Articulating Theories of States and State Formation

Issues and Agenda

Articulating Theories of States andState Formationjohs_1369 553..603

PATRICK CARROLL

Abstract Some historical sociologists have, with some justification, described thedevelopment of the sub-discipline in the language of three successive “waves.” Thisframing implies that each wave supercedes the other across time. Given that secondand third waves map onto generational distinctions, the whole idea of waves hasbeen met with consternation from second wavers who are not ready to be super-seded. In addition, there is some debate, if not confusion, over the criteria that definethe waves. In this paper I suggest that the language of successive waves frustratesthe potential to articulate different approaches with the aim of a more comprehen-sive understanding of historical societies. This is particularly the case with ourunderstanding of states and state formation, which is the focus here. Instead of thewaves framing, I suggest a strategy for articulating research agendas on stateformation by conceiving of such in terms of their “centers of gravity” (or COGs)1

rather than their boundaries. I pay particular attention to the body of work that canbe said to have a concern with culture as its center of gravity, a body of work thatwhile overlapping considerably is not co-extensive with that identified as third wave.In this context I elaborate a broad conceptual architecture of culture, at thefoundation of which is the distinction between meaning, practice, and materiality.This triangulated conceptualization of culture can, I argue, clarify some ambiguitiesin the literature and aid articulation of three COGs in state theory. In addition, Isuggest that many questions taken to be theoretical are actually empirical. I con-clude by briefly illustrating the approach in the case of science and modern stateformation in Ireland.

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A growing number of historical sociologists are following the lead ofJulia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff and are speakingof the development of the sub-discipline in terms of three “waves”(Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005).2 Adams et al. lay out anextremely detailed map of the second two waves, and the delinea-tion now seems destined to become part of the vernacular of thefield. The first wave appears to include anything published prior tocirca 1965, the second wave to work that began to emerge in thelate 1960s, and the third wave to work that appears from the early1990s. Second wave work is characterized by an emphasis oncomparative methods, political economic analysis, determinism,and structuralism, in contrast to third wave emphasis on casestudies, cultural analysis, contingency, and agency.3 However, a

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 22 No. 4 December 2009ISSN 0952-1909

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symposium on the book in which this framing was presenteddemonstrated that it has come in for serious criticism by some“second wavers” (Lachmann et al. 2006). Adams et al. dispatchmuch of that criticism as what one would expect from anentrenched and (until quite recently) hegemonic paradigm, thedefenders of which being either unwilling or unable to see thechanges that are taking place in the field (Adams et al. 2006). As wehave long learned from Kuhn (1962), this is likely in large measuretrue. However, I suggest that it also follows from the agonisticnature of the wave framing.

Many will easily relate to the use by Adams et al. of the words“repression” and “exclusion” when describing second waver’s polic-ing of what gets to be called historical sociology and what issues getto be defined as “settled.” Those who do case studies know inti-mately that the language of “historical comparative sociology” ismeant to exclude them in the hope of maintaining an image of thesub-discipline that might gain acceptance with positivists. And anysocial scientist will identify with the language of contestations,battles, showdowns, challenges, and so forth that are used todescribe our “conversations.” Such agonistic framings surely doreflect real struggles, but their constant iteration cannot easilyserve the articulation of insights from different bodies of work. Andthe struggles will almost always be generational, for it is necessarilythose who have invested many decades in a paradigm that will bemost resistant to change (Kuhn 1962, Mulkay 1969). Generationalagonistics in academia are perhaps the most difficult to overcome,as exemplified by the response of Andrew Abbott to the wave frame,which beneath the humorous tone is caustic (Abbott 2006). Indeed,the conflict between second and third wavers has something of thecharacter of an intergenerational family fight. And though Adamset al. state that viewing the waves in terms of age-generations is toocrude, when they describe the second wave hegemony, it seemsvery much generational.

This paper attempts a different approach. Rather than frame thefield in terms of successive waves or hostile quasi-generations,state theory is framed in terms of “centers of gravity.” The aim is tospark an interest in genuinely building upon earlier work while atthe same time showing how it needs to be modified. This is not tosay that every third waver should be doing this, but it can justifi-ably be hoped that such an approach might find equal place withthe five current “foci” of the third wave research described byAdams et al. (2005: 32).4 The concept of center of gravity identifiescenters that do indeed hold even as their boundaries are increas-ingly fuzzy. Thus the center of gravity analytic heads off fallaciousarguments that point to a few “exceptions to the rule” as a way to

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© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 22 No. 4 December 2009

challenge an entire framing, as has been attempted by some secondwavers in their response to the wave framing. Examples that do notneatly fit the framing are not so much exceptions to the rule, ascases that orbit at something of a distance from the center. Adamset al. seem genuinely committed to not allowing the agonistics ofthe debate lead to a new set of exclusions (2006: 419), yet theyseemingly find it impossible to refrain from labeling such secondwave arguments as “specious,” a word not well fitted for movingbeyond the hostility of the debate (2006: 420). That the hostilecharacter of the “conversation” remains despite the intentions ofthe players indicates that it derives in part from the agonisticsinherent in the wave framing itself. I now turn to an alternativeapproach of thinking about one of the most central objects of thefield, states and state formation, in terms of centers of gravity, orCOGs. I should perhaps note immediately that what follows is nota literature review. No attempt is made to reference all work asso-ciated with each COG. Rather the point is to capture key elementsof each.

Three COGs can be readily identified: the military-fiscal, theautonomous state, and the cultural. These distinctions will not beunfamiliar to many, but they are not the only distinctions thatcould be drawn. I choose them because they identify critical dimen-sions of the object “the state.” My suggestion is that rather thanmoving beyond the military-fiscal and autonomous state COGs tocultural analysis, we need to turn the cultural analytic back uponthe other two. The point of articulating all three is not to achievesome kind of theoretical synthesis. On the contrary, it is to drawtogether key empirical findings of each in order to generate newtheoretical questions that can guide a research agenda concernedwith articulation of findings. And while my own research lies in theculture COG, the aim of this paper is to invite researchers from anyof the three to explore possibilities for articulation.

The Military-Fiscal Center of Gravity

The military-fiscal COG has states emerging from the dynamics ofconquest and domination. States originate in military organizationand subsequently develop through the mutually sustaining tacticsof conquest, treaty, and alliance. Thus states align with powerfulsocial classes in symbiotic relationships. The treasure requiredto sustain military activity seeds the development of a taxationapparatus. Domain over territory and population calls forth otheradministrative functions, driven by the imperative of internal secu-rity (e.g. police and food supply), and therefore the expansion ofstate offices, and the growth of an administrative bureaucracy.

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Because states emerge from war and the costs of war,5 they alwaysexist in relation to other states (allies or enemies), and cannot beunderstood apart from these relationships. It is this external rela-tionship, and its attendant foreign policy, that partly constitutesthe state as a “sovereign” actor. The mobilization of forces and theextraction of revenues are foundational state activities, and it isthese activities that explain the emergence of bureaucracy as acontrolling, taxing, and governing structure.

As Tilly put it over thirty years ago, the focus is on the “organi-zation of armed forces, taxation, policing, the control of foodsupply, and the formation of technical personnel,” more or less inlinear temporal order (Tilly 1975: 6; see also Mann 1986, 1993).6

The military-fiscal COG is perhaps most clearly articulated by Tillyin Capital and Coercion (1992), where he classifies states accordingto where they are located on the revenue/extraction – coercion/violence spectrum (1992: 33). Two examples of state forms locatedat the extremes of the spectrum are provided, with another inthe middle: coercion-intensive (e.g. Russia), capital-intensive (e.g.Venice), and capitalized-coercion (e.g. Britain) (1992: 133ff). Themilitary-fiscal model can be thought of as a Machiavelli/Marxinspired model. Machiavelli (2007) articulated a science of states interms of enemies and allies where regime craft and statecraft areone and the same. Marx conceived of the state as a relationshipthat is police/management oriented internally, and militarily/diplomatically oriented externally. In this context it was a smallstep for Lenin to define the state as a repressive apparatus. Whilethere are more recent sources for the military-fiscal conceptualiza-tion of the state (such as rational choice and resource mobilizationtheory), the Marxist-Leninist conception of the state as a coercive(variously oppressive) organization with an executive head (sover-eign) that is aligned (more or less) during particular periods withspecific classes (usually the ruling but sometimes the popular)appears central. Alongside the view of the state as a military-fiscalcomplex, however, was the somewhat contradictory idea of thestate as a unified actor, which partly results from viewing states inrelation to other states, i.e. as sovereign actors with their owninterests, objectives, etc. In this context one can trace connectionsnot only to Machiavelli, but to Hobbes.

Hobbes conceived of the state as an actor in the image of anindividual, embodied in the person of the sovereign. Hence thefamous engraving of Leviathan showing all the bodies of the com-monwealth contained within the body of the king. The actions of thesovereign are the actions of all, the actions of the entire stateunderstood as a commonwealth. I emphasize Hobbes’ conceptual-ization of the actor-state to highlight the historicity of the idea. For

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instance, with Machiavelli it is the Prince who acts to secure hisstate, which is quite different from the idea that the Prince’s actionsare the actions of the state.7 The distinction is reflected in the titlesof their respective books, The Prince and The Leviathan, both ofwhich are “actors.” Today the language of the actor-state is sodeeply institutionalized and thus taken for granted that it is con-troversial to suggest that states not only do not act, but cannot act(Carroll 2006).8

The Autonomous State Center of Gravity

The war-taxation, actor-state, class-dynamic foci that form keyelements of the military-fiscal COG easily articulate with the notionof an “autonomous state” actor, and thus research on or related tothe idea of state autonomy can easily be conceived as part andparcel of a single wave of research, i.e. the second wave. Adamset al. suggest that the broader idea of the “relative autonomy of thepolitical . . . best characterizes both the promise and limits of thesecond wave” (2005: 17). But they do not really pursue this dis-tinction, instead following with a list of different works they asso-ciate with the second wave. The focus on the relative autonomy ofthe state can, however, be viewed as a research COG distinct from,if easily articulated with (because historically associated with), themilitary-fiscal.9 The autonomous state COG had both Marxist andWeberian variants. The latter has had the more enduring impact,partly by virtue of providing Weberian answers to Marxist ques-tions. Within the Weberian research agenda the state is conceivedas an organizational actor (variously institutionalized) that is ableto act with a degree of autonomy from the ruling class, and thiscreates a research agenda distinct from that of the military-fiscalCOG, where the military power of the state is seen as “an intrinsicpart of the reproduction of class relations” (Mann 2006: 349).Within Marxism the autonomy debate had been underway in theearly 1970s, crystallized in the exchanges between Poulantzas andMiliband. Miliband viewed the state as a direct instrument of thecapitalist class, but Poulantzas argued that the state was betterunderstood as a structural expression of the logic of capital. Pou-lantzas’ structural alternative to Miliband’s instrumentalism gavethe state (as a real-time government) a degree of autonomy from thedirect interests of particular capitalists while at the same timegranting that it secured capitalism over the long run: hence thenotion of the “relative autonomy” of the state (see also, Block 1977).

Ann Orloff, discussing the relative autonomy conceptualization,describes it as a more “society-centered” approach, distinct fromthe new “state-centered” view articulated by Skocpol and herself.



Weberians thus “broke with neo-Marxist views about the relative –that is ultimately limited – autonomy of the state” (Orloff 2005:206). This shift from an internal Marxist debate to a direct engage-ment by Weberians on the autonomy issue brought with it a certaindegree of confusion. The Marxist-Poulantzas notion of relativeautonomy only made sense in relation to the instrumentalist view.The framing of the debate between “society-centered” and “state-centered” theories recast the Marxist-Poulantzas position as“limited autonomy.” But Poulantzas’ position was closer to that ofSkocpol than either was to Miliband. It was not so much a shift, asthe terminology might indicate, from a non-autonomy view of thestate (Miliband – class centered) to a relative autonomy view (Pou-lantzas – society centered) to a strong autonomy view (Skocpol –state centered). Rather at least in my view, it was a movement froma non-autonomy view to a limited autonomy view to a relativeautonomy view. Either way, the recognition of state autonomyby both Marxists and Weberians provided the grounds for thearticulation of the two literatures, with the strong sense of relativeautonomy (state centered) being supported by decades of empiricalresearch.10 Key concepts that emerged from the autonomy focuswere those of relative autonomy, embeddedness, and embeddedautonomy (Evans 1995), each of which grappled with the characterof the relationship between state and society. The focus on a state/society relationship implied a concern with the collapse of thatrelationship through revolutions (Skocpol 1979, 1994; Goldstone1991). The research agenda on revolutions was easily expanded toinclude both early modern and postcolonial periods (Goldstone1991; Goodwin 2001).

