ABSTRACT
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. Critics from both right and left have increasingly condemned the state as inefficient, ineffective and despotic. 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.
