, 86, 127, 147–8; approach 5, 30, 32, 40, 44, 47, 61, 130; commitment ix, 108; difficulties 6, 89–90, 149; framework 97, 113; positions 28, 40, 46, 54, 101; problems xiii, 15, 70, 149; strategies ix–x, 5, 22, 32, 50–1, 66, 70–1, 87, 90–1, 102, 126 Migdal, Joel 27n6 military personnel 26–7, 31, 85 Miller, Peter 35, 49, 57, 59–61, 69, 74, 78–9, 81, 93; accounts of the production of “congenitally failing governmental machines” 77; claims about governmental “programmers” 85; and the problematics of government 74 Mill, John Stuart 16 Mitchell, Timothy 15, 28, 49, 67n4, 67n11, 123n1 models 5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 31, 35, 40, 56–8, 82, 85, 89, 98, 102–5, 109; building of 11, 44, 89, 102–3; conceptual 8; developing 5; disembedded 104; explanatory 5; general 30–1, 89, 105; idealised 23; indigenous 42; intellectual 79; pre-existing 42; rhetorical 4, 8; of state structures 11, 49, 58; use of 89, 103–5 modes 7, 26, 93, 103, 134–5, 141, 143–4, 147, 158, 160; analytical 33; constitutive 143; dominant 135; multiple 144; new 148; settled 49, 57 monopolies 18, 21, 35, 49, 58, 117–18

Index narratives 8, 42, 65, 78, 118–19, 156 narrators 4–5, 7–8, 16 National Assembly (French Revolution) 111–12 nations 59, 62, 80, 152, 161, 164 natural gas 145 Navaro-Yashin, Yael 43–5, 49, 63, 67n2, 68n23, 108, 138, 161 neo-liberalism 80 neo-Marxists x, xvi, 19, 67 neo-Weberians 19, 28, 54, 67n7 newspapers, Guardian 128 NGOs see non-governmental organisations non-governmental organisations 91 Norman Conquest 33, 35 Northern Ireland 118–19 Nugent, David 27n6 ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’ 21 Occam’s razor 147–8 OECD see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development officers 92–3, 111 Officers of Judicature and Execution 20 O’Leary, T. 35, 60, 69, 72, 74 On Liberty 16n4 ontological xvii, 15, 29, 31, 45, 71, 125–7, 131, 137–9, 142–4, 147–9; claims 126, 148–9; commitments 137–9, 147; demarcationism 143; dimensions 137, 139, 147, 149; positions 139; programmes 149 opposition xvi, 70, 104, 109, 112; antagonistic 144; democratic 115; local 5; putative xvi Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 57 organisations 3, 6, 34, 36, 38–40, 43, 53, 56–7, 59, 73–4, 86, 88, 92, 94–6, 133; civil rights 118; coercive 23; commonplace 81; financial 72; internal 8, 38; local 60, 104; macropolitical 133; military 3; non-governmental 91; political 51, 135; structural 4, 6, 9, 31; societal 135 orientations x, 11, 27–8, 55, 106, 114–15, 126, 129, 133–4 Paine, Thomas 15n4 Palestinian territories 41 panoramic studies 64, 66, 72 paperwork 35, 53; see also documents

