Part I Emergence: Towards a Framework for Studying State- State-facilitated Governance State-facilitated Governance
Chapter 5. The Conditions of Modern Statehood
5.1 Towards the modern state
5.1.3 Impersonalization and the emergentist institutional self-interest of the state
121
category – it seems sufficient to say that the state has a more or less systematic relatively unmatched capacity and authority with regards to the relevant monopoly.
Clearly, roughly in line with Weber’s thinking (see more generally Anter 2014: 33), the distinctive constitutive authoritative status of the above four monopolies is both (1) dependent on the state’s concentration of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1994, 2005) – notably, the necessary constitutive role of symbolic power and symbolic violence in the historical formation of modern statehood – and (2) critically hinges on the material quality of the force monopoly (cf., e.g., Thorup 2015: 119).116 That said, while Weber (1978: 54) understood that ‘the use of physical force (…) is neither the sole, nor even the most usual, method of administration of political organizations’, he nevertheless stressed that the
‘threat of force, and in the case of need its actual use, is the method which is specific to political organizations and is always the last resort when others have failed’. In this Weberian-Schmittian sense, while, for example, taxation is plausibly most effectively exercised through a state monopoly, it is the original and underlying ultimate coercive or materially physical nature of the state that insures the authority of its fiscal monopoly.
122
characterized by four key partly consecutive ‘struggles’, which in the end culminated in the
‘triumph of the monarchs’, namely the struggle against the church, the Empire, the nobility and the towns. In this period, we thus see the territorial concentration of private violence; one may say that at the end of this rivalrous process, relatively successful or stable military or force monopolies are set up.
x Stage two – roughly 17-18thcentury. Central to this period is ‘the rationalization of rule’ (Poggi 2003). Here, successful or at least surviving power centers gradually sought to ‘exercise rule in a more purposeful, continuous, self-conscious manner’ (Ibid.: 251). In this period, the accumulation of might increasingly takes on a fiscal or extractive character, administrative offices are set up and (self-)binding laws and procedures emerge (Ibid.: 151-2). For van Creveld (1999), the period 1648-1789 covers the emergence of the ‘state as an instrument’. We observe the emergence of bureaucratic arrangements and officials (notably ‘secretaries of state’), statistical and fiscal techniques and infrastructures, ‘state-owned armies and navies’, and so on (Ibid.: 130, 143-155, 156, passim). Via a form of enlightened absolutism or enlightened absolutist statehood – underpinned by a creeping ‘reason of state’ – we see the gradual coming into existence of a state apparatus, which, towards the end of this process, to some considerable degree ‘emancipated itself both from royal control and from civil society’ (Ibid.: 127).
x Stage three – roughly 19th-20th century. Central to this period is, according to Poggi (2003), the
‘expansion of rule’. Here, we see the opening up and cumulative expansion of state structures;
an increased involvement ‘in a greater and greater number and variety of social tasks’, both triggering and responding to various social, economic, political and cultural ‘modernization’
processes (Ibid.: 252-3). For van Creveld (1999) the period 1789-1945 covers the process instituting the ‘state as an ideal’; the state shifts from being an instrument for ruling to becoming an ideal or ‘an end, and later, a living god’ (Ibid.: 190). In this period we observe the state formally ‘conquering money’ – that is, authorizing, printing and concentrating/accumulating it successfully – and, under the weight of a brewing nationalism,
123
institutionalizing intricate systems of policing and imprisonment, mass education and social services (Ibid.: 224-242, passim).117
Another more analytical-intensive way to depict the above synthetic three-stage scheme, is to describe it, drawing on Bourdieu (1994, 2005), as a two-stage transition from personal to what he denotes as ‘impersonal’ bureaucratic power (see also Thorup 2015).118 For Bourdieu (2005: e.g., 30, passim), the period 1330-1630 is centered on what he (perhaps anachronistically) terms the ‘dynastic state’, characterized inter alia by feudal nobility and the personalized hereditary reproduction of the
