Making States: Theory and Practice
Spring 2015
Consuelo Cruz
113 Packard Hall
Office hours: W 4:00 to 5:30 and by appointment
Course description and objectives :
The state remains at the center of some of the most important political-institutional stories of our time, from communist China’s sui generis path to market and recurrent civil war in Africa to the Euro- zone’s crisis and the unfolding of the Arab Spring. In Latin America, meanwhile, states continue to puzzle because they loom large in politics and society yet are often ineffectual providers of public goods.
This course takes a close look at the most influential theories of the state and state-building, then places three major and distinctive empirical cases in comparative perspective: Mexico, Egypt, and the United States.
The objective of the course is to gain a better understanding of states both as agents of power and as stakes in the struggle for power. More specifically, we want to know why the state -- the quintessential power monopolist and the most tempting of prizes – can be strong or weak, effective or ineffective, despotic or democratic, or simply muddle through, coping day to day with the vicissitudes of domination and rule.
Requirements:
This is a lecture course, but dialogue between the instructor and the class is part of the key to success. Students therefore are expected to do the assigned readings before each session (we meet twice a week). They should also make sure to bring the readings to class, as we will consult the texts frequently.
Grades will be determined as follows: 30% midterm (take-home exam, 10 double-spaced pages); 60% final (take-home exam, 10 double-spaced pages); and 10% class participation.
Please note that this course is not suitable for freshmen unless they have taken Introduction to Comparative Politics.
I. “The State”-- a stylized discussion
1. Introduction . No readings assigned.
II. Theoretical and historical materials
2. A brief background
Ram ón Blanco, “The Modern State in Western Europe: Three Narratives of its Formation,” Revista Debates, 7:3 (September- December 2013): 169-184.
3. Classical perspectives on the state
Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, “The Classical Theories,” in Badie and Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1983), 3-24.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International publishers, 1967), 118-135.
4. Classical perspectives (continued) Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” and “Bureaucracy,” Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. C. Roth and C. Wittich, trans. E. Fischoff, H. Gerth et al., (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 956-1005.
Otto Hintze, “Formation of States and Constitutional Development,” Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 157-178.
5. From traditional states to absolutism and the nation-state
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 35-121.
6. From absolutism to the nation-state: capitalism and the state
Giddens, Ibid.,148-221.
7. Tilly, Mann and European state-formation
Charles Tilly: “State-making and War-making as Organized Crime,” in Theda Skocpol et al. eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-191.
Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, Volume I, A history of power from the beginning to AD 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 2012), 500-17.
Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, Volume II, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2012), 23-43; 44-49.
III. State-Building and Society
8. Opposing perspectives on “political order” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (New York and London: International Publishers and Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 228-70.
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1-92.
9. Who puts “the state” in state-building?
Theda Skocpol: Introduction to Bringing the State Back In, 3-37.
Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Peter B. Evans, “The State and Economic Transformation,” Bringing the State Back In, 44-77.
Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy and the State Effect,” State/Culture, ed. George Steinmetz, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1999), 76-97.
10. State/society pt. 1: state-in-society
Joel Migdal, State-in-Society, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3-134.
11. Ibid ., Continued, 135-264.
12. State/Society pt. 2: contemporary changes in governance/society
Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, “Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization,” from Anthropology of the State: A Reader, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 1- 41.
Nicholas Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” from Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37-65.
Bob Jessop, “Narrating the Future of the National Economy and the National State: Remarks on Remapping Regulation and Reinventing Governance,” State/Culture ed. George Steinmetz, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1999), 378-405.
IV. “Post-” Perspectives on State-Formation
13. Ideological and symbolic power
Phillip Gorski, “Mann’s Theory of Ideological power: sources, applications and elaborations,” An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 101-134.
Julia Adams, “Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State Formation,” State/Culture ed. George Steinmetz, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1999), 98-122.
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87- 104.
14. Ideological and Symbolic Power (continued)
Pierre Bourdieu “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” State/Culture, 3-75.
V. Expressive power
15. Elaboration
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11-63; 98-136.
16. Denial Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 7-47; 177-218.
VI. State failure and Reconstruction
17. Post-conflict situations
Armin von Bogdandy et al., “State-Building, Nation-Building, and Constitutional Politics in Post-Conflict Situations: Conceptual Clarifications and an Appraisal of Different Approaches,” Max Plank Yearbook of United Nations Law, Volume 9 (2005): 579-613.
VII. Case Studies
18. Latin America and Mexico
Overview
Miguel Centeno and Agustin Ferraro, “Introduction,” and Frank Safford, “The Construction of National States in Latin America: 1820- 1890,” both in Centeno and Ferraro, eds., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3-55.
Steven Gregory and Daniel Timerman, “Rituals of the Modern State: The Case of Torture in Argentina, Dialectical Anthropology 11:1 (1986): 63-72.
19. Latin America and Mexico (continued)
Helga Baitenmann, “Counting on State Subjects: State Formation and Citizenship in Twentieth Century Mexico,” in Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut Nustad, eds. State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005), 172-194.
Mary Kay Vaughan, “Nationalizing the Countryside: Schools and Rural Communities in the 1930s,” in Mary Kay Vaughn and Stephen E. Lewis, eds. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 157-275.
20. Latin America and Mexico (continued)
Mary Kay Vaughan, “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural households, and Women in Mexico, 1930-1940,” in Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, eds., Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 194- 214.
Alan Knight, “The Weight of the State in Modern Mexico,” in James Dunkerley, ed., Studies in the formation of the Nation-State in Latin America (London: 2002), 212-253.
Merilee S. Grindle, Challenging the State: Crisis and Innovation in Latin America and Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-46, 180-194.
Egypt
21. Identity and the state
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 63-93; 161-179.
Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1-13; 180-255.
22. Change, challenge, Egypt (continued)
Barak Salmoni, “Historical Consciousness for Modern Citizenship,” in Arthur Goldschmidt et al., eds., Re-Envisioning Egypt (New York: The American University of Cairo Press, 2005), 154-189.
Timothy Mitchell, “Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of your Desires,” in Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing, eds., The Journey to Tahir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (New York: Verso, 2012), 224-234.
Anthony Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 1- 78.
23. The United States
Sheldon Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 205-299.
Catherine Lutz, “Making War at in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist, 104:3 (2002): 723- 735
24. The United States (Continued)
Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State : The American Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 ), 61-97.
Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, “Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in the USA and Australia,” Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 8:2 (1994):135-161.
Desmond King and Rogers Smith, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” The American Political Science Review 99:1 (February 2005): 75-92.
25. Conclusion
Review 3 assigned readings you found most compelling on any topic or country.