The classical sources of this COG are Hobbes, Marx and Weber.Hobbes, once again, because of the way he conceives of the state asa regime with a sovereign head whose actions are taken to be theactions of the state as a whole, that is, the actor-state idea (thoughoftentimes only used as shorthand within more complex analyses).Weber because of the focus upon the state as a continuouslyoperating rationalized organization with a degree of institutional-ized autonomy from production relations. And Marx because of theconcern with class dynamics and revolutions. Just as Weber offerednew answers to questions first posed by Marx, so the stateautonomy COG developed Weberian solutions to Marxist problems.Whereas Tilly exemplified the military-fiscal COG, Skocpol is thescholar most centrally associated with the idea of state autonomy.For instance, a search of Amazon for “state autonomy” yields about1,600 hits, most of which reference Skocpol, or someone else whoreferences her. Though Skocpol also ascribed to the military-fiscalmodel, it was her original contribution on autonomy that opened

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up a whole new research agenda. The concept of state autonomybecame an engine of research, for instance, into professions, insti-tutions, and especially the “welfare state,” which opened up a routeto cultural analyses of state formation, and critique of the positiv-ism (Steinmetz 1993, 1999, 2005).

Ironically, the institutional and cultural analyses that have fol-lowed have implicitly undermined the idea of a coherent actor-state.Skocpol defined the state in a manner consistent with the military-fiscal COG, as a “set of administrative, policing, and military orga-nizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executiveauthority” (1979: 29). However, once the autonomy question isconceived in terms of institutions understood as cultural forma-tions,11 the notion of the politically bounded actor-state begins tounravel. There is a way, however, to reconcile the notion of theactor-state with institutional analysis. The actor-state can be recastas an institutionalized discourse, a distorted representation of thestate that is nonetheless real enough in its effects (see discussionof Timothy Mitchell’s work below). In this context state theory canbenefit from articulation with actor-network theory (ANT) in Scienceand Technology Studies (STS). For instance, John Law uses the term“punctualization” to describe the process through which a com-plex and heterogeneous actor-network, composed of humans, non-humans, institutions and all the rest, is simplified in the language ofsingular coherent actors, whether human individuals or organiza-tions (Law 1992). This insight is readily applicable to the notion ofthe state as an actor. Though in reality a heterogeneous formationassembled together over centuries, all the complexity of the modernstate is suppressed and made invisible through an act of punctual-ization that renders it a single unified actor. This punctualizationis itself institutionalized such that when an executive acts thoseactions are taken as the actions of the state (or indeed “country”)as a whole. Thus we get the idiom “America decided,” “Chinaannounced,” “Britain declared,” and so one.

By drawing on actor-network theory it is possible to reveal thestate as, on the one hand, a complex actor-network within whichagency is distributed and,12 on the other, a punctualized actor inwhich agency is taken to be concentrated in a single macro-actor.This appearance of an actor-state should not, in analyses, beequated with an executive at the head of a more or less coordinatedapparatus, for to do so allows, ironically again, the idea of theclass-instrumental state to reenter through the back door. Reflect,for instance, on the actions of the executive under the G.W. Bushadministration. If that executive’s actions are treated as the actionsof the state, then ipso facto the state was an instrument of thecapitalist class during that administration. We know however that



the institutional structures of the state system, buttressed by theagency of professionalism, resisted executive directives in manycases. For instance, “health and safety inspectors” responsible forthe mining industry refused to adopt the new title of “complianceassistance officers,” as directed by their newly appointed boss, whobefore his appointment was a big coal CEO. This shows that theautonomous state COG, as articulated by Skocpol, contains withinit an “essential tension” (to borrow a term from Kuhn) between theidea of the state as an actor and the idea of the state as a complex ofinstitutions. That tension is currently dissipating, not because it hasbeen reconciled theoretically, but because the “next generation” isleaving behind talk of the actor-state as they move the institution-alist part of the COG further in the direction of cultural analysis. Forexample, the idiom of the actor-state is hardly used at all by the“third wave” authors in Adams et al. (eds. 2005).13 Yet the idea isnowhere explicitly questioned either, and it does pop up occasionallyin a rather ad hoc and common sense way, i.e., in its punctualized,institutionalized, and therefore taken for granted meaning.

The Culture Center of Gravity

The range of research encompassed by the culture COG is too vastand diverse to summarize here. Much of it is already summarizedand represented in Adams et al., and also in Steinmetz (1999), andin any case my purpose here is not to write a literature review.Instead I will discuss some of the research from the cultural COGthat one, relates to the state; two, is identified as third wave; andthree, explicitly or implicitly articulates, or has the potential to sodo, with the military-fiscal and autonomy COGs. This will in turnserve to expand the discussion to other cultural approaches that donot easily fit the wave frame but which do fit in the COG frame(such as governmentality studies and STS). As noted, a culturalapproach to the state as an institutional formation emerged fromthe autonomy COG and for this reason is easily articulated with it.Adams et al. acknowledge this by noting that institutionalism inhistorical sociology is essentially “a friendly amendment” (to theirsecond wave grouping). However, while this is the case with respectto the autonomy COG, it is much less so with respect to themilitary-fiscal COG, which still awaits consistent cultural analysis.

The new historical institutionalism is exemplified in the work ofOrloff and Clemens. Both straddle the autonomy and culture COGsand have now become leaders of the third wave, particularly itscultural aspect. Orloff, for instance, argues for an exorcism of “thewhole set of socially determinist analytic approaches that have heldus back from making a cultural turn in this field” (Orloff 2005). The

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turn to culture always existed as a potentiality in the autonomyCOG in a way that it was not in the military-fiscal, and the actualtransition now underway further underlines the distinctiveness ofeach COG and thus the inefficacy of viewing them as part of a singlewave of research. Orloff’s work developed out of the autonomyCOG’s adoption of the welfare state as an object of inquiry. As Orloffrecalls, their approach to the welfare state was set apart fromkindred social democratic and neo-Marxist approaches through theconcern to look “at the ways in which state elites might pursueprojects beyond any suggested” by non-state actors (Orloff 2005).This led to a view of the “institutional constitution of actors,” whichled directly to considerations of culture. Ironically, however, muchof the institutionalist work from the state-centered perspective,while extending to crucial questions such as gender and race, hasgenerally not interrogated the very idea of “the state.” It is mostlytaken for granted that we know what the state is: it is only requiredto distinguish its varieties, particularly its welfare varieties, andthe historical contingencies or forces that shape those differences,for instance, professionalization of state actors.14 More broadly, thenew institutionalism brought something of a departure from theentire state problematic, rather that a direct critique of it.

This is surprising given the emergence, at roughly the same time,of “governmentality studies (see Burchell et al 1991),” an approachthat may be articulated with cultural institutionalism and whichshifted the register away from states as actor-structures andtowards rationalities of governance. On the other hand, becauseinstitutionalism emerged from a state centered view it did notarticulate well with a Foucaultian perspective (Foucault 1978,1980, 1988, 1990, 2007) that emphasized a liberal governmentalityin which the state is decentered. A more focused discussion ofgovernmentality literature follows below, but for now it can benoted that the orientation is wonderfully captured by Patrick Joycein the phrase “the rule of freedom,” a form of rule that signalsa liberal governmentality in which free choosing subjects areconstructed, and are compelled to act as such, that is, as self-governing subjects free of an overarching and dictating centralizedpower in the form of “the state” (Joyce 2001, 2003 see also, Rose1990). As Orloff more recently notes, however, there are manyavenues for articulation of an institutionalized view of the state withFoucault’s work, particularly the themes of regulation, classifica-tion, discipline and the capillary processes of administrative power(Orloff 2005: 223–4). Indeed it is another irony that while institu-tionalism emerged from an effort to bring the state back in, it hasan important affinity with a research agenda that was foundedupon “taking the state back out” (Curtis 1995).



A key area for articulating cultural analyses with the other twoGOGs is the tricky issue of the state/nation relationship. LynSpillman’s work on nation is less directly derived from either theautonomy or military-fiscal COGs, yet it is more explicitly articu-lated with them. She notes that Tilly acknowledged in 1975 that heand his colleagues at the time focused on the state rather than thenation because it was so difficult to come to an agreement on whatnations are. The result was a bias “toward the extractive andrepressive activities of states” (Spillman and Faeges 2005: 426).Spillman shifts away from conceiving of culture simply in terms ofbeliefs, values, and interests, largely viewed within the military-fiscal GOG through the analytic lens of ideology. The ideologicalview treated culture in the classical sense, as a mere reflection/distortion of material structures and interests at the moredeterminate level of the political-economic. Culture was thusexplanandum rather than explanans. As recently as 1999 Tilly putit thus: “culture and identity, not to mention language and con-sciousness, [are] changing phenomena to be explained rather thanas ultimate explanations of all other social phenomena” (Tilly 1999:411). Tilly overstates the choice, since cultural sociologists have notgenerally claimed that culture is the ultimate explanation of every-thing. On the other hand, the second wavers did, with few excep-tions, hold that culture could explain nothing.

Brubaker and Spillman advance us beyond that view, by showinghow culture is constitutive of national identity and nationhood.This constitutive view is also advocated by John Walton, whostrangely does not appear in the exhaustive bibliography in Adamset al. Walton argued, in opposition to Tilly, that culture was con-stitutive of identity, which fundamentally informs a groups sense oftheir “interests,” and therefore explains collective action (Walton1992). The absence of Walton from the third wave grouping tends toconfirm the generational character of the wave framing, as does theabsence, in Adams et al.’s detailed introduction, of Corrigan andSayer’s 1985 work on state formation as cultural revolution. In anycase, all cultural work of the third wave takes the constitutive view(Adams et al., 2005). However, as far as explanatory capacity goesit can be argued that the issue is not a theoretical one to beanswered once and for all, but an empirical question that requiresexamination in every case. It is likely less a case of either/or thanone of the complex co-constitution of the political, the economic,and the cultural.

Spillman’s work on the ways that culture is constitutive of nation(and the open agenda for research that she lays out) could easily bearticulated with the military-fiscal and autonomous state COGs inorder to reveal the co-production of that perplexing hybrid, the

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“nation-state,” and Spillman explicitly advocates building uponearlier historical and comparative work (Spillman and Faeges 2005:434–437).15 Indeed, such an approach could also help explainpost-colonial nation-states, where the colonizer was successful atengineering state-systems, but failed, partly due to nationalism, tomaintain sovereignty (Carroll 2006). This should not, however, beread to mean that cultural analysis does not explain the particularform of states. Cultural analysis of states should not be confined tothe nation side of the nation-state coupling. On the contrary, nowthat science (both natural and social) has been revealed by STS asa form of culture, an explanation of the peculiar form of the modernstate is impossible without recourse to cultural analysis (Mukerji1997, 2009; Carroll 2006). Furthermore, current work is revealinghow both the political and the economic are culturally constructedin specific ways. For instance, Adams shows how the political isshaped by gender through the patriarchal forms of patrimonialism(Adams 2005). Gorski shows how religion shapes the social, politi-cal, and economic order (Gorski 2003). And work on the culture ofeconomics, markets, and capitalism is finally dismantling throughempirical research the reification and naturalization of thesecategories (e.g. Carruthers 2005; MacKenzie 2006; Knorr-Cetina,Karin and Alex Preda, eds. 2006; Nee and Swedberg, eds. 2005).

