A STATE-IN-SOCIETY APPROACH

The recent renewal of intellectual interest in the state has made a number of salutary collateral contributions to the field of comparative politics. One of these has been to provoke a certain rejuvenation of the comparative study of politics and society in the low-income countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moving beyond the lamentable dialogue of the deaf to which the debates between both modernization and dependency analysts had descended in the 1970s, numerous stimulating monographs published during the 1980s have been successful in “bringing the state back in” to Third World studies. It often happens in the social sciences, however, that new gains made on one analytical front may only give rise to yet newer and yet more challenging problems of analysis on other fronts. Against this generic malady, the recent state-oriented studies have shown no immunity.

Furthermore, a common tendency to mistake analytical claims for empirical ones has shown itself to be especially problematic for this line of inquiry and research. The general analytical claim concerning the primacy of state can easily lead, for example, to the fallacious view that states in low-income settings are always and inevitably the most significant social actors on the scene. And the research agenda that, in turn, can flow from a view of the state-as-domineering- Leviathan is almost bound to be deficient for the study of most countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where really-existing states have so rarely achieved such colossal proportions, and where those that might be classified as genuine goliaths have so often proved to be but crippled giants.