Tracking the leviathan

Abstract

Bringing the State back in? I didn't know it was ever out. Albion Small, a pioneer of American sociology and the first chairman of the Chicago Department of Sociology wrote a treatise on The Camaralists, the German eighteenth-century founders of administration. A good number of American sociologists of the first and second generation studied in Germany under such state-oriented Sociologists of the Chair as Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner. Later generations of American sociologists knew that for Max Weber the study of social phenomena without reference to the would be like writing about Hamlet without mentioning the Prince. Even though the title of this volume is misleading, it makes a lot of sense in relation to Marxist sociology. Marx developed his doctrine in principled opposition to Hegel, who stressed the predominant specific weight of the state; as opposed to Hegel's state-centered science, Marx argued for the centrality of civil society in capitalist civilization. Until fairly recently, the bulk of Marxist scholarship counterposed the anatomy of civil society to theory, minimizing the important of the latter and maximizing that of the former. To the extent that the contributors to this book are former Marxists, the title of this book makes good sense. Marxist scholarship has discovered the relative autonomy of the state only in the last few decades. For those of us who have gotten rid of much Marxist baggage earlier, some of this work looks a bit like reinventing the wheel. We have known for a long time that the