ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Foucault’s break with the constitutionalist position and how he sought to re-orient research on the state, best viewed as a set of conceptual and methodological proposals rather than substantive points. Foucault notes we talk of the state as a complex of men and things but asks ‘what does that mean?’. For Foucault, it cannot merely be a structure in which certain functions are housed. Not only does the constitutionalist vision offer an over-simplified picture of social and political life, it is conceptually and methodologically impoverished. Against the ontological certainties that characterise the constitutionalist position, that the what of the state is clearly and easily accessed, Foucault raises a series of epistemological objections, variants on the question, ‘how could we possibly know?’. Foucault’s radical insight, one which distinguishes his work from others, was that we can only talk about the state and its structures – we can only know the state – by virtue of arrangements of practices – ways of recording, mapping, documenting, describing, counting, weighing, differentiating, classifying and so on – that enable us to treat the state as an entity in the first place. The structures of the state are not what enable us to talk of the state; rather, we come to know the structures of the state through interwoven complexes of ancillary practices upon which the state rests. Without them, there is no state – it is a product and we do not understand it unless we understand what it is produced by. This is not to say structures are unimportant, they patently are. But they are not analytically primitive, they are secondary – the constitutionalists, on Foucault’s reading, are wrong. What is more, the sense in which they are secondary can be empirically examined: we can see how the structures of the state come to acquire their form concretely in different contexts and historical periods. The chapter ends by examining what Foucauldian studies of the state and state practices promise by way of new insights.
