Through the mid-20th century, American political sociology tended to treat states as epiphenomena of underlying social relations. States were the political result of public opinion, collective consciousness, or class struggle, and did little other than index these more basic processes. As a result, states were, in and of themselves, not very interesting.
By the 1980s, however, many political sociologists were arguing strongly and convincingly in favor of treating states as things, even as actors. States were indeed the product of social processes, but as they became institutionalized, their features hardened into organizational and cultural structures. On the one hand, these structures exerted independent, mediating effects that were irreducible. States had to be gone through, around, or over. On the other hand, states possessed variable capacities to achieve various purposes. These included not only the interests of democratic publics or powerful groups, but also those of state officials themselves. States were tools that actors could take up with various ease and effectiveness.
A frequent lamentation is that the effort to “bring the state back in” traded the reduction of the state for its reification. States usually present themselves as monolithic, and often convince us in so doing. But the truth is that different parts of states are staffed by very different kinds of people pursuing very different ends. An early characterization of this problem was offered by Pierre Bourdieu, who observed that the modern European nation-state possessed both left and right “hands.” The former was populated by a “minor state nobility” charged with social provision and administration; the latter was led by an “upper state nobility” whose function was primarily financial, executive, and coercive. But for observers of other states—especially the United States—Bourdieu’s imagery was still too coordinated. What of states that looked, felt, and acted more like loose networks of agencies than unified organizations? What of those instances where states’ “hands” appeared to be tugging at one another? Or when their hands seemed to be not entirely their own?
Kimberly Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff’s edited volume, The Many Hands of the State, takes the porosity, complexity and heterogeneity of states as its motivating premise. The title extends Bourdieu’s manual metaphor to reflect “the pervasive move” in recent theory and empirical research “away from conceptions of states as unitary actors and toward an understanding of states as encompassing multiple institutions, varying forms of interpenetration with civil society, multiple scales of governance, and multiple and potentially contradictory logics” [3]. The volume testifies forcefully to the generativity of avoiding reification. Researchers’ efforts over the last several decades to “disaggregate” states have led them to many new points of entry for empirical research. This has led in turn to considerable innovation and diversification in state theory. Morgan and Orloff have assembled a highly readable collection of original and exciting research that exemplifies these payoffs.
Although the volume’s contributions are somewhat uneven, a good number of the case studies are outright fascinating. For example, Meyer Kestnbaum shows how modern states’ ability to mobilize mass militaries and legitimize the intentional killing of unarmed civilians grew from their symbolic efforts to get citizenries to identify with interstate conflicts. Elisabeth S. Clemens documents how the work of voluntary organizations prepared citizen-state relations for important early-20th century expansions in the US welfare state by negotiating tensions between individuals’ expectations of personal care and political and administrative norms of equal treatment. Marion Fourcade shows that states are not only founts of symbolic violence, but are also themselves subject to such violence in the form of private ratings firms whose evaluations shape vast and consequential sovereign credit markets. The diversity of the volume’s contributions is impressive, and is likely to expand the curiosity of even the most eclectic students of the state.
Specific theoretical interventions are even more noteworthy. Damon Mayrl and Sarah Quinn argue that the US state is better understood as misrecognized than objectively hidden. This distinction matters because it shifts analytical emphasis from ontology to cognition, greatly expanding one’s ability to explain political subjects’ disagreements about basic facts. Julia Adams and Steven Pincus show that the later racialization of empires obscures the universally imperial character of modern state formation. This yields a very different intellectual history of modernity, in which democratic revolutionaries are seen not as anti-imperialists, but as proponents of a model of empire based on the integration of labor markets rather than the extraction of natural resources. William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, and James T. Sparrow show why American pragmatists outmatch canonical European thinkers in theorizing American political development. Their exegesis makes a convincing case for using home-grown theories in general, and in particular demonstrates that American pragmatism should be a point of departure for scholars seeking theories of law, the state, and politics that can better handle the complexity, hybridity, and improvisation that have always been central to American political life.
