6 State

Interdisciplinarity of political sociological questions is no more evident than in the case of study of state. In this chapter, we will invite readings of a number of influential works that employs different methodologies and therefore produce different answers to the question of the state.

The Development of The Modern State, Gianfranco Poggi, 1978

In different democracies, the voting behavior reflects a division between urban centers and rural areas; the coast and the mainland. What’s the source of this recurring pattern? While cities with their intrinsic cultural pluralism and economical diversity are prone to celebrate a politics of freedom; the country-side often finds tradition and communal identity as the main fronts of the political —often defensively. Thus, the value-ridden division of politics into reactionaries and revolutionaries, conservatives and progressives.

While this binary expresses a profound organizing principle rendering intelligible a vast variety political phenomena by placing them on a spectrum, it also gives us a historical hint on the historical roots of the modern state. In this work, Poggi traces the emergence of the absolutist state out of feudal political conflicts. The absolutist state is a critical transitional point in the emergence of modern state. It is a point at which personal and familial tie of the governing body is broken.

The absolutist state will take its constitution as its grounding or legitimating reference instead of family lineage or religious sanctification. It is a a political entity that does not share its sovereignty as opposed to ad-hoc nature of political alliances of the feudal political diagram. The absolutist state claims, in uniform, the territory under its impersonal banner ending feudal dispersal of political space. In practice, administrative workers of the state will be asked to circulate the country in an effort to equalize the field and create a sense of commonality beyond local and customary differences.  Poggi shows the socioeconomic processes that created the condition of possibility by examining economically differentiated actors residing in the cities and in rural areas.

He describes a political triangle: feudal lords, monarch as primus inter pares, and guilded business associations in the cities. The absolutist state came about out of the alliance of the monarch and the city. Business needed protection but even more importantly; regular, impersonal, uniform and reliable rules across geographically disparate trade zones allowing integration of markets and expansion of finance. Monarch benefited from the support of the business as merchants and “middle-class” allowed a distinction and a possibility of consolidating power.

With Poggi’s reading of historical process through which state come about, the students of political sociology will have a chance to witness political economic processes shaping emergence of republican state beyond explanations based on Rousseau’s general will or Marxist notion of bourgeois revolutions. Indeed, expansion of political community to hitherto excluded estates and economic force of new rich will play a strong role in his analysis as well. Yet, Poggi will also show alliances across classes as well as paying attention to particularity of the modern state in its declaration of absolute dictate of law. Abstraction of political power through first constitutional monarchies and then through constitutional republics will open the way for political participation of emerging masses through slow and often contested universalization of suffrage beyond its confinement to men with wealth in classical Athenian democracy.

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France; Michel Foucault

In this series of lectures, Foucault develops for the first time his analytics of biopolitics. Classical political philosophy conceptualized the participants of political community in terms of their intrinsic ability to violate each other’s freedom or each unit’s unique interest. The former called forth a theoretical elaboration on rule of law and its justifications. The later paved the way of political economical critique of modern state by exposing its constituting class context. In Foucault, participants of political community are taken in their biological character. While in Marx and Engels as well the fact of life (bios) was taken into consideration, life was related to work which in its historical determination leading to the formation of class-interest. In Foucault, life relates to norms regulating its health. Similar to Marxian move from individual to class, Foucault will move from individual to population. Yet here, population is not non-historical abstraction or aggregation of a number of individuals but a definite effects of political apparatus. Thus, its not a return to pre-Marxian, uncritical notion of population devoid of technological mediation.

Foucault will analyze how modern state emerged as practices of governance over a population which is forever at risk of straying away from its calculated norms. Birthrates can drop weakening the ability to tax and to recruit for army, production can drop collapsing trade, price of wheat can rise causing hunger and recession, dangerous opinions can widely circulate eroding legitimacy of public figures and driving public mood to undesirable states. In Foucault, politics is control of circulation—circulation of diseases, prices and opinions. It is increasingly statistical and regulatory. The political sociological research is examination political technologies making possible exercise of power.

With these analyses, Foucault will move away from repressive conception of power towards a concept of normalizing power. With this new ideal orienting political rationality, there is also a new relativism introduced into the field. Depending on contingent aims of the state, norms can be redefined. Elimination or eradication can still be its potential aims reminiscent of state’s repressive and brutal phase (as in death penalty) reinforcing its absolutist character (in its public health campaigns to eliminate particular diseases. We’ll see, in the last chapter, how state gradually moves from a model of eradication to modulation), but the new abilities will allow state to fine tune the curve of different rates vital to its governmental performance instead of approaching them as only matters that can be decided within a binary —yes or no. Growing quantification will allow the state to find numbers between 0 and 1 and say more often “maybe”, “sometimes”, “it depends”. This can lead a strict relativisation of local variables or a loosening of mechanical, protocol-based application of force. State will decide when to admit exceptions to the norm and will not find itself threatened in every instance of abnormality. In this, one can see both the overcoming of the conditions and gaining liberty over ossification of rules while also the growing possibility of arbitrariness of the exercise of power.

At times lowering of birth rate will be desirable and at times, its increase. Financially, modulation of minimum-wage, inflation and interest-rates will be economical instruments through which wide range of political effects will be derived. With Foucault, then, widening of political action repertoire is seen as the defining feature of modern state where co-emergence of modern biology and modern state are articulated. Continuity of life will be reflected in the continuity of political rationality. Reaching to a truly secular plateau, the modern state will move in a perpetual present unbound from a particular historical end point. Through the articulation of concept of national security as the culmination of governmental reason assuming what Foucault called pastoral power over population, state will ward off discontinuous phenomena threatening its integrity while at the same time will find insertion of discontinuity through coups as legitimate acts of reestablishing the governmental reason. Determination of true essence of what constitutes the highly normative concept of national security, public health, and threats to those will become central tension points of modern politics.

Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990; Charles Tilly, 1990

In the sociological study of political process there is often an epistemic gap between concepts governing domestic politics and the ones that attend to foreign affairs. It has been difficult to attend to interconnection between interiority of state and its openness to external flows of goods, ideas, people and  geopolitical influences. In this historical work that encompasses a millennia, Tilly attends to processes through which this separation became possible. Medieval wars required effective taxation of the population. This in turn was possible through development of a bureaucracy. Yet the ability to afford a large governmental apparatus demands ongoing financial and ideological gains of warmaking. War expands the markets and creates a common enemy against which national unit is glued together. Thus, Tilly’s famous circularity: war makes states and states make war.

Mothers in Mourning, with the essay Of Amnesty and Its Opposite; Nicole Loraux, 1998

In Foucault’s work, we learn the importance of continuity to political temporality. Just as in establishing uniform authority across space, the state desires seamless perpetuation of its presence in time. Loraux’s work looks at this problematic of interruption by examining formative decrees regulating Athenian democracy. She examines the prohibition placed upon mourning —especially of women. Seeing as disruptive and dangerous laments of women were displaced from public.

Exploring the constitutive exclusions defining the parameters of the state is one of the main reconstructive strategies of political theory. In Loraux’s work, this thinking is not limited to questions of property, sex and race but expands into emotional states. Control of public feeling will be a major governmental interest. Rationalization of emotions from a biopolitical perspective points towards integration of psychological disciplines next to biological and sociological scientific disciplines into the governmental apparatus.

Works Cited

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (M. Senellart, Ed., G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Loraux, N. (1998). Mothers in mourning: With the essay “Of amnesty and its opposite” (C. Pache, Trans.). Cornell University Press.

Poggi, G. (1978). The development of the modern state: A sociological introduction. Stanford University Press.

Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Blackwell.