Rethinking the State: Perspectives on the Legibility and Reproduction of Political Societies

In: Political theory: an international journal of political philosophy, Band 28, Heft 6, S. 822-834

Abstract

A review essay on books by (1) James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale U Press, 1998); (2) Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press, 1999); & (3) Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press, 1999). Seeing Like a State focuses on the conceptual & practical problem of legibility, ie, the state's need to map its territory & people & make them legible for political ends. Scott supports this topic with an extraordinarily rich array of historical examples & case studies. He stresses the distinctive high-modernist scheme of the 20th century that destroys present community when imposing new legible grids for future ends. Jacqueline Stevens's book is equally cautious about the state, but has an alternative focus on how conventional conceptual frameworks from the past impact present & future political life. For Stevens, the state is one form of a political society amidst other forms, eg, one based on kinship. Reus-Smit's ambitious project in The Moral Purpose of the State is to make legible to international political theorists differences in the structures of fundamental institutions & practices between sovereign states. He does this through a historically informed constructivist theory. M. Pflum