But the volume’s editors have rightly set for themselves a goal above and beyond reflecting and extending disparate trends in theory and research. In their introductory essay, Morgan and Orloff observe that “we now confront a situation of far greater empirical breadth but less theoretical engagement among scholars pursuing different lines of thinking” [2]. As an example of this theoretical degeneration they cite the proliferation of theories of “the such-and-such state,” in which a novel case study of a limited component or activity of a state is often used to characterize the entire state. Ironically, this sort of metonymic theorizing—occasionally on display in the volume itself—is directly contrary to an appreciation of states as heterogeneous. It is precisely states’ complexity that allows them to appear differently from different viewpoints, and which should caution us from making generalizations on the basis of case studies focused on specific areas of state action.
Of course, even if observers of “the associational state” or “the delegated state” only mean to point out limited aspects of states, this accumulation of abstract descriptions may, past a point, have diminishing and even negative returns in terms of theoretical development. If the state’s many hands are said to be distinct enough to warrant their own new and specific theories, but we neglect to test theories derived from some areas of empirical study in others, how are we even to know that all these hands are really all that different in the first place? How are we to understand how the hands hold together or interact? To paraphrase the Zen master Hakuin Ekaku, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Morgan and Orloff present the volume as a corrective effort, “to reconnect with one another on a higher, theoretical plane” [3]. This is a mixed success. They organize the volume into four sections that address state/society boundary issues, stratification processes, state formation, and colonial and imperial dynamics. But the section on state formation is disorienting for its almost total disconnect from the volume’s premise, and there is a relatively low degree of overlap in the theories that the empirical chapters aim to build upon, revise, or improve.
If there is a real theoretical through line for the volume, it is that of symbolic power and classification, a productive trend that Morgan and Orloff also observe and uphold. Questions about the state’s boundaries are well understood as questions about how state officials impel political subjects to classify things, actors, and acts as public or private, official or unofficial. Inequalities are very often the result of states sorting individuals into groups and assigning them specific legal rights and responsibilities. At their core, colonies and empires are political arrangements in which states make such divisions in territorial terms. The influence of constructivism in general and Bourdieu’s sociology in particular is evident in almost every contribution, and almost always this influence is productive.
Ultimately, though, the central recommendation of the volume, stated explicitly by its editors and exemplified by most of its contributors, is to continue the “disaggregating drive” [7] in the study of states. But the mere insistence on attending to states’ multiplicity does not a theoretical agenda make. On the one hand, the complexity, multiplicity, permeability and contradiction of states should be variables, not axioms. On the other hand, at the end of the day, everything is complex, multiple, permeable and contradictory if looked at closely enough, and the imperative to disaggregate is really a methodological appeal more than a theoretical one. We must therefore ask ourselves what is to be gained by zooming out or zooming in, adopting or rejecting assumptions, embracing or renouncing abstraction and generalization.
It seems to me that after several decades of research documenting the very many things that states do, we are nearing if not past the point of negative returns to disaggregation. The many hands of state theory can only go so far in helping us understand the many hands of the state. By simply compiling such diverse and engaging state theorization, Morgan and Orloff have done a certain service. But what more can be done to reconstitute healthy programs of research on the state? What would generate more dialog across substantive research areas, all the while encouraging the extension and revision of theory rather than its recombination and proliferation? For one, this would demand more intra-state comparative and negative case research, through which we could better understand the generality or specificity of the attributes of each of the state’s supposed “hands.” For another, generative research programs on the state would require a relational approach that focuses on the general logic of the state’s body—how and why the hands work sometimes alone, sometimes together, and sometimes against one another. Fortunately, two of the volume’s contributions point in such a direction.
The first is the final chapter, in which George Steinmetz adapts the conceptual framework of Bourdieu’s field theory to clarify differences between colonial states and empires, a distinction to which Bourdieu appears to have been indifferent. For Steinmetz, colonial states are rightly described as fields, because actors in each tend to recognize one another as participating in a shared struggle with mutually recognized rules and forms of power. By contrast, empires cannot be similarly characterized, and are better labeled “social spaces,” in which there is some degree of shared symbolic life but in which the terms and stakes of multiple struggles are distinct. This is well illustrated by the career trajectories of metropolitan colonial officeholders. Such administrators had ample mobility within colonial states, but not across states contained within the same empire. To a certain extent these boundaries between colonial fields were formal. But there were also heterogeneous economies of symbolic power: for example, British colonial service in India was regulated by competitive examination, while service in Africa tended to follow informal principles of social class.
