Lester J. Mazor

Although the modern state is difficult to comprehend, given the lack of a referent in common experience, the duty to avoid its reappearance and the responsibility of periodic intercourse with creatures living in states in other parts of the galaxy justify the effort to describe the circumstance of its dissolution, its characteristics during the period of its terrestial hegemony, and the conditions of its initial establishment. In addition to the difficulties arising from cultural distance, the inquiry is hampered by the fact that few records were preserved during the waves of actions against information retention at the end of the Modern Ages. Moreover, of the existing documents, most of those which were "official" or "corporate" in origin are considered unreliable, since it is known that they were often falsified to serve the immediate purposes of particular factions. For this reason the attempt to sketch the main outlines of the modern state which follows is based upon inferences drawn from scattered and fragmentary writings of a theoretical nature, which apparently survived because they were considered to be of little consequence.

From these materials it appears that the state was a form of human association, consisting in a plurality of persons. Claims to statehood by a single person occasionally seem to have been made (l'etat, c'est mois) but these were not acknowledged, although particular persons were believed to exert great influence in the affairs of states. Small groups also were not permitted to be states. Statements that even "the smallest are too large for assembly government" and that the population of a state "can be even tens of millions" (Bobbio 1978: 26, 18) may seem incomprehensible, but are supported by innumerable references to the state as "large and complex." States often sought to increase their populations by conquest or by the introduction of various measures to increase human reproduction. No simple formula has been found, however, for the relationship between population size and rank in the hierarchies which obtained among states.

Exclusive control of a substantial territorial area also appears to have been a prerequisite of statehood. Though no explicit criteria for minima of population and territory have been discovered, ridicule of states for being unduly small and the treatment of groups claiming autonomy but lacking a bounded territory suggest that they may have existed. The frequency of conflicts over territory indicates that expansion often was considered advantageous. There is abundant evidence to support this finding, despite the fact that gigantism was a major factor in the decline of the state. There were even a few states whose dimensions approached continental scale, though these appear to have been unmanageable, and proposals were made for the creation of a world state as a response to incessant interstate conflict and lack of coordination. However, these proposals received little support, since they were made at a time when the state already was losing acceptance as a viable political form.

Demographically, a state consisted of one or more (often several) areas of moderate population density but enormous area, set within a larger, much more sparsely populated territory. The principle of location of the denser areas has not yet been determined; it follows no discernible ecological pattern. The areas of greater density were the sites of "the urban crisis" (Castells 1976:2-3), while sparsely populated areas were often referred to as "underdeveloped" or "areas of rural impoverishment." In this arrangement large numbers of people were divorced from the land, were ignorant of its needs and cycles, and did not participate directly in nutritional maintenance. In fact, some states derived a substantial part of their nutritional support from others. This was accomplished both by direct seizure and by establishing relations of economic dependence. For urban dwellers, living conditions tended to be personally hazardous and often culturally barren. Yet persistent shifts of population from rural to urban areas indicate that, even when people were not directly driven from the land, conditions of life in rural areas had become unacceptable. The state was deeply implicated in these demographic arrangements, maintaining by force the exclusiveness of landholdings by a small number of persons; supporting a structure of finance under which small landholders frequently lost their land; encouraging patterns of distribution which favored massive, energy consuming and ecologically destructive forms of agriculture; and adopting numerous other measures which fostered urbanization and industrialization. These aspects of state policy were supported by the belief that it was both possible and desirable for human beings to dominate and exploit their environment-which complemented the view that social relations among persons should be hierarchical. Although eventually the full extent of the destructiveness of these beliefs became known, the development of this understanding was retarded by efforts of the state to maintain these myths in order to sustain the system of power relations.

The pattern of interaction among persons was based on an elaborate and multiple arrangement of relations of domination and subordination (Giddens 1973). Although most of the sources indicate that the overall shape of this arrangement was pyramidal, the issue is confused in the literature, which sometimes suggests that there were three distinct classes consisting of approximately equal numbers of persons and which even contains claims that there were no classes at all. However, frequent references to distinctions based on age, gender, skin color, wealth, language group, belief system, technical skill, general knowledge or other characteristics demonstrate that the population of states must have been highly stratified. Apparently, many of the hierarchies were mutually reinforcing, though some were crosscutting. Because there was little fluidity in either the relative significance of the hierarchies or within each one, the entire arrangement had a static quality.

Detailed and minute knowledge of the behavior of persons within the state appears to have been one of its major preoccupations. Persons living within a state were considered its "subjects," although some of them were also called "citizens" in most states. The state claimed the power to limit entry and exit, to define permissible behaviors, to demand expressions of allegiance, to impose obligations to contribute labor or even life, and to support these and other demands by a system of education, habilitation, and incarceration which was more generally called "discipline" (Foucault 1977).

The state was consistently involved in efforts to create and maintain the expansion of material production, especially by industrial means, with little regard for the burdens this imposed upon both persons and environment. In some states this entailed direct management by members of the state apparatus, extending to the control of communication, transportation, housing, nutritional production, entertainment and many other activities. Since in many of the states of this type it was held that the state was merely a transitional form of political life, extensive state management coexisted with efforts to prepare for the disappearance of the state, though details of the latter effort are lacking. (Chkhikvadze 1972). Another set of states adopted what was called a "corporatist" organization of society in which major economic decisions were made by monopolies supported by a state planning apparatus, labor union representatives guaranteed the acquiescence of workers, wage and price controls were imposed, restrictions on information, communication and assembly were instituted, and political participation was reduced to a charade. (Wolfe 1977: 340) It was widely believed that these states had as their main purpose the perpetuation, maintenance and support of class rule, although it is unclear whether the state apparatus was directly manipulated by the ruling class, was semi-autonomous as a means of controlling divisions within this class and defining interests of the entire class, or was primarily an agent engaged in crisis intervention (Burawoy 1978: 60). In any case, it is not readily apparent what difference these distinctions might have made, although they may have been consequential to the strategies proposed by rival factions seeking to justify their particular political stance.

