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The Modern State The Modern State The modern state is hugely important in our everyday lives. It takes nearly half our income in taxes. It registers our births, marriages and deaths. It educates our children and pays our pensions. It has a unique power to compel, in some cases exercising the ultimate sanction of preserving life or ordering death. Yet most of us would struggle to say exactly what the state is. The new edition of this well-established and highly regarded textbook continues to provide the clearest and most comprehensive introduction to the modern state. It examines the state from its historical origins at the birth of modernity to its current jeopardized position in the globalized politics of the twenty-first century. Subjects covered include: G state and economy G states and societies G states and citizens G states within the international system G ‘rogue’ and failed states. Thoroughly updated and revised with two new chapters, students will continue to find The Modern State a provocative introduction to one of the most important phenomena of contemporary life. Christopher Pierson is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The Modern State Second edition Christopher Pierson First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Second edition 2004 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 1996, 2004 Christopher Pierson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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. 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 Pierson, Christopher. The modern state/Christopher Pierson.– 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. State, The. I. Title. JC11.P54 2004 320.1–dc22 2003021058 ISBN 0-203-39137-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67225-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32932–9 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–32933–7 (pbk) Still for Ailsa, Lewis and Meridee Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Modern states 4 2 Placing the state in modernity 27 3 States and societies 50 4 State and economy 78 5 States and citizens 106 6 States and the international order 127 7 States of the twenty-first century 155 8 Conclusion 174 Bibliography 183 Index 193 Acknowledgements The author and publisher are happy to acknowledge permission to reproduce the following material in the book: David Held and Polity Press for Figure 2.1, derived from ‘The development of the modern state’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds) The Formations of Modernity; B. Turner and Sociology for Tables 5.1 and 5.2, derived from ‘Outline of a theory of citizenship’, Sociology 24, 2, 1990. The first edition of this book was written with the support of the University of Stirling, the Public Policy Program/Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the British Academy. This revised edition was written in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham. I am happy to record my appreciation of the support I have received from all these quarters. The book is still dedicated to Lewis, Ailsa and Meridee, who have had to weather a lot more than a Scottish winter. Chris Pierson Nottingham, 2003 Introduction That academic division of labour which once (and briefly) split the social sciences into the discrete study of the state (political science), economy (economics) and society (sociology) is breaking down. Of course, such a division was never water- tight. It is absent from most classical political theory and from the founding texts of both classical political economy and the sociological tradition. At a more mundane level, students of social policy, for example, have long had to consider the ways in which state, economy and society interact. Increasingly, students of sociology are required to understand the basic laws of motion of the state, just as students of politics and economics are required to place political and economic institutions in their appropriate social context. With these old lines of intellectual demarcation breaking down, it is now widely recognized that, in most developed societies, the state has probably been the single most important social, economic and political force. Ironically, this renewal of interest in the analysis of the state has coincided with a very widespread decline in popular and intellectual faith in its competence and, for some, the belief that we are witnessing the ‘twilight of the state’. Critics from both right and left have increasingly condemned the state as inefficient, ineffective and despotic. Meanwhile, commentators from a very diverse range of political positions have encouraged us to believe that the state is an increasingly archaic form, yielding to markets or global networks or simply being swept up and away in a coming clash of civilizations. Yet, for all this critical interest, the very basic task of establishing what we mean by ‘the state’ remains unresolved. Debates about the ‘proper’ nature of the state have raised some of the most important and difficult problems in the whole of the social sciences: the relationship between value judgements (the normative) and matters of fact (the empirical), between internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) explanations of societal development, between contingency and determination, between generalizing and individualizing methodologies. But in all these areas, too, it seems as if there are many more questions than answers. Indeed, at times our sense of the importance of the state and its contemporary problems appears to be matched only by a pervasive frustration at its sheer ungraspability. Some of the questions that surround the state are certainly difficult. After all, the finest minds that have devoted themselves to these questions over two millennia have failed to generate any totally persuasive answers. Yet it is hardly to be doubted 2 Introduction that an already difficult issue has sometimes been made much more impenetrable by accretions of wilful obscurantism. My ambition in this book is not so much to resolve as to try to make sense of these disputes and, without doing too much violence to their originators, to make them accessible and meaningful to the uninitiated reader. It’s worth saying at the outset, too, that I think that states are still very important and very far from withering away. In Chapter 1, I confront the question of defining the state. Here we are faced with a bewildering range of options, including the rather tempting (and sometimes well- argued) case for dropping the idea of the state altogether. We shall see that the simplest ‘one-line’ definitions of the state have not generally fared well. Most commentators are agreed that the state is multifaceted and many accept that it is a little fuzzy around the edges. Nor (fortunately) is a watertight definition of the state a precondition for discussing it. In his authoritative text State Theory, Jessop saves a definition of the state until page 341 and immediately follows this up with six substantial qualifications (Jessop 1990: 341–2)! While we shall not find any uniform agreement upon a precise definition of the state, I shall suggest that there is at least a ‘cluster’ of characteristic ideas, institutions and practices around which many commentators isolate their working definitions of the modern state. This should at least help us to focus upon a clear range of topics that are ‘state related’. In Chapter 2, 1 set out the case for insisting that the state must be understood historically and review some of the most important recent attempts to do so. In part, this judgement about the historical specificity of states is already contained in my decision to focus upon the modern state. With this qualification, the state is already placed in a particular historical locale. But even states more generically belong to a particular time and place. It is clear that, for most of its history, humankind functioned without even a very primitive form of state. In line with much recent historical sociology, I shall argue that modern states can only be properly understood in a historical context: clearly one way of getting a better grasp upon the nature of states is to trace the paths of their historical development. It underpins the judgement that the proper object of our study is not the state, but states placed in an international order of unequal and competing states. This helps us to avoid some of the problems that have arisen (e.g. in both structural-functionalism and functionalist forms of Marxism) from seeing the state in purely functional terms. This emphasis upon the historically unique does not, however, prevent us from identifying some common features and processes in the evolution of a range of modern states. A further way to approach the problem of simultaneously delimiting and understanding the state is to consider it in terms of its relation to other forces and actors. This, very broadly, is the approach that I adopt in the central chapters of the book. In each of these chapters, I assess the state in terms of its relationship to a key term which it is frequently seen either to complement or to confront. In Chapter 3, I consider the relationship between states and societies. I seek to adjudicate between state-centred and society-centred accounts of states’ development and try to identify the nature of the societies with which states are said to interact.
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