This work is opening up opportunities for articulating STS withthe new economic sociology, as well as with historical research onstates and state formation. Carruthers, for instance, while notingthat work in the military-fiscal COG always accepted that “states”and economies “co-evolved,” takes the role for states a stepfurther by showing how they are constitutive of particular eco-nomic forms. Work in STS adds to this by emphasizing how eco-nomic science crucially constructs the very economic reality itclaims to merely represent (MacKenzie et al., eds. 2007). Bothforces of cultural construction, science (or knowledge/expertise),and government (or governmentality) are now being shown toco-produce the capitalist economy as a distinct object and sphereof activity. The linkages that develop between economics asknowledge and government as policy become institutionalized inlaw (Denis 1989), and constituted in calculative techniques and“metrological regimes” (Barry 2002; Mitchell 2008) in such aubiquitous way that the notion of a mechanical “relationship”between “state” and “economy” seems increasingly inadequate asa theoretical assumption. Though eschewing explicitly “cultural”analysis, Mitchell demonstrates that the idea of the economy as aspecifically material realm separate and apart from discursiverepresentation is unsustainable (Mitchell 1998). Work on econo-mics (however construed) in STS and Foucaultian work has con-



verged in a powerful new analytic, and though rarely presentedas explicitly cultural in orientation, can be justifiably viewed aspart of a wider cultural approach.

A range of other work exists that can be viewed as part of thecultural COG. This work, which I will address presently, does notfind its way into the waves framing for two reasons. First, some ofit is published prior to the chronological emergence of the thirdwave. Second, most of it is published outside of the United States,the overall limiting factor for the wave framing. The two problemsare linked together, as a quasi-generational framing between hege-monic teachers and their rebellious students must necessarilybe rooted in a relatively self-referential space/place, in this casea particular national context. Adams et al. have defended thenational approach as necessary to prevent their project becomingunwieldy. Perhaps, however, it is more a case that the wave frameitself only makes sense in a national context. Unfortunately, anational framing has some drawbacks. First, it seems somewhatanachronistic in a globalizing world where the integrity and dis-creteness of nations is increasingly questionable, particularly withrespect to intellectual or scientific traditions. Second, and moreimportantly, it compounds the problem of “methodological nation-alism” (which, in terms of the analyst’s intentions, need not implya political nationalism). The actual nature of methodologicalnationalism is subject to debate (Chernilo 2006), but it is expressedin the equation drawn between societies and nation-states as afunction of modernity, and the methodological use of the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis in political sociology, particularlyin “comparative historical” work, but also in case studies. Dividingthe field of historical sociology in national terms creates what mightbe termed a meta methodological nationalism. I am not suggestingthat framing research traditions or research agendas in nationalterms is by definition wrong. On the contrary, part of the job ofinterrogating methodological nationalism is to understand the roleit plays in both explaining and supporting the equation betweensocieties and modern states. However, if the aim is to achieve acumulative understanding of states and state formation, and inparticular illuminate the contributions of cultural analysis, thengoing beyond the nation framing is desirable.

An early and groundbreaking cultural analysis of state formationis Corrigan and Sayer’s The Great Arch (1985). Importantly, andunlike in the United States, this work brings to bear Durkheimianthemes on the question of state formation, without rejecting thecontributions of Marx and Weber. A key concept in this analysis isthe idea of “moral regulation.” Durkheim conceived of social rela-tions as irreducibly moral relations, and while arguing that social

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solidarity was spontaneous when “normal,” an unusually rapidincrease in the division of labor broke apart social ties leadingboth to greater individualism and the elaboration of individualisttheories of society. The answer for Durkheim was, partly, moral(disciplinary) education (Durkheim 2002). Importantly, however,Durkheim sees the state not as some kind of master actor, for “thestate does not execute anything” (Durkheim, in Giddens, ed. 1986:41).16 Rather “the State is a special organ whose responsibility itis to work out certain representations which hold good for thecollectivity” (Durkheim, in Giddens, ed. 1986: 40). This idea,though reformulated from a critical perspective, appears central toCorrigan and Sayer’s concept of moral regulation. While moralregulation is distributed across a wide range of spaces and prac-tices (locales of execution), and always involves a “particular” mis-construed as a “universal” (the influence of Abrams [1988] isevident here), it is crucially informed in the English case by the veryidea, orchestrated and broadcast from London, of what it means tobe English. In other words, the state in this case is inseparablefrom the central government’s collective representation of English-ness and the English nation. English (and later British) state for-mation is shown to be an 800-year process through which theEnglish subject and the English state are co-constructed.17 Sayerfurther develops the analysis by explaining the unique developmentof capitalism in England by reference to the institutional forms ofstate and civil society.

English state formation, over the very longue duree, molded a civil society in whichcapitalist economy was possible. Critical in this was the early unification of Englandas a national state. But equally significant was the “peculiar” character of thepolitical and legal institutions through which this national unification wasaccomplished and in whose continuities, real and imagined, society came to berepresented. . . . These institutions of state directly, and from a very early date,empowered a wide spectrum of Englishmen of property against encroachments,whether from above or below. They proved sufficiently flexible, by virtue of theirrootedness in locality and interest, to accommodate secular economic and socialchanges in the connotation of property. They long subjected the populace to a socialdiscipline that was local, personal, and patriarchal, and the more effective for allthat. And they legitimated all these things, superbly, in the name of an Englishnationality claiming to embrace everyone in a common and ancient polity andculture. From the point of view of its contribution to the rise of capitalism, therewould appear to be every reason for regarding such a polity as paradigmatic ratherthan peculiar (1992: 1410–11).

Sayer’s work on English state formation was less an effort toelaborate a cultural analysis (though it was that also) than it waspart of a wider critique of the reification of analytic categories(particularly in Marxism) and what he called the “violence of



abstraction” (1987). But there is no question that this work canbe understood as cultural in orientation. Culture could no longerbe viewed as merely a reflection of the supposedly more real andtherefore determinate action at the level of the economy andpolitics. Economy was both demarcated and developed throughpractices of political culture and the institution buildingimplicit in such. Modernity, as an institutional and thereforecultural formation, needed to be seen as part and parcel ofcapitalism.

Quite independently of such re-readings of Marx, a similarflight from abstraction was being inspired by Foucault in bothFrance and England (Corrigan and Sayer also took cues fromFoucault, particularly with respect to individualization/totaliza-tion). Arguments were increasingly made against the use of macrocategories of analysis such as “the state,” and in favor of atten-tion to specific rationalities, programs, practices, and technologiesof government and their associate expertise, both within the stateas conventionally understood, but also “beyond” it. This is mostclear in the field known as “governmentality studies” (Burchellet al 1991). Despite the heterogeneity of work that shares thislabel, it does appear to have as its center of gravity a concernwith the microphysics of power. This is particularly the case inthe work of two of its most ardent proponents, Nikolas Rose andPeter Miller (Rose and Miller 1992, 2008). At first blush, and fora number of reasons, this work does not appear to contribute toa cultural analysis of states and state formation. First, it presentsas a more constructivist approach in opposition to the realism ofstate theory. Second, it is less connected to cultural analysis perse than to a range of Foucaultian themes. Third, and perhapsmost importantly, it was initially presented as a kind of non-statetheory in that it followed Foucault’s injunction to seek out theways political power was exercised beyond the state. Rose andMiller expressed the agenda as one that “relocates ‘the state’within an investigation of the problematics of government.” (1992:174 [emphasis original]) This framing left open the possibility forarticulation with state theory, but the agonistics of the field weresuch that this non-state theory soon became an anti-state theory,and eventually even an approach that was not even concerned,precisely, with power or governance (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde2006: 85). Again, my purpose here is not a literature review. ButI do wish to dwell for a moment on how a departure from con-ventional state theory became over time an opposition to statetheory. The point of retracing part of this process is to show howthere was nothing inevitable about it, and that it is entirely pos-sible to incorporate governmentality studies into cultural analyses

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of states and state formation, and articulate it with both themilitary-fiscal and the state autonomy COGs in state theory.

Rose and Miller decenter the state by focusing instead on therole of political rationalities in shaping modes of governance, theconstitution of the liberal subject through discourse and lan-guage, the emergence of problems of government for which pro-grams are created and expertise elaborated, and the constructionof an array of connections between government projects and non-government actions that are heterogeneous and spread through-out the social body. They explicitly reject the realism of statetheory (1992: 177), and instead of focusing on systems of coer-cion and revenue extraction, address how the state “emerges asan historically variable linguistic device for conceptualizing andarticulating ways of ruling” (1992: 177). And finally they focus onthe role of knowledge in projects for “acting upon action,” definednot simply in term of ideas, but rather as a “vast assemblage ofpersons, theories, projects, experiments and techniques that hasbecome a central component of government” (1992: 177). Each ofthese points are presented as setting their agenda apart from theconcerns of state theory at the time. In America, where Marxistand Weberian mixtures of theory had become institutionalized,the project was largely ignored. There was little appetite forFoucault in historical comparative sociology, and governmentalitywas sometimes viewed as a mere return to liberal talk of govern-ment in the sense that it was somehow neutral with respect tothe social structures of capitalism. The dismissal of the govern-mentality agenda was based on a lack of understanding of it, butit was buttressed by some blistering critiques that were very wellinformed and lucidly crafted.

A case in point is the response of Bruce Curtis to Miller andRose’s 1992 agenda setting piece (Curtis 1995), his sharply wordedcritique clearly hitting a nerve with the authors, who responded bywondering how a single paper could “produce such a defensivereaction, while an entire field of related literature can be ignoredwithout discomfort” (Miller and Rose 1995: 590). In an otherwisesmart and penetrating critique, Curtis at times expressed a degreeof contempt for the entire project, describing it at one point as“smoke and mirrors” (1995: 585). Miller and Rose clearly took itpersonally, shooting back with references to Curtis’ “outdated anti-nomies,” his “fixations” and “confusion,” and his “comforting cal-culus of domination and emancipation.” While claiming they didnot deny the existence of states “understood as political appara-tuses and their associated devices and techniques of rule” (1995:593), they responded with prickliness, saying one was under noobligation to account for them in the “constitutional language of the



nineteenth century” (1995: 594). The agonistics of polite scholarlydiscourse was now in full swing, and Miller and Rose became muchmore strident in their critique of state theory, stating the need to“abandon,” “discard,” and “reject” a range of foundational ideas instate theory, such as the “belief that regimes of power rest upon afalsification of human subjectivity,” i.e., ideology (1995: 593). Inaddition, they simply ducked Curtis’ cogent points of critique, forinstance with respect to what exactly they understood by the word“government,” or ignored them completely, for example with respectto their failure to complement their account of subject formationthrough individualization with an account of totalization within thestate. Whatever prospect existed for Miller and Rose to engage withstate theory rapidly receded over the following decade. Whereasthey had earlier reflected on how governmentality studies couldspeak to issues such as the military-diplomatic complex, interna-tional relations between states, geopolitical issues, the idea ofsovereignty, and the prosecution of war, these possibilities werestarkly absent from Rose et al’s 2006 review of the field, whichaddressed the origins of governmentality, the kinds of research thathad been conducted, and its connections with other literatures.While reasserting (2006, 2008) their agenda as originally formu-lated, they seemed to cut off all possibility of articulating govern-mentality work with the concerns of the military-fiscal andautonomous state COGs. Indeed, they stated that “governmentalityis far from a theory of power, authority, or even of governance”(2006: 85). If these are not central to governmentality studies, thatfield would seem fundamentally incompatible with state theory.

