State agency: social action without human activity?

Abstract

What are we to make of the state? According to Hegel, it was the ‘Divine Idea on Earth’. For Hobbes it was an ‘Artificiall Man’. Nietzsche declared it the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’. And for Alexander Wendt it is a ‘person’. Wendt is absolutely serious about this; it is not that the state ‘is like’ a person; it literally is a person; ‘states are people too’. Wendt's literalist take on the state marks a watershed within that broad category of scholars committed to a scientific International Relations. Previous generations of scientifically orientated IR scholars, many of a positivist persuasion, have been happy to personify the state only insofar as this is understood as an instrumental device aimed at facilitating explanation. Talk of a state acting was admissible only as long as it was understood that this implied no ontological commitment to the state possessing any of the properties assigned to it. It may seem ‘as if’ the state acted; it may even seem ‘as if’ states existed. But as David Easton knew only too well, the state was only a ‘ghost in the machine’. A necessary ghost, of course, but a spectral apparition nonetheless. Wendt, whatever one thinks of his treatment of the state, has at least reopened the question of state ontology and state agency.