| Review of: | The state: Theories and issues edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister, David Marsh |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Andrew Gamble |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 85, Issue 03, Pages 857-883 |
Reviews
The state has always been central to the study of politics, but as the editors of this new collection note, enthusiasm for studying it has waxed and waned with different analytical fashions in political science. Opinion has sometimes been polarized between those who think that only the state matters, and others who think it does not matter at all. A distinction has often been drawn as a result between state- and society-centred explanations of politics, which disagree on whether the state has real autonomy or whether it is a cipher for forces outside itself. Even many of those who think the state is important dislike the term state, and prefer to disaggregate it into the institutions and processes that comprise it.
This book belongs quite firmly to the side of the debate that thinks the state is important and should be a key focus for study. The rationale for this comes from the earlier book on
As will be clear from the above list, no single approach is being offered or imposed by the editors. The methodological positions of the various contributors are quite diverse, ranging from rational choice to anti-foundationalism. The collection offers, not a new unified theory of the state, but a toolkit of different approaches and methods, written by leading authorities, including Martin Smith on pluralism, Mark Evans on elitism, Vivien Schmidt on institutionalism, and Andrew Hindmoor on public choice. If there is a unifying theme in the collection it is that, as Johan Kantola argues in the chapter on feminism, the state is best understood not for what it is but for what it does, or as Alan Finlayson and James Martin put it in their chapter on post-structuralism, the object of enquiry is not the state as such but 'a diverse range of agencies, apparatuses and practices producing varied mechanisms of control and varied forms of knowledge that make areas or aspects of social life available for governmental action' (p. 167). The language is different but the approach is not dissimilar in the chapter on governance by Guy Peters and Jon Pierre, or the chapter on state boundaries by Matthew Flinders.
Another unifying theme is the attempt to transcend the Scylla and Charybdis of structure and agency. Colin Hay and Michael Lister argue that the concept of the state alerts researchers to the existence of constraints, safeguarding them against uncritical voluntarism, but at the same time they warn against some older variants of state theory which tended to get rid of agency altogether and treated the state as having no autonomy at all. Such a stance is particularly important because the editors wish to resist the idea that recent economic and social changes are making the state less important. A theme which runs through the collection - for instance, in the chapters by Georg Sørensen on the transformation of the state, and by Nicola Hothi, David Marsh and Nicola Smith on globalization and the state - is the impact of globalization on contemporary forms of the state, the ways in which it has and has not transformed the state. Behaviouralism at one time threatened to undermine the traditional focus on the state, but more recently it has been globalization with its implication that the powers and authority of the nation-state is withering away and a borderless world is coming into existence. This presents a particular challenge to the Weberian concept of the state, which remains so central to our understanding of state institutional forms and capacities. But most of the authors here argue that the case has often been exaggerated. As Peters and Pierre put it, the real issue is about the changing role of government in governance, not the disappearance of government.
In the concluding chapter, David Marsh and Michael Lister argue that although there is no complete convergence in theories of the state, and never likely to be, there has nevertheless been a retreat from some of the extreme polarized positions that could be found in older state theory. This present collection is a good example of that shift, and also of the vitality and range of contemporary thinking on the state. It is a welcome and valuable addition to the literature on state theory.