On the other hand, while they had never explicitly cast govern-mentality studies in terms of cultural analysis, they granted, in thecontext of speaking to connections with other traditions (though itseems almost an afterthought), that “we should mention culture.”Yet their interest was not so much about how state theory couldbenefit from a cultural understanding of government and knowl-edge, but rather how “culture, too, could be analyzed from theperspective of government” (2006: 97). Indeed, the idea of culturewas useful to the extent that it could be reduced to their ownfamiliar categories of analysis: “Culture itself, then, can be analyzedas a set of technologies for governing habits, morals, ethics – forgoverning subjects” (2006: 97). Before culture was reconceived interms of the concerns of governmentality studies, the suspicion ofcultural analysis seemed largely to rest on what was viewed as itsinextricable connection to the analysis of ideology, as is evidencedin Dean’s critique of Corrigan and Sayer and the role they gave tomoral regulation in the “(mis)attribution of meaning to experience”(Dean 1994: 151). Yet despite the rather ambivalent attitude toward

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cultural analysis, and the increasingly hostile stance toward“the state” as an analytic category, I suggest that the main fociof governmentality studies can be recast in cultural terms andarticulated with theories of states and state formation.

Where Rose, Miller, O’Malley and others largely left macrocategories like “the state” behind, others, particularly TimothyMitchell, set out an agenda that sought to explain such macrocategories as the effects of more micro practices and technologies.In a classic article published in 1991 (see also, Mitchell 1999,2002), a year before Miller and Rose proposed to “relocate thestate” in the problematics of government, Mitchell proposed to go“beyond” both state theory and its critics. Though also inspired byFoucault, Mitchell’s work went in a different direction than govern-mentality studies, with different consequences for state theory.Less concerned with the construction of subjectitivities, Mitchelllaid out his critique of state theory and his alternative researchagenda with stunning clarity. His major point was that no one hadbeen able to establish a clear boundary between the state (or eventhe political) and society and/or economy. His conclusion was thatwe should give up trying and instead acknowledge that the distinc-tion did not stand up to empirical scrutiny. The agenda thereforeshould be to show how the “apparent” distinction between stateand society was the product of webs of discourses and technologies(both of which seem to include practices), that is, how it was a“structural effect” (Mitchell 1991: 93). Mitchell’s analysis is cen-trally informed by the concept of disciplinary power elaboratedby Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1978), and this partlyexplains his divergence from governmentality scholars, who neverpaid much attention to that text.

Like governmentality analysts, however, Mitchell tended to cutoff opportunities for articulating his analysis with themes in statetheory. For instance, with respect to the autonomous state COGhe points out that Skocpol provides a definition of the state uponwhich the notion of autonomy depends, but provides “no actualmeans of knowing whether a given institution belongs merely tothe political system or the state proper” (Mitchell 1991: 87). Heincisively demonstrates that the “boundary of the state . . . doesnot mark a real edge. It is not the border of an actual object”(1991: 95). With respect to the military-fiscal COG he questionswhether it is appropriate to make transhistorical reference to arepressive apparatus of police, prisons, etc., “when almost every-thing we mean by these institutions is . . . recent in appearance”(Mitchell in Bendix et al 1992: 1019). Finally, in his groundbreak-ing work on the constitution of “the economy,” he cuts off oppor-tunities for articulation with cultural analyses, by invoking the



now familiar rejection of macro categories like polity, economy,and culture: “To rethink economy, we will not get far by posingquestions about the relationship between economy and culture –as if these were two big objects or spaces or dimensions, foundeverywhere, and as if our task were to identify their changingrelationship, the diverging degrees of embeddedness, and so on”(Mitchell 2008: 1120). Thus he rejects the “relational” analysis ofmacro categories/worlds in the context of economy and culturejust as he did in the context of state and society. His uniquecontribution to governmentality studies is thus to direct attentionnot to the processes of individualization, but to the mechanismsof totalization, and their correlate in sociological analysis, whatmight be called “macro-ization.” Connections could be drawn hereto the work of Sayer, but that is for another day. The point is thatMitchell, if from a different direction than Rose and Miller,eschewed macro categories of analysis. This seemed to precludearticulation of his work with cultural analyses of the state andthe new economic sociology, not to mention conventional theoriesof state and state formation more generally. But this need not bethe case.

First, while such macro categories cannot be found delineatedand pure in the world of practice, they can be identified discursivelyin terms of ideas, beliefs, and meanings. They have epistemicqualities that cannot be reduced to misattributions any more thansubjectivities can be reduced to false consciousness. As such theyare central categories through which distinct policies and practicesare carried out. Organizations of government form around them,specific bodies of knowledge and expertise become associated withthem. We need to understand how macro distinctions are formed inmicro practices in which such distinctions can seem arbitrary, butalso how those macro distinctions then create means for under-standing and acting upon the world. From a sociological point ofview they can be elaborated as analytic categories derived from thecategories of actors. If they shape how actors act then we mustaccount for the genuine work they do. For instance, actors con-struct rights and define and limit powers in the overarching orderdesignated by the macro categories of politics and “the state.”Government builds infrastructure, stimulates demand, trainsand educates in the context of purposeful development of “theeconomy.” National meanings and “national cultures” are con-structed in quite deliberate ways through exhibitions, rituals,symbols, representations, knowledges, monuments, maps, narra-tives and so on (Anderson 1991). “Social” workers and mentalhealth professionals of every stripe intervene to reorder and correctrelationships (i.e. “the social”). And from the other side, just as

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particular agents and agencies of government “see like a state”(Scott 1998), so subjects of such government “see [and therebyexperience] the state” (Corbridge et al. 2005).

But we do not have to follow the actors’ meanings slavishly, inthe sense of crass empiricism. We can define them analyticallyand consistently, but always with reference to actors’ categories.And we need not think of them as bounded, but rather in termsof their key centers of gravity. For instance, we can analyticallyconceive the center of gravity of politics as power, that of theeconomy as production, that of “the social” as relationships, andthat of culture as meaning. By seeing them as centers of gravitythat overlap in complex ways we can avoid the extremes of bothmicro and macro stances. For instance, while we can say that thecenter of gravity of culture is meaning, we can also point out thatall meaning requires production, involves relationships, impliespower, and is inseparable from material forms, and that all ofthese aspects are crucial to an adequate understanding ofculture. How they are all connected in any one case is, again, anempirical question. That is, the material dimensions of culturewill not be of equal significance in every case and at every time.The main point, however, is that macro categories do not refer toless real realities than micro categories, meaning is not less realthan practice or materiality, and the macro effects of microphys-ics are no less real than microphysics itself. Indeed, Foucault’sargument that categories like “the state” are derivative does not atall imply that they are without causal consequences (Hannah2000: 42). The very idea of the state is a powerful force in his-torical events and outcomes. In any event, the essentialist oppo-sition of governmentality (micro) to state theory (macro) hasrecently been brought into question by returning directly to Fou-cault’s own writings (Jessop 2007; see also MacKinnon 2000;Hannah 2000).

There is no essential reason why Foucaultian research cannotbe articulated with state theory more generally. Those locked inan agonistic frame with powerful paradigmatic commitments willview every difficulty of articulation as proof that such is impos-sible. But for those who wish to break out of the existing para-digmatic fragmentation and opposition, such difficulties aremerely a challenge demanding a commitment to work hard toovercome them.18 For instance we can explore how it need not bethe case that the disciplined military only “appears” greater thanthe sum of its parts, as Mitchell once suggested (1991: 93). It canbe argued that the modern disciplined military is greater than thesum of its parts, that it is an emergent macro power that whileemerging from micro disciplinary practices cannot be reduced to



them. The same can be said of the macro phenomena of the state.Or in the context of Mitchell’s critique we can agree that deploy-ing the category “repressive state apparatuses” transhistoricallyproduces a generalization that does not stand up to empiricalscrutiny. But we can deploy the ideas of coercion and extractionat the heart of the military-fiscal conceptualization of the state inorder to grasp a key characteristic of states in general. That is,while we should not generalize what are better seen as particu-lars, nor should we take such errors of generalization as proofthat generalization itself is essentially flawed. Also, we do notneed to think of cultural analysis simply in terms of the “inter-action,” “embeddedness,” etc., of culture and economy or cultureand polity or culture and state. Rather we can develop a distinc-tively cultural analysis of state formation while revealing em-pirically the complex networks of discourses, practices, andmaterialities through which and out of which states are built andsustained. In this context there need not be any essential barrierto articulating the findings of governmentality studies with theconcerns of state theory. And it is worth noting that despiteefforts to eschew talk of the state it has generally not been pos-sible to do so entirely. For instance, Miller speaks of the “inter-relations between accounting and the state,” going so far as to“define” the state, even if only “as a loosely assembled complexof rationales and practices of government” (Miller 1990: 315; fordifferent conceptualizations of the state in governmentalitystudies see Asch 2007; Christie 2005; Bailey 2006; Hannah 2000;Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Goldman 2001; Hindess 2005;Kivinen and Rinne 1998; Leibler 2004; Li 2005; Sharma 2006).While I suggest below that the materiality of states as countries/populations/technologies can and should be distinguished fromthe ideas/discourses of state that constitute rationalities, and theorganizational practices of government that constitute the statesystem, the point here is that the degree of tightness or loosenessin how the various elements are assembled is entirely an empiri-cal question.

Finally, it is clear that some working under the governmentalityumbrella have more explicitly adopted a cultural analysis, particu-larly those from the perspective of anthropology. Ferguson andGupta, for instance, point to a growing anthropological literaturewhich recognizes that “states are not simply functional bureau-cratic apparatuses, but powerful sites of symbolic and culturalproduction that are themselves always culturally represented andunderstood in particular ways” (2002: 981). On the other hand, inother governmentality studies the status of culture in the analysisis sometimes vague (for instance Asch 2007; Silverman and

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Gulliver 2006; Christie 2005; Hindess 2005; McFall and Dodsworth2009). The variety of views on “the state,” and the array of positionson culture points to the variability of the governmentality literature,a literature that spans disciplines and appears more akin to aheterogeneous group of fellow travelers than a well defined para-digm. Indeed this is sometimes not only acknowledged by its majorspokespeople, but welcomed. In terms of the goals of articulationit is a plus. Since there is no powerful disciplinary matrix associ-ated with the paradigm its agenda is more plastic than otherapproaches.

Conceptualizing the Analytic Architecture of Culture

Because the status and meaning of “culture” is often only implicitin governmentality studies, the category as employed in such workis sometimes understated. On the other hand, work that explicitlyadopts a cultural analysis of states and state formation reveals awide range of ways in which culture is conceptualized. Rather thanviewing this as a problem it can be seen as an opportunity forgreater articulation. Instead of pitching one view of culture againstanother, it is possible to attempt to sketch a broad architectureof culture. This will demand moving beyond a modernist view ofculture that sees it in ideational terms set in opposition to thematerial. Weber is not of great service here, since his concept ofculture is inescapably modern in that it contrasts culture as theideal with economy as the material (and also politics as material inthe sense that it is the organization of “rational” individuals pur-suing their material interests, which are themselves ultimatelyeconomic). Adams et al. emphasize the ideational and emotionalaspects of culture, and associate it closely with agency and contin-gency. This sustains the dualism of the material/structural andcultural/immaterial and ironically both hinders articulation ofculture with the themes they describe for the second wave, andresults in a too conservative view of culture that leaves thosesecond wave elements intact. Let me be clear that I am not sug-gesting that the focus on meaning in cultural analysis be replacedby something else. However, culture also needs to be understood asinternal to practice, and much greater attention needs to be paid tomaterial culture. STS can be a resource here, as it has emphasizedthe analysis of practice as a strategy for understanding the cultureof science (Pickering 1995).

The focus on practice in turn directs analysis to the materialtechnologies immanent in the research process, and to the inter-vention in, and transformation of, material forms, i.e., the pro-duction and use of material culture, which extends to the built



environment and land that has been transformed by practice. Itis important with respect to material culture that it be acknow-ledged that material environments that embody designs andmeaningful purposes can structure action without individualseven being aware of it, without it being consciously meaningful tothem. Whether or not this is the case becomes an empirical ques-tion. The various ways that culture is conceptualized, however,implies that in order to pursue a research agenda aimed atarticulating the three main COGs of research on states, it is firstnecessary to attempt to graph the various conceptualizations in acoherent theoretical way. It seems useful to begin parsimoniously,and from that point fill in the detail. One approach is to trian-gulate the concept of culture in terms of meaning, practice, andmateriality, and then map the variety of ways culture can beunderstood. The result is the following graph, which may appearcomplicated at first, but is quite easy to read once its symmetryis understood.