173

Parsons, T. xii, 27n3, 67n4, 81 parties xv, 43, 64, 96, 114; contracting 43; political xv; political 96, 106; religious 64 peace 19, 35, 111, 114; see also peacekeeping peacekeeping 4, 8 The Phenomenology of Spirit 16n4, 67n12 philosophers xiii, 15, 149 philosophical xvii, 2, 16, 16n5, 17–18, 20, 22, 45, 48, 108, 113, 138–40, 154, 156–7, 165–6; abstracts xvii; mistakes 113; problems 16; questions 2 “philosophical turn” (Latour) 16n5 philosophy xii, xv, 16, 45, 49, 67, 132, 140–1, 147, 151, 153, 155, 157, 164–5; analytical 142; empirical x, 126, 140; political 149; systematic 16 The Philosophy of Right 16n4 Plato 147–8 Pleasants, N. 17n11, 45, 105, 123n5 police personnel 3, 26, 44, 47, 64, 138 political xiii, xvi, 1, 9–12, 15, 87, 113–14, 116–17, 125, 134; action 106, 115, 119; authority 19, 41, 55, 57, 59, 133; communities xii–xiii, 73, 126, 131, 133, 136, 149; conflicts 28; domination 133; forces 80; identities 41–2, 118; inquiries 19, 49, 57, 146; integration 32, 34; interests 62, 112; leadership 133; life 2, 9, 14, 29, 51, 87, 117, 131; phenomena ix, xi–xii, xvi, 74, 127, 144; power 56, 63, 162; practices ix–xi, xiii–xvii, 1–2, 12, 15, 64, 69–70, 106–8, 113, 116, 121–2, 126–8, 131, 134, 139; prisoners 118; prisons 119; programs 42; realities 8, 76, 82, 127, 148; regimes 133, 135; researchers xiv, 9, 131, 147; rivals 114; scenarios 42, 66, 107, 113, 115; sciences ix–xiii, xv–xvi, 1–2, 4, 9, 12, 15, 42–3, 55, 57, 66–7, 126–7, 129, 131, 139–40; scientists xi–xvii, 2, 4–6, 10, 15, 18, 48, 67, 96, 122, 126, 131, 136, 138–9, 149; statements 84; structures xi; studies xvi, 6, 9, 15, 20–1, 27, 48, 53, 67, 152, 162; systems 15, 26, 52, 119–20, 144; terms 106, 113; theories 94, 108; unrest xiv, 111 ‘political dopes’ 98, 105 politics xii, xv, 4, 56, 64, 80, 86, 121–3, 128–9, 140–2, 150–1, 154–6, 158, 161, 163–4; bourgeois 110; colonial 38;

174

Index

mass 54; modernist 55; pluralist 94; practical 122; suspended 128 population 3, 23, 30, 36, 54, 59, 73, 90, 135 power 30, 32, 36–7, 43, 47, 53, 59–60, 92, 94, 107–9, 111–12, 114–16, 128, 154, 162–3; analytics of 67; armed 111; cellular 37; European 16, 114; impersonal 50, 58, 61; legitimated 58; local 26; political 56, 63, 162; public 74; seizing 111; sovereign 128; struggles 142; tactics of 57; theory of 56 practices 61–2, 76, 110, 137; cultural 123, 152; investigative 57, 70; organisational 81; political ix–xi, xiii–xvii, 1–2, 12, 15, 64, 69–70, 106–8, 113, 116, 121–2, 126–8, 131, 134, 139; ritualistic 63; state and governmental 20, 53, 71, 90, 100, 104, 117 presidents 106, 110–11 The Prince 16n4 prisoners 118–19 problematisation 8, 60–1, 64, 66, 69, 86, 100–1, 104, 108–9; limits of 69–89; methods of 102–3, 107; procedures 101; theorists 114 problems 12, 106–7, 113, 117; analytical 87; conceptual 69; and constitutionalism 9; epistemological 22; general 11, 13, 99, 107, 113, 115–17; of government 7, 60, 70, 75–6; heterogeneous xii; identifiable 136; intellectual xiii, 2; methodological xiii, 15, 70, 149; monolithic 89, 103; ontological 149; political scientist’s research xii; practical xvii, 119; recurring 103; socio-political xiii; sociological 27; of the state 1–15; transcontextual 106 processes 4, 6, 8–9, 31, 34–5, 51–2, 58–60, 63, 67, 73, 78, 80, 90, 99, 102; analytical 78; historical 114; scientific 143; socio-historical 107, 116 production 34, 44, 51, 59–60, 77, 109–10, 128, 135, 157, 159; collaborative 34; embodied 66; experimental theatre 140; spontaneous 34 programmes xi, 25, 56, 60, 72, 75–6, 80, 84, 92, 94, 96–7, 127; calculative 74; discursive 74; explicit 25, 72; government 72, 75–6, 80–1, 93, 95; ontological 149; research 56–7, 66, 86, 93; state 60; systematic 77 projects 49, 58, 60, 74, 76, 80, 103, 107, 130–1, 134, 136, 139–41, 143, 149,

