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Do We Need a Theory of the State?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. B. Macpherson
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Extract

MyQuestion is not whether we need a theoretical understanding of the political process in modern states, but whether we need a theory of the state in the grand manner of the acknowledged ‘great’ theories, ranging in modern times from, say, Bodin and Hobbes to Hegel and the nineteenth century juristic theories of sovereignty, and on to the less ‘great’, but in intention equally grand, theories of Green and Bosanquet and such twentieth century thinkers as Barker and Lindsay and MacIver.

Type
Whither the Unwithered State?
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , December 1977 , pp. 222 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1977

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References

(1) E.g., several of the contributors to three collections: McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John (eds.), Apolitical Politics (1967)Google Scholar;Connolly, William E. (ed.), The Bias of Pluralism (1969)Google Scholar;Kariel, Henry S. (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory (1970)Google Scholar.

(2) In his Power, Violence, Decision (1975).

(3) Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (1971)Google Scholar;Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)Google Scholar.

(4) Maciver, R. M., The Modern State (1926), p. 342Google Scholar.

(5) Below, pp. 240–41.

(6) Published in Lindberg, Leon N. et al. (eds.), Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism: public policy and the theory of the state (Lexington, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar.

(7) Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975)Google Scholar, first published in German in 1973.

(8) The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York, 1973Google Scholar.

(9) E. g. the controversy between Miliband and Poulantzas, and other controversies in the New Left Review, e.g. Gough (NLR 92) and Fine & Harris (NLR 98).

(10) Cf. ‘Bow and Arrow Power’, The Nation, Jan. 19, 1970.

(11) Below, pp. 239–42.

(12) Cf. Wolfe, Alan, New Directions in the Marxist Theory of Politics, Politics and Society (1974), pp. 145 sqqGoogle Scholar.

(13) Cf. Mandel, Ernest, Late Capitalism (1975): ‘Belief in the omnipotence of technology is the specific form of bourgeois ideology in late capitalism’ (p. 501)Google Scholar.

(14) Cf. my forthcoming The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford 1977), ch. III, sect. 3Google Scholar.

(15) Cf. the essays by various authors in Fitzgerald, Ross (ed.), Human Needs and Politics (New York, Pergamon, 1977)Google Scholar.

(16) A striking beginning has been made in Wolfe's, Alan article cited above. Cf. his forthcoming The Limits of Legitimacy (Boston, Beacon, 1977)Google Scholar.