Triangulating Culture

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The point of this exercise is partly to show that different viewsof culture in terms of, for instance, values/beliefs, symbolicresources/systems, a toolkit, ideology, cognitive structures, insti-tutions, discursive formations etc., need not be taken as compe-ting conceptualizations, but rather as elements in the overarchingarchitecture of culture. When one scratches the surface of discus-sions that set these different elements of culture in competitionwith each other, one often finds not so much a debate over how toconceive of culture, but rather debates over agency/contingencyand structure/determinism, micro vs. macro analysis, or aboutculture as explanans rather than explanandum. The agency/structure argument is exemplified in discussions sparked by AnnSwidler’s concept of culture as a toolkit (2001).19 By emphasizingthe toolkit aspects of culture Swidler aimed to keep the agent frontand center. Some critics took a more structural view, arguing thatculture existed prior to the agent and therefore was a limit onagency and/or its condition of possibility. But both these positionsmust be true in varying degrees, and the question might be bettercast as when and how action is structured by culture and whenand how culture is a resource for agency.

Most sociologists likely agree that culture is composed ofsymbolic, cognitive, discursive and institutionalized elements. Thecommon denominator of this understanding of culture is meaning.Meaning may be consciously known and acted upon by socialactors (Swidler 2001), or it may be an institutional structure thatconstitutes subjects (Meyer and Rowan 1977). It may be a set ofunderstandings to be explained by interest-based action (Tilly1999), or an active process of construction that constitutes inter-ests and thus explains action (Walton 1992). Either way, the centerof gravity is still meaning, however expressed in institutions,beliefs, values, norms, cognitive structures, discursive formationsand so on.

Sociologists are less likely to place practice on equal terms withmeaning in definitions of culture, but there is justification for doingso. Marx, for instance, conceived praxis to designate that humanactivity always involves both the ideal and the material. Ideologycame to be understood as a set of ideas that distorted and maskedthe actual character of human activity which is both material andmeaningful. Followers of Marx subsequently viewed ideology ascultural in the sense of a structure of meaning, confining materi-ality to economic practice, and thus erasing the materiality ofcultural production. Members of the Frankfurt school partlyreversed this by elaborating on the production of culture and theculture industry, but they did not precisely theorize the materialityof cultural practice, focusing more on the ideological role of the



culture industry. Althusser, however, developed the more profoundidea of praxis found in the early Marx, by arguing that ideology wasnot simply a set of beliefs that failed to correspond with materialreality, but that it was a meaning structure itself dependent uponmaterial practices for its reproduction (Althusser 1994 [1969]). Thepractices that sustain the “ideological state apparatus” are there-fore just as material as economic practices, or the practices of the“repressive state apparatus.”20 Weber’s conceptualization of actionalso unites meaning and doing, at least to some extent. Indeed, it isprecisely the combination of meaning and behavior that distin-guishes action from mere behavior. Intersubjectivity is thus neversimply about meaning, since it implies social interaction. And whilemeaning can traverse time and space, interaction is always rootedin real-time material spaces. However, the focus on action andagency in terms of meaning has tended to lead sociologists awayfrom the analysis of culture as practice. An exception is the work ofBourdieu, where, Calhoun and Sennett note, the concept of prac-tice “knit together structure and action, meaning and materialconditions” (2007: 7).

Anthropologists have been more inclined to view culture in termsof practice. Sewell, who Adams et al. classify as second wave buthere fits the culture COG, proceeds on the basis of an anthropo-logical sense of culture, noting that “the presumption that aconcept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings is at oddswith a concept of culture as practice seems to me perverse” (Sewell2005: 163–164). As Sewell points out, to engage in practice isnecessarily to engage with a system of symbols and meanings.Perhaps the best proof that practice is cultural is the example oftacit knowledge (Kuhn 1962). As Harry Collins, working within theSTS sub-field of sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has mostforcefully shown, there are some forms of knowledge that can onlybe communicated through practice (Collins 1985). Though Collinsfirst addressed the issue in relation to the role of skill in naturalscientific experimental replication, the implications are much widersince there are all kinds of skills that can only be acquired inpractice, from carpentry to drawing blood to playing basketball.Practice must be more than a vector for the transmission of culturalmeanings. It must be internal to bodily cultural production, main-tenance, and transformation. This is shown in an important newvolume entitled Practicing Culture, edited by Craig Calhoun andRichard Sennett (2007), in which the argument is made thatculture “is practice: embodied, engaged, interactive, creative, andcontested” (2007: 5).

If practice has had a doubtful place in sociological understand-ings of culture, “material culture” has largely been viewed as a

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contradiction in terms. The material, from both a Marxist andWeberian perspective, was seen to belong more properly to therealm of production, or more broadly to the realm of the economicand the politics that flowed from it (hence the notion of “materialinterests”). Adams et al. somewhat sustain this idea, contrastingmaterial determinism with a view of culture that stresses signifi-cation (2005: 48–51), and framing the cultural turn in terms of“religion, emotion, violence, habit, and all the nonrational elementsof social life” (2005: 64). However, John Hall has recently noted thatof the three dimensions (meaning, practice, and materiality) ofculture, the material is the most in need of theoretical elaboration(Hall, Neitz and Battani 2003). Practice should be central to howwe think about material culture, for as well as participating inmeaning (as Sewell notes), studying practice leads necessarily to itsmaterial forms. The focus on cultural practices draws attention tothe tools, instruments, technologies and other materials of humanactivity, as well as the material environments in which and throughwhich action unfolds. Such materials must be understood asboth embodying earlier discourses and practices, and as shaping,driving, and constituting unfolding cultural practices. For instance,Chandra Mukerji has illustrated how the analysis of materialculture helps explain how the modern state was forged andsecured, made in an agential sense and concretized in a structuralsense. Mukerji focuses on the Gardens of Versailles, demonstratingtheir centrality in the construction of Louis XIV as the Sun Kingand France as a new Rome (Mukerji 1997; for a different context seeLofland 1998). The gardens were not simply a symbol of royal powerand French taste. Elaborate parties brought the nobles to the courtwhere interactions were carefully choreographed as enactments ofroyal power. The material culture of the gardens acted to structuresymbolic articulation and concretize hierarchical relations. Thiswas a case of material agency since the gardens embodied specificintentions and designs. The gardens extended out into the coun-tryside serving to illustrate the unbroken connection between thecourt and the country. And the techniques of land management,forestry, cartography, engineering, and geometry employed in thematerial construction of Versailles were the same as those usedthroughout the country to incorporate the land into the state(Mukerji 1994, 1997).

It should be clear then that practice can be conceived as thelinchpin between the world of meaning and the world of mate-riality. It partakes of both. With respect to my graph of culture,the important orienting point to note is that as the perimeters ofthe meaning and materiality circles recede from the point wherethey intersect with practice, descending from top to bottom, they



represent a greater degree of structure. Thus the term “discursiveformation” signifies highly structured meanings that endureacross time and place, while the term “intersubjectivities,” at theintersection of practice and meaning, signifies less structuredmeanings that are used by agents, like a toolkit, and that servethe active construction of meaning in interaction. On the mate-riality side the transition is from material designs, which involvea culture of working with materials, to material formations thatagain are structural in form and therefore shape human lifeand interaction in a manner that is largely beyond the ability ofmost individuals to change or resist. Material formations can alsostructure at the macro level of economics, politics, and socialorder, for instance, in the case of the water conveyance and floodcontrol infrastructure in California. None of this requires eschew-ing more traditional cultural analysis that focuses on beliefs,values or ideas. Such beliefs and values are in some respectsborn of the consequences of material engagements with natureand the transformations wrought by material cultural infrastruc-tures. It is a question of understanding the power of culture inthe specificities of its manifestation, and the dynamic relations ofits ideational/discursive, practiced/organizational, and materialforms.

The graph presents “institutions” as somewhat less structuralthan discursive formations in that they are closer to practice andthus to particular organizational forms. Marriage, for instance, isan institution tied to various organizational forms of familial life.But a discursive formation, for instance that centered on “reclama-tion,” is both more free-floating with respect to specific organiza-tional form, and more diffusively structural. The details here are,however, very much open to debate and articulation in variousways. Some might argue that the differences between institutionsand discursive formations are too insignificant to constitute auseful analytic distinction. Yet at a minimum the distinction mapsonto particular approaches in cultural analysis (broadly conceived),so it does no harm to maintain them, even if the purpose is onlyto show through articulation that the distinction is more one ofparadigmatic idiom than of substance. Similarly, the category ofcognitive structure can be articulated with conventional culturalaccounts of ideology. On the one hand ideology can be granteda certain structural salience in that it is a symbolic system forknowing the world structured by political-economic or other situ-ated positionalities (“identities” and “interests”). On the other handit can be viewed in the agential sense as a political toolkit activelyand consciously deployed by actors, sometimes in an overtly decep-tive way. Mannheim was more interested in the former sense of

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ideology, the sense in which it shaped the “the mental structure inits totality” (Mannheim 1936: 238), but given the contemporarymedia landscape of political punditry it would seem rash to viewthe latter sense as less important for cultural analysis. Consider,for instance, the flap over “death panels” in the health insurancereform debate in the United States.

The location of agency and structure in the graph at the pointsof overlap between meaning/practice and meaning/materiality onthe one hand, and between meaning and materiality on the other,signifies how the agency/structure issue can be conceived withina triangulated cultural analysis. The double reference to agencyis not to privilege it over structure once and for all, but to signifywithin the analytical architecture that agency is present across thespectrum of meaning, practice, and material culture. This does notrequire stripping choice from our understanding of agency, but itdoes require recognition that choice need not always be expresslyarticulated in real time. For instance, the concept of practice doesnot imply that individuals so engaged with the world are con-sciously making choices concerning everything they do, but thosepractices can be traced to choices made in the past and subse-quently institutionalized. Thus when a scientist uses a particulartechnology in practice she may well do so as a matter of routinethat does not involve choice in the normal sense of the term, butthe use of that particular technology can in principle be traced toconscious choices (in the context of struggle) between alternativesat an earlier point in time. In this sense practice, no matter howroutine or unconscious, must encompass some degree of agency.The same is true of the concept of material culture. It implies thatthe materiality in question embodies past designs and purposesand in this sense it can be said to have agency. This way ofconceiving material agency has the advantages of an actor-networkapproach but without the disadvantages. That is, the agency of thematerial world can be brought into the analysis without completelyredefining the meaning of agency as generally understood withinsociology. Intentionality is built into the material world andbecause of this it can act in the manner that human actors can.However, the material world does not act without human actorsany more than human actors do without non-human: the core ideaof actor-network theory is maintained. Thus we easily see thefallacious character of the notion that “guns don’t kill people,people do.” Such a claim is similar to saying “airplanes don’t fly,people do.” An actor-network approach, encompassing meaning,practice, materiality, agency, and structure, would say that peopleand guns act together to kill, just as people and planes act togetherto fly.



