The State and Political Theory

by Martin Carnoy

Overview

Martin Carnoy clarifies the important contemporary debate on the social role of an increasingly complex State. He analyzes the most recent recasting of Marxist political theories in continental Europe, the Third World, and the United States; sets the new theories in a context of past thinking about the State; and argues for the existence of a major shift in Marxist views.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612706
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #468
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

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The State and Political Theory

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By Martin Carnoy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07669-0

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CHAPTER 1

The State and American Political Thought

In America, the typical citizen would probably describe the government as a pluralist democracy in which competing interest groups and the public at large define public policy. The State is seen as a neutral arena of debate. Elected representatives and appointed bureaucrats lead but simultaneously reflect public wishes, at least for that public which is interested in the issues at hand. And although the State bureaucracy may develop a life of its own, the general public assumes that, through elections, it has ultimate power over government decisions.

Pluralist political theory is, in some sense, the official ideology of capitalist democracies. On the basis of its central tenet of individual liberty, pluralism claims an exclusive right to democracy itself. But, as we shall show, there are problems with this claim, and they emanate from the fundamentals of classical political theory. The theory makes certain assumptions about economic and social relations among individuals — specifically, about the relationship between individual liberty in the market and individual political power. In light of the history of capitalist development and the capitalist State, those assumptions are highly questionable — so questionable, that non-Marxist political analysts from Max Weber to Joseph Schumpeter to recent writers such as Philippe Schmitter, Alfred Stepan, and Leo Panitch have questioned whether the liberal democratic State is in fact democratic. There are some who suggest that democracy as such is inherently compromised under twentieth-century industrial capitalism, and others who argue that what is described as pluralism is really corporatism.

Nevertheless, pluralist theory continues to be dominant ideologically in the United States. Pluralism's pervasiveness and its claims on democracy demand that we explore its intellectual bases before going on to analyze an alternative class-perspective tradition. That alternative, as we shall see, not only challenges the fundamental classical and pluralist premises about the relationship of State and civil society, but also challenges their theories of democracy and the democratic State. More recent debates between Marxist theories of the State focus on the meaning of individual liberty in a class State, and the deepening and extension of capitalist democracy. The class-perspective analysis of the State in America, to be discussed in Chapter 8, brings the views we describe in this chapter into sharp contrast with the Marxist theories of the State that are the theme of the rest of the book. It is that contrast that best reflects the underlying political divisions between contemporary social scientists with traditional and class-perspective views. And it is the challenge to the pluralist claims on democracy that represents the most serious move toward a new Marxist politics.

"Common Good" Theories of the State

Implicit in analyses of the State that are couched in the pluralist view is the idea that the government intends to serve mass interests even if, in practice, it does not always do so. Government is the servant of the people placed there by the people to perform that function. The concept that individuals collectively should be able to determine the laws that govern them is as old as the ideas of human rights and democracy themselves. Yet, for a long period of history, divine law defined relations between individuals, including who was to govern them and how they should be governed. Divine law came from a higher authority, a superhuman force that was both above and beyond the comprehension and control of the individual and yet within each person, giving him or her the possibility of complete knowledge and understanding. Authority was derived from interpretations of this law, interpretations provided by the hierarchy of organized religious institutions and the struggle within the political hierarchy itself. In Europe, this meant that landed nobility (who had acquired their land through conquest during and after the fall of the Roman Empire) and the Catholic Church established and enforced a set of "divine" laws. These laws came not only from religious texts but from economic and social relationships directly established by the conquerors of Europe as they replaced Roman rule. Nevertheless, religious precepts served to legitimize all these relationships, including economic ones, for more than a thousand years.

