No concept is more central to political discourse and political analysis than that of the state.

Yet, whilst we all tend to think we know what we’re talking about when we refer to the state, it is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Since the seventeenth century, when the term was first widely deployed, the concept of the state has been heavily contested (Skinner 1989; Viroli 1992).

Yet whether depicted as an overbearing apparatus of patriarchal oppression or as the very condition of social and political freedom, as an ‘ideal collective capitalist’ or a fetter on the self-regulating capacity of the market, few commentators would disagree that the concept of the state is fundamental to social, political and economic analysis. The state, for better or worse: mobilizes populations in defence of its realm; regulates, monitors and polices conduct within civil society; intervenes (whether we think we like it or not) within the economy; and regulates (and in some instances controls) the flow of information within the public sphere, to detail merely some of its more obvious activities. Few then would deny the ubiquity or pervasiveness of the influence of the state within modern societies.

Or so we might imagine. For in recent years the very relevance of the concept of the state has come under increasing dispute.

Though the state almost certainly accounts for a higher aggregate share of global GDP than ever before in its history, it attracts considerably less attention than 20 or even 40 years ago when that share was considerably smaller. And although it is frequently suggested that the share of GDP devoted to state-like activities in OECD countries has fallen somewhat since the early 1990s, that fall has proved far less pronounced than many commentators suggested. Rather more accurate, it would seem, is that the rate of increase of state revenue and/or expenditure has lessened somewhat. Moreover, at the time of writing, state expenditure is clearly on the rise once more (see Figures I.1 and 1.2). As this suggests, whilst intellectual interest in the state has waxed and waned, the state has remained a constant (arguably even a growing) presence at the heart of contemporary politics. This makes its seeming disappearance from the political analyst’s radar in the last two decades somewhat difficult to explain. The result is that the theory of the state, once a raging torrent, is now little more than a trickle, an intellectual backwater traversed only by hardened theorists. A ‘return to the state’, by no means the first (see, for instance, Evans etal. 1985), is now long overdue; and, as many of the chapters in this volume

Figure I.1 State revenue as a percentage of GDP: OECD, EU15, USA, Australia, 1965-2000

45

40

35

30

25

20 -

15 -

10 -

5

1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

—O------ OECD EU15 —a — USA +— Australia

Source: OECD Revenue Statistics, 1965-2001 (2003); authors’ own calculations.

Figure I.2 State expenditure as a share of GDP: selected OECD countries

Sources: OECD, Economic Outlook; Tanzi and Schuknecht (2000). The data for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and US (the only OECD countries with an uninterrupted series of data) have been calculated by the authors.

make clear, the beginnings of such a return might just about be discerned in a number of contemporary developments from a diverse range of theoretical perspectives.

It would be presumptuous to think that a volume such as this might contribute in all but the most meagre of ways to such a ‘return to the state’. What it can hope to offer, however, is something of a stock-taking exercise. If the continued centrality of the state to contemporary political life is to be acknowledged and reflected in the accounts of political dynamics offered by contemporary political analysts (as we think it should), then it is crucial that we interrogate the range and diversity of theoretical resources at our disposal to interrogate the state. That is the more modest aim of this volume.

In this relatively brief introductory chapter we examine first the emergence and development of the distinctive concept of the modern state in European political thought. We then turn to the still considerable influence of the Weberian approach to, and definition of, the state in more contemporary state theory. We show how the Weberian understanding of the state continues to exert a powerful influence on the traditional triumvirate of state theories - pluralism, elite theory and Marxism. We turn next to the challenge to the ascendancy of this mainstream conception of the state posed by Foucauldian, discourse-analytical and, above all, feminist perspec­tives. We conclude by considering the prospects for the state, and for the theory of the state, in an era of supposed globalization and neoliberal retrenchment.