Société québécoise de science politique

Review
Author(s): Stephen Bornstein
Review by: Stephen Bornstein
Source: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 20, No
. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 205-206
Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de science
politique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3228832
Accessed: 30-09-2015 06:50 UTC

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Recensions / Reviews 205

Bringing the State Back In

Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. x, 390
The central claim of this collection of essays is embodied in its title. Until
recently, the social sciences have ignored "the state" as an independent variable
and have, therefore, produced distorted or truncated accounts of social and
political processes. During the past decade, however, what Theda Skocpol's
introduction calls a "sea change" or a "paradigmatic shift" has begun to occur
as more and more scholars have shifted their descriptive and explanatory
attention away from the social and economic phenomena emphasized by
pluralism, structural-functionalism and traditional Marxism and instead begun
paying attention to the state-its structures, capacities and interactions. For the
editors of this volume, the more theoretically oriented of this new literature is,
generally, of rather limited utility: neo-Marxist writings on "the theory of the
state" suggest interesting hypotheses but remain too abstract and universal to be
of much concrete relevance, while neo-Weberians (there appear to be far fewer
of these) tend to over-simplify the wide variety of state forms and the complex
patterns of uneven development of structures and capacities within specific
states by imposing a misleading notion of "strong" and "weak" states (350-51,
355). What the editors claim to prefer are more empirical studies by people such
as Hugh Heclo, Stephen Krasner and Peter Katzenstein, work situating specific
states in their historical and international contexts and using the methods of
"historically grounded comparison" and "analytic induction" to generate
"middle-level generalizations." It is this kind of work that they hope will replace
the dominant society-deterministic models of explanation by a more adequate
approach: an understanding of the state as a potentially autonomous actor with a
multiplicity of possible strengths and weaknesses; as imbedded in complex
networks of dialectical interaction with the forces of civil society (they speak of a
"fully relational" understanding of state-society relations and insist that ideas,
intellectuals and knowledge-creating institutions play a crucial role alongside
social classes and economic actors); and as facing simultaneously both inwards
towards domestic society and outward towards the forces of the international
system. The nine substantive chapters of the book are intended to present some
of this promising substantive research and to suggest working hypotheses and
areas for continuing work. They are organized into three sections: one on the
state's economic activities, the second on states and transnational relations, and
the third on the state and social conflicts.
The approach taken by this book is of considerable interest. The
overarching claim-that the state has been neglected but is now being "brought
back in"-appears apposite at least concerning those social scientists influenced
by Marxism. On the other hand, for those sociologists working within other
traditions and, in particular, for political scientists involved in research on
bureaucracies, parties, public policy, federalism and the like, the editors'
announcement of the death and resurrection of the state will come as somethiing
of a surprise although they ought, perhaps, to welcome the invitation to
re-examine their findings in the light of the sorts of theoretical questions raised in
this volume. I am similarly in agreement with the editors' claims about most
neo-Marxist work on the state as well as with their desire to focus attention on
the role of ideas and knowledge-producing structures. However, I am not
convinced that the alternative vision suggested in this volume can, as yet,
provide a sufficiently coherent or powerful explanatory model of state-society
relations. Many of the substantive chapters are quite impressive, providing

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206 Recensions / Reviews

theoretically sensitive, historically informed case studies or astutely

constructed, if not always so convincingly documented and argued,
comparisons. The attempt of the editors to bridge the "developed-developing"
gap is admirable although the juxtaposition of chapters on the US and Sweden in
the 1930s or the US and England in the 1890s with chapters on Yorubaland in the
1970s or Taiwan in the postwar period may, I think, place a strain on many
readers.
This is not to say that the volume is without its problems. While the effort to
focus theoretically informed attention on the state is entirely laudable, nowhere
can one find in this volume a clear delineation of what exactly the state is and
what it is not. Many of the contributors use "state" as a synonym of
"government" or of "the party in power" with the result that some of their
claims to have produced "state-centred explanations" are not entirely
convincing nor as innovative as they pretend. Moreover, while many of the
contributions put too much inside the state, few of them pay any attention to
important aspects of state activity such as the police, the judicial system, and
public education. Finally, on certain important questions, the substantive
chapters seem incongruent with the principles enunciated in the introduction
and conclusion. This is true not only of contributors like Alfred Stepan, whose
language and whose approach to state-society relations sound more like
Poulantzas than like Skocpol, but also of co-editors Evans and Rueschemeyer.
Their jointly authored chapter on the state's economic role is as abstract and
general and as lacking in historically grounded induction as anything by
Althusser or Offe. Similary, Evans' position in chapter six on the inevitable
"handmaiden role" of the state (62) sounds very different from the ideas on state
autonomy presented in Skocpol's introduction (9, 11-14)or in the jointly signed
conclusion (353, 356).
Despite these flaws, however, this volume is important reading for any
scholar interested in the state and dissatisfied with the circularity of the "relative
autonomy" debate.
STEPHENBORNSTEINMcGill University

New Nationalisms of the Developed West

Edward A. Tiryakian and Ronald Rogowski, eds.
Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985, pp. xii, 394

Nationalism, we are told by one contributor to this volume, is the most powerful
political force in the modern world. But it is not ubiquitous. "In a CDL [cultural
division of labour], changes in the mode of production that render inessential the
chief skills of the non-elite will, unless preceded or accompanied by other kinds
of change (for instance, unassimilated upward mobility), not give rise to
nationalism, even where severe deprivation of the non-elite ensues" (96). This is
one of 13 hypotheses posited by Ronald Rogowski in his rationalistic account of
the causes and varieties of nationalism, which would have been more valuable
had they been taken up by the authors of the chapters on particular countries.
Even Rogowski himself, in his concluding chapter, prefers to make other
connections.
A more serious example of the editors' failure to produce a more tightly
integrated anthology on what is after all a fairly circumscribed subject-the
internal nationalist challenge to the seemingly established states of the West-is
Gunnar P. Nielsson's uncorrected chapter, "States and 'Nation-Groups', a
Global Taxonomy." The distinction he makes between the terms

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