‘king’s household’. From the 17th century, Bourdieu (2005: 30, passim) argues, we observe the genesis of a, properly speaking, modern ‘bureaucratic state’. This Bourdieusian two-stage-transition thus involves a gradual shift from a feudal, hereditary, dynastic and patrimonial form of personal authority to a bureaucratic, administrative and differentiated form of impersonal public power. Toying with the notion of the ‘impersonal’ bureaucratic state, one may perceive this trajectory, which to a large extent corresponds to the above three-stage account of state-formation, as an overarching gradual process of impersonalization.119
With regards to the dynamics of this process, both Bourdieu (2005) and van Creveld (1999) seem to agree on the historical importance of what may be termed the functional delegation mechanism. For Bourdieu (2005: 48), the bureaucratization process – the shift from personal to impersonal power – ultimately came about through ‘the differentiation of power and (…) the lengthening of the chains of authority and agency’. In particular, the regularization of law, a civil service (especially jurists) and new administrative procedures helped foster an understanding and notion of universality and ‘public
117 One might add that the ‘expansion of rule’ in this period also entails the gradual (and not always successful) spreading and mainstreaming across the globe of a certain version of modern statehood, developed and refined primarily in Western Europe, particularly after 1945 (on this, see van Creveld 1999: 263-335).
118 Weber (e.g., 1948: 229) also speaks of bureaucracy as being ‘impersonal’.
119 In Weber’s (1948: 334) text Intermediate Reflections (with the subtitle Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions) he refers to ’depersonalization’ (Verunpersönlichung) – or in some translations
‘impersonalization’ – in connection to the bureaucratic state. Bourdieu (2005) seems to prefer other terms which strongly correlates with this macro-oriented process, such as ‘defeudalization’ or ‘bureaucratization’. See also Thorup (2015).
124
interest’ (Ibid.: 43-50). According to van Creveld (1999: 125), ‘the more absolute any monarch the greater his dependence on impersonal bureaucratic, military, and legal mechanisms to transmit his will and impose it on society at large’. From this functional monarchical impulse we see, ‘[i]n the end’, that
‘those mechanisms showed themselves capable of functioning without him and were even destined to take power away from him’ (Ibid.). In this understanding, delegation, initially triggered by (enlightened) absolutist monarchs out of mainly functional considerations, help set in motion the first stage of a long and gradual process of impersonalization of ruling authority – and, eventually, modern bureaucratic statehood and variegated forms of advanced political-institutional embracement and fiscal accumulation.
Through the process of impersonalization, we see the gradual emergence of a separate institutional sphere of governing. In van Creveld’s (1999: 258) words, one can say that ‘[s]tage by stage’ the state, or perhaps, the state-in-making, ‘separated itself from, and raised itself above, civil society’. Emerging out of essentially feudal structures, the modern state eventually appears as an
‘organized power of decision’ with a sovereign authority distinguishable from that of civil society (Böckenförde 1991: 150). According to Quentin Skinner’s (1989, 2002, 2009) genealogical analysis of the concept of the state – which looks at a historical process that both in timing and content strongly correlates with the above outlined state-formation trajectory – Thomas Hobbes appears as the foundational thinker of the modern (sovereign) state. Looking roughly at the period 14th century till 18th century, Skinner traces the political-theoretical transformations from, amongst many other labels, Machiavelli’s stato (focused on princely rulership) to Hobbes’ ‘fictional’ Leviathan. From the perspective of Hobbes’ 17th century ‘fictional theory’, going from ‘the person of the ruler’ to the
‘person of the state’ means to confer power on a sovereign who is ‘merely ‘personating’ the state’
(Skinner 2002: 9, 2009: 347). This understanding of the state, which breaks with the specific person of the ruler – in Machiavelli’s terms this would be princely rule, in Bourdieu’s (2005) terms this would be the ‘king’s household’ – entails a devaluing of ‘the more charismatic elements of political leadership’
(Skinner 2002: 411); instead the state becomes ‘an artificial person’, or simply ‘the seat of sovereignty’
(Ibid.: 410, 409). In this way, according to Skinner (1989: 112), the modern concept of the state has a
‘doubly impersonal character’: on the one hand, the state’s authority is distinguished ‘from that of the rulers or magistrates’, and on the other, it is distinguished ‘from that of the whole society or community’. From this perspective – where the modern state is an ‘authority distinct from rulers and
125
ruled’ (Skinner 2002: 386) – the state ‘must be acknowledged to be an entity with a life of its own’
(Skinner 1989: 112).
