Society-centered approaches
Utilitarian approaches
Eric Nordlinger’s On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (1981) attempts to adapt the utilitarian method to states that act according to their own agendas.
Nordlinger does so first by introducing a utilitarian (but non-public choice) definition of the state. The term “state,” we are told, “refers to all those individuals who occupy offices that authorize them, and them alone, to make and apply decisions that are binding on any and all segments of society” (1981:11). We learn two important things about the state from this definition. First, it consists of individuals and, second, it stands apart from the society on which its decisions are binding. From this definition of the state how do we get to state autonomy? Individuals have preferences that are expressed as political claims (political demands). Similarly, individuals in authorized public offices have preferences that in turn may arise from the preferences of their constituents, their own personalities, or the structure of political authority within which they operate. State autonomy for Nordlinger, then, consists in the capacity of state leaders so defined to execute their preferences by translating them into public policy, whether or not in opposition to the preferences of nonofficeholders.The logical determination of state autonomy is easy enough. Private individuals have preferences. Individuals holding public office have preferences. Sometimes they conflict, and when they conflict, sometimes holders of public office win. When they do we have state autonomy. Nordlinger presents the problem of state autonomy as a straightforward empirical claim (who succeeds in translating preferences into policy?) along with an underlying decisional conception of power. The state is autonomous when it succeeds. However, several large questions involving the distinction between state and economy are unresolved by this approach.
Nordlinger tries to establish this difference by reference to the nature of the offices held. The state is a state because it has offices that make binding decisions on any and all private agents. The private sphere lacks components capable of making such binding decisions. But the problem with this demarcation line is that it embodies no criterion relevant to the content of state decision makers’ preferences and how these are distinguished. Since state and nonstate preferences are assumed to be similar in form (even if opposed to each other), it is impossible to deduce the state from the distinctive content of the goals pursued by state leaders. These goals may be essentially of a private nature (expansion of agency budgets, maximization of influence, extension of private benefits to constituents) or they may have a genuinely public character to them. The content of state preferences is open, that is to say, contingent, and may be exactly the same as the content of individual preferences in society.The lack of a substantive distinction between state and nonstate spheres places the issue of state autonomy on uncertain grounds. If agents of the state and private persons are identical with regard to the content of their preferences, state autonomy is reduced to a tug of war between competing private claims, rather than between claims rooted in private goals and a rival conception of public interest.
Finally, consider the pluralist variant of the utilitarian approach. As we have seen, pluralism ascribes a facilitative role to the state. Faced with often conflicting societal pressures, the state mediates and coordinates conflicting group claims, fosters compromises, and assures that the rules of the game are adhered to by all participants. The state is both an arena and umpire (Connolly, 1969), a place where societal conflict is played out, and a set of governing rules. After the societal forces express their demands, the state as procedural guarantor gives way to the state as implementor of policy.
It is easy to see how pluralism as social theory relegates the state to a minor position. Arthur Bentley, the father of the theory of pluralism in the United States, remarked:
My interest in politics is not primary, but [derives] from my interest in economic life.... (1908:210)
And:
The “state” itself is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no factor in our investigation.... (1908:263-4)
The quotes from Bentley are relevant not only for the content of his own work but also for the subsequent half-century and more of pluralist research on the state. If pluralist theory is taken seriously, it is difficult if not impossible to entertain autonomous state action. State policies reflect the resultant of group pressures in society. Indeed, the presumed stability of pluralist systems is tied to the proposition that political outcomes reflect the balance of power among groups in society (Connolly, 1969:4). If there is deadlock among groups, if the vector of group forces approaches zero, the possibilities of independent state action increase. But it is not clear if state action in these circumstances constitutes autonomy or is more akin to discretion that surrounds the ambiguities of stalemated group life.
State autonomy emerges as an empirical anomaly for pluralist theory. In numerous cases the facts of political life do not seem to fit that theory. As Skocpol points out, the world that unraveled after World War II “rendered society-centered views of social change and politics less credible” (1985:6). The Depression of the thirties ushered in a new period of interventionism and macroeconomic policy making, and public expenditures soared in almost all liberal democracies. Perhaps even more important to Skocpol was the fact that by the seventies, both Britain and the United States were under severe strain from international economic competition (Skocpol, 1985:6). Their societies, no longer strong enough to assure economic superiority, were now more prepared to accept an activist state.
Other examples are relevant. The work of Peter Evans (1979) on the Brazilian state as, in part, a “state for itself,” in addition to a state responsive to domestic and international capital, comes to mind. The project of creating state enterprises in Brazil involved more than organizational adaptation. It included the creation and manipulation of the very socioeconomic base that was to serve as the foundation of state power. In this case it seemed that Bentley had been turned on his head. Evidence concerning the importance of autonomous state power is not limited to examples of activist state polices. The autonomy of the state has structural roots that give it broad scope for independent initiative. Stepan, in The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (1978), argues in detail that the Peruvian state is proactive in many cases. The state is highly interventionist, reaching into society to structure the conditions under which groups organize and pressure political institutions. Finally, the corporatist literature (Schmitter, 1977) points out that groups do not always “freely combine” to “spontaneously reflect new social realities.” In many democratic systems, groups are licensed and chartered by the state itself and then brought into the state structure. The result is that the foundational demarcation line between the realm of the private (societal-based, self-seeking interest groups) and the public (nonprivate, state institutions) is erased, or at the least, blurred.
