Table Of ContentStates in History
Iniias is a new Blackwell series which makes available in paperback
some of the most adventurous writing in the social and humane sciences
in recent years, extending the frontiers of research, crossing disciplinary
borders and setting new intellectual standards in international scholar-
ship. Published and fordicoming titles include:
Jean Baechler, john A. Hall and Michael Mann, Europe and the Rise
Capitalism
Colin Campbell, The Romantéc Ethic anal z*heSpirit 0f/l/lodem Consumerism
William Connolly, Political Theory and it/Ioeiewziqy
john A- Hall (ed.), States in History
Alan Macfarlane, The Culture 0f Capizalism
Derek Sayer, The Violence of/*llvstrection
Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin, The Capitalist City
States in History
Edited by
John A. Had
Basil Blackwell
© Basil Blackwell Ltd 1986
First published 1986
First published in the USA 1987
First published in paperback 1989
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Libewjl of Congress Cara forging in Puéficazion Data
States in History.
Includes index.
1. Constitutional history. 2. Comparative
government. 3. State, The. I. I all, john A.,
1949-
]F3l.S73 1986 320.1 86-11804
ISBN 0-631_ 14365-3
ISBN 0-631-17136-3 (pack_)
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Printed in Great Britain by The Camelot Press, Southampton
Contents
Introduction 1
john A. Hal!
1 Hunter-Gatherers and the Origin of States 22
Clive Gamble
2 The Tribe and the State 48
Patricia Crrmc'
3 Soviets against Wittfogel: or, the Anthropological
Preconditions of Mature Marxism 78
Ernest Gellner
4 The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins,
Mechanisms and Results 109
Michael Mann
5 City-States 137
Peter Hurlee
6 States and Economic Development: Reflections on
Adam Smith 154
john A. Hall
7 Sharing Public Space' States and Organized Interests
in Western Europe 177
Colin Crouch
8 State and Politics in Developed Socialism: Recent
Developments in Soviet Theory 211
Karen Dawisha
9 State-Making and Nation-Building 228
Anthony D. Smllth
vi Contents
,
10 Patterns of State-Building in Brazil and Argentina 264
1
G. Merquior
11 Supranationals and the State 289
Susan Strange
Notes on Contributors 306
Index 307
\
Introduction
john A. Hal!
It is widely agreed that the state is now at the centre of our attention.
Given the importance of coercion and violence as forces affecting the
historical record, this can only be welcomed as a wholly beneficial
development. Indeed it is, at first sight, highly puzzling that the state was
once somehow 'off the agenda' and that its salience needed to be
rediscovered. This introduction begins by explaining the 'withering
away of the state': of course, the explanation says more about hopes
entertained by social theorists than it does about actual patterns of social
development. A second section describes and evaluates the character of
the recent rediscovery of the state. The argument of the book is, of
-
course, that ofits title that states must be considered in their historical
contexts l and the fin_,1] section of this introduction spells out this
position. In those final comments, I have also chosen to highlight the
advances, conceptual and substantive, made by the various contributors
of this volume to the understanding of the behavior of states.
'The Witherlng Away of the State'
To discuss the state is to consider the political. There is, of course, a
vast history of 'things political'. Each of the world civilizations, for
example, has a particular view of the role and duty of states, such
views are occasionally considered in this book. However, the hope that
the state would 'wither away' is particularly Western and modern. It
would not have been comprehensible to the Greeks who regarded the
poleS as the highest expression of communal life. The Greek experi-
ence, mediated by the Renaissance, created a tradition of 'civic
hurnanisnl', interested in the nature of corruption and the possibility of
civic virtue, this is a political theory whose influence is by no means
2 _johnA. Hall
finished* But it is fair to say that a rather different and more modern
tradition has had greater importance, and it is certainly from this view-
point that hopes for the 'widiering away of the state' derive.