An important consequence of this conceptualization is thatagency is a micro rather than macro capacity. Roger Sibeon arguesthat there are macro (social or organizational) as well as microagents (Sibeon 1999). However, this seems inconsistent with aview of agency that involves choice, and it goes to the heart of theactor-state problematic. For instance, it does not make sense tosay that Russia chose to invade Georgia. In the first place, a stateis far too complex an entity to able to make choices. Second, all thepeople of Russia did not participate in the decision. And from anactor-network perspective such a view seems to reduce the mul-titude of agents in a network down to a few, such that the actionsof the few are made to appear the actions of all. Thus it would seemmore appropriate to say that Putin and his inner circle chose toinvade, doing so in the name of Russia. Through strategies oftranslation and punctualization the actions of particulars appearto be the actions of a generality. But this is only an appearance. Atthe same time, specifying agency with respect to particular indi-viduals does not deny the larger body of actors that make up thestate of Russia, a network including tanks and missiles as well ashumans, a network that makes the appearance of macro agencypossible. Macro agency is a network effect, it is the outcome ratherthan the source of agency. This is not to say we should never speakof organizational agency. For instance, when a collective actsthrough consensus decision making it would seem appropriate tosay that the organization acted as one, that the organization is anagent or has agency. But most organizations are hierarchicalcommand structures in which particular segments mobilize others,and in which particular persons make decisions on behalf ofothers. Nor is this to say that there is no such thing as socialagency, for apart from the example of a consensus based organi-zation, all individuals are social entities, or to use John Law’sterms, all persons are network effects (Law 1992). Thus individualagency is, inescapably, social agency. Agency is a necessaryelement of the architecture of culture because cultural forms aredesigned and built by actors and they in turn sustain and struc-ture action. It follows, consistent with Giddens’ theory of structu-ration (1986), that practice is the bridge between agency andstructure, just as it is between meaning and materiality. Finally,this analysis of culture breaks it into its constitutive parts onlyto put them back together again. The strategy avoids what Sayerdescribes “the violence of abstraction,” whereby conceptual andanalytic distinctions become reified to the point that social realityis broken into distinct parts that are seen as having their ownunique qualities independently of the other parts (Sayer 1987).Discourse, practice, and materiality are not well bounded and

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interacting realities, but are fully embedded in each other and areco-productive of each other. They are analytical distinctions, notontological separations.

Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation

With this conceptualization of culture in mind, I now turn tothe relationship between science and modern state formation.Research on states and state formation has paid surprisingly littleattention to the role of science (particularly natural science), largelybecause there has been very little traffic of ideas with the varioussub-fields that make up STS (on state policies and “social knowl-edge,” see Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996). This lack of attentionto science is also due in part to the intellectualization of science andthe failure to see it as a form of culture. However, even with thecultural turn in historical analysis the issue has been obscured byideational accounts of culture, or by analyses that focus entirely ondiscourse. Paying attention, in addition to discourse, to the culturalpractices and material culture of science, reveals a more profoundrelationship between science and state formation than is generallyrecognized. It is now largely agreed that the adoption of experimentand thus the introduction of craft knowledge (Oster 1992) intonatural philosophy was central to the scientific revolution, particu-larly in England. Those unfamiliar with the history of science maybe surprised to hear that this is only a relatively recent recognition(despite Zilsel’s classic demonstration, in 1942, of the role of craftand engineering in the genesis of the new science [2000]). Ashistory of science sought, in the 1930s and 1940s, an epistemo-logical basis for defining its object of study, it adopted an histori-ography that took rationality and the potential genius of such asthe basis of the scientific revolution, explicitly rejecting the impor-tance of empiricism and thereby experimentalism. The case wasmost famously stated by Alexandre Koyré, in his article “Galileo andthe Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century” (1943). In oneof the most influential statements of the new historiography ofscience, Koyré argued that the single most important basis of thescientific revolution was the conceptualization, by Galileo, of iner-tial motion: the idea that something at rest will remain at restunless moved by another force, and something moving at a par-ticular velocity will continue moving at that velocity unless itsmovement is countered by another force. Galileo, according toKoyré, had thus rejected the empirically based philosophy ofmotion derived from Aristotle, and he did so not through the newform of empiricism called experiment, but by the sheer genius of hisrational mind. Thus Koyré quoted a famous exchange between



Galileo and one of his imaginary Aristotelian opponents. Havingexplained the principle of inertial motion the empirically mindedAristotelian asked if he had confirmed it by experiment. Galileoreplies: “ ‘No, and I do not need to, as without any experience I canaffirm that it is so, because it cannot be otherwise’ ” (Quoted inKoyré, 1943: 13). Koyré thus concludes that “it is thought, pureunadulterated thought, and not experience or sense-perception, asuntil then, that gives the basis for the ‘new science’ of Galileo”(1943: 13).

Ironically, while Koyré’s neo-Platonism was a major influence onKuhn, informing his conceptualization of paradigms and his adop-tion of Gestalt psychology (Kuhn 1962), Kuhn’s impact was tocause a focus on the “research activity itself,” a focus that led awayfrom intellectualist accounts and a move toward laboratory prac-tices and the machineries of knowledge production (Latour andWoolgar 1986 [1979]; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Knorr-Cetina1999), in addition to a full blown critique of the abstractions ofanalytic philosophy and the functionalism of Mertonian sociology ofscience. A focus on the actuality of science led early to its treatmentas a form of culture, for instance, Michael Mulkay’s Kuhnian-basedcritique of Merton, “Some Aspects of Cultural Growth in NaturalScience” (1969). Mulkay argued that scientists were governed notby Merton’s social norms, but by technical norms that formed acognitive structure similar to a paradigm.

Over the past thirty years the focus on experiment and labo-ratories has increasingly moved cultural analysis of sciencebeyond cognitive structures and discursive formations andtowards an interest in technologies and materialities (Knorr-Cetina 1999; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour 1988; Pickering1995; Law 1992). It has now become clear that experimentinvolved the integration of a new material culture of inquiry intothe cultural practice of science, and that this insight has pro-found consequences for cultural analyses of state formation. Fourkey material technologies can be discerned in modern science:scopes (telescopes, microscopes, gyroscopes, etc.), meters (baro-meters, thermometers, inclinometers, etc.), graphs (cartographs,photographs, seismographs and all technologies of graphic re-presentation), and chambers (pumps and other devices whichcapture and isolate entities so they can be materially mani-pulated). The internality of such technologies to experimentalresearch bound natural philosophy to engineering and gave birthto modern techno-science, or what I call “engine science” (Carroll2006). Modern engineering culture and its associated technolo-gies increasingly served to link both science and government, andscience and production.

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Jack Goldstone is one of the few historical sociologists toemphasize the role of the scientific revolution, particularly thesignificance of the steam engine, in the rise of the west (2000,2002). It has long been believed that the development of thesteam engine had little to do with science (understood ideationallyas theory). However, the connections can be drawn by tracing theemergence of the new engineering culture that was central toengine science, and which articulated with invention in industry(Jacob and Stewart 2004). Second, the connection can be drawnby following the traffic of material cultural technologies betweenscience and invention. For instance, Boyle badgered London’sartisans to contrive brass valves for him so that he could containand control the pressures in his pneumatic pump as he sought to“weigh the air” (atmospheric pressure). After much resistance onthe possibility of such from the artisans, he finally got what hewanted (on Boyle as an artisan and craftsman in his own right,see Oster 1992). The steam engine, with its high pressures, wouldhave been impossible without this little recognized revolution invalve technology. Similar connections could be traced through themeters used to monitor pressures, though it is important to rec-ognize that traffic in the material culture of engine science wentboth ways. For instance, James Watt invented the first automaticgraphing/metering device in the form of his “indicator-diagram.”The indicator metered the pressure at each stage of the stroke ofhis steam engine while at the same time graphing the work beingdone during each stroke based upon the volume of steam in thechamber. The steam engine, in turn, became central to the for-mulation of the theory of thermodynamics. And now automaticgraphing and metering technologies are almost ubiquitous in thepractice of scientific research. They are part and parcel of thepractice.

The steam engine was, of course, the technological powerhouseof the industrial revolution. As such it powered an economy thatcould finance a massive growth in the state system and the expan-sion of standing armies. In addition, the steam engine set the stagefor the further growth of engine science and the eventual mecha-nization of warfare. And here again we find unexpected linkageswhen we follow the material culture. The first “caterpillar tractor,”powered by a steam engine, was developed to move earth in theextreme muddy conditions of the California Delta, but it was onlya small step to fit it with a gun in order to get what we call a “tank,”a technology that further revolutionized warfare. Thus here areexamples of how an expanded understanding of culture thatincludes practice and materiality can articulate with the military-fiscal COG. It is not so much to deny the extent of what has been



said about the military-fiscal dimensions of state formation, but togreatly expand upon it by articulating its central concerns withthose of cultural analysis.

We might also ask how modern engineering shapes military orga-nizations. The first highly organized groups called “engineers” werethe ordnance builders and handlers in the early modern military.21

And by understanding the engineering culture at the heart of thenew experimental science of the seventeenth century we can betterexplain how scientific research and military power become insepa-rable, obviously with respect to nuclear science and the bomb, butmore profoundly and ubiquitously in the traffic of scopes, meters,chambers, and graphing technologies and their associated skills,techniques and knowledge. For instance, a submarine is an exem-plary case of chambers, scopes, meters, and graphing technologiesengineered together, all forming part of an actor-network of whichthe crew is also a part. Michael Mann speaks of Europeans’ “love ofwar,” and he agrees with Patrick O’Brien’s claim that Britishsuccess as a powerful state is based primarily on its fiscal-military(and naval) “core” (Mann 2006: 348, 344). But the very success ofits military-fiscal apparatus can perhaps be attributed to some-thing even more defining of Britain’s modern “core,” that is, itsmodern engineering culture.

Considering the role of science as culture can also help usrecognize that conceiving of the modern military, and indeed police,entirely in terms of war, violence, coercion and repression fails tograsp much of what is distinct about these modern organizations.Consider, for instance, the military’s constructive role in cartogra-phy, medicine, earthworks, and land reclamation, or the policein toxicology, forensics, and public health and safety. The con-temporary notion of biosecurity might seem novel, but it goes allthe way back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to theconstruction of a people as a population of a state, and to theidea that the power of a state was proportionate to the number andcharacter of its population. Science studies is beginning to showthat the development of political arithmetic and political economyin the context of statecraft and reason of state in the seventeenthcentury is central to the development of modern capitalist states.With this in mind I turn to the case of science and state formationin Ireland, which illustrates the centrality of science in the devel-opment of the modern state generally.

Science and State Formation in Ireland

By focusing on materiality the significance of the new relationsbetween science and government that emerged in the seventeenth

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century is revealed. Land, the built environment, and bodies/people became boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989)between science and government. This is made possible, on theone hand, by the rise of a new engineering culture and it asso-ciated engine science with the adoption of experimental tech-niques. On the other hand, it is made possible by governmentaccepting the ontology of nature elaborated in the new mechani-cal philosophy. Also important is that major figures in the newtechno-science worked closely with or for government. Thus withrespect to land we see cartography, geology, hydraulics, fisheriesand forestry management, arterial drainage, and experimentalagriculture (with its related sciences such as chemistry andnatural history, and later biology and biochemistry). With respectto the built environment we find model building designs, sani-tary engineering, ventilation systems, structural mechanics, roadconstruction, and drainage systems. And in the case of bodies/people we find public health and safety, toxicology, sanitation,pedagogy, and training. Of course, some sciences and technolo-gies are found in one or more of these centers of gravity, forinstance, political arithmetic and censuses. But it is through thisnetworking of science and government that nature and culturecome to be hybridized in a new specifically modern state forma-tion. It is important to note immediately that this is not the riseof “scientific government,” an idea which has been exploded, forthe boundaries between science and government, however dif-ficult to discern at times, remained due to the distinct center ofgravity of each. However, a process of networking science andgovernment together in the context of a new engineering culturebegins in the seventeenth century, and it continues to expand tothis day.

William Petty, writing in the second half of the seven-teenth century, is one of the most famous harbingers of thisprocess. Like other experimentalists at the time, Petty separatedand purified natural and political philosophy. But he immedi-ately sought to reunite them in a simultaneously natural andpolitical analysis that he called political anatomy. Politicalanatomy involved, in Petty’s words, “both natural and politicalobservations.” As an analysis of the state, his approach standsin contrast with the regime-oriented political science found ineither Machiavelli or Hobbes. Machiavelli famously gave us thedark craft of policy, and Hobbes the wonderfully simplistic imageof all persons and their actions united in the singular person andactions of the sovereign. Petty’s legacy, however, is the concep-tualization of the state as something composed of both naturaland political objects; indeed, that natural objects were or at least



should be recognized as political objects too. On this pointalone it might be argued that Petty was even a harbinger ofSTS!

