ABSTRACT
Historians and sociologists have now begun to reconstitute the appropriate paradigm for studying ‘the State’. Although the relevance of the latter concept is still disputed, many idealists and materialists have long defended the relevance of this focus as an essence, objective facticity, second-order phenomenon, spirit, cultural field, and so on. What a ‘State-formation’ approach promises is a way of overcoming (for the region of its focus) the antinomies (of both Marxist and bourgeois scholarship) between Constraint and Consensus; Force and Will; Body and Mind; Society and Self. In sum: the objective and the subjective. These are, so it is argued, the disciplined, powerful, acknowledged archetypes of rationalism and the Enlightenment. In other words, patriarchy, racism, and class-ism become visible as constitutive features of rule (both precapitalist and capitalist; developed and colonized capitalist; vanguard and reformist socialism). Governance becomes unified with the ‘private’ realm; indeed seen as constitutive of that crucial ‘private’/'public’ split; and sexualized subjectivities enter ‘politics’.