The political vitality which began to emerge at the end of the Modern Ages was first recognized in the form of "the hoarding of political power from the state." (Wolfe 1977: 344) It had become clear that enormous suffering and ecological damage would be done by elites reluctant to yield control (Offe 1972: 486). During the crisis period, the state became immobilized as it was called upon to solve a limitless number of problems, produced by its own activities and by those which it supported, at the same time that the willingness of people to respond to the demands of the state was declining. The situation was one in which there appeared to be both "a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority" (Huntington 1976: 11). The state could not both meet the demands of promoting efficiency (accumulation) and for amelioration of its effects (Connolly 1978). Hence, there was "simultaneous need for but despair of bureaucratization" (Wolfe 1977: 264), as the state absorbed an increasing proportion of human effort. Despite the vast state apparatus and the penetration of the state into almost every aspect of daily life, the "coexistence of poverty and affluence" (Offe 1972: 479) was highly visible in most states and was a salient feature of the differences among states. While some people recommended resignation in the face of an intractable condition, others sought to make the state an object of worship by endowing it with personal, mechanical or epic characteristics (Wolfe 1977: 278-87).

A state whose claim to validity as a political form rested on its promise to provide a satisfying and fulfilling life to its subjects could not survive at the limit of its capacity to export misery, exploit the environment, and postpone the question of the meaningfulness of the existence it had to offer. Had the state been able to achieve an ethical character (Hegel 1952: 155), it might have persisted, but this could only be asserted, not accomplished (Marx 1977: 26-35, 63-74), since the state could establish neither community nor universality (Unger 1975: 284-89). The attempt to found the legitimacy of the state upon democratic premises had foundered because of the obviously undemocratic nature of its bureaucracies, the impossibility of conducting its affairs openly, and its unwieldy scale. The transnational state of the late period had so slender a democratic foundation (Wolfe 1977: 241-44), that it did not even claim to be grounded in participation; indeed, it often saw participation as undesirable (Huntington 1976: 36). The earlier attempt to maintain on the one side a visible face of the state, an arena of public controversy open to view if not to involvement, while on the other concealing large segments of the state machinery, including those of greatest consequence, failed as revelations inspired by factionalism and the sheer size of the covert operations made it impossible to keep their existence from becoming a factor in political consciousness. Public distrust for the state already had risen substantially at the point at which the state had sought to sustain itself and its principal roles by delegation of large portions of its activities to "quasi-private bodies." But the distinction between public and private spheres proved to be untenable (Wolfe 1977: 204-13, 165; Unger 1975: 175-76). Expansionism also did not suffice to maintain belief in the state, because the finiteness of territory revealed its limits, because it risked overextension of state resources, and because of the excessive demands it placed upon the populace (Wolfe 1977: 100-07).

A firmer ground for the legitimacy of the state had seemed to be its capacity to provide a framework within which a society of freedom and equality could be developed (Rawls 1971), but this had not been sustainable, since freedom was either given only a completely abstract content or consigned to arbitrariness (Unger 1975: 83-88), equality was either reduced to formal equality before the state or interpreted as homogeneity, and both freedom and equality were held to be in competition with each other. At one time it had appeared that the state could claim to be justified on the ground that it was supremely just, issuing from "the general, united will of the people" (Kant 1970: 77), but this had been possible only so long as it seemed plausible that this "freedom, equality and unity of the will of all the members" somehow could be equated with a decision reached by a majority vote of delegates of a citizenry defined to exclude almost all of the population-children, women, and those who labor for their livelihood (Kant 1970: 77-78). This theory had the advantage of avoiding any obligation of the state to justify itself by contributing to the happiness of people (Kant 1970: 73), precisely the notion on which the state finally lost its claim to legitimacy, a danger which had escaped some advocates of the state (Hobbes 1967).

The pessimistic version of the argument from happiness, which saw the state as necessary to provide security in a society in which human relations were reduced to "a series of market relations" (Macpherson 1964:264-65), was willing to concede "extraordinary powers" to the state (Wolfe 1977: 279). The optimistic version sought to model a society in which a panoptic state could "induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power," a state in which "he who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection." (Foucault 1977: 201, 203).

Despite its various facades, its efforts to depict itself as inevitable, necessary, perpetual, protective, paternalistic, adventurous, the unifier of separate interests, the guardian of fundamental rights and peaceful order, the state consistently held to its role of maintaining control. Though this might at some times have appeared to have purpose, to be of benefit to the few, ultimately it claimed no other end than control itself, holding close to its origins in patriarchal power (Bodin 1955; Allen 1951). But the power of the state never was merely negative, for "power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault 1977: 194), including those which lent reality to the state. The existence of the state was contingent on the view that power could be centralized, that it could be held at the top of hierarchies, that it could descend from the heights to permeate every corner of the society and permanently stifle opposition. The struggle for the lifting of the veil of ignorance which sustained these myths, for the recognition that power is dispersed, that it resides in all relationships, and that it could be assembled horizontally rather than vertically, stands between the political vitality of our own epoch and the iron cage which once was the modern state,

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Lester Mazor teaches law at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.