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Feb 22, 2020 · Summary. During the 1980s, the state was “brought back in” to political sociology (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985), but its reappearance has taken a number of forms. For many scholars, the state returned in the role of a dominant actor or as a centralized organizational vehicle controlled by political elites and bureaucratic officials.
Oct 5, 2018 · This article examines the interdisciplinary movement to “bring the state back in,” advanced during the 1980s by the Committee on States and Social Structures. Drawing on the Committee’s archives at the Social Science Research Council, I show that its influential neo-Weberian conception of the state was developed in dialogue with earlier neo-Marxist debates about the capitalist state.
- Rafael Khachaturian
- Society-Centered Theories of Politics and Government
- Focusing on Britain and The United States
- Revival of A Continental European Perspective
- States as Autonomous Actors
- Reformist Military Coups in Latin America
- Civil Bureaucrats and European Social Policies
- Can States Achieve Their Goals?
- Finances as “The Nerves of The State”
- Policy Instruments For Specific Kinds of State Efforts
- States in Relation to Societal Actors
Not long ago, the dominant theories and research agendas of the social sciences spoke of anything and everything but “the state.” This was true even—indeed especially—when politics was at issue. Cultural values, socialized personalities, clashing interest groups, conflicting or allying classes, and differentiating social systems—these were supposed...
As world history moved—via colonial conquests, two world wars, and various state-building revolutions and anticolonial movements—from the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century to the Pax Americana of the period after World War II, the Western social sciences managed to keep their eyes averted from the explanatory centrality of states as potent a...
In the nineteenth century, social theorists oriented to the realities of social change on the European Continent refused to accept the deemphasis of the state characteristic of those founders of the modern social sciences who centered their thinking on Britain. German scholars, especially, insisted upon the institutional reality of the state and it...
States conceived as organizations controlling territories and people may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society. This is what is usually meant by “state autonomy.” Unless such independent goal formulation can be demonstrated and explained, there is little need to t...
An unusually comprehensive kind of autonomous state action is analyzed in Alfred Stepan’s book, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective, which offers a causal explanation of attempts by state elites in Latin America to install “inclusionary” or “exclusionary” corporatist regimes.6Stepan, The State and Society, chap. 3–4. See also Alf...
If Stepan deals with extraordinary instances of state autonomy, in which nonconstitutionally-ruling strategic elites have used the state as a whole to redirect and restructure society and politics, other scholars have teased out more circumscribed instances of state autonomy in the histories of public policy making in liberal-democratic, constituti...
Some comparative-historical scholars have not only investigated the underpinnings of autonomous state actions but have also tackled the still more challenging task of explaining the varying capacitiesof states to implement their policies. Of course, the explanation of such capacities is not entirely separable from the explanation of autonomous goal...
Factors determining a state’s financial resources may sometimes be more manipulable over time. The amounts and forms of revenues and credit available to a state grow out of institutionally conditioned, yet historically shifting, political balances and bargains among states and between a state and social classes. Basic sets of facts to sort out in a...
Basic questions about a state’s territorial integrity, financial means, and staffing may be the place to start in any investigation of its capacities to realize goals, yet the most fruitful studies of state capacities tend to focus on particular policy areas. As Stephen Krasner puts it: “There is no reason to assume a priori that the pattern of str...
Fully specified studies of state capacities not only entail examinations of the resources and instruments states may have for dealing with particular sorts of problems; they also necessarily look at more than states as such. They examine states in relationto particular kinds of socioeconomic and political environments, populated by actors with give...
Marxist influence. In effect, the Committee "brought the state back in" to political science and political sociology, but its intervention simultaneously marginalized a frame-work that had provided a standpoint of critical and practi-cal reflexivity for studying the ideological relationship between the American social sciences and the state.
in the politics of labor movements. The 1980s’ ascent of state-centric institutionalism regis-tered a major impact on political sociology with its Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (1985). The works of these times had a common focus on the societal determination
A sudden upsurge of interest in “the state” has occurred in comparative social science in the past decade. Whether as an object of investigation or as something invoked to explain outcomes of interest, the state as an actor or an institution has been highlighted in an extraordinary outpouring of studies by scholars of diverse theoretical proclivities from all of the major disciplines.
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In short, the state is a force in its own right and does not just serve the economy or civil society (e.g., Krasner 1978; Nordlinger 1981; Skocpol 1979; and Stepan 1985). Their approach leads 'state-centred' theorists to advance a very different approach to state autonomy.