It is difficult to say when the feudal system and the legitimacy of divine law began to break down. Although the development of alternative economic patterns in Europe can be found in the thirteenth-century Adriatic city-states, where merchants trading between Europe and the Orient accumulated vast sums without owning land or using serfs (they even established banks), when capitalism arose depends largely on the definition of capitalism itself. Some authors have stressed that the rise can be dated by the accumulation of capital as the prices of grains rose over a long period of time in the sixteenth century (Wallerstein 1974); others argue that it was a new concept of man or a new rationality in the conduct of economic and political affairs that defined the rise of capitalism (Foucault 1970; Weber [1904] 1958); others that it was the integration of national markets; and still others that it was the emancipation (or forcing off) of the labor force from the land (Marx [1867] 1906). Although it would be foolish, then, to try to date the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, it is clear that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were important transformations taking place in the old social formation. And although divine law was still fundamental to hierarchical legitimacy even in the 1600s, the Catholic Church (as the single interpreter of that law) had been split asunder by religious wars that reflected the gradual economic decline of the nobility as the dominant class supporting the enormous economic and political power of the Church.

Thus, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of drastic change in European history. As we have suggested, the reasons for this change is a subject of continuous debate among historians, who have developed a variety of historical theories to explain the transformation. We are not going to discuss the merits of these ideas here, despite their importance for a theory of the State. The crucial point for our purposes is that there was a drastic change, and because of that change it was possible for new forms of government to develop. Along with those new forms came new concepts of what governments should be like. The spread of these ideas, in time, served as the basis for further changes.

It is toward the end of the seventeenth century that we see a redefinition of the state of nature (man's natural condition), and the final systematic presentation of individual rights replacing divine law as the foundation of political hierarchies.

Classical writers such as Hobbes and Locke developed their ideas in the throes of political changes already taking place in England. Indeed, the basic concept of representative democracy had existed since the thirteenth century in their country (the Magna Carta and Parliament — including a House of Commons — date from that time), and can be said to be rooted in nobles' protesting their feudal rights against attempts to centralize power in the hands of a king. Nevertheless, although it is definitely not obvious that representative democracy is a concept whose origins lie with the rise of a bourgeoisie, in practice its spread and institutionalization are identified with the growth of capitalism and bourgeois economic and political power.

The Classical Doctrine

The classical theory of the State emerged from the changing conditions of economic and political power in seventeenth-century Europe. As the feudal system — already transformed by the development of centralized, authoritarian, national monarchies — declined further, the existence of narrowly based State and quasi-State apparatuses (like the Catholic Church, for example) were not only questioned but attacked. The result was a series of civil wars which racked Europe in the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth.

Hirschman (1977) discusses this change in terms of the history of ideas. He points out that although Machiavelli tried to improve the art of statecraft by teaching his prince how to achieve, maintain, and expand power by providing a scientific, positive approach to governing in the real world, political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based their theories of the State on human nature, on individual behavior and the relationship between individuals. And, at the same time, a profound change took place in the approach to human behavior: "A feeling arose in the Renaissance and became firm conviction during the seventeenth century that moralizing philosophy and religious precept could no longer be trusted with restraining the destructive passions of men" (Hirschman 1977, 14-15). Coercion and repression, as Foucault (1978) has shown us, gradually were replaced as the principal means of restraining passions, by a State and society that harnessed the passions instead of simply repressing them. Again, it was the State that was called upon to accomplish this — to act as a civilizing medium.

It is in this context, then, that the theory of the liberal State based on individual rights and the State acting in the "common good" — to harness men's passions by allowing their interests to overcome those passions — developed. As we shall see, the particular version of that theory that eventually became dominant in England and America was that men's interests — especially their insatiable desire for material gain — would themselves oppose and control their passions; and the role of the State that would best serve humankind was one that relied on and guaranteed the operation of a free market in civil society.

The theory of the liberal State went through a series of important changes. They reflected the political struggles taking place as English and French capitalism developed. There is no truly appropriate way to divide the discussion of that State, since any change in theory has its roots in previous writing and reaction to political reality. Nevertheless, I have taken the often-used categories of classical and liberal doctrine for the purposes of the analysis.

The new political philosophy that came on the heels of these enormous disruptions stressed individual over divine rights and in that sense legitimized new bases of power, new relationships among human beings, and the human soul itself. No longer were power and knowledge inherited through birthright; they were acquired (although, as we shall see, this was not quite as egalitarian as would first appear). Now a new version of human rights was the birthright. Furthermore, the classical theorists retained a "divine" basis for exercising power: the "common good."

