There were relatively few states when the modern discipline of political science came into being, and the most thoroughly institutionalized among them became intellectual as well as normative templates for what states should be. Our initial expectations for the political development of the vast number of new states—an increase from fewer than 60 to more than 200 since the end of World War II—had been conditioned by ahistorical takes on the roles of the social and the cultural in state formation and nation building (see Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas, 1960; and not excepting the contributions of Charles Tilly and associates in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 1975). Two such expectations were that, over time, states' populations would exhibit more coherent political cultures and increasing social order (with diminishing violence) within frameworks of state-delineated laws and state-centered institutions. The authors of these two books suggest that those expectations are more likely to be met in form and illusion than in substance. For Thomas Hobbes, stateness is hardly sufficient for social cohesion or nonviolent civil existence. They also give reason to ask how well they have been met in the model states of the historic West.
As colonies and other territories gained statehood—or quasi-statehood, in Robert H. Jackson's seminal terms (Quasi-states, 1990)—they faced many of the same challenges of social, cultural, and political consolidation that “old states” had confronted in the past but had deleted from their collective memories (but cf. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, 1985). Four of these are as daunting for new states or those undergoing drastic regime change as they were earlier for today's mature democracies: 1) great economic disparity and poorly distributed political voices across territorial and social spaces, 2) limited and uneven access to educational opportunities and to cultural capital necessary in modern economic life, 3) a stable, institutionalized, modus vivendi between secular and religious norms, and 4) the formation of a coherent collective identity. These morph into questions about the nature of the state and what—and whose—purposes it is to serve.
Sam Kaplan and Gyanendra Pandey both offer sharply focused studies of, respectively, Turkey and India. Yet like other exemplary case studies, they steer attention toward more general issues, such as the normative paradoxes and practical problems indwelling the formation and content of collective identities, institutional coherence, and the establishment of effective governance—issues relevant for most states and for understanding how older states became what they are.
Kaplan is trained as an anthropologist but, on the evidence of this work (which is based on his dissertation research), he is an interdisciplinary social scientist skilled in pursuing large questions of interest to political scientists and sociologists. His book is grounded in a two-year stay (1989–91) in a small town (population 6,000) in southcentral Turkey, where he taught school; but it is based on a deep and multidimensional understanding of social and political life in Turkey and more generally. His participant observation of public attitudes and central and local governments' policies toward education affords him a useful perspective on the forms and intensities of debates about secular and Islamic values in education and life more generally; adult and children perceptions of the state, nation, culture, and society; and ongoing, often tension-filled, transformations of gender-related values and behaviors. It furnishes a good vantage point from which to observe the impacts of modernization, secularization, and economic development, as well as the tug-of-war between larger, if amorphous, collective identities—Europe and the West, on one side, and Islam, on the other.
The Turkish educational system a decade after the military (once again) took control of the state, in 1980, serves as Kaplan's laboratory. His premises are as sound as they are basic: Access to education, the intent and content of curricula, public attitudes toward education, and, crucially, changes in the identities, aspirations, and life chances (“subjectivities”) of individuals are keys both to the transformation of society and to understanding how and how effectively the transformative enterprise is working. Powerful interests, he reasons, will therefore exert influence to put the educational system on a path directed toward their preferred values and goals.
Kaplan identifies three interests, with varying degrees and forms of organization, that sought to shape education policy, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. One of these is the state, in varying degrees of alignment with “religious nationalists”—which he terms the “Turkish Islamic Synthesis” (see esp. pp. 75ff.). A second revolves around business interests intent on enhancing Turkey's economic competitiveness by preparing young people for roles in the modern commercial and industrial sectors. The third is the Turkish military, committed to preserving Kemal Atatürk's vision of a modern, secular (but Muslim) Turkey, oriented toward European ways of social, economic, and political life.
The author probes the competition among these interests, but even though the time frame for most of the book is the short period in which his fieldwork was conducted, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the business interests and the military, not to mention the supposedly neutral state experts in education, found it progressively necessary to accommodate demands for including Islamic values in both the structure and content of education.
