Law as unifier of the state

The Poulantzas project 2

Bob Jessop’s book on Poulantzas [Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist theory and political strategy, 1985, Macmillan] helpfully summarises some of the early papers I can’t read as I don’t know French. There’s some useful background on his view of the law which is highly condensed in the translated papers. This, in particular, is useful in clarifying his view of the nature of the ‘internal’ logic of law discussed in the last post:

One of the most pervasive and fascinating influences within modern legal theory has been the neo-Kantian positivism of Hans Kelsen (and the so-called ‘Vienna School’) with its concept of a purely internal Normlogik. This argues that an effective legal order must be hierarchically unified under a fundamental legal norm (Grundnorm) and backed up by effective coercive sanctions. It also declares the state and law to be identical and insists that in any one society only one sovereign, coercive legal order is possible. Indeed Kelsen argued that in any real, ‘sociological’ state there will be many authorities, multitudinous relations of domination, numerous acts of commanding and obeying: only the unity of the legal order justifies us in considering the state as a single system of domination. For the same reason Kelsen denied that the state is a subject which exercises power – its power is simply that of a valid and effective legal order. At best he was prepared to concede that the machinery of state (‘the bureaucratic apparatus’) is the material personification of the broader formal legal order within a nation-state. He also suggested that the division between public and private law is ideological and simply serves to dissimulate private law as located beyond politics…

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Not, in fact, where we might choose to begin

The Poulantzas project 1

Nicos Poulantzas in his final book, 1978:

The constructivist image of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, which is supposed to allow the determining role of the economic sphere to be visualised after a fashion, cannot in fact provide a correct representation of the articulation of social reality, nor therefore of that determining role itself. It has proved to be disastrous in more ways than one, and there is everything to be gained from not relying on it. For my own part, I have long ceased to use it in analysis of the State. [Poulantzas, 1978: State, Power, Socialism, Verso, p. 16]

The Poulantzas project

Nicos Poulantzas in days before smoking in the office was structurally selected against

Now that I have some spare time on my hands, one of my medium-term projects is to do a proper engagement with Poulantzas, with the aim of sorting out my own theory of the capitalist state, and of economic policy in particular. I draw on Poulantzas a bit in my thesis, borrowing useful ideas without dealing with his vision as a whole. Now I want to go back and sort out exactly what I think. Poulantzas is one of those theorists who is incredibly helpful even when I disagree with points or even think the framing itself is misguided. He asks the right kinds of questions, and shows what a theory of the capitalist state has to do, even when his own particular constructions (which he kept radically revising throughout his short career) are problematic. Thirty or forty years on, he is still the person to engage with in Marxian state theory – a tradition that reached its high-water mark in the late 1970s, and never died but faded away.

Poulantzas is also difficult to read, and I don’t think it’s the translation. He adopts the language of other theoretical systems – first Sartre’s, then Althusser’s – of which he simply assumes knowledge. So there are a lot of sidetracks to do in dealing with him. On the other hand, once the language is understood, he is a very clear and systematic writer. And the fact that most of his exposition takes place through engagement with other writers is a good thing – in dealing with Poulantzas, you are also dealing with the Marxian ‘classics’, with Gramsci, Sartre, Althusser, Ralph Miliband, Perry Anderson, and Foucault.

The book Paradigm Lost: state theory reconsidered, edited by Aronowitz and Bratsis [2002], has some great chapters on why Poulantzian state theory – along with the work of Miliband, which I’ll also discuss – receded as a research program and why it deserves to be revived. (It also makes clear why Poulantzas and Miliband – their names linked mainly by the polemics they directed against one another – can be seen as part of the same program.) Leo Panitch, in his chapter, “The impoverishment of state theory”, stresses that there was substance and systematicity to the state theory of the 1970s that was new to both social science and the Marxian tradition, especially in its attempts to deal with modern advaced capitalist democracies:

It needs to be stressed today that we did not at all see ourselves as falling back on a prefabricated Marxism; the new theory of the state had Marxist roots but it was founded on the notion that nothing like an elaborated and coherent theory of the capitalist state (in contrast with the complex array of concepts and tendential laws that constituted Marxian economics and historical materialism) had been fashioned either by Marx himself or by his successors—up to and including Gramsci. And the new theory was concerned to displace the narrowly ideological official Marxism of the Communist parties. [p. 90]

My plan, then, is to work through Poulantzas’s major essays and books and some of their reference points – with particular attention to his theory’s relevance for the development of economic policy in the twentieth century. Economics is sometimes said to be a weak point for Poulantzas – but that gives me something to do.