Foregrounding the legitimation and accumulation functions

As is evident, this study puts focus on the functions of legitimation and fiscal accumulation (and their tension-filled relationship) – that is, two of the four above described functions of modern statehood.

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This analytical decision is of course directly connected to the study’s overall governance-directed agenda. Instead of repeating this agenda, or presenting an exhaustive list of reasons for why the study seeks to foreground specifically legitimation and fiscal accumulation, three (partly additional) factors shall be briefly discussed.

Firstly, and most evidently, the decision to focus on particularly these two dimensions of functional reproduction is an analytically motivated move that flows directly from the prior choice to adopt/rework/resituate the LAF approach. I have already presented the basic properties of the LAF approach and their arguments concerning the tension-filled relationship between legitimation and accumulation – the existence and central importance of which they partly took for granted as productive analytical premises. Basically, internal differences notwithstanding, the overall argument of the LAF approach concerned how the (ultimately Marxist) antagonism between the ‘socialization of costs and the private appropriation of profits’ (O’Connor 1973: 9; see also Offe 1984: 49; Habermas 1973: 20-24) became institutionally-organizationally transferred to the increasingly ‘politicized’ democratic capitalist states, destabilizing and straining them, and would tendentially culminate in regular notably fiscal and/or legitimation crises.

Secondly, the fact that many other notable strands of thinking in their own distinctive ways have pointed to the relationship between overall somewhat correlative types of forces – namely economic/fiscal and cultural/normative – as key to understanding the general dynamics of contemporary advanced Western societies, generically and indirectly bolsters the saliency of specifically emphasizing the tension-filled relationship between the legitimation and fiscal function of the state. As argued, the LAF approach provides a particular functionalist and state-situated account of these general dynamics that, as explained earlier, introduces a productive analytical/conceptual repertoire for examining the conditions of governance and particularly the post-1970s governance period. Specifically, taking departure in the LAF approach, this study is interested in how a forceful dynamic that to some extent exists ‘out there’ – as both a tension-filled dynamic of modern capitalist society and as a relatively generic property of social action – finds institutionalized expression in the modern state-form, i.e. how it plays out from within a particular institutional-organizational arena, namely the self-interested ‘lens’ of the modern liberal-capitalist democratic polity. In this view, the story of the above dynamic is also very much a story of how the two sides of the tension both become two monopolies of the state and, importantly, two separate state functions.

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Thirdly, through what has been described as the Maslowian hierarchy of state functions, the study has presented a historically informed argument for the contemporary analytical saliency of the legitimatory and fiscal dimensions. Importantly, as argued above, the Maslowian logic implies, in the context of advanced Western European polities and their continuous historical development and institutional-organizational formalization, a relative historical backgrounding of the more ‘basic’

violence-security-sovereignty function and conversely a relative historical foregrounding of the ‘higher’

organizational, fiscal and legitimation functions of the state.

Of course, the decision to focus on the tension-filled relationship between the legitimation and accumulation function of the state – rather than the violence-security-sovereignty or organizational function – to a large extent boils down to an initial analytical or heuristic choice. As mentioned, despite the Maslowian historical logic, the four functions always already dialectically coexist and particularly the violence-security-sovereignty function becomes recognizable or manifest with full force in so-called state-of-exception events. In this sense, any of the four functions could technically speaking be chosen as the focus of a separate study – a study in which this function would be granted its own (partly) separate history and proper treatment. Partly heuristically, then, I have chosen in this study to foreground the twin dimensions of legitimation and fiscalism, knowingly backgrounding the other two constitutive functions of modern statehood.

Clearly, while the LAF scholars by no means would deny the existence/importance of a violence-security-sovereignty function – it was to some extent an (at least) implicit feature of their frameworks¹³⁹ – this feature did not play a central role in their analyses. More generally, as I have argued, the LAF approach usually backgrounded the modern state itself; it would implicitly overwhelmingly operate with a postwar Golden Age typology of the Western liberal-capitalist democratic state. In contrast to this, although the focus is obviously on the legitimation and accumulation functions, this study, and particularly this chapter, explicitly foregrounds this background of modern statehood, i.e., as mentioned, in a sense stressing the Weberian historically informed state-situated side of the ‘Weberian Marxism’ coin.

139 Although space does not allow me to dwell on or further develop this often neglected element of his

framework, it should for example be noted that O’Connor’s (1973: 99, 150-158) analysis spoke of the ‘warfare-welfare state’ and tried to somewhat integrate this into his overall scheme.

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Summing up, this chapter has performed an extensive range of maneuvers indirectly critically renovating, complimenting and extending the (in some ways naturally limited) LAF approach. Modern statehood has been tackled from two interrelated sides: its modern side centered on its modern emergence and characteristics, its corporate impersonalism and ISI and its functional side focused on the dynamics of functional reproduction and the both historical (i.e., the Maslowian hierarchy) and synchronically emergent connection between the four functions. Importantly, this chapter’s selective and ideal-typical examination of some of the key historical and theoretical conditions and dynamics of modern statehood has contributed to the analysis of governance in two main ways: Firstly, it has directly qualified a range of aspects related to both the governance perspective and the basic particularly historical and state-situated conditions of possibility for the shift from government to governance. Secondly, the above examination has indirectly contributed to the analysis of the governance phenomenon by facilitating the next chapter’s (and the study’s ongoing) development of a historically informed framework centered on legitimatory and fiscal state-crafting.

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