Kaplan's book has two limitations. First, even though he did not stray beyond 1991, when his fieldwork was concluded, so much of relevance to his concerns happened in and to Turkey in the 15 years between that date and the book's publication that an updating of his analyses (beyond the very brief postscript he provides) could have been valuable. Another entrance into politics by the military, increased attention to candidacy for membership in the European Union, and the coming to power of more avowedly Islamic political actors are crucial recent developments, and they cannot be thoroughly understood through simple extrapolation from the book. The second limitation is the omission of the possible affects on education, culture, and politics of the emigration, life abroad, and return migration of substantial numbers of Turks. These drawbacks notwithstanding, The Pedagogical State is an outstanding work of social science. It can be read with great benefit by students in comparative politics, political sociology, and politics and religion, and will also be of interest to senior comparativists.
Pandey's empirically rich, analytically sophisticated, and theoretically constructive book is an exemplar of subaltern studies, focused on India, the setting in which that orientation arose. A distinguished historian, Pandey skillfully deconstructs the self-understanding of postcolonial India as a peaceful country, “the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule” (p. 13).
This may be the most thorough reanalysis of postpartition India to date. Pandey challenges conventional (presubaltern) renditions of that history and points out (alas, repeatedly) that self-congratulatory, self-forgiving history, cultivated collective amnesia regarding past horrors committed in one's name, and the posited “naturalness” of nation, religion, worldview and faction are, indeed, self-serving constructions. But there are few historians, political scientists, political sociologists, or specialists in South Asian history, society, or politics—or, for that matter, students of many other parts of the world—who need a(nother) book-length reminder of the constructed nature of histories and communities, or, for that matter, of the violence through which they were (and continue to be) produced.
The book's most important contributions lie elsewhere. First, it makes a strong case for its title's claim of the routineness of violence. In an earlier book, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (2001), Pandey provided a powerful analysis of the almost unimaginable scope and viciousness of the violence that had accompanied the partition of the subcontinent. Such violence was routine only in the sense that large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of mass violence had long been associated with state formation and nation building; scholars and publics had become more or less inured to “the birth pangs of nations.” Here, he shows that a country that, for decades, has been congratulated—and continuously congratulates itself—for its peaceful nature and intentions and for having established a stable, democratic state (“the world's largest democracy”) not only can but routinely does foster violence. Such violence emanates from both aggressive and defensive social dynamics, but also from the state and under the cover that its machinery, laws, and routines provide to acts of communal, police, and citizen-on-citizen violence. The violence is both physical and contextual—that is, state and society creating and supporting conditions that facilitate routine physical, psychological, social, and economic harm to groups and individuals. The indictment is thorough, powerful, and quite convincing, though the emphasis on unearthing the array of forms and instances of such violence may obscure the extent and importance of the spaces not directly connected with it.
Second, more by implication than explicit extrapolation from the Indian case, Pandey's analysis suggests that much can be learned by looking at both contemporary society and historical constructions of collective pasts everywhere through the refractive lenses honed by the subaltern school. This can give rise to more critical and inquisitive publics, people who will habitually look beneath the pleasant, positive stories of who we are and where we have come from. The attendant risk is the growth of cynicism and skepticism about who we are, how we got here, what hope we can entertain for a more peaceful and just future.
One is left wondering, however, whether violence is a discrete, isolatable concept. Can it be usefully rendered into one? Is it a segment of a continuum—perhaps of amity to enmity, or benevolence to malevolence, or psychological health to pathology? Can degrees, levels, or forms of violence be arrayed on an interval scale—are two slaps one punch? Or are there identifiable thresholds, above which violence is categorically different from its manifestations below it? Is threatening violence a form of violence—and is it invariably in the source of the threat, or is it sometimes in the perception of the putative target? A few other questions, not trivial from the perspective of theory, remained for me: When it comes to the state's and elites' roles in routinizing violence, is state authority different in kind or morality from “unofficial” authority, such as that of leaders of an ethnic group, a sect, or a party? Who or what authorizes violence; and is authorization tantamount to authorship, or must the latter be manifested in action?
These are two exceptional works of scholarship. In addition to informing and enlightening readers about the countries on which they focus, they provide analytic insights and theoretical suggestions for understanding countries in the throes of political development, as well as the paths traveled by, and ambiguities remaining in, more “advanced” societies presumed to be politically developed.
