6 State

The interdisciplinary character  of political sociological questions is most clearly on display in the study of the state. In this chapter, we will invite readings of a number of influential works that employ 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 is 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-laden 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 as to the 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 the modern state. It is a point at which the personal and familial ties of the governing body are 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 in contrast to the ad-hoc nature of political alliances of the feudal political diagram. The absolutist state claims uniform control over its territory under its impersonal banner, thereby bringing to an end the feudal dispersal of political space. In practice, administrative workers of the state are deployed throughout 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 conditions of possibility for this transformation 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, it needed regular, impersonal, uniform, and reliable rules across geographically disparate trade zones, which allowed for the integration of markets and the expansion of finance. The monarch benefited from the support of the business community as the interests of merchants and other members of the “middle-class” converged with the crown, laying the  groundwork for consolidated absolutist rule.

With Poggi’s reading of the historical process through which the state came about, the students of political sociology will have a chance to witness the political economic processes shaping the emergence of republican without resorting to explanations based on Rousseau’s general will or the Marxist notion of bourgeois revolutions. Indeed, eschewing abstract schemas, Poggi offers an empirical account rooted in the historical  expansion of the political community to hitherto excluded estates and to the economic forces of the newly rich. Yet, Poggi also underscores the importance of cross-class alliances and explores the particularity of the modern state in its principle  of the absolute authority of law. The gradual abstraction of political power first through constitutional monarchies and then through constitutional republics opens the way for the political participation of emerging masses through the slow and often contested universalization of suffrage. This political process of emergence of representative democracy rerevitalized and reinterpreted classical Athenian direct democracy that through the work of Solon and Pericles expanded political participation in order to limit the oligarchic rule by including peasants and artisans in the running of the affairs of the state (Wood, 2015) . While radical for its time in its inclusion of lower-classes within political paradigm, modern democracies eventually formally surpassed Athenian form by including all people irrespective their property-ownership, status and gender.

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978; Michel Foucault

In this series of lectures, Foucault develops for the first time his analytics of biopolitics. Classical political philosophy conceptualized the participants of the 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 of the rule of law and its justifications. The latter paved the way for a political-economic critique of the modern state by exposing its constitutive class context. In Foucault, the participants of the political community are taken in their biological character. While Marx and Engels also took the fact of life (bios) into consideration, life was related to work, which. in its historical determination, leads to the formation of class-interests. In Foucault, by contrast, life relates to the norms regulating its health. Similar to the Marxian move from individual to class, Foucault will move from individual to population. Yet here, population is neither an ahistorical abstraction nor an aggregation of a number of individuals but a definite set of effects of the political apparatus. Thus, Foucault’s intervention is not a return to a pre-Marxian, uncritical notion of population devoid of technological mediation.

Foucault will analyze the ways in which the modern state emerged as a series of practices of governance, exercised over a population which is forever at risk of straying away from the state-calculated  norms. Birthrates can drop, weakening the ability to tax and to recruit for the army. Production can fall, undermining trade. The price of wheat can rise, causing hunger and recession. Dangerous opinions can widely circulate, eroding the legitimacy of public figures and driving the public mood to undesirable states. In Foucault, politics is principally the control of circulation—the circulation of diseases, of prices, of opinions, etc. In the modern period, politics  increasingly becomes a statistical and regulatory phenomenon. Political sociological research is the examination of the political technologies that make possible the exercise of power.

With these analyses, Foucault moves away from the repressive conception of power prevailing in the tradition of political philosophy and towards a concept of normalizing power. Foucault’s discovery of this new ideal orienting modern political rationality implies a new form of relativism in the field of political sociology:: depending upon the contingent aims of the state, norms can be redefined. Elimination or eradication can still be the potential aims of exercises of power —reminiscent of state’s repressive and brutal phase (as in death penalty) reinforcing its absolutist character (as in its public health campaigns to eliminate particular diseases). We’ll see, in the last chapter, how the state gradually moves from a model of eradication to modulation. These emerging capabilities enable the state to fine tune the curves of various demographic rates vital to governmental performance, rather than approaching them merely as matters that can be decided within a binary —yes or no. Growing quantification will allow the state to find numbers between 0 and 1, responding more frequently with “maybe”, “sometimes”, or “it depends”. This shift in governmental reason can lead to a strict relativisation of local variables or to a loosening of mechanical, protocol-based applications of force. The state will decide when to admit exceptions to the norm and will not perceive every instance of abnormality as a threat. In this development, we can see, on the one hand, the overcoming of inherited conditions of state repression and a certain growth of liberty over ossified rules and oppressive restraints; and, on the other hand, we can also see growing opportunities for the arbitrary exercise of power.

In certain circumstances, a decrease of the birth rate will be desirable; while at other times, its increase will be called for.  Economic instruments—such as the modulation of minimum-wages, inflation control, and interest-rate manipulation—become vehicles through which a wide range of political effects are achieved. For Foucault, then, the widening of the repertoire of political action is seen as the defining feature of the modern state, marking the site where modern biology and modern statecraft emerge together in mutual articulation.

The continuity of life will be reflected in the continuity of political rationality. Operating on a truly secular plane, the modern state inhabits a perpetual present, unbound from any particular historical end point.  Through the articulation of the concept of national security—as the culmination of governmental reason marked by what Foucault termed the pastoral power over populations—the state wards off discontinuous phenomena threatening its integrity while simultaneously inserts its own forms of discontinuity, e.g., through coups conceived as legitimate acts necessary for the restoration of orderly and efficient governmental reason. The determination of what constitutes the true essence of the highly normative concepts of national security and public health—as well as what constitutes threats to those normative ideals—will become central tension points of modern politics.

City and governance

• In the works of Poggi and Foucault, cities play a significant role in the development of modern forms of power. Poggi describes the rise of the urban business class as a strategic economic force useful to the absolutist aspirations of monarchist forces, both of which share a common interest in the imposition of uniform rules. In Foucault, the cities are the first target of biopolitical control, where the statistical surgery of the population becomes a veritable possibility.
• Compare historical and technical roles of the city. What is the relationship between cities and political concept of population? How does city before nation-state become the site of intense political governance?

• How is space conceptualized in both accounts? Does Foucault operate within an idealized unity of the city-state that is at times assumed and at times achieved? How does the dispersal of power across feudal networks, cities and and emerging absolutist state in Poggi’s account of European genealogy of modern state complicate Foucault’s story emergence of governmental reason covering the same period of time?
• What are the weakness infusing both accounts of modern European relations of power? How colonialism is under-conceptualized in both accounts? How would you describe colonialism as condition of possibility of modern state?

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

In the sociological study of political processes, there is often an epistemic gap between concepts governing domestic politics and those that attend to foreign affairs. Hence, it has been difficult to grasp the interconnections between the interiority of the 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 the processes through which this separation became possible. Medieval wars required effective taxation of the population. This, in turn, was facilitated through the development of a state bureaucracy. Yet the ability to maintain a large governmental apparatus demands ongoing financial and ideological gains from expensive and socially disruptive warmaking. War expands the markets and creates a common enemy against which the 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 about the importance of continuity to political temporality. Just as it seeks to establish uniform authority across space, the state desires seamless perpetuation of its presence in time. Loraux’s work looks at the problematic of interruption by examining the formative decrees that regulated the Athenian democracy. She examines the prohibition placed upon mourning—especially of women. The laments of women were seen as disruptive and dangerous, and thus were displaced from the public sphere.

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. The control of public feeling will be a major governmental interest. The rationalization of emotions from a biopolitical perspective points towards the integration of psychological disciplines alongside biological and sociological  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.

Wood, E. W. (2015) Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy. Verso.