Statism
Statist approaches to political economy reverse the causal flow associated with society-centered theories. In the latter, the causal flow runs from private preference (or material circumstance in Marxian theory) through organized political demands (such as interest groups, parties) to the state.
The state is asked to respond in some way, to translate the aggregate of private preferences into coherent policy. Statist approaches go about the matter in a different way. These approaches are likely to begin with a state agenda not reducible to private interest and may go so far as to examine how state actors cultivate the very constituencies they are to serve. In this section, we briefly explore the contribution of Stephen Krasner to statist theory. We recognize that state-centered approaches include many other authors and issues. We focus on Krasner for illustrative purposes.Stephen Krasner presents a distinctive and provocative view of the state and its relationship to the private sphere. He explicitly conceives of the state as “a set of roles and institutions having peculiar drives, compulsions, and aims of their own that are separate from the interests of any particular societal group” (1978:10). By beginning with roles and institutions rather than persons, Krasner sets the stage for identifying the state with goals and ends of a genuinely public rather than private character. And he proceeds to argue along these lines. Not only is it “a fundamental error to identify the goals of the state with some summation of the desires of specific individuals or groups,” but, on the contrary, state objectives “refer to the utility of the community and will be called the nation’s general or national interest” (pp. 11-12).
Krasner goes to some length to argue that the utility of the community must not be confused with a sum or other aggregate of private utilities of its members.
Indeed, the utility of the community depends on values “assigned by the state” (p. 12). This last argument requires a sharper and more restrictive notion of the state than that of the sum total of public offices or of officeholders. For the purposes of foreign policy analysis, Krasner does indeed work with such restriction. While the restriction introduced (to the executive and state department) is justified more on empirical than analytical grounds, it is clearly necessitated by Krasner’s (largely implicit) theory of the state. That Nordlinger criticizes Krasner for introducing this restriction (1981: 124-5) simply reveals the fundamental difference in conception between the two.In a sense, Krasner defines the state in terms of the national interest. The state is the institutions (or set of institutions) responsible for assigning those values used to determine the utility of the community. This means that Krasner begins neither with empirical-historical institutions (the state consists of whatever organizations make up the “public sector” in a given society) nor with preferences of persons. He begins with the idea of the national interest. The state defines the national interest, but the capacity to define (and defend) the national interest defines the state. If there is no national interest there is no state.
The circularity of this approach will no doubt cause discomfort. We need to know the national interest in order to identify the state; thus a concept of national interest must be developed (at least in principle) independently of (prior to?) the deliberations of given state institutions. Yet, the state defines the national interest. Does this mean that the national interest is whatever the state defines it to be?
Krasner’s empirical method and discussion seem to follow the latter movement. In so doing, Krasner retreats from his initial statement. He seems driven by the dilemma identified above to an inductive view of the national interest which brings in the preferences of policymakers: “Here the national interest is defined inductively as the preferences of American central decision makers.” The aims of these decision makers “range from satisfying psychological needs to increasing wealth, weakening opponents, capturing territory, and establishing justice” (1978:13-14), clearly a varied assortment. Not too much further along, this list narrows to one more in line with the limitations of a national interest perspective when the goals of the state are associated with “power and the general interests of society” (p.
33). And, by the end of the book, Krasner moves the national interest a significant distance from the world of private preferences (of citizens or policymakers) searching instead into “the realm of ideology, of vision for a persuasive explanation of American foreign policy” (p. 338).Two observations seem relevant here. First, this is a distinct method for thinking about the state. It requires a clear notion of national interest and a concept of the state that is not simply organizational-empirical. Second, in order to resolve the tension built into this method, Krasner retreats into a more purely utilitarian-empirical view by starting out from a (seemingly) arbitrary organizational definition of the state and then using that (those) organization^) to define the national interest.
To what extent does Krasner’s approach help us to clarify the relationship between polity and economy? However uncertain the rooting of the concept of national interest, it clearly suggests a ground for the distinction between the state and the economy. By definition the state pursues the national interest as its end, and only the state does so. The state defines and defends the national interest. The private sphere does not.
It is striking to discover that Krasner’s statist approach does not allow the state-society opposition to parallel the public-private opposition. Of course, it should have been obvious from the outset that once we restrict the state to the executive and state department, much of government becomes part of society. This would be less true if we widened the notion of national interest to include aspects of domestic policy. But, even if we do so, the problem remains: A significant part of government and of our “public” will be outside the state.
This might seem to establish state autonomy, but whether or not it does depends on the relation between national interest and private interest. This is a bit tricky. When the national interest conflicts with private interests we have a strong case.
But cases of this type force us to identify the national interest with those things private persons might not have any interest in and this is surely problematic. Surely (especially in a democratic society) we expect private citizens to perceive and value the national interest (when we think there is such a thing). What would we make of a theory that has the national interest disappear when citizens make it their own? The items Krasner includes in the national interest are clearly of this type: to “maximize the competitive structure of industry and thereby reduce prices,” to “increase security of supply,” and to “secure foreign policy objectives” (p. 331).Where does this leave us? Perhaps Krasner (together with Poulantzas and Gramsci) takes us as far as we can reasonably travel within the theoretical and methodological frameworks of private interest-based approaches to the determination of state action. He does so by explicitly tying state action to ideology, and although he also makes the effort to connect ideology to private interests (indeed, preferences), the connection cannot be considered very strong. Theories of state autonomy teach us much about the limits of the underlying methods for thinking about the relation of state to society, and something also about the changes that must be made in the conception of private interest to sustain the possibility of an active state. To understand the state as an actor, however, we must give up significant elements of the underlying method used by the approaches considered so far.