Thinking the Unthinkable: The State and Crimes of the State

Abstract

Over thirty years ago the American writer Theda Skocpol (1985) was moved to urge that we ‘bring the state back in’. As she and her co-editors suggested, the then dominant ‘theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors’ (Evans et al. 1985: vii). Her appeal was directed as much to historians, economists and policy analysts, as it was to sociologists and political theorists—and dare I add, to criminologists. Her sense was that too much weight had been given and for too long, especially by sociologists (including neo-Marxists) and political scientists, to interpretative frameworks that stressed the role of social and economic factors like class, gender or markets and gave too little attention to the capacity of states to act more or less autonomously. She argued that government itself was not taken very seriously as an independent actor, given a tendency to treat the state as simplyDrawing on the tradition set loose by Weber, she encouraged treating the state as a much larger and even more amorphous entity than government, citing a formulation stressed by Stepyan:On this basis and without for a minute ignoring the social and economic setting, Skocpol made the case for recognizing better the capacity of those working ‘in and for’ the state to engage in a variety of legal, administrative and coercive practices ‘understood as actions not simply reflecting social demands’ but involving ‘sets of officials who might—or might not—be able to act coherently, pursuing lines of policy-making not reducible to class, interest group or majoritarian demands’ (Skocpol 2008: 110). Skocpol emphasized the contingent and highly political nature of such practices. Her argument relied on Heclo’s notion that governments ‘not only “power” (or whatever the verb form of that approach might be) but puzzle. Policy-making is a form of collective puzzlement on society’s behalf; it entails both deciding and knowing.’ This process is political, added Heclo, ‘not because all policy is a by-product of power and conflict, but because some men have undertaken to act in the name of others’ (1974: 78). Here, as I will shortly show, was a powerful starting point.