The concept of the state

It is all very well to have a clear and consistently articulated conception of the state and all the better if that is framed in a clearly articulated definition of the state. Yet, given that the state is not an immediately transparent or self-evident material object, this is merely one step in defending a view of politics which places the state at centre stage.

To develop a concept (and, by extension, a theory) of the state is to look at politics in a particular way. It is a choice which can and should be defended. This is an important point with clear implications. Political analysis can - and often does - proceed in the absence of a concept of the state (see, for instance, Easton 1967; Allen 1990). If we are, then, to justify a ‘return to the state’, we must first provide an answer to the question ‘What conceptual work does this concept (or theoretical abstraction) do’? Stated more starkly still, ‘What analytical purchase does the concept of the state offer the political analyst?

However good, and however obvious, a question this might seem, it is not one to which theorists of the state, with a few notable exceptions, have rushed to provide answers. Even Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987: 1-6), who, as we have seen, perhaps get closest to tabling this as the relevant question, fail to provide an answer, contenting themselves with noting that the state is an analytical abstraction and then pointing to certain family resem­blances in the definitions of the state offered by theorists of the state. In so doing they identify the kinds of theoretical abstraction that state theorists are appealing to in invoking the state as a category, differentiating in so doing between organizational and functional definitions. Yet what they don’t do is to assess and defend the analytical purchase on political reality offered by such abstractions. To be fair, some of this is implicit in what they say. But, for present purposes it is important that we are perhaps a little more explicit. Two elements, in particular, of the analytical utility offered by the concept of the state might usefully be identified. Both are concerned with the ability to contextualize political behaviour: the first relates to the structural and/or institutional contextualization of political actors, the second to the historical contextualization of political behaviour and dynamics. Consider each in turn.