States, Ancient and Modern

Abstract

ThisPaper has a fairly clear overall argument: that the relationship between State and Society in large-scale societies changed dramatically with the advent of industrial capitalism. Prior to that development, the State and the state bureaucracy played a substantially autonomous role vis-à-vis the class structure of civil society. After that its autonomy has been negligible: indeed, for most analytic purposes the State can be reduced to class structure. Such an argument is by no means original. For example, its outlines were commonplace among eighteenth and nineteenth-century theorists. In this paper I draw somewhat on Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. For one particular argument I am indebted to the contemporary sinologist Owen Lattimore. The idea of such a dramatic shift in the history of society is nowadays extremely unfashionable, however. Today theorists usually present essentially the same view of state-society relations throughout human history. Most Marxists reduce the state to being contingent upon the ‘determining’ categories of ‘mode of production’ and ‘class struggle’. Functionalists present a theory of structural differentiation which occurs so early in human evolution that in all recorded history the relationship between, and relative autonomy of, economy and polity are essentially unchanging. Weberians, in arguing for the autonomy of each element of ‘the structure of social action’, also give a picture of the mutual independence of state and economy throughout history. In all three cases, the caution and specificity of the theory of the ‘founding fathers’—Marx, Spencer and Weber—is thrown to the wind.