Marxian approaches
The problem identified in the previous section with utilitarianism arises also for Marxism. Why reach beyond the idea of the state as a creature of private interest in order to conceptualize the problem of state autonomy? The Marxian answer to this question is in some ways more complicated. Because of this it reveals something important about the shared effort to think about the state as a creature of private interest.
First, we should observe that the instrumental notion of the state as a creature of the private interests of the capitalists themselves (doing their bidding, so to speak), while visible in Marxian theory, was never considered a satisfactory resting place for that theory so far as its more sophisticated adherents were concerned.
In different ways, twentieth-century theorists in the Marxian tradition (especially those often called “structural Marxists”) have devoted themselves to the problem of treating the state as an agent of class interest without reducing the state to a creature of the interests of the capitalists taken individually or collectively (see Gramsci, 1971; Poulantzas, 1973; Jessop, 1982).Explicitly, the most vexing problems raised by the instrumental approach to the state are the following: (1) Do we identify the interests of the capitalist class with the interests of the capitalists who compose that class or with an objective interest that we can impute to them on the basis of their class position? (2) Given that the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class (in one of the two previous senses), and given that (in either sense) that interest conflicts with the interests of workers, how can the state command the allegiance of the “majority” of the population as it must in a capitalist democracy? The ideas of hegemony (Gramsci) and of “relative autonomy” (Poulantzas) speak to these two problems.
The two issues identified in the previous paragraph point to the same problem. Civil society, understood as the system of private relations between juridically independent agents, sets persons in opposition one to another. This opposition appears within the capitalist class between factions of capitalists, among the workers, and between the capitalists and the workers. Furthermore, in the Marxian view, civil society in a sense educates participants to a narrow view of themselves and of their relations to one another. This education is an instance of the way in which their social condition forms the consciousness of persons rather than vice versa as in the utilitarian theories. But this education to the narrow standpoint of private self-interest stands in the way of action directed at maintaining the system within which the narrow view thrives. It endangers the pursuit of private interest precisely by obscuring the restraints on private interest needed to assure that the overall structure of self-seeking will sustain itself over time.
In order to protect the real interests of the capitalist class in preservation of the social institutions that allow it to pursue its work of amassing private accumulations of wealth, the state must (1) identify itself not with the private interests of individual capitalists but with interests it imputes to them according to the imperatives of the preservation of their class position as a whole (see Poulantzas, 1973:54, 190-3) and (2) educate both capitalists and workers to the virtues of protecting that imputed class interest. Thus, while the state is not autonomous of class interests - it is still the creature of private interest - it must be autonomous of the interests of individuals and must not succumb to their narrow views. In this sense, the state, if it is to succeed, must have the appropriate “relative autonomy.”
Thus, in the Marxian theory the concept of relative autonomy of the state constitutes a repudiation of the idea that the state acts as the agent of particular persons (namely capitalists) and their given interests or preferences. It gives the interest of the state a decidedly ideological stamp since this interest is deduced from an understanding of the structure of society and from the implied requirements of social cohesion around the objective of the ongoing and long-term accumulation of wealth in the form of private accumulations of capital (see Lukacs, 1971:51). We can see here, as we will with Krasner, how the leap to state autonomy carries with it a movement from a material and individualistic conception of interest to an ideological concept of interest. This movement accounts both for the importance of state autonomy and for the difficulties which that concept creates.
If we adopt the view that the interest of the capitalist class is an interest imputed to it from its objective situation and not the interest capitalists actually pursue individually or collectively, this raises problems concerning the relation of the state to private interest. Both for Gramsci and for Pou- lantzas, the interest pursued by the state is an interest in the maintenance of a particular social order. The state does not maintain that order because it makes individual capitalists wealthy but because, for the state, the preservation of a favorable political and social order is its distinctive business. The state concerns itself with the assurance that the social order is, after all, a particular kind of society with space for pursuit of particular kinds of private interest.
What important themes arise within the utilitarian and Marxian analyses of the state and its relation to society? One theme concerns the problem of social order. Societies (at least national societies) are composed of millions of individuals occupying countless roles, yet relating to one another in complex, coordinated (not to say harmonious) ways. If individual interests and goals are subjective and undetermined (as in utilitarian theory) or defined by forces which are conflictual (as in Marxian theory), how is social order possible? For utilitarian theory we can ask: Can society emerge as a result of the separate pursuit of socially undetermined goals? For Marxian theory we ask: Is a social order possible given the division of society into conflictual classes? The narrow treatment of interest as material (Marxian) or subjective (utilitarian) interest places limits on the development of a full theory of the state.
Both utilitarian and Marxian theories take note of this problem, if in different ways. Utilitarian theories recognize the necessity for consensus on the basic “rules of the game” or principles of social order as an underlying condition for allowing a clash of interests within society. Since the state must take responsibility not only for assuring that these norms prevail but also for education in the norms, utilitarianism cannot rest with its own instrumental theory of the state since the purely instrumental state could never survive. Utilitarianism allows through the back door what it refuses to acknowledge as a legitimate analytical starting point. Marxian theory recognizes the same difficulty when it notes the inconsistency between the narrow material interests of the capitalists and the work that must be done by the state to maintain social order. In both cases, the concept of interest cannot support a theory of the state adequate to account for and maintain a society within which those narrow interests prevail.