154; ambitious 130; digital humanities 140; government-led development 91; ideological 63, 99–100; legibility 49, 73–6; meta-methodological xi, 123, 130–1; metaphysical 146 properties 7, 12, 23, 28, 49, 51, 59, 64, 87, 91, 104, 120 public administration 15n1 public demonstrations 44 public policies 26, 84 Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology 121 Quine, W.V.O. 142–3, 147 racketeering 51 rape 118 Reassembling the Social 140, 146 recruitment 26 Reformation 35 regimes 5, 27, 38, 56, 60–2, 71, 85–6, 100, 112, 133, 135, 141, 152, 158–9; absolutist 27; governmental 62, 71, 100; liberal 85; parliamentary 112; political 133, 135; regulatory 38; tax 5 regulations xvi, 21, 32, 35, 43, 53, 55, 58, 93, 123, 131 relationships xvi, 2, 19, 21, 26, 52, 68, 82, 94, 96, 117, 123, 145; changing 26; competitive 136, 149; international 30; overarching 31; problematic 10; regulated 21 religion 68, 120, 140–1, 143 religious parties 64 research xiv, xvi, 6, 8, 19–20, 39–41, 53– 4, 57, 61, 64, 66, 98, 101–2, 108–9, 129–30; archaeological 30, 68; constructionist ix, 69, 72, 102, 141; creative xvi; empirical ix, xv, 26, 125; ethnographic 13, 94; historical 69; informed 66; literatures on the state 4, 15; oriented 53; phenomenological ix; political 4, 13, 49–50, 127, 138; practices xvi, 139; programmes 56–7, 66, 86, 93; scientific 40; socio-political xii resources 12, 23–4, 32, 34, 46, 52–3, 74, 113, 117, 133, 138; cultural 42, 101; descriptive 8, 20; explanatory 130; extracting 3, 23–4, 43; historicalarchival 63; human 5; natural 30; organizational 24; practical 76; technical 54 revolution 138; see also 1848 Revolution

Index Rhodes, R.A.W. xv–xvi, 10–11, 16n7, 50, 54–5, 68n22, 68, 68n22, 68, 123n7, 123, 152, 158, 160, 162 rights 15n4, 16, 44, 117–18, 128, 143, 161; of the citizen vis-à-vis the state 16; of political prisoners 118; and responsibilities of governmental and non-governmental actors 117 The Rights of Man 15n4 risk xi, 10, 80, 114, 116, 127 rituals 52, 62–3, 68, 93, 151 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15n4 Routledge, Bruce 15n2, 16n8, 28n15, 41, 50 royal officials 35, 72 rules 4, 10, 12, 21, 27, 43, 53, 56, 68, 74, 79–80, 83–4, 137; centralised 5; political 59, 74 Runciman, David 128, 130 Ryle, G. 16n8, 48n8, 78, 105n8 Sacks, Harvey xii, 33, 91, 95, 97 Sayer, Derek 16n9, 27n8, 30, 33–6, 38, 48n2, 49, 52, 57–8, 68n15, 69, 72, 85, 105n5, 137–9 Schaffer, Simon 27n4, 114, 130 Schütz, A. xiii, 24, 46, 105n4, 137 science xii, 15, 36, 67, 140–1, 143, 145, 151–2, 155, 158–60, 162–3; behavioural 8; social and political ix–xiii, xv–xvi, 1–2, 4, 9, 12, 15, 42–3, 55, 57, 66–7, 126–7, 129, 131, 139–40; studies 140 scientists 15, 23 Scott, James 49, 53–4, 69, 73, 77, 85 Skinner, Quentin 16, 49, 52, 121 Skocpol, T. 23–4, 28n12, 138 Smith, Dorothy 98, 113, 116 social 13, 60–2, 68; construction 59, 123; interactions 21–2; order 19, 27, 66, 138; risk 80; sciences 16n8, 18, 21, 45, 52, 132; semiosis 131; structures 2, 14, 52, 153; theory 81, 113, 152, 159 The Social Contract 15n4 social scientists xv, 21, 105, 127 societal organizations 135 society xiv, 1–2, 8, 10, 13, 19, 26–7, 40–1, 64, 68, 73–4, 91, 100, 107–8, 132–3; administered 80; analyst’s 15; civilized 110; contemporary 2, 25; human 100; manipulating 74; members of x, xii, 9, 14, 23, 62, 101, 103, 107, 109, 116–17, 126; state and civil 156 socio-political actions 13, 126

