The State Is Dead, Long Live the State

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Privatizing the State. Edited by Beatrice Hibou. Translated by Jonathan Derrick. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 279 pp., $37.00 (ISBN: 0-231-13464-9). Privatizing the State , by Beatrice Hibou, consists of a series of essays by French academics on the international political economy. The theoretical focus of the book concerns the “decline of the state” thesis, that is, the assertion that the modern state is withering away as a result of private agents of the global economy. The relentless introduction by Hibou and smart conclusion by Yves Chevrier effectively lay out the case against the thesis of state decline and challenge neoliberal assumptions about privatization and politics. The case chapters, drawn from transitional and developing economies, are especially good at elaborating the informal ways in which state power is increasingly exercised in countries that are said to have weak or failed states. At another level, Privatizing the State is a contemporary incarnation of the long-running feud between the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and the French–German counter-Enlightenment. Is society the aggregation of rational individuals or the organic arrangement of communities? Is human behavior based on reason or culture? Is the state a set of neutral institutions providing law and order, or is it the embodiment of a national experience providing meaning and identity? In this regard, the book helps articulate a postmodern view of the state that is unconventional in Anglo-US scholarship, in which “neo” variants of realism, Marxism, and liberalism prevail. Part I of Privatizing the State explores the privatization of state enterprises. Chapters on Poland and China offer evidence that privatization does not automatically lead to “free market” behavior among enterprise managers. Indeed, politics remains relevant for at least some managers, and past behaviors, like corruption, are still to be found. For …