I say "divine" basis for power because, although the classical doctrine overthrew divine rights in favor of a redefinition of natural and, from it, individual rights, the origin of all rights was still a "higher authority" — human reason itself came from God. Thus, the basis for new forms of the State was still divine reason and rationality inculcated in human beings from above. The "common good" was inherent in the divine rationality of human beings; it was God in man; but rather than being revealed, its understanding could be acquired.

The religious foundations of classical doctrine stem from the moment in time in which the doctrine was formulated. Political struggles in the seventeenth century were still enmeshed with interpretations of divine law. It is perfectly logical, then, that the origins of bourgeois legitimacy and the theory of the bourgeois State should be couched in theological terms, and that intellectual differences among classical writers revolve around theological interpretations.

Is it contradictory to stress the relation between feudal divine concepts and a classical doctrine that was supposed to be such a sharp break with those concepts? At that point in history arguing that man was rational — that God gave him reason in the state of nature and that from there he was on his own — explicitly broke with the divine order of feudal society and specifically with the idea that people were put on an earth whose workings were totally out of their control. But from the perspective of the twentieth century, the religious aspects of the doctrine are striking. As historian Carl Becker has argued:

We are accustomed to think of the eighteenth century as essentially modern in temper. ... Surely, we say, the eighteenth century was preeminently the age of reason, surely the philosophes were a skeptical lot, atheists in effect if not by profession, addicted to science and the scientific method, always out to crush the infamous, valiant defenders of liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom of speech, and what you will. ... But, if we examine the foundations of their faith, we find that at every turn the philosophes betray their debt to medieval thought without being aware of it. ... In spite of their rationalism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their aversion to hocus-pocus and enthusiasm and dim perspective, in spite of their eager skepticism, their engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of the last priest — in spite of all of it, theirs is more of a Christian philosophy in the writings of the philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories. (Becker 1963, 28-30)

The other fundamental aspect of classical doctrine is its revolutionary character: classical philosophers were, to different degrees, deeply committed to political change in particular directions. They were concerned with finding a new organization of the State based on a new concept of man. Although this may seem contradictory to the theological elements of the classical doctrine, we can well imagine that revolutionary ideas, like new social formations, contain important elements from the past — and in the case of political ideas trying to "persuade," must indeed contain past elements in order to convince people of their worthiness. Thus, while drawing on God for men's reason, the classical philosophers broke sharply with divine law in placing all political and economic power in the hands of reasonable men, not God.

Understanding these general features of classical theory, we now turn to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. These three "representative" classicists are analyzed primarily because of their influence on American political thinking.

Hobbes's Leviathan (1968), originally published in 1651, was one of the first attempts to systematize human political behavior according to deductive logic and the laws of motion, the seventeenth-century concepts that had so revolutionized scientific investigation. In its very method, then, Hobbes's work was a break with the past on two counts: first, he applied a scientific methodology to individual behavior — instead of making the operation of the State itself more efficient (like Machiavelli) — as the basis of his political theory; and secondly, he argued that appetites and aversions are what determine a man's voluntary actions (as opposed to the medieval view that man's appetites, or passions, had to be curbed by an external source), and that the only way for men to satisfy their appetites and simultaneously avoid the most important aversion (death) was to acknowledge a perpetual sovereign power, against which each of them would be powerless.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter One. The State and American Political Thought, pg. 10
• Chapter Two. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the State, pg. 44
• Chapter Three. Gramsci and the State, pg. 65
• Chapter Four. Structuralism and the State: Althusser and Poulantzas, pg. 89
• Chapter Five. The German Debate, pg. 128
• Chapter Six. The State, Democracy, and the Transition to Socialism, pg. 153
• Chapter Seven. The Dependent State, pg. 172
• Chapter Eight. Class and State in Recent American Political Theory, pg. 208
• Chapter Nine. Whither Theories of the State?, pg. 246
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 263
• Index, pg. 271