Despite Thomas Hobbes offering, as seen above, an inaccurate depiction of the actual genesis of the modern state (see also Sagar 2015) – loosely paraphrasing Marx (1990: 926) on the ‘primitive’
origins of capitalism, one can say that the state ‘comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’120 – he nevertheless implicitly provides us with an early and intellectually productive emergentist account of this particular entity.121 The Hobbesian-Skinnerian emergentist account of the state appears in the way in which Hobbes (2008: 106-7, emphasis removed) refers to the state as a third, separate, entity: a ‘feigned’ or ‘artifical person’, an ‘actor’ or ‘representer’.
The emergentist element, the fact of something being qualitatively more than the simple sum of its aggregate parts, appears when ‘[a] multitude of men, are made one person’ – that is, a ‘unity of the representer (…) that maketh the person one’ (Ibid.: 109, emphasis in original). Interestingly, the classical frontispiece of Leviathan from 1651 precisely illustrates, as Skinner’s (2008: 185-198) analysis of this also seems to convey, the abstract emergent power of the sovereign state, as well as the challenges of graphically depicting this: Hobbes’ Commonwealth can neither be reduced to the head (the king) nor the body (the people, subjects, citizens, etc.) – it is a synthetic third entity.122
Arguably, one can detect an implicit harmony between the relational emergentist character of the modern Hobbesian-Skinnerian sovereign state and the Staatslehre tradition’s description of the irreducibility of the state entity. In both cases it implicitly follows that one should problematize the question of the direct empirical comprehensibility of the state – a problem which seems particularly pertinent for scholarship working from a broadly construed ‘phenomenalist’ position (Jackson 2011:
42). Thus, in their own distinctive phenomenalist ways, both empiricist scholarship looking at state and government, such as Weberian conceptions of statehood (notably Evans et al. 1985a) or
120 Although Hobbes himself seems to have believed, although in a fairly qualified manner, in the historical reality of the State of War (Gaskin 2008: xxxii; Sagar 2015: 105), neither the early/original authorization of sovereignty via the Covenant nor the ruthless State of Nature ever took place or existed in the way described.
121 Neither Hobbes, nor Skinner, social-theoretically verbalize their understanding of the modern state as being emergentist.
122 According to the alternative reading of Kristiansson & Tralau (2014) we (also) see a hidden monster on Leviathan’s frontispiece.
126
pluralist governance scholarship (notably Rhodes 1996, 1994), and more nominalist constructivist/poststructuralist conceptions of advanced governing and authority, such as neo-Foucauldian governmentality studies (notably Miller & Rose 1990; Rose & Miller 1992), tend to lose sight of the abstract, impersonal, irreducible and contingently observable emergentist character of the modern state entity.
