Critique Of The State.pdf

REVIEW

POLITICAL THEORY / December 2004

BOOKS IN REVIEW

10.1177/0090591704267528

THE CRITIQUE OF THE STATE by Jens Bartelson. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2001. 222 pp. $22.00 paper.

DOI: 10.1177/0090591704267528

Marx, in the little-read second section of The German Ideology, unflinch-

ingly identified the central drawback in the theory of the individualistic

(indeed solipsistic) anarchist, Max Stirner: if Stirner is not prepared to grant

each and every real individual the capacity of taking the measure of his or her

own individuality, says Marx, Stirner’s pet category, “the individual,” will be

nothing but a Procrustean bed of abstraction that real, individual persons are

going to have to (be made to) fit.

What then of the category, the concept, the abstraction, that is “the state”?

This, as Jens Bartelson aptly puts the matter, “has been second nature to polit-

ical scientists: if not inescapable, the concept has remained sufficiently pow-

erful to set limits to the theoretical imagination” (p. 4), much as the concept

of “the individual” has, too. But there is at least one crucial difference: while

those of us who are sensitive to what Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx were up to

can contrast “individualism” with “individuality” and can deploy these as

categories that often work at cross-purposes, there is no way of making a sim-

ilar move with respect to “the state.” The guilty little secret of political theo-

rists is that we love to hate the state, and this means (among other things) that

few would wish to make any real state the measure of its “stateness”—if I

may purloin an ugly neologism from the now-forgotten “bringing the state

back in” debate of yesteryear. Jens Bartelson is under no illusions about this

debate. “What was recycled” in its course “had in fact been present all the

time” (p. 76). The state never really went away. Nor indeed is it about to do so

in an age of what Bob Jessop has termed “globaloney.”

Bartelson’s The Critique of the State is both thoughtful and thought pro-

voking. There is an agile, supple intelligence (and a pleasingly dry wit) at

work here. The problem with “state-bashing,” as Bartelson sees it, is that

“within large parts of our legacy of political theorizing, the state is both pos-

ited as an object of political analysis and presupposed as the foundation of

such analysis.” This double service “makes it inherently difficult to take

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 6, December 2004 877-884

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POLITICAL THEORY / December 2004

political theorizing out of its statist predispositions” (p. 5). For starters,

though this is not an example Bartelson draws on, the reason why so much

anarchist theorizing fails at the level of significance is simply that “the state”

is the subject of its each and every sentence, both the object of critique and the

condition of critique—a point of which Marx was only too well aware. 1 But

this is not a problem we can confine to anarchism. It is a problem with the cri-

tique of the state in general. As Bartelson shrewdly goes on to indicate,

Whereas [Quentin] Skinner and other contextualists have accounted for the emergence of

the modern state concept, they have had very little, if anything, to say about its changing

place and function within modern political discourse. Indeed, it could be argued that their

accounts of the state concept are themselves inherently statist, since they have posited a

modern notion of the state as the end towards which early modern political reflection

evolved through a delicate blend of necessity and accident. ...Itisasthough all roads in

the past led to Weber but none further beyond. (p. 9)

Touché . The question is, “how the state concept came to fulfill a constitu-

tive function within late modern scientific political discourse—that is,

beyond Weber—and how this concept subsequently became an unques-

tioned part of political reflection despite—and sometimes because of—the

numerous efforts to abolish and redefine it” (p. 9)? The state “has condi-

tioned the ways the core problems of modern political science have been

phrased, despite . . . numerous attempts to rid the discipline of an ambiguous,

opaque or obsolete concept”: “attempts to emancipate political reflection

from its influence have largely been futile.” What accounts for this futility is

the very ambiguity and centrality of the concept itself. The logics of central-

ity and of ambiguity are “mutually reinforcing” (p. 12). To see this, we must

ask questions about the presumed centrality of the state. On one hand, it

appears as a unified entity when seen from the outside looking in; it is condi-

tioned by the absence of its features—authority and sovereignty—in the

international sphere. On the other hand, the state is distinct from civil society

when viewed from the inside looking out. In either case, the boundary in

question is regarded these days as less clear-cut, more blurred, than once it

may have been, as Bartelson freely admits. But those who call attention to

this fuzziness always presuppose the conceptual boundaries they set out to

question or dissolve. The state and the international sphere, and the state and

civil society, are binaries in which each term is always already defined in

terms of the other term in the couplet (pp. 13-14). This means that even those

aspects of political discourse that problematize the state are in effect pre-

mised on its presence, and that those who have struggled to reconceptualize

the state and political order have failed to escape statism (defined on p. 27as

BOOKS IN REVIEW

879

the presupposed presence of the state), especially when their aim was to

escape or undercut statism.

The state is conceived “as an object of theoretical and empirical knowl-

edge” and “as a transcendental condition of that knowledge” (p. 4). What

accounts for this double service? First, the state is conceptualized not in

terms of rulers and ruled but as an entity independent of both (p. 34). Second,

it is fused with the nation, and it is this fusion that connects authority with

political community and differentiates the nation-state concept from the

international arena. Third, it is distinguished (or distinguishes itself) from its

“own” civil society. Then what gets thrown into the mix, as the nineteenth

century runs its course, is the motto on the (Comtist) Brazilian flag, “ ordem e

progresso .” Once the concepts of order and progress (or futurity) kick in,

“concepts of authority were removed from the dimension of contingency and

reinscribed within the dimension of continuity” (p. 38). Historical time

becomes a principle of identity rather than the antithesis of political order

(p. 41). The nation, as the Abbé Sieyès foresaw during the French Revolu-

tion, has to be the source of identity before it can be the source of authority;

over time, “the concept of the nation state comes to express nothing more

than a vaguely tautological relationship between two entities which are

merely numerically distinct” (p. 41).

