In Search of the State: A Review Article

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Prussian bureaucrats and military officers imposed a unified state organization on the fragmented territories that once had composed the Holy Roman Empire. For German intellectuals like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Otto Hintze the state was the protagonist of modern history.' While European social scientists theorized about class conflict, bureaucracy, and the state, American sociologists studied folkways, primary groups, and urban succession. Only recently has American scholarship recognized the problematic character of the state. This is not surprising. The consensus view of American history assumed that a great liberal tradition invalidated the antagonistic implications inherent in a distinction between the state and society. Parsonian sociology argued that the American social system tended to remain in equilibrium; there was scant room in such a scheme for explaining the Civil War, populism, or the Wobblies, except as momentary imbalances in a system that soon reached another, more general consensus. During the 1960s and '70s the state's organization became a significant political issue. Whose interests did the state serve? What powers had it acquired? How could the rights of citizens be guaranteed? As strong protest