175

socio-political communities xii, 52, 129, 136–7 sociological research 5, 87 sociologists 27 sociology 3, 15, 132, 151–3, 155–9, 161–3, 165–6 spatial practices 90–1, 94 standards 8, 40, 70, 74, 78, 110, 143–4 state 5, 7, 15–17, 23, 39, 44, 47, 52, 56–8, 73, 97, 115, 119, 138–9; accountability of the 14, 37; activities of 10, 16, 27, 68, 70, 82; agencies 99; authority 60, 94–5, 97–8; Babylonian 84; formation 4, 55, 58, 73, 132, 135; as a heterarchical system 120; idea of 58, 90, 93, 110; imagined 61, 63, 68, 70, 72, 97; modern 151, 163; political 56, 108; power of the xvi, 3, 132, 135; practices ix, 49–50, 60, 76; problems of xv, 28, 107; programmes 60; projects 135; simplifications 73–4, 77, 85; social construction of 59, 123; structures 10, 81; system 99, 132–3; theory of xvi, 27, 126, 157, 161 state-directed rape 118 statecraft 13, 68, 73–4, 77 statehood 23, 49–50, 58–9, 75–6, 135; conditions of 18, 30, 133; historical construction 68, 72, 75–6, 85; historical density 108; historical development 41; historical forms 56, 135; historical investigations ix, 14, 30, 61, 69, 83, 90, 102, 108 statutes 34–5, 73 Stengers, Isabelle 140, 142 strategies 5, 7, 25, 39, 47–8, 52, 56, 60–4, 68, 70, 77, 90, 96, 108, 156; analytical 93, 96; complementary 60; historicising 61; oppositional 104 strip searches 118 structures 3, 5–7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 23–4, 26, 29, 31–2, 43, 45, 62–3, 107–8, 115–16; administrative 21, 43, 84, 138; bureaucratic 1, 39; institutional 10; organisational 4, 6, 9; political xi “subject positions” 39, 60, 132 subjects 16, 20, 30, 59, 66, 73–4, 93, 98, 118, 134, 138; collective 134; orientedto 22; political 133; unified 134–6, 138 Taksim Square 44, 48, 138 Taussig, Michael 49, 62, 67n2 taxation 4–5, 39, 73 taxes 4–5, 74

176

Index

technologies 8, 10, 26, 32, 50, 56, 60, 63, 75, 83, 108, 141, 152; contemporary 80; of the intellect 84; political 37; of rules 74, 77 temptations 42, 101, 103, 142 tensions 41, 129, 134, 137, 139 territorial maps 23 territory 1, 3–4, 7, 23–4, 27, 30, 41, 55, 59, 64, 90–1, 118, 133; contiguous 28, 54; enlarged geographic 42; given 18, 21, 49, 58, 117; ontological 137 testimony 118–19 theorists 6, 24, 50, 66, 84, 86; contract 15; critical 19; liberal 19; neo-Weberian 17; social xiii, 44 theory 8, 15, 20, 26, 31, 40, 54, 56, 67, 82, 120, 124–5, 132, 144, 147; academic 127; competitor 137; critical 68; dominant 123; of forms 147–8; functionalist 27; generalized 110; sociological 22, 155, 157; transhistorical xv The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism 19 Thucydides 114–15 Tilly, Charles 3–5, 19, 27, 28n12, 35 trade 3–4, 32, 46 training troops 25, 46 transactions 26, 34–5, 37, 43 transformation 56, 142, 147, 160; ceremonial 62; discontinuist 109; see also self-transformation The Trial 46, 62 Trouillot, M. 67n4, 123n1 truth 26, 37, 59, 128, 141 Tudors 34–6 Tully, James xiv, 139 Two Treatises on Government 15n4 Utilitarianism and Other Essays 16n4, 16, 16n4 values ix, xii, 14, 56, 86–7, 102, 104, 134, 149, 166; analytical 148; cultural xii; economic 144; intellectual 132; right wing 80 vernacular 9–10, 13, 31–4, 39, 48, 51, 77–9, 81, 96, 102, 116, 120, 136, 139, 147; accounting practices 9–10, 13, 31, 33–4, 48, 51, 77–9, 81, 96, 102, 108, 120; categories 147; characterisation 147; descriptions 116; evaluation 10; official 48; understandings 136, 139 “vertical encompassment” 90–1, 94, 98

