ABSTRACT
From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s the term “state” virtually disappeared from the professional academic lexicon. Political scientists wrote about government, political development, interest groups, voting, legislative behavior, leadership, and bureaucratic politics, almost everything but “the state.” However, beginning with the mid-1970s “the state” has reappeared in the literature. Marxist scholars made a self-conscious, theoretically grounded effort to develop a theory of the capitalist state. In Between Power and Plenty, an edited volume about the foreign economic policies of advanced industrial countries, Peter Katzenstein developed a typology of weak and strong states. Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolution examined the political conditions, both international and domestic, associated with major social revolutions. Alfred Stepan’s The State and Society in Peru investigated both the organic statist intellectual tradition and corporatist political structures that gave “the state” a major initiative role in the Peruvian and other Latin American political systems (Katzenstein 1977; Skocpol 1979; Stepan 1978; Krasner 1978). Several additional books added to this growing body of literature. However, to note that terms have changed, that certain scholars self-
consciously adopted a new vocabulary (or readopted an old one), does not necessarily imply that there was a change in substance. The purpose of this essay is to examine the ways in which several books explicitly concerned with “the state” differed from and challenged prevailing intellectual approaches that emerged out of the behavioral revolution of the 1950s. The following are discussed at length in this essay: Eric Nordlinger’s On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (1981), Clifford Geertz’s Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980), Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), Charles Tilly’s edited volume The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), Raymond Grew’s edited volume Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978), and Ellen Kay Trimberger’s Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (1978). These studies were concerned with two central issues: the extent of state
autonomy and the degree of congruity between the state and its environment.
The issue of autonomy has generally been cast in a temporarily static framework in which the state is viewed as an exogenous variable. The central issue is: can the state formulate and implement its preferences? The issue of congruity was placed in a temporally dynamic framework in which the state is viewed as an intervening variable. The central issue is: how do institutional structures change in response to alterations in domestic and international environments and then in subsequent time periods influence these environments? Cutting across both of these analytic concerns is the prior question of how
the state should be defined. Roger Benjamin and Raymond Duvall argue that the following conceptualizations have appeared in the literature.
