How have political anthropologists built or challenged the claim that the state is ‘just an idea’?
A state is a nation or territory considered as an organised political community under one government. A state also refers to a condition or way of being that exists at a particular time. To state means to express something definitely or clearly in speech or writing.
Political anthropologists have often questioned whether the state’s definition as a polity under a system of governance is in adequation with its reality. Indeed, many have claimed that the ‘state’ seems to transcend its definition, become something beyond itself, something ultimately quite hard to define. Some have argued that perhaps the state is conceptual in essence, akin to concepts like that of God, present yet elusive, whose meaning is malleable.
This essay will assess how political anthropologist have built or challenged the claim that the state is ‘just an idea’. It will first look at why such a claim might have been made by focusing on ways in which the state can be understood to be an idea. Then it will focus on how some have claimed that the ‘state’ can be taken out of the realm of ideas and made real through practice. Lastly, it will briefly address the emergence of new conceptualisations of the state.
To state that political anthropologists have claimed that the state is ‘just an idea’ is misleading insofar as phrasing it in that way implies a reductionist tendency to depict the state as ‘just’ an idea, nothing more; while in fact, to claim that the state is ‘just an idea’ does not take away from its power. Although many would argue that the state is difficult to define, they would also argue that to dispense of the concept altogether or think of it as simply an idea with no real potency, has proven impossible. Drawing the boundaries of the state to be able to explain what is meant by the state has proven difficult, with the modern state coming to be seen as ‘an amorphous complex of agencies with ill-defined boundaries, performing a great variety of not very distinctive functions’ (Schmitter, 1985). However, attempts to abandon the concept of the state on account of its vagueness and replace it with the concept of political systems were not productive insofar as the change in vocabulary did not solve the problem of the nature of the state. As Nettl (1968) remarks, despite people knowing that the dictionary definition of the state does not adequately represent the reality of all the state entails, the state itself refused to disappear, retaining a ‘conceptual existence’ as a ‘sociological phenomenon’ whose salience could not be ignored.
As such, this prompted an interest in understanding what it could mean for the state to be a concept. For many, the state became ideological in nature. Abrams (1977) notes that the state could be understood as ‘the device in terms of which subjection is legitimated … [presenting] politically institutionalised power [in] a form that is at once integrated and isolated and by satisfying both these conditions it creates for our sort of society an acceptable basis for acquiescence’. Here, the state is considered to be in the world of myth insofar as ‘it gives an account of political institutions in terms of cohesion, purpose, independence, common interest and morality without necessarily telling us anything about the actual nature, meaning or functions of political institutions’. Thus, because of its ideological potency, the state becomes an institution of domination – more than an idea yet immaterial. Abrams contends that the state is not an object akin to a human ear nor even an object akin to human marriage, rather ‘it is a third-order object, an ideological project. It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation – and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which is seen directly as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination’. Thus, while armies and prisons might be the material reality through which legitimation ensues – the ‘skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies’ – it is their association with ‘the idea of the state and the invocation of that idea that silences protest, excuses force and convinces almost all of us that the fate of the victims is just and necessary’. Interestingly however, it is only when the association is broken that the ‘real powers emerge [and when they do] they are not the powers of the state but of armies of liberation or repression, foreign governments, guerrilla movements, soviets, juntas, parties, classes. The state for its part never emerges except as a claim to domination – a claim which has become so plausible it is hardly ever challenged’. Hence, Abrams suggests that the state does not exist in material reality in the way a chair or a corporation would, rather it exists as an idea. But this is precisely its power insofar as ideas are malleable and therefore can be invoked for legitimacy. This echoes Graeber’s ethnographic work on the Ghost-State in Madagascar (2007) outlining the paradox present in Arivonimamo and its surrounding countryside. He explains that on one level, there was a government in Arivonimamo insofar as there were ‘government personal, government offices, and at least in town, government-run schools, banks and hospitals’. What is more, almost all economic transactions, even if they were generally ‘off books’ were ‘carried out using government-issued Malagasy currency’ and ‘the territory and a whole was claimed under the sovereign authority of a Malagasy state that was recognised by all other states in the world’. Nonetheless, the Malagasy state was, in the region at least, either uninterested in, or incapable of, carrying out many of what would be considered, in most Western conceptualisations