While Hobbes presents us with what in the Skinnerian perspective is referred to as the ‘fictional theory of the state’, Skinner (2009: 347) reminds us that ‘it would be a grave mistake according to Hobbes to dismiss the importance of the state on the grounds of its merely fictional character’. While the state, in the Hobbesian-Skinnerian perspective, should be regarded as an artificial or fictional person (persona ficta) this does not diminish its reality or its objective performativity (see also Loughlin 2009:
8; cf. Thorup 2015).123 Two arguments (out of a potentially extensive list) in support of this may briefly be provided with regards to contemporary statehood. Firstly, as Skinner (2009: 344, 347) also stresses, one may speak of the existence and efficiency of an attribution mechanism. As Alf Ross (1961: 115, emphasis removed) puts it, ‘certain acts that are in reality performed by definite individuals (…) are spoken of as being performed (…) by a subject called ‘the State’’. International law explicitly allows for, and takes into account, this mechanism of attribution: the juridical character of the state – ‘a being which is on a higher plane and is more powerful than man’– allows various ‘organs’ to speak and act on its behalf (Ross 1961: 118).124 Such form of Hobbesian ‘attributed action’ (Skinner 2009: 347) is for example implied in the fourth criteria of statehood in The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), which concerns a state’s ‘capacity to enter into relations with other states’.
Also, a head of state, a minister of foreign affairs, diplomatic officers, etc., are considered
123 Against this, see for example Abrams (1988: 75, 79, emphasis in original) who believe that we should
‘abandon the state as a material object’ or deny the ‘reality of the state’, in favor of merely stressing the ‘cogency of the idea of the state as an ideological power’.
124 It should be emphasized that even though Ross (1961: 125) accepts the ‘as if’ quality of the state, (what may be perceived as) his legal nominalism nonetheless makes him very skeptical of ‘substantial-metaphysical’
understandings of statehood.
127
‘internationally protected persons’ because of their capacity to act on behalf of the state (as agents of the state), as if they were the state.125
Secondly, the very fact that the state is regarded as a ‘person’ of international law (of course along with other important entities) – which, according to a leading textbook on this matter, entails that it is perceived as ‘possessing the capacity to have and to maintain certain rights, and being subject to perform certain duties’ (Shaw 2008: 175) – is absolutely crucial, since without a ‘legal personality’, without being recognized as a legal person by (international) law, the state loses its title as a state-subject.126
Complex emergent social entities, such as the modern state, appear, and become institutionally meaningful and operational, through their legal personality – that is, more generically, through corporate personhood. In James S. Coleman’s (1974, 1982) two books Power and the Structure of Society and The Asymmetric Society he makes a helpful simple distinction between two distinctive actors of modern society, namely ‘corporate actors’ and ‘natural persons’ (e.g., Coleman 1982: 19).
Whereas the natural person is a tangible person of flesh and blood, the corporate actor is a ‘juristic person’, who/which amongst other things is able to ‘substitute functionally for a natural person’, ‘act in a unitary way’, ‘own resources’, ‘have rights and responsibilities’, and ‘occupy the fixed functional position or estate which [have] been imposed on natural persons’ (Ibid.: 14). While the business corporation obviously represents the exemplary or most well-known corporate actor, the modern state is, as Coleman (1982: 50, 37, 1974: 29) variously puts it, a ‘single exceptional corporate actor’ or a
‘special case’. Like modern business companies (‘corporations’), modern states are corporate bodies that, amongst other things, accumulate and concentrate power/resources and engage with other corporate-institutional persons.
Corporate-institutional entities (or bodies, actors, persons, etc.) embody modern dynamics – they are, as Harari (2014: 27) would have it, what makes enduring, advanced and flexible ‘large-scale human cooperation’ possible. From a long-term historical perspective, one can say that sapiens’ basic ability to imagine and tell stories becomes ‘real’ when the fictional abstractions acquire a collective
125 See, for example, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents (1973).
126 According to Ross (1961: 114), ‘[a] definition of the concept ‘State’ is undoubtedly required in international law, because the rules of international law have reference (in the first resort) precisely to ‘States’’.