Petty explicitly viewed Ireland as an experimental ground, andwhile in Ireland he developed all of the schemes for which heis famous. His political arithmetic and political medicine werethe precursors to demography, statistics, and public health andmedicine. Marx credits him as one of the founders of politicaleconomy.22 He drew up plans for technical colleges, teaching hos-pitals, and “workhouses” (in the sense of apprenticeship shops).As Surveyor-General of Ireland he conducted the first census ofthe country and the first accurate cartography. The map becamethe basis for land valuation and for the distribution of land tothe conquering soldiers and “adventurers,” the latter being earlyventure capitalists taking great risk for great profit. The mapremained an important reference in political and economic affairswell into the nineteenth century. He turned his Irish estate into alocal experiment in statecraft, mapping it, developing a port andindustrial center, drawing up plans for fisheries and forestrymanagement, and exploring land drainage techniques. He appliedhis political arithmetic to engineer a plantation population basedon the economical division of labor, and also in terms of securityby balancing the numbers of natives and planters (Carroll 2006).As time went by it was not only the discourses and practicesof experimental science that translated into the political andeconomic realms, since specific material technologies of naturalscientific inquiry were also integrated into political projects. Forinstance, microscopes and telescopes became crucial for accuratemap-making, pumping engines were necessary elements of landreclamation and sanitary engineering, and thermometers andbarometers became instruments of political medicine and publichealth.

Petty’s actual accomplishments at the level of the state were notas great as he had wished as they were often scuttled by politicaljealousies, and more generally by deep suspicion about his pro-posals for political anatomy, medicine, arithmetic and economyin terms of “reason of state.” For instance, in relation to the RoyalSociety’s schemes for agriculture, one yeoman refused to answertheir “inquiries on the grounds that ‘there is more reason of statein this Royall societie then at first I was aware of’ ” (Quoted inHunter 1995: 109). Yet Petty became the exemplar for scien-tifically informed government in Ireland, his name constantlycited by others conducting similar schemes in more favorablecontexts. A century and a half after Petty, through the mecha-nism of iteration, the formation of historical memory, the process

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of institutionalization, the organization of practices, the expansionof the material culture of engine science, and so on, his visionis largely realized. That vision is particularly exemplified in theOrdnance Survey of Ireland, conducted between 1824 and 1846,and it provides just one example of how science as culture net-worked with government, and shaped the course of modern stateformation.

Considering the history of cartography in Ireland from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century reveals the need for abroad conceptualization of culture that both accounts for agency,spectacular in the case of Petty, and the processes of institution-alization through which the discourse of reason of state came toembrace map-making as a foundational government activity. TheOrdnance Survey was carried out by Royal Engineers of the BritishArmy. Recognized at the time as the most accurate national mapever produced anywhere in the world, the achievement of thesurvey marks a significant watershed in the history of militarycapabilities not captured by work in the military-fiscal COG, butwhich obviously can be articulated with the latter. The baseline wasmeasured near the shore of Lough Foyle in Ulster. Here again wemust have recourse to an analysis of agency, since the baselinemeasurement involved considerable innovation by a particularindividual. The material culture of the measuring technologyinvolved a series of bars of different kinds of metal that expandedand contracted at different rates, the comparison of which allowedcompensation to be made for atmospheric conditions. A series of sixmicroscopes was used to observe the variations, another example ofhow a scope could migrate into new areas making new more pow-erful actor-networks possible. A contemporary image of the mea-surement shows the colonized and known land of Derry to the east,and the relatively uncharted lands of Donegal to the west. Goodcartographic reasons for choosing the location were articulated bythe scientists, but the wider symbolism the site furnished wasequally significant, visualizing as it did the link between modernscientific England on the one hand, and traditional Ireland onthe other. To the west a blank page or great unknown, to theeast a great engineering culture plotting its ingenious scheme. Inthis sense the image of the baseline measurement tapped intocenturies-old ideas of civilization and improvement. These ideascan be understood as classically ideological in that they maskedthe practices of conquest and expropriation at the center ofcolonialism and empire building. But they were also part of thecognitive structure informing cartography and surveying, practicesgenuinely aimed at gaining knowledge in order to materiallyimprove the country.



The triangulation operations at the heart of the cartographyillustrate the role of the most abstract forms of knowledge – math-ematics and geometry – in the formation of the modern state. Theaccuracy is reflected in the detailed knowledge it produced of thelay of the land, showing not only the natural and civil boundaries– the provinces, counties, towns, rivers, mountains, bogs and so on

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– but the size and shape of individual fields, and the precisemeandering of ditches and streams. An army of engineers movedmethodically (for two decades) across the country, equipped withthe mundane baggage of tents, chains and provisions, and the moreesoteric technologies of the time, at the heart of which were tele-scopes, microscopes, compasses and so on. The use of scopes andmeters in the production of graphs, in this context as in others,indicates the logic of cultural practice at the core of engine science.Spirit leveling rendered the rise and fall of the land, producing amap that facilitated the more effective prosecution of roads andrailways into the interior, and in this sense the map was never onlyabout representation. The map served the practices of materialintervention, roads and railways permitting deeper penetration intothe country by the agents of government. To paraphrase an oldsaying about Roman conquest, English colonial governmentalitytraveled down English roads. An early nineteenth century engineercaptured the idea succinctly in his book, Strictures of Road Police,in which he argued that roads were themselves agents of govern-ment policy, and hence part of the internal police of a country(Greig 1819).

The survey included geological, zoological, and botanical inquir-ies that helped value the land as a commodity and establish itspotential for economic development. Of particular importance wasthe search for coal deposits. All manner of samples were collectedand analyzed in government museums and laboratories. Antiquar-ian and archaeological research reconstructed the ancient face ofthe island, complicating and making intellectual the question ofwho could legitimately lay claim to it. Historical, statistical,political-economic, and social-economic studies rounded out themap as a statement not simply of place, but of the people, theireconomy, society and culture. Ethnographic and orthographicinquiries documented every possible place-name and spelling ofthat name, clearing the way for the wholesale translation of thecountry into the English language. Data was inscribed in reportsand maps, delivered to government, integrated with other repre-sentational forms like the census and the land valuation, and madeto stand for the real Ireland, that which was demonstrated byscience and enshrined in law. Integration with the land valuationwas particularly important as the latter served to legitimate andregularize revenue extraction through property taxes. O’Brienpoints out that during the early modern period “all attempts byambitious Chancellors and fiscal advisor[s] to construct realisticvaluation of the King’s base for taxation provoked serious resis-tance and turned out to be impossible to use on a routine basis”(2006: 353–54). Here again we can broaden the analysis of the



military-fiscal COG by seeing how the new scientific culturereshaped both military capabilities and revenue extractionmechanisms.

The “success” of the British state, of which O’Brien, Mann andother like researchers are so concerned, cannot be explainedwithout reference to the new science, and cannot therefore beexplained without recourse to cultural analysis. Again it is not aquestion of pitting cultural analysis against bilicist – or politicaleconomic approaches more broadly, but of conceiving of the entirefield of research on states and state formation in a manner thatfacilitates articulation of different conceptualizations of that object.Similarly, efforts at articulation with respect to the autonomy COGhas the potential to widen the scope on the state and state forma-tion. The protracted design and implementation of the surveyreveals competing institutionalized forces that resisted its moreinnovative elements. For instance, the plan to publish extensivesurvey “memoirs” (akin to ethnographies) for each county wassubsequently killed, with only one memoir (for Templemore inDerry) being actually published (though extensive data was col-lected for the entire country).23 Despite the praise from influentialagents such as Charles Babbage, publication of the memoirs wasconstrued as being beyond the domain of government, and was saidto be more appropriately left to private business. Thus structuredinstitutionalized discourses around public and private frustratedthe designs and choices of particular actors. Here again the ques-tion of the relative significance of agency and structure is anempirical one.

The case of the Irish Ordnance Survey shows that states are notsimply regulatory structures that govern a reality apart from them.What we see is the constitution of new forms of reality. Through thetechnology of the survey Ireland was translated into English,erasing in many respects the names of places indigenous to thenative people. A new taxation system was built from the survey andthe land valuation, one that cross-referenced value estimates forproperties with coordinates on maps. The maps also cross-referenced with the census, of which by this time the count ofpopulation was only a minor part of the total technology. Thecensus now contained information, in various subdivisions fromprovince, to county, to barony etc., on English language profi-ciency, on educational levels, on births, deaths, and marriages, andon agricultural production among other things. As Bruce Curtishas shown, the census does not simply describe a country, itremakes social relationships (2001). The country is made increas-ingly legible, to use James Scott’s term (1998), for the purpose offurther government intervention and transformation. “Population”

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becomes a reality partly produced by political arithmetic: it isshorthand for “population of a state” or of an internal administra-tive division. And this population is secured as a basis for statepower through political medicine, or public health and safety,which itself is secured by a growing system of police (Carroll 2002).

Foucault paid considerable attention to the growth of the policein the eighteenth century, but by viewing the culture of “liberalgovernmentality” in purely discursive terms he mistakenly impliesthat the rise of liberal economics brought the end of the “policestate.” As he put it in his lectures on security, population, andterritory, “a whole new form of governmentality is sketched out [inthe late eighteenth century] that is opposed almost term for term tothe governmentality outlined in the idea of the police state” (Fou-cault 2007: 347). As a consequence of Foucault opposing liberalism(and its concept of “economy”) to police, the continued growth of thepolice state has not been appreciated by governmentality studies.24

Despite claims to the contrary, governmentality studies have beendriven primarily by a focus on mentalities, systems of thought, anddiscourses. But discursive shifts from police, to liberalism, to wel-farism, to neo-liberalism have not been accompanied by equivalentshifts at the level of practice, though new practices have emerged inaddition to the old (for an illustration of the disjunctions betweengovernmental discourse and practice see Kipnis 2008).25 So whilethe discourse of police regulation became relatively muted with therise of a discourse of liberal self-government, the practices of polic-ing grew exponentially in the nineteenth century, particularly interms of what was called “medical police.” Medical police corre-sponds with what today we call public health and safety, the lattersecured through an apparatus of policing practices that regulatepractically everything consumed by individuals in the state, andevery aspect of the built environment, from the sewer trap underevery kitchen sink to the roofs over our heads. And while this policecan be understood as “regulatory” at any particular moment intime, when viewed across centuries of state formation it can be seenmore profoundly to constitute the reality of the state, particularlythe material culture of sanitary engineering, which becomes both agoverned and governing form that is ubiquitous. Cleanliness mayor may not be next to godliness, but it is certainly next to modernstateliness.

The histories of medical police and sanitary engineering provideopportunities to articulate cultural analysis with the autonomyCOG, rather than simply moving beyond it to institutional analysisand other cultural forms. We can recognize how these sciences,as culture, drove the development of a state system that becameautonomous from the interests of particular classes because of the



cultural logics of those sciences. And we can further articulate thesecases with governmentality studies by pointing out that liberalgovernmentality, which emphasized self-government over stategovernment, was always countered, from within the state system,by what can justifiably be called a police governmentality and anengineering governmentality. We can thus see that the autonomyquestion is far from exhausted and need not be dismissed as stale oroverdone. It is important to discover that the modern state, partly byvirtue of the cultural logics of reason of state, always had a logicof autonomy built into it. Thus there is no need to view the issue ofautonomy as inextricably bound to Marxist/Weberian debates, suchthat because those debates have since dissipated the autonomyCOG should be superceded. Indeed, the autonomy COG can befruitfully articulated with the culture analytic through governmen-tality studies, not only in terms of police and engineering, but fromthe other side through the traditional concern of that field with theformation of a liberal subjectivity.

