ABSTRACT
What would an approach to the problem of the state that did not repeat the problems of constitutionalism and constructionism look like? In many respects, it would be an approach that took Foucault’s radical insights seriously and did not try to reserve a position of authority for the researcher. It would instead look to social and political practices and attempt to grapple with the sense in which the problem of the state is a problem for anyone.
There is a precursor: Marx’s lengthy exposition of the circumstances that led up to the collapse of French parliamentary democracy in 1851, following the 1848 Revolution, and allowed Louis-Napoleon, the then President of the French Second Republic, to reclaim the Imperial throne his uncle (Napoleon) had been forced to abdicate – The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx has often been castigated for not offering a general theory of the state in his work. The argument here is that this was precisely the point. In framing his analysis in the way he did Marx is asking us, as readers, to treat what it might mean to describe the state as itself a phenomenon for investigation, a problem within political practice, and a problem, moreover, to which his own text is explicitly addressed. It is this feature of Marx’s description of the French state that is worth concentrating on; namely, its insistence on treating the problem of the state in practical political terms. What is most significant about Marx’s treatment is that he does not allow us to move from his description to a generalised problem of the state, and so blocks attempts to treat the former as a manifestation of the latter. Indeed, one of the lessons of the account is that the claim there is a general, transcontextual problem of the state has no content and thus lacks an identifiable sense.
One of the most striking things about The Eighteenth Brumaire is that it is made up of unrelentingly detailed descriptions of complex sequences of events, where the analytical emphasis continually re-centres on a consideration of what was happening at each step within unfolding sequences of practical political action. The significance of any one episode within a longer sequence, such as the question of who did what when (‘details’ of the sort that are frequently dismissed as trivial by many constitutionalists and constructionists alike), can only be determined with respect to the manner in which it was seen in practice, by the parties involved, as connected to what came before and their orientation to what might come after. In other words, to draw on conversation analytic terminology, Marx is showing us that some possible next political move by any one of the protagonists became intelligible in the context of some identifiably prior move by another. When we read The Eighteenth Brumaire as a specifically interactional account of collaboratively produced ‘chains’ of political activity, it becomes easier to see why Marx would resist the idea that there could be a general problem of the state: to generalise the problem would be to divorce it from the environments within which the state could come to be a problem for those involved within the political scenarios he is examining.
Marx’s method of analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire works to prevent the severing of contextual ties by building on the observation that determinations about the state (its proper scope, role, character, structure, powers, activities, jurisdictions, failures and so on) are made within social and political practices. Approached in this way, the objective in Marx’s account then becomes to see how such determinations acquire their sense in, through and as part of practical courses of action. Marx shows us why we should not try to specify in advance what form those determinations will take, where we will find them or what import they will or can have, but instead look to see if, when and how they become relevant in a given situation. It is in this sense that the account points us in a very different direction to the other forms of investigation that have been examined so far. Marx, like Machiavelli before him, shows us that general problems of the state cannot be identified independently of members of society’s specific practical concerns, projects and activities and urges us to explicate the ties between them.
For this reason, it is not enough to look into the imbrications of structures, functions and socio-historical processes that are implicated in the ways in which members of society pose questions of the state, we must also address the circumstances within which these questions become meaningful, significant, consequential in the specific ways that they do. Rather than treat the problem of the state as having a timeless validity, or trans-historical relevance, investigations would concentrate on looking at the implications of raising particular questions at the specific moments in time and the specific places in which they were raised. Proceeding in this way the ground is thus prepared for a respecification of the ‘classical’ problem of the state in and through empirical investigations of social and political practices. The central contention advanced in this book is that it is in this sense that ‘the problem of the state’ can best be addressed, i.e., by returning ‘the problem’ to its home environment, namely our practices, including the disputes and conflicts that both surround and arise out of them.