128
character in the form of a legal codification or institutional-material sedimentation, which enables millions of humans to ‘cooperate and work towards common goals’ (Ibid.: 31).127 Importantly, the corporate-institutional personality critically conditions, or makes possible, a range of activities and situations: it allow for authorized delegation, attribution, dispersion, and distribution, etc. – processes which may still maintain the monopoly status of the particular entity engaging in this activity; it entails that complex social entities may exist, in an enduring way, as (legal, bureaucratic, administrative, nominal) abstractions; using Coleman’s terminology one can say that unlike ‘natural persons’,
‘corporate persons’ can be present physically or organizationally in potentially endless locations at the same time.128 Moreover, from a basic Staatslehre perspective one can say that the legal-institutional character of the corporate body ensures that one cannot reduce it to one of its constitutive dimensions.
Thus, even though one were to replace the specific employees (the Volk), the physical property (the territory) or (even) the CEO (the head of state/government), the corporate entity would nevertheless remain, as if for an eternity (see also Loughlin 2009: 8).
As argued in chapter 3, the relational emergentism of complex corporate-institutional entities not only warrants a permanent condition of ontological (and conceptual) irreducibility and epistemological contingent observability, it also renders social-theoretically meaningful that social entities can possess/concentrate their own distinctive causal powers. Specifically, the existence of emergent causal powers in relation to complex corporate-institutional entities is particularly saliently expressed through the Hobbesian-Skinnerian modern sovereign state, which precisely should be considered an ‘entity with a life of its own’ (Skinner 1989: 112). Importantly, emergentism philosophically and social-theoretically conditions the existence of a separation or a distinction between the modern state entity and the underlying constitutive societal structures and dynamics. It renders meaningful a historical process culminating in the appearance of, using the formulation of Villadsen & Dean (2012: 406), a
127 Historians have deemed the period 70,000-30,000 years before present as the ‘cognitive revolution’ – a great leap forward for homo sapiens starting with the spreading out of Africa, critical inventions such as ‘boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles’, and the appearance of the first forms of ‘art’ (Harari 2014: 21, 3-74).
Particularly the ‘lion-man’ ivory figurine from the Stadel Cave in Germany and the red-colored human handprint in the Chauved-Pont-d’Arc Cave in Southern France, both dated circa 30,000 years ago, illustrates the cognitive revolution in human’s ability to create fictional abstractions and collective imaginations (Ibid.: 1, 23, 20-39).
128 Of course, modern technology at least partly allows ‘natural persons’ this privilege.
129
‘state-civil society binary’.129 As Böckenförde (1991: 151, fn. 11) reminds us, it is precisely the historical ‘objectivization’ of the state, ‘the formation of a state person independent of the ruler’, which produces a state-society distinction.
It is precisely as part of this historical cumulative process of gradual independence – or, as above, impersonalization, or, perhaps, extra-individualization – that we see the emergence and eventual consolidation of what may be described as, using Offe’s (1984: 120, emphasis removed) expression, the modern state’s emergent ‘institutional self-interest’.130 Despite his general adherence to a form of methodological individualism, Coleman (1974, 1982) productively brings attention to the ‘interest’ of corporate actors (see also Swedberg 2005: 61-2) – that is, the fact that larger sociological units can have a self-interested agenda. Although it would be impossible to take on board his rather complicated framework, Touraine (1977: 218) seems correct when pointing out that although ultimately stemming from society – as a ‘go-between’ – ‘the state is itself an organization’. In a similar spirit, while Bourdieu’s understanding of the state perceives the state as a bureaucratic ‘arena of struggle for statist capital’ (Swartz 2013: 135, 136), it also recognizes that the state has developed into a ‘distinct field [that] generates its own particular sets of interests’. As Cerny (1990: 96) points out, the state has historically shifted from ‘being a rambling and diffuse structure (…) to being a more dense structure, clearly differentiated from other structures and therefore developing its own logic and autonomy’.