Concluding Remarks

The state can be understood simultaneously as an idea, a system,and a country as a complex of meanings, practices, and materiali-ties. The state idea has become a powerful discursive formation,a cognitive structure, and assemblage of institutions; the statesystem has become a vast organizational apparatus that is prac-ticed with varying degrees of coherence (and indeed incoherence)from the heads of executive agencies to the most mundane aspectsof everyday life (e.g. the building police who insure the plumbingis up to code); and the state country is constituted through thematerialities of land, built environment, and bodies/people, trans-formed by the co-productive agencies of science and government,and rendered in the new forms of techno-territory, infrastructuraljurisdiction, and bio-population (Carroll 2006). The concept ofinfrastructural jurisdiction articulates with Mann’s concept ofinfrastructural power. Both concepts point to a “power to routinelyimplement decisions across a realm” (Mann 2006: 344). Infrastruc-tural jurisdiction, however, points not so much to relations betweenstate officials and “dominant classes,” as to the extension of gov-ernment regulation of the built environment, from health andbuilding inspectors, to surveys and control of development. Thegrowth of infrastructural jurisdiction through the state systemundermines the unitary image of the actor state found in theautonomy COG. Yet the institutional analysis within the latterarticulates with analysis of meaning and practice within the cultureCOG. Institutional analysis points to a more complex image of

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many state actors, variously coherent or at odds with one another.This very complexity stands in contrast with the coherency of thestate as an actor, and illustrates a tension that has existed in theautonomy COG ever since Skocpol paired the two – state as actorand state as institutional structure – in her foundational piece,“Bringing the State Back In” (1985). However, both can be articu-lated once the very idea of an actor state is seen as a discursiveformation partly born of strategic attempts at the level of earlypolitical philosophy to justify the sovereignty of emerging “nation-states.” The question becomes less one of “how states formulateand pursue their own goals,” as Skocpol put it (1985: 9), and moreone of how the goals of particular state actors come to be takenas the goals of states themselves. How, in short, is that equationconstructed and secured. In this context an important analyticdistinction needs to be maintained between the here and now ofstate actors and the trans-historical quality of state formations,between individual agents of state and the state as a structure withemergent qualities that cannot be reduced to the actions of indi-viduals. A reflexive moment is also desirable, since the constructionand institutionalization of the actor-state idea is partly secured byits constant iteration within social science discourses.

In this context there is a need for greater clarity in our use ofterminology to describe the object. We need to better delineate,relative to each other, terms like the state, government, regime, andstate actor. Though scholars make these distinctions in preciseanalytical ways in their own work, there seems to be little broadconsensus on what these terms mean, nor theoretical consistencyin how they are used. There are many interesting questions to beaddressed, such as the status of local governance as elements ofstate formations. For instance, when considering the capillarypower of infrastructural jurisdiction, it seems appropriate to speakof local government health and safety police as “state actors.” Andhow are we to grasp the complex jurisdictional articulation of city,county (or equivalent), and regional governments, and that won-derfully reconfigured feudal domain, the “district.” It has often beenassumed that the growth of “state power” is to be measured bycentralization at the expense of local governments, but this ideadoes not seem consistent with important empirical cases, forinstance the United Kingdom and the United States. The latter is aparticularly interesting case of how national, state (the very nomen-clature is jarring as national is here distinguished from state),regional, county, city, and district (which can even be quasi“private,” as in levee districts) agencies of government are stitchedtogether over time to form what, from one angle, appears like aseamless web of governance, while from another appears com-



pletely incoherent and discombobulated. What is clear is that allthese levels of government contribute to what Mitchell calls the“state effect” (1999), they all contribute to the microphysics ofpower that constitutes state formations. Finally, more clarity isparticularly needed between “state” and “regime,” and consequentlybetween statecraft and regime craft. Historically, as the military-fiscal model indicates, state and regime have sometimes beencoterminous. But with the rise of the modern democratic andtechno scientific state, a gap opens up between the two, a gap thatcan be gauged. For instance, in a state like Myanmar statecraft andregime craft are practically one and the same, but by comparisonthis is far from the case in democratic states. Indeed, there may becases where democratic state craft undermines the regime.

It seems to me that we can accept the view that states, at leastpartly, originated as military-fiscal structures, and that thesestructures remain common to all states. However, one can rightlyask if culture, in the form of religion, might not also be an originalsource of states, and whether the temple was as important as thefortress in their emergence. The point here is that it is not at allclear that religion is merely superstructural with respect to themilitary-fiscal apparatus. And it would seem necessary to investi-gate a range of other beliefs having to do with warrior culture, suchas honor, in order to fully understand the variability of military-fiscal structures and the consequences of such for historicaloutcomes. In addition, while modern states are military-fiscal for-mations, one cannot explain what is specifically modern aboutthem by pointing to structures that are shared with the pre-modern. The success of western states in terms of warfare wouldseem less a matter of money per se, as a matter of the rise of whatcan justifiably be called cyborg armies, ones in which communica-tions capacities, from radio to satellite, as well as engines of allkinds, are as central as guns and bombs. We would have to con-sider scoping capacities, from telescopes to periscopes, and thewhole range of graphing and metering technologies, not to mentionchambers like submarines and jet aircraft (and the test chambersused to design them and test the limits of human stresses). All ofthis technology this material culture, needs to be understood in thecontext of the rise of modern engineering, which is inseparable fromwhat is perhaps the greatest cultural revolution of all time, i.e., thescientific revolution. We would want to consider not only how thesoldier and his weapon were integrated through new disciplinarytechnologies (Foucault 1978), but how entire “socio technical”(Bijker and Law 1992) collectives were constituted out of networksof people and technologies. These are some of the questions thatflow from a framing of the field motivated by articulating past and

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current research. The point is that by adopting a triangulatedconceptualization of culture in terms of meaning, practice, andmateriality, we can see how even the military-fiscal dimension ofthe state is an object of cultural analysis. The culture COG cancontribute as much in this context as in the more familiar culturalterritory of gender, race, nation, institutions, and so on.

The aim of this paper has not been to reconcile different theories,which would be impossible. Rather it has been to identify keyfindings of different bodies of work and explore avenues for articu-lating them in the service of a genuine cumulative advance in ourunderstanding of states and state formation. The centers of gravityframing, and the triangulated conceptualization of culture, havebeen offered as a means to that end. As such this paper is not ananswer so much as an invitation. It is an invitation to generate a newcenter of gravity of research on states and state formation, the goalof which is articulation. The result, I suggest, will be quite differentfrom, and at least as productive as, a framing that contrasts wholetheoretical traditions and highlights breaks and contestations.

Notes1 I use the acronym for brevity, but also because the word “cog”

indicates that each center of gravity captures only a piece of the completeobject – i.e. the state – and also because it implies that in principle eachpiece can be articulated with the other in a more or less workable fashion.

2 Orloff (and implicitly Adams) reiterated her commitment to the waveframing at the 2009 American Sociological Association meetings.

3 If I situated my own work in the wave framing it would fit solidly in thethird wave. So it is the framing, not third wave research, which I amcritiquing.

4 They list the following: “(1) institutionalism, (2) rational choice, (3) thecultural turn, (4) feminist challenges, and (5) the scholarship on colonial-ism and the racial formations of empire.” Of course, a focus on articulatingkey findings could engage any or all of these foci.

5 The notion that states emerge from war, as a universalproposition, has been effectively critiqued (See, for instance, Centeno,1997).

6 Randall Collins states the matter in almost mirror fashion exactlythree decades later: “To reiterate the main points, which have been welldocumented by Tilly, Mann, Skocpol, Goldstone and others: the stateoriginates as a military organization, and expands by military conquests(e.g. Prussia) or alliances (e.g. Dutch); military costs are the biggest item inthe state budget; the ‘military revolution’ in size and expense of troops,weapons and logistics leads to creation of administrative apparatus(bureaucracy) to extract revenues. From here on several historical path-ways can be followed: resistance by aristocrats and populace to revenueburdens and administrative encroachment can lead to state breakdownand revolution, or alternatively to authoritarian restoration, or to statedisintegration; what happens to states which take the latter pathways isusually a fatal geopolitical weakness that ends the independent history of



that state. In the long run, the states which survive are those whichsuccessfully expand their tax extraction and administrative organization;and this penetrates into society, breaking down patrimonial households,inscribing individuals as citizen-subjects of the state, and thereby creatingmobilizing conditions for modern mass politics, and for state welfareadministration” (Collins 2004: 5).

7 “A COMMONWEALTH is said to be instituted when a multitude ofmen do agree, and covenant, every one with every one, that to whatsoeverman, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part the right topresent the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative;every one, as well he that voted for it as he that voted against it, shallauthorize all the actions and judgements of that man, or assembly of men,in the same manner as if they were his own . . . [for] . . . the right of bearingthe person of them all is given to him they make sovereign . . . ” (Hobbes2008 [1651]: 114 [Ch. xviii]). Emphasis added.

8 John Meyer notes that states “are by no means really actors” (Meyer1999: 137), and his followers are apt to put the word actor in quotationmarks when speaking about the state.

9 While Skocpol ascribed to the military-fiscal model as well, it was nother innovation. Where she ascribes to the model – “Any state first andfundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys these to createand support coercive and administrative organizations” (1979: 29), shecites as follows: “My views on the state have been most directly influencedby such classical and contemporary writings as: Max Weber, Economy andSociety, 3 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedmin-ister Press, 1968), vol. 2, chap. 9 and vol. 3, chaps. 10–13; Otto Hintze,essays in Historical Essays, ed., Felix Gilbert, chaps, 4–6, 11; Tilly, ed.,Formation of National States; Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (New York:Academic Press, 1975), chap. 7; Bendix, et al., eds., State and Society; andFranz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power (New York: Pantheon Books,1974), page 301, note 77.”

10 Block’s classic “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” (1977), became a keytext for articulating the two. The piece is reprinted in Block 1987.

11 Institutionalists sometimes speak of the “relationship” between insti-tutions and culture, but it is difficult to conceive institutions as anythingother than cultural.

12 A micro-physics, to use Foucaultian terminology, of agency.13 An exception is Meyer Kestnbaum’s piece, “Mars Revealed: The Entry

of Ordinary People into War between States.”14 Orloff’s idiomatic/analytical shift from talking about the welfare state

to talking about “regulation and provision” is a critical advance in theory.The language of “welfare state,” like that of “regulatory state,” is thoroughlyproblematic.

15 “The more general point here is that a rich array of interestingquestions for comparative-historical investigation emerge when the nationis conceptualized as – and not simply assumed to be – one among anumber of common forms of mobilizable collective identities, with fluid andcontested relationships.” 436–457.

16 There has been something of a rediscovery of Durkheim in the contextof state theory, but exploring such in detail is beyond the already wide scopeof this paper. See for instance Giddens ed., 1986; Stedman Jones 2001).

17 A range of work has adopted the notion of “moral regulation” invarious ways, but one of the most compelling examples is Alan Hunt’s

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work. Significantly, Hunt resists the inclination in governmentality studiesto reject moral regulation as a useful concept, illustrating how articulationis possible if one wishes it (Hunt 1999: 14–18).

18 As Kuhn noted, to move beyond an existing paradigm one mustbelieve in the new agenda not only before one has better evidence, but inorder to create the condition of possibility to get such evidence (Kuhn1962).

19 See the critiques and Swidler’s reply in Newsletter of the Sociology ofCulture Section of the American Sociological Society, (Winter 2004).

20 Though Althusser maintained what has been called “deferred reduc-tionism,” in that the economic is invoked as the primary cause “in the lastanalysis” (Sibeon 1999).

21 Some may ask how that squares with what we know about ancientengineers, to which I reply that the words “engine” and “engineer” have veryspecific meanings that do not have ancient roots like the words “machine”and “mechanics.” A historicist historical sociology must take this seriously.

22 Arguing against cameralist and merchantilism doctrine, which heldthat labor was the only source of wealth, Marx cited and paraphrasedPetty, stating that “nature” was itself a source of wealth: “Labour is theFather and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother.” (Marx,Capital Vol. I: 50). Marx described Benjamin Franklin as “one of the firsteconomists, after Wm. Petty.” Ibid., 47, note 1. See also, Lansdowne inPetty 1927, Vol. 2, 47.

23 For an excellent detailed and recent study of the survey, see Doherty2004.

24 The work of Mark Neocleous is critical on this point (1996, 2000). Seealso, Raeff 1983.

25 For a broader critique of the loose coupling between discursive ratio-nalities and organizational practices, see Meyer and Rowan 1977.

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Documents

Articulating Theories of States and State Formation