ABSTRACT
At the start of Leviathan (2017 [1651]), Hobbes famously sets out the nature of his inquiry into the state and the problem it must grapple with. He explains it must take into account two things: “the Matter thereof and the Artificer, both which is man”. The state is explicitly recognised as a human creation but Hobbes also treats it as having an independent existence. Inquiries into the state must, therefore, not just examine what the state is, they must also examine how it comes to be constituted as such.
While Hobbes’ treatment is philosophical, it sets the stage for the study of the state within the social and political sciences. For much of their histories, they too have treated the state as a human creation, one historically anchored in distinctive social, cultural, political and economic conditions yet nonetheless having an existence over and above them. The state is therefore both socially embedded and a thing unto itself. This duality is found in Weber’s work as much as Hobbes’ but it is Weber’s formulations that have provided one of the principle methodological starting points for empirical studies of the state. Weber’s sociological reworking of the problem as introduced by Hobbes thus helped make the state investigable.
Ignoring his more phenomenological pronouncements on the state as an oriented to complex of action and interaction, attention has been focused on Weber’s pithy ideal-typical rendering in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1946b [1919]): the state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. One of the most well-known ‘definitions’ in the social sciences, it exercises a grip on the imaginations of social and political scientists to this day. Most importantly, and despite representing a misreading of Weber’s nominalism, it provides the basis for the constitutionalist approach which seeks to define what the state is and has to be by exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions of statehood. The basis for the constitutionalist approach is to look at what needs to be in place for a state – or a kind of state, such as a democratic state or capitalist state – to be a state at all. It does not neglect what states do but it treats such matters as constitutionally enabled. The how is, therefore, approached via the what, function via structure or form, and it is the latter which is treated as analytically primitive. Seen constitutionally, an entity cannot be a state unless it has such things, for instance, as a standing army: either to maintain law and order, for the neo-Weberians and liberal theorists, or to enforce the demands of capital and enforce domination, for the neo-Marxists and critical theorists.
The emphasis on the constitution of the state – the elements upon which it is founded, which together make it up and make it possible for it do certain things – has produced a number of waves of research, including that grouped together under the call to ‘bring the state back in’ in the mid-1980s which involved such figures as Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann. More recently, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, along with research inspired by his The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) on the varieties of capitalist welfare state, has helped reshape understandings not just of the state but of its relationship to society and economy through investigations of the structural role the state plays in different political economic contexts. Constitutionalist work has, undoubtedly, produced real insights. Nonetheless, it has been subjected to sustained critique. The most powerful of those critiques is that presented by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, the constitutionalist position was conceptually and methodologically unstable: one could not access the what of the state if one relegated the how to a secondary position. The chapter ends with an examination of some of the problems that result from this methodological prioritisation, suggesting the constitutionalist approach has proven illuminating not because of its commitments but in spite of them.