The gradual consolidation of an emergent logic of statehood also points towards the emergence of a form of ‘organizational solipsism’ (Marchese 2012); the process of extra-individualization – the shaping of a sui generis corporate quality of the state – helps foster a certain causally relevant institutional-organizational uni-perspectivalism on the part of the state. As shortly mentioned earlier, in his book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott (1998) productively points to the notion of ‘state simplifications’ and the existence of a ‘lens’ (particularly a ‘fiscal lens’) of the state. Importantly, for
129 Arguably, Villadsen & Dean (2012) primarily seek to normatively defend the maintenance of a ‘state-civil society binary’ rather than necessarily posit the more objective existence of the separateness of the state from civil society.
130 Claus Offe uses this expression in passing, and in a mostly commonsensical way, without really elaborating on it. While Offe (1984: 120, emphasis removed and added) seems to speak specifically of the ‘institutional self-interest of the state in accumulation’, my intention is to use the idea of an ‘institutional self-self-interest’ in a more expansive manner, to have it represent a more generic feature of institutional-organizational relations and have it cover a broader range of tasks and operations.
130
Scott (1998: 3), state simplifications, accumulated over many years of state-formation, ‘[do] not merely describe’ or ‘represent’ (in an always inaccurate way) they also for example ‘create’ via giving categories ‘the force of law’. The complexity-reducing ‘intellectual filter’ of the state’s fiscal lens serves to centralize decision-making and discipline it ‘by a small number of objectives’ (Ibid.: 22, 23).
Such forms of organizational solipsism corresponds well with the attitude of the LAF approach, which, as I have pointed out earlier, was naturally interested in looking at crises tendencies and tensions in a mediated way – that is, from within the institutional or organizational perspective of the state.
When speaking of the state’s ‘institutional self-interest’ one may naturally ask: a self-interest in what? One may stipulate that at bottom, the modern state ultimately seeks survival or self-preservation – that is, its basic end (what has often been labeled its ‘Raison d’être’) is simply to maintain/maximize itself (as a state). Or one could say that the modern state is, to use Norbert Elias’
term, a ‘survival unit’ (on this, see Kaspersen & Gabriel 2008: 377). While, as argued, Weber proposed to speak of the means as opposed to the ends/purposes of the state, ‘it is possible to detect the outlines’
(Anter 2014: 16) of an end/purpose in Weber’s writings. Following Anter’s (Ibid.: 17, 16) reading, Weber, although without explicating the order concept, speaks of making ‘use of the monopoly of force for executive implementation of orders’, or, with regards to early state-formation, he comments that
‘the Prince wants ‘order’’.131 That said, and while it remains fairly generic, this idea of a basic ‘interest in order’ (Hegel, as cited in Anter 2014: 16), nonetheless points us in the right direction: the modern state is a certain form of social order – an Anstaltsbetrieb in which, amongst other things, ‘organized activities’ are ‘oriented to the enforcement and realization of this order’ (Dusza 1989: 76). One can perhaps speak of a cardinal motivation: the ontological maintenance/maximization of the state as a social order.
While there is admittedly a certain naivety associated with the notion of ‘interest’ or the state’s
‘institutional self-interest’ – and although I have no space here to survey the various particularly sociological, economic and political science usages and understandings of the concept of interest (on this, see Swedberg 2005: 48-94) – one can follow Swedberg’s (Ibid.: 95, emphasis added) Wittgensteinian advice to ‘use the analogy of following a signpost as part of an attempt to get at the
131 At one point Weber (1948: 334) also boldly states that ‘[t]he state’s absolute end is to safeguard (or to change) the external and internal distribution of power’
131
meaning of interest’. In this view, the signpost tells actors ‘where to go’, it points towards a ‘direction’,
‘a certain type of activity’ (Ibid.: 106, 96, emphasis removed). Importantly, as Swedberg (Ibid.: 96) points out, while ‘a signpost may seem to give sure directions of where to go (…) in reality [it] only indicates a general direction’. In this way, while one cannot speak with certainty of the successful maintenance of an eternal interest of the state it is possible to point towards a historically informed direction and tendentiality/disposition.