Those who comprise the contemporary in sub-Saharan Africa have, since independence, carried out a sustained drive to achieve through which they have attempted to augment the political and economic power of the state. By hardness I refer specifically to (1) structural autonomy, whereby institutions, leaders, and officials effectively remove themselves from the influence of societal actors and influences and are thereby able to act and make decisions independently of social forces; (2) the political penetration of society, by which national leaders and governmental institutions secure clear-cut hegemony over intermediary and ground-level political actors and social units; (3) the extraction of resources from the most productive economic sectors, which in the African case usually refers to peasant agriculture; and (4) ideological legitimation, that is, the promulgation of official doctrines to defend and justify the achievement of autonomy, penetration, and extraction.' It is a goal of this article to portray this fourfold autonomy seeking, penetrative, extractive, and legitimating effort on the part of the African state. However, it is equally important to make clear the enormous limitations to hardness that African society presents. Indeed, a quarter century of independence has revealed that African states are in fact mostly soft.2 First, national leaders and administrators remain closely linked to societal actors and groups, to some extent beholden to their interests and often bearing the brunt of their dissatisfactions, thereby counteracting states' moves toward autonomy. Second, they are not able to thoroughly consolidate the political penetration of local level political and social institutions, so that these structures remain mostly independent of higher level authorities rather than becoming effectively integrated into the formal, centralized politico-administrative system. Third, they have encountered severe limitations in appropriating peasant resources and in establishing regularized, official control over rural trade, which presents an especially problematic challenge to states' economic growth in these predominantly agrarian and nonindustrialized nations. And fourth, they do not effectively employ legitimating ideologies; African leaders are unable to convince the majority of their populace that the state's central purpose is to act in the interests of its citizenry. Thus, despite a sustained and vigorous drive to achieve hardness, the political and economic strength of society has to a large extent impeded rulers from carrying out their goals. In this article I also seek to show how the concept of the state may be employed as an analytic tool of comparative significance that expands our appreciation of the dynamics of politics. I define the as that constellation of leaders, officials, political institutions, administrative agencies, and military and police organizations that holds centralized political power in a given territorial domain. This definition includes the executive branch (the president, prime minister, king, or dictator), the political party in power,3 the government, and the parliament (if one exists). Such a conceptualization allows us to analyze the as