ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the question of the state's ontology to the fore of political theory and to redirect its gaze away from the textual and scholastic. Marxist state theory reflects the developmental trajectory of the problematic presented here. Marxism has taken the state literally and has thus failed to interrogate the deeper truths that the self-presentation of the state may be covering over. During the war in Kosovo, Doctors without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontieres, was expelled for sending a team of doctors to Serbia. The book highlights a key epistemological hurdle for social science, going beyond appearances and the familiar in order to achieve a more rigorous and objective understanding of social reality. It shares a central argument with the present work: that social scientific theory tends to take the state as a given, that contemporary political theory is, in Bartelson's terms, 'statist'.