Steinmetz’s approach reflects the best of Morgan and Orloff’s call for disaggregation. We see that the imperial political form indeed had many hands—here, imperial and colonial states. We see also that these hands were not so much unitary actors, but were themselves diverse—if you will, having many digits. Through empirical comparison, we have a basic sense of how these hands worked differently. We also have a theory of action and organization that explains the general internal logic of multiple states/hands, and, most importantly, one that also explains how these hands interacted. The result is a modest extension of a prior theory, but one that greatly expands its explanatory power. Its generality points immediately to other potentially fruitful extensions, such as a comparison of the organizational structures of imperial and federal systems.
The same modest but productive theory building is on display in Armando Lara-Millán’s chapter “States as a Series of People Exchanges,” which describes some of the various ways that state agencies vie with one another to acquire or abdicate responsibility for individuals. When state and local governments swap juvenile offenders or the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs trade soldiers, with each exchange state actors aim to reshape their revenue streams, liabilities, jurisdictions, and political influences. The dynamic is observed among high-level administrators and street-level bureaucrats alike. Both are primarily concerned with the reproduction of their official and social positions, not with their official responsibilities toward subject populations, which are symbolic glosses for their true efforts. Thus, we see specific groupings of the many hands of the state pushing and pulling at one another in a pattern that is general to multiple struggles. More than any other analysis in the volume, therefore, Lara-Millán’s extension of field theory to the analysis of the exchange of administrative subjects illustrates a relatively straightforward way for moving beyond mere disaggregation to interaction.
Several other contributors to the volume adopt principles of field theory with varying degrees of explicitness and explanatory power. Based on the theory’s ability to reconcile the porosity, complexity and heterogeneity of states with the scientific imperative toward theoretical generality and synthesis, it currently appears that field theory provides the most promising avenue for theorizing states. This is all the more so for its compatibility with an emphasis on symbolic power that is on display so successfully in the volume.
But field theory is not, of course, the only recourse for those seeking to reconcile attention to states’ multiplicities with the scientific goal of progressive problem shift. Efforts to “bring the state back in” were largely inspired by classical organizational theorists of the state, whose emphasis on rational professionalism and formal hierarchy mostly justified subsequent criticism that states had been attributed an unrealistic and unhelpful degree of unity. But a return to organizational theory—contemporary organizational theory—may again be fruitful. The growing recognition that even firms are bogglingly complex, coupled with drastic technical improvements in our ability to model adaptive systems, has led some contemporary organizational theorists to embrace complexity and to seek systematic explanations of complex organizational processes. Organizations are increasingly seen as relatively open systems comprising multiple types of actors and logics of action. Morgan and Orloff argue that states are “sets of organizations,” but this seems to go too far in denying the integrity of states. Are states not better understood as complex organizations? As we seek to explain many of their workings, are their differences from other organizations perhaps differences of degree rather than kind?
Based on fairly minimal assumptions about social action, complex organizational theory has developed an integrated lexicon that seems easily and productively adapted to the study of many state processes. Concepts like nonlinearity, feedback loops, and recombination appear useful for describing why state outcomes are often unpredictable, how parts of states gain relative autonomy, or why states sometimes seem so higgledy-piggledy. Others, such as emergence and tipping points, already have clear but underused parallels in historical institutional theory. Without necessarily adopting the methods from which such ideas have been developed, students of the state may find complex organizational concepts useful in testing and revising micro-founded, mechanism-based explanations of state processes. Of course, such borrowing could lead to further theoretical proliferation, but it also has the opposite potential—to lead to a careful and systematic cataloging of important state mechanisms whose workings and scope conditions are known with progressive certainty.
The internal variegation of states should not discourage us from seeking systematic and unified theories of the state. The Many Hands of the State exemplifies the best results of several decades of treating states with careful attention to detail. Consummating these efforts in the form of more powerful theories of the state will take more discipline. But by showing how far we have come, Morgan and Orloff’s stimulating volume is a necessary intervention that points toward what must come next.