Nor is this all. “We are all heirs to Hegel by virtue of being modern, if

being modern means something as simple yet strange as being citizens of

states”; “instead of being an individual person writ large as in Hobbes, the

state now furnishes the very principle of political identity and individual

autonomy; the individual becomes the state writ small” (p. 43). Bartelson,

who has an eye for the apt quotation, here cites not Hegel’s work but

Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, a text that is too often over-

looked. 2 Statehood “has become an inescapable part of the modern condition

and the sole source of its intelligibility” (p. 43).

The question now becomes this. How was “early political science able to

emerge and acquire an identity of its own by means of this nebulous concept

(the state)”? The answer entails that the concept be more than just nebulous.

“What characterizes the modern conception of politics is its reflexive and

limitless character....Politics is boundless to the extent that the drawing of

boundaries separating the political domain from other domains is itself a

political activity” (p. 59). And it is the state that becomes “crucial to the pos-

sibility of defining political knowledge as distinct from other disciplines,

since there was no apparent way to define politics as an autonomous sphere

of thought and action except in terms of the state, understood either as a sub-

ject which acts or as an object which is acted upon.”

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POLITICAL THEORY / December 2004

Such is its indispensability to political scientists, that whenever the con-

cept of the state has been thrown out, some other semantically equivalent

concept (the “governmental process,” the “political system”) is brought in

through the back door to explain and justify the presence or desirability of

political order, “thus merely restoring the initial problem which state-bashers

were trying to avoid or circumvent” (p. 78). In this way, criticism of the state

“was bound to be much of an away game.” But “if the effort to throw the state

out was futile, the effort to bring it back in has largely been perverse” (p. 115).

Bringing the state back in cannot be understood as a simple, knee-jerk reac-

tion against pluralism and behavioralism, for it was also shaped and informed

by that Marxist state theory that had already attacked these as “conservatism

dressed up as science” (p. 122). Once again the merciless Bartelson gives no

quarter: “If the state really were dependent on something other than itself,

then the state concept would seem as redundant to political analysis as those

who had tried to throw it out had so laboriously argued. ...Ifthestate could

be turned into a dependent variable, the state concept might as well be

abandoned completely” (p. 123), and we’d all be out of a job.

The solution (or would-be solution) to this conundrum was of course the

assertion of the state’s relative autonomy, which Bartelson concedes has “a

certain fragile coherence” (p. 124). But this concession is an instance of

reculer pour mieux sauter and a feint. Once the reader is rendered off guard

by it, Bartelson plunges in his blade: “If the state is nothing but a relation

between things themselves defined in relational terms, the relative autonomy

of the state must consist in the relative autonomy of a relation in relation to

other relations, an idea which is difficult to make sense of other than in rather

esoteric terms” (p. 144).

More recent “theories which assume the state to be contingent on dis-

course” (p. 150) fare no better. “Arguing that the state is contingent upon

things themselves contingent on the presupposed presence of the state is

equivalent to saying that the state is an inescapable limit to the political imag-

ination, and therefore tantamount to demonstrating its necessity” (pp. 167-

68). As to Foucault’s famous statement that the king’s head must be cut off—

that is, that we must get rid of the paralyzing fiction of sovereignty if we are to

understand the exercise of power, an exercise that is otherwise likely to

remain veiled and concealed behind the barren formalism of legal and politi-

cal theory—Bartelson is once again as relentless as he is deft. He gleefully

points out that “the attempt to temporalize the state by rendering the distinc-

tion between state and civil society contingent upon the changing discursive

practices of governmentality merely restores at a new level those concepts

and practices that this strategy promises to dispose of once and for all . . . even

if we successfully rid political discourse of the concept of sovereignty, there

BOOKS IN REVIEW

881

is a distinct possibility that its ugly head will reappear where we least expect

to find it” (p. 171).

The state, in the end, “has not been constituted in and through political dis-

course, but rather the other way round: the presupposed presence of the state

has constituted this discourse as at once scientific and political. . . . The con-

cept of the state was (thus) removed from the domain of the politically con-

testable. . . . Scientification represents a reversal of hopes of contestability in

political discourse, and brings a superficial substitution of scientific author-

ity for political authority to bear on that discourse” (p. 183). “The triumph of

the state in political science marks the postponement of political Enlighten-

ment,” (p. 76) and this in effect leaves us all with a great deal of work to do. It

is Bartelson’s sensitivity to this enterprise that helps make The Critique of the

State as valuable a book as his earlier A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cam-

bridge University Press, 1995), which covers earlier historical territory.

Bartelson’s scholarship is relentless. For this and other reasons, he deserves

the last word. Why our preoccupation with the state? It preoccupies us and

ought to preoccupy us because it is well-nigh escape proof and because polit-

ical scientists’ efforts to dispense with it run the gamut from the wayward to

the risible.

—Paul Thomas

University of California, Berkeley

NOTES

1. See Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (New York: Routledge, 1985), especially

chap. 3, “Marx and Stirner,” 125-74.

2. But see David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge,

1998), 46-53, for a similar characterization of Schiller.

REGIONS OF SORROW: ANXIETY AND MESSIANISM IN HANNAH

ARENDT AND W. H. AUDEN by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press. 301 + xii pp. $24.95.

DOI: 10.1177/0090591704265526

In Regions of Sorrow , Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb compares Hannah

Arendt’s and W. H. Auden’s attempts to take the measure of their times. That

Arendt is a philosopher and Auden a poet poses no difficulties for Gottlieb,

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