viaducts 4–5 Victorian period 35 violence 28, 54, 110, 118, 151, 155, 162, 164; and contraventions of rights 118; legitimate use of 64, 74; and oppression 133 visuo-material artefacts 108 Voss, B. 32–4, 38–40, 42–3, 47, 165; and how economic activity was organised at El Presidio 40; makes use of a mixture of archaeological and documentary evidence 32; portrays vernacular texts as the document of stable, pre-existing arrangements 33; relies on the idea that economic activities generate the textual equivalent of a running commentary 34; and the use of data 42 votes (canvassing) xi Wacquant, L. 98 war 1, 3, 8, 94, 111, 114, 118–19, 145 War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 3 Weber, Max xi, xvi, 2, 18, 20, 23–4, 27, 143; on bureaucracy 28; conception of the state as a sociological phenomenon 28; and the Hobbesian conception of the state as a composite 27; illustrates the difficulties connected with the problem of defining the state for the purpose of social and political study 21; and nominalism 18; observations regarding the normative character of adherence to the rules in bureaucratic contexts 53; one of the first social scientists to adopt a distinctively sociological approach 21; pithy ideal-typical rendering in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ 18; “problem of the state” differs markedly from its constitutionalist and constructionist counterparts 28n16; provides one of the principle starting points for empirical studies of the state 18, 23; resolution to the problem of describing the state 22; ‘Science as a Vocation’ xi–xii; turns Hobbes’ philosophical arguments into subjects for empirical inquiry 20 welfare states 24, 61 welfarism 80 ‘Westphalian model’ 50, 55, 57 ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ 150n2

Index Winch, Peter 78 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xii, 11, 17n11, 17, 31, 79, 89, 95, 100, 102–3, 105, 117, 136; paraphrasing 81, 100; Philosophical Investigations 48n8; philosophy and ethno-methodology xvi; terms the “craving for generality” and the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” 89 women 27, 65, 118, 142 Wood, J. 16, 65 work xvi–xvii, 8–10, 27–30, 34–7, 45–7, 50–4, 62–5, 74–6, 80–2, 84–6, 95–6, 125–6, 129–34, 139–41, 148–9; analytical 89, 103; body of 20, 49, 141, 143; compositional 142; constitutionalist 19, 103; contextualising 13; expository 59; extrapolative detective 141; governmental 39; historical-conceptual 49; ideological 62; legitimation of 100;

177

marginal 16; ministerial 123; practices 95–6; recent 16, 20, 125; state-maintaining 89 workers 92–3 workings 2, 49–50, 55, 59–60; of constructionists 129–31; inner 55, 59; of the state 2, 49–50, 60, 155, 162 world xiii–xiv, xvi, 19, 24–5, 42, 54, 63, 75, 86–7, 97, 126–30, 137–40, 142–9; common 140–3; empty 147; of programmes 75; real 98, 152, 157 World Trade Organization xiv, 57 worldmaking 140, 144–5, 156 WTO see World Trade Organization Yang, S. -Y 67n4 Yoffee, Norman 40, 50, 62, 83–4, 119–20 Zimmerman, D.H. 31