In the last chapter of this enlightening collection of essays and literature reviews, Joel Migdal notes that the modern state is “the mountain that all political scientists sooner or later must climb” (P. 231). Climbing this mountain, however, might well be a Sisyphean task. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine where political science – if not the social sciences writ large, or for that matter, all modern thought – would be without the state. As one recent book notes: “we simply seem to lack the intellectual resources necessary to conceive of a political order beyond or without the state.”^[1] On the other hand, the state’s very centrality has made it an especially elusive concept, as well as a contentious one. How should the state be defined? Do theories of the state refer to something “out there,” even if that something cannot be directly observed? Should the state be given ontological status? Or do scholars who conceptualize (and anthropomorphize) states as unitary actors necessarily engage in reification, that lowliest of scholarly sins?
While Migdal does not address these questions directly, “State in Society” is nonetheless a useful guide up the mountain. The book’s value, though, lies less in the model of the state that Migdal purports to offer – indeed, there is no identifiable model in the text, even in the second chapter “A Model of State-Society Relations” – and more in the plethora of “little” methodological and practical insights found therein (those in search of “grand theory” will find little gratification). His call for an “anthropology of the state” – that is, for a research program in which the state is disaggregated rather than presented as a single “static, independent” variable (P. 24), and in which the focus is on “process” rather than on “structure” and “outcomes” (P. 23) – is one that political science would do well to heed.
Though the essays in “State in Society” discuss various themes – individual change and institutional change, modernization and development – the book is at its core a critique of the voluminous literature on the state. Of course, American political science from the late 1950s onward typically ignored the question of the state altogether – the work of Samuel P. Huntington, Migdal’s dissertation advisor (P. 7), being an important exception – until the state, as the clichй goes, was “brought back in” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unfortunately, in Migdal’s view, the new group of “state theorists” – particularly those associated with the volume edited by Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, and Dietrich Reuschemeyer^[2] – uncritically relied on a Weberian conceptualization of the state. In Migdal’s reading of this literature, the state’s ability to formulate and implement policy (respectively, “autonomy” and “capacity”) was too often assumed, and the state’s “extraordinary means to dominate” frequently overstated (P. 8). Moreover, the literature’s “analytic isolation” of the state resulted in “a mystification of its capabilities and power” (P. 232). Their adherence to Weber led scholars to measure “actual states against an ideal version of what states are or should be” (P. 15), rather than to look at how states actually functioned – or didn’t. This was as true of studies of Western states as it was of developing states (P. 60).
Especially problematic for Migdal is how the state has typically been conceptualized as a unitary actor with a fixed set of goals (Pp. 20, 42, 63, 98, 100, 234, 239). In contrast, Migdal describes the state as a “contradictory entity that acts against itself” (P. 22); and as something that “continually morphs” (P. 23). The essays in “State in Society” draw our attention to how states are pulled in different directions (Pp. 116-17) and sometimes thus are “badly fractured and weakened through the particular nature of their encounters with other social forces” (P. 250). Here, it is worth nothing, Migdal is careful to conceptualize society not as some “structure dichotomous to the state” but as a “mйlange of social organizations” (P. 49).
Of particular importance for Migdal’s critique of the literature is the notion of “encounter.” His argument here is that “at different points in the state organization, the calculus of pressures on state officials” varies (P. 117). Yet political scientists have too often ignored this calculus – at their peril. Indeed, as Migdal points out in one of the book’s strongest essays, “Strong States, Weak States” (chapter 3), the calculus of pressures (or what he dubs here “the politics of survival”) might lead state officials to seemingly irrational and counterintuitive decisions: “State leaders may purposely weaken their own state agencies that could apply and enforce rules, and […] the state may purposely strengthen those who apply and enforce rules in contradiction to those of the state” (P. 64). The fifth chapter, perhaps the most interesting of all, explores not the question of why so many states are falling apart, but of why so many states survive (“Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?”). All of this leads Migdal to some rather sobering conclusions, especially for those who would put their faith in civil service reform:

“Bureaucrats in the Third World have been singled out by scholars and foreign aid officials alike for their slothfulness, their lack of will, and their lack of commitment to reform. Very little attention has been paid to the calculus of pressures these bureaucrats face that makes them so “lazy” or “uncommitted.” Success for public policies does not lie around the corner in a “new breed” of implementor. It certainly will not be found in an exclusive focus on new management techniques” (P. 87).

Having convincingly demonstrated how little purchase is to be obtained from conceptualizing the state as a unitary actor, Migdal proposes a research program in which disaggregating the state takes center stage. Such a research program, he seems to suggest, would enrich the study of state by injecting it with, ironically, “politics” – particularly the politics of domination and opposition. His definition of the state suggests that the state is simply the “site” where the politics of domination and opposition gets played out: “the state is a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts” (P. 16; emphasis in the original). Such a definition seems to recognize what J. P. Nettl noted in the late 1960s (“the thing [i.e., the state] exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it”^[3]), as well as what the sociologist Philip Abrams called for in the late 1970s (“[social science should] attend to the senses in which the state does not exist rather than those in which it does”).^[4] In the language of the philosophy of social science, Migdal walks a fine line between the ontology of the “state theorists” he disparages – by acknowledging that we cannot have a political science without the state – and that of hermeneutics – by pointing out how the state’s “practices are often pitted against image” (P. 19). Is Migdal trying to have it both ways? Of course. But for those committed to a “problem-driven” rather than “grand-theory-driven” social science, Migdal’s research program has much to recommend it. Of course, many of the questions raised by the book are, in the end, empirical ones.
“State in Society” itself, however, is not empirically rich. Thus the reader is left wondering what an anthropology of the state in monograph form might look like. Vadim Volkov’s work on the post-Soviet Russian state is a good example.^[5] Indeed, one of the things that makes Migdal’s work particularly relevant for post-1989 global politics – and for the post-Soviet space – is its probing of the problem of “state weakness.” His methodological discussions of the state, moreover, reach beyond political science and the study of the state: readers will find that Migdal’s focus on how states are pulled in different directions and how, sometimes, certain states do cease to exist, provides a useful framework for thinking about empires, quasi-states, supra-states, and other political entities. Despite the fact that some of the essays were written over twenty years ago – and with the Third World state in mind – “State in Society” is an essential text.