of state, its most ‘elementary, definitional, functions’, that is to coerce in order to enforce the law. Graeber relates the story of a village assembly in Betafo to deal with an instance of violence. There had been a quarrel between Benja and his sister over some mutual business arrangement and it was believed that Benja, known for his temper, had beaten her to ‘within an inch of her life’. Although the extent of violence of the beating varied from story to story, this was still considered to be a serious matter and the fokon’olona ‘ordered Benja to write an undated letter confessing to having murder his sister, and then, brough the confession down to be lodged at the local gendarme station in town’. This was done so that if his sister was ever found to be the victim of foul play, his confession would be readily available, and he could simply be turned over to the authorities. Here, the state is being used as a ‘kind of ghost-image of authority, a principle but not a threat, since if his sister was found dead, the fokon’olona would have to be the ones to arrest him and carry him down to the gendarmes’ office; the papers would merely make it much more likely that he would have to spend some time in jail’. Thus, it would seem that the state is to some extent ‘just an idea’ insofar as the state here does not exist except as a form of accountability and official authority. This relates to ideas about the inherent immateriality and transcendent nature of the state. Some have argued that the state is not a ‘thing’ which can be located but rather it is a space for power. Trouillot (2001) suggests that the state is not reducible to government, rather ‘what ‘the state’ stands for is a number of particular institutions which, together, constitute its reality, and which interact as part of what may be called the state system’ (Milliband, 1969). He further outlines the value of suspending the ‘state-nation’ homology as it enables to understand that there is ‘no necessary site for the state, institutional or geographical’ allowing the state to appear as an open field with multiple boundaries and no institutional fixity’ which must be conceptualised at more than one level. Trouillot notes that, ‘though linked to a number of apparatuses not all of which may be governmental, the state is not an apparatus but a set of processes. It is not necessarily bound by institution, nor can any institution fully encapsulate it. At that level, its materiality resides much less in institutions than in the reworking of processes and relations of power so as to create new spaces for the deployment of power’. This parallel’s Agamben’s idea of the state as a ‘privileged setting for the staging of political fantasy in the modern world’ (1998).
This reveals the ambiguous nature of the state; it is not a ‘real’ thing, yet it enables ‘real’ deployment of power; it is not an idea, yet the ‘idea’ of the state can be invoked for legitimacy; the state is unifying, yet its reality is fundamental fragmented.
This ambiguity in a way is the state’s power. In fact, secrecy is possibly the state’s most important form of power. As Abrams (1977) remarks, ‘if one approaches the more serious levels of the functioning of political, judicial and administrative institutions the control or denial of knowledge becomes at once simpler and more absolute … one encounters the world of official secrets’. He further underlines how any attempt to examine politically institutionalised power at close quarters reveals that ‘an integral element of such power is the quite straightforward ability to withhold information, deny observation and dictate the terms of knowledge’. As such, what distinguishes the state is its ability to control the idea or image people have of it to some extent; arguably the state does exist, it is more than an idea and it is really very powerful, and a chief aspect of its powerfulness would seem to lie in its ‘ability to prevent the adequate study of the state’. Yet, many have argued that there are other ways to encounter the state and that it is in fact concealed in everyday practices. They posit that the state is dual in nature; it is an idea but also made real in tangible forms through practice. Fassin (2015) offers a new perspective on the nature of the state through focusing on its embodiment. He notes that ‘beyond the idea of abstraction and neutrality which tends to be associated with it, the state is a concrete and situated reality … simultaneously embodied in the individuals and inscribed in a temporality’. People reveal the state insofar as they make up the state; ‘far from being a readily essentialised entity that exists in a sort of permanence, the state is at any given moment a product of its time’. What is more, people are often not content simply with ‘implementing the policy of the state – they make it. They are the state’. For instance, ‘when a liberty and detention judge inquires into an undocumented person’s past or present situation as the basis to request for their release, she exceeds the strict delimitation of her role and resists the repression of immigrants’. Through his analysis of the French state, Fassin reveals what he considers to be its heart, that is public institutions such as the police, the justice system, the correctional facilities, social services or mental health facilities – the site ‘where the state is produced’. The state becomes a ‘field’, structured according to oppositions, wherein ‘various institutions defend differing ideas and interests’. However, because their agents ‘do not represent the common good in the same manner’, insofar as while both the police and magistrates value the protection of society against crimes, they do not achieve their goals in the same way, as such producing the state.
