What we talk about when we talk about the state

As a way of concluding my third-order study of the study of the state, in this, the final chapter of the book, I return to a question initially raised in its opening chapters: namely, what are we talking about when we talk about the state? The arguments up to this point have been geared to showing that we will not find an answer to that question in constitution or construction treated in isolation because the problem of the state resists narrow treatment in those terms. A focus on either can be illuminating but can also be misleading, depending on the circumstances. Crucially, however, it is the circumstances which determine which is the case. The work of Marx and Machiavelli, and indeed Weber when freed from neo-Weberian interpretations, encourages us to examine the ways in which the problem of the state arises in and as part of social and political affairs for those engaged in them. In so doing, that work allows us to dissolve the problems of constitution and construction by reminding us that we do not need to extend primacy to either, or indeed anything else. Our task on this view is to see how the problem of the state acquires whatever practical relevance and urgency it has in concrete socio-political circumstances and take our lead from that. By taking that lead, I have argued, we can re-ground our studies and acquire a clarity on the problem of the state it is all too easy to otherwise lose. However, I am not the only voice arguing for the need to re-ground our inquiries into the problem of the state and in this chapter I turn my attention to recent work by two of the most prominent figures in this field on that front: Bob Jessop and Bruno Latour. This involves a shift in focus away from empirical research because their work, like mine, is also of the third order. While they do not offer studies of the state per se, they do offer meta-methodological frameworks designed to guide such studies, albeit in Latour’s case indirectly so. Taking up the question of what we talk about when we talk about the state from a different angle, I highlight the points at which the work of both aligns with the position I have argued for in previous chapters as well as where they depart from it. The key issue of contention concerns ontology, our commitment to theories of what there is and what there can be, and whether we need to take a stance on it – Jessop and Latour both believe we do, I believe we do not. Treated as methodologists on a weak reading which brackets out and ignores the ontological aspects of their positions, I argue it is possible to learn much from the work of both; but when read on the basis of the strong ontological claims they advance, however, their frameworks raise many problems. This is primarily because those frameworks disguise the crucial point that we learn from members of social and political communities what we could be talking about in talking about the problem of the state – and hence of the kind of problem the problem of the state could be – not from metaphysical schemas designed to define the forms that problem does or could possibly take. We are not nor could we be legislators in this domain and we need to avoid subordinating our phenomena to our intellectual preoccupations or treating what we find in the world as reflecting our investigative orientation to it for that very reason. The problem of the state isn’t ours as social and political scientists; it belongs to social and political practice and ought to be studied in those practices’ own terms.