An Anthropology of the State
STRUGGLES FOR DOMINATION
From the writing of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in
the seventeenth century, more than a century before the full blooming of
capitalism and industrialization, thinkers have grappled with the increasingly
powerful state and its role in society. After the industrial revolution, classical
social thinkers, such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, devoted themselves to issues
surrounding what Karl Polanyi later called the Great Transformation.
1 Their interest,
too, was drawn to the state and its relationship to the momentous social and
political changes overtaking European societies. Some writers, such as the
Hegelians, put the state – and the idea of the state – at the center of the
sweeping social and political changes overtaking Europe. Others, including
Marx, rejected the primacy of the state and saw the source of historical change
in other forces in society, notably the organization of production. But even
Marx and others who saw the motor
of
change outside the formal political realm felt called upon to address the notion
of the transformative state. The underlying questions in this volume resonate
with the themes of the classical debates in social theory about major societal
transformations and the relationship of the state to them. When and how have
states been able to establish comprehensive political authority? When have they
succeeded in defining the prevailing moral order or in determining the
parameters of daily social relations, whether in preserving existing patterns
or forging new ones? When and how have states been able to establish the economic
agenda for their societies – to appropriate resources and to shape patterns of
investment, production, distribution, and consumption?
REFRENCE:
1 Karl
Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our
Time
(Boston:
Beacon Press, 1944).
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