This reveals the existence of bias in state making. Indeed, as Bourdieu (1999) notes that most of the writings devoted to the state ‘partake, more or less efficaciously and directly, of the construction of the state, i.e., of its very existence’. This rings true especially in regard to juridical writings which ‘take their full meaning not only as theoretical contributions to the knowledge of the state but also as political strategies aimed at imposing a particular vision of the state, a vision in agreement with the interests and values associated with the particular position of those who produce them in the emerging bureaucratic universe’.
Moreover, it brings into question the inherently western conceptualisation of the state. Hansen and Stepputat (2001) advocate that ‘instead of talking about the state as an entity that always/already consists of certain features, functions, and forms of governance’ perhaps to approach ‘each actual state as a historically specific configuration of a range of languages of stateness, some practical, others symbolic and performative, that have been disseminated, translated, interpreted, and combined in widely differing ways and sequences across the globe’ might be of value. This highlights that while the ‘state’ might be an idea, it is innately malleable and finds in expression in differing forms.
This idea that the state can be understood and conceptualised on multiple levels has encouraged the development of new conceptions of the state. Bourdieu (1999) for instance introduces how physical violence, which in Max Weber’s formular refers to the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, works in tandem with ‘symbolic violence’. He posits that ‘if the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organisational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought’. Hence, ‘by realising itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural’. Further, by thinking of the state as a ‘culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital’ which includes ‘capital of physical force or instruments of coercion, economic capital, cultural or (better) information capital and symbolic capital’, the state becomes the holder of a sort of ‘meta-capital’, allowing for the juxtaposition of notions of the state as an idea and encounters of the state in practice. To illustrate this the example of information capital can be used. Bourdieu highlights that the state ‘concentrates, treats, and redistributes information and, most of all, effects a theoretical unification. Taking the vantage point of the whole, of society in its totality, the state claims responsibility for all operations of totalisation [through] census taking and statistics or national accounting, and of objectivation through cartography … or more simply through writing as an instrument of accumulation of knowledge (e.g. Archives)’ but also for all operations of ‘codification as cognitive unification implying centralisation and monopolization in the hands of clerks’. As such, culture becomes unifying through the state’s unification of the cultural market by ‘unifying all codes, linguistic and juridical, and by effecting a homogenisation of all forms of communication, including bureaucratic communications’. Thus, while shaping reality in a concrete and tangible way, the state also seems to shape reality in an ideological sense insofar as through the framing it imposes on practices, ‘the state establishes and inculcates common forms and categories of perception and appreciation, social frameworks of perception, of understanding or of memory, in short stateforms of classifications’. Bourdieu highlights how this pre-reflexive agreement explains the ease with which
the dominant imposes their dominance. As Hume notes ‘only opinion can sustain the governors. It is thus solely on opinion that government is founded, and such maxim applies to the most despotic and military government as well as to the freest and most popular’. Therefore, the state is at once an idea, a very powerful one, and also an active transformation of reality.
However, that opinions sustain the state and allows for its existence to some extent reveals the mutual influence at play in state construction. That the state is an idea, or even an ideal is what enables the state to persist through time, precisely because ideas can be shaped, changed and challenged, conferring a dimension of accountability and responsibility to the conceptualisation of the state. As Hansen and Stepputat (2001) note that ‘the state and modern governance is not something one can be for or against as such, for the simple reason that we cannot escape it, one can and should criticise specific forms of governance, undesirable institutions, and oppressive state practices … Implied in such critiques are not visions of the absence of government or the state as such but rather the possibility of other, more humane and democratic forms of governance’. to recognise that the state is at some level an idea does not imply belief in the current form it is manifested in but rather belief in its malleable nature and hope for the future. Ideas and ideals structure the world, enabling us to think beyond the immediate and the real, allowing for conceptualisations of the future, which are, essentially, based on nothing if not ideals.
To conclude, the claim that the state is ‘an idea’ is interesting to think with on some levels as it reveals the ideological and influential side of the concept of the state. However, to claim that the state is ‘just’ an idea is limiting as it obscures the ways in which the state is produced and reproduced in a real way through people. The state might be hard to define but its effect should be hard to ignore.
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