This modern viewpoint is that of classical liberalism, which sees civil
society as die fount of all virtue. It is very likely that this viewpoint
derives from the decentred but contractualistic civil society, described
in my own chapter, established in North-Western Europe after the Fall
of Rome. The liberal viewpoint was not one which was necessarily anti-
political? However, it is true that a large part of the liberal interest in
politics was negative: the question they asked was how to control
political power so that the beneficial workings of civil society could
proceed unhindered. But a liberal thinker such as Adam Smith had a
lively positive appreciation of the necessity of the state to carry out
certain key social functions, most notably those of deface, the estab-
lishment and maintenance of the rule of law and the protection of
property. Even James and john Mill, the advocates of a new democratic
era, did not simply trust society as it actally was; they believed that the
rule of the wise would need to continue for some considerable time, and
that the state should certainly engage in a great deal of social engineer-
ing in order to improve society?
Nevertheless, it was the aspect ofliberalisrn that stressed the minimal
functions of the state that proved to be most influential, Perhaps this was
due to the extraordinary impact of Herbert Spencer, whose thought is
relevant here in two ways. First, Spencer entertained in a fully
systematic way the notion of the end of the state: as individualism
developed and SO gained a sense of social responsibility, it became
realistic to envisage that it might be so perfected as to allow social life to
be guided merely by contractual relationships between free agents.'*
Second, Spencer, as was so often the case, summed up Victorian hopes
when he claimed that the spread of commerce would bring in its wake a
reign of peace. Wars were created by the remnants of feudal aristo-
cracies, overly represented in the Foreign Offices of various countries,
whose style of life, being honorific and militaristic, encouraged war.
Once such remnants were removed from office, the spread of commerce
would unite the nations of the world through specialization and by
1 Recent interest in the tradition has owed much to the work off. G. A. Pocock, and in
particular to his The Mach zkweilian Moment, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975.
Modern thinkers influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by this tradition include
_Iiirgen Haherxnas, Alasdair Maclntyre and Hannah Arendt.
2 I have benefited from the account of liberalism in D. Held, 'Central perspectives on
the modem state', in D. Held, j. Anderson, B. Gieben, S. Hall, L. Harris, P. Lewis,
N. Parker, B. Tirok, eds, States and Societies, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1983.
3 J- A. Hall, Liberalism, London, Granada, 1987, chapters 2-4.
4 j. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1981.
Introduction 3
means of increasing prosperity. The development of social relations
would mean that states would be deprived of what was, and what was
generally recognized to be, their single most important historic liunction,
namely that of preparing for and engaging in war.
It is well known that sustained attack on a particular intellectual
position is no bar to unconscious acceptance of many of its key pre-
suppositions. Karl Marx is a prime example of this. He took society-
centred analysis to an extreme similar to that of Spencer when he
announced that the state would have no reason to exist once the era of
class history had been finished: states, deprived of their function would
'wither away'. Ernest Gellner's chapter makes it clear that the key intel-
lectual presupposition at work here is that there is but a single source of
evil in human affairs, that of economic exploitation by class, and that
there is no ontological basis to political coercion. None of this is, of
course, to say that Marx did not offer interesting comments about
various states which were in existence, albeit these were fragmentary
rather than systematic in nature. But these do not in any way go against
the society-centred nature of his general approach. His most important
and central point was to reject that part of liberal theory which had seen
the state as a source of power in its own right, fit to be controlled so that
it could not interfere with the beneficial workings of civil society. He
insisted that it was an utter- delusion tO believe that the restrictions of
which liberal political theorists were so proud were in any way real, let
alone important. The freedoms established by the bourgeois class were
merely formal, this was necessarily so since the state was merely the
instrument of the bourgeoisie, doing the bidding of the capitalist class.
Marx replaced the political problem with the social problem, and his
work has been the single most important source of the loss of interest in
the state in modern social science.
Scholars oflVlarx, keen to make his work more relevant to the modern
era, have combed his writings to discover more sophisticated statements
about the state. They have been successful. Marxwas aware of differ-
ences in patterns of state-buildingbetween various European states, and
he had particularly interesting comments to make about the Bonapartist
state of Napoleon 111.5 His comments about the latter were sufficiently
interesting to allow later theorists to build up a more general Marxist
view of the state. A state can, according to this interpretation, gain a
measure of autonomy by standing between different social classes. I
doubt very much, however, whether this fundamentally challenges the
society-centred nature of Marx's general approach. Marx's analysis of
5 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brw:»1azlre of Lwuk Bonaparte, New York, International
Publishers, 1963.
