Minding the State — or a State of Mind?

Abstract

In political theory the state has been enjoying a conceptual rebirth even while some of its activities have been receding. The state, however, remains conceptually ambiguous and is thus molded into many different conceptual forms. Three of those forms are discussed in this article: the decision-making state, the production state, and the intermediary state. The first relates to the organization and architecture of decisional authority; the second to the public and distributive goods supplied by the state; and the third to the interconnections between state organization and the organizations of civil society. Although the state lacks unique definition as a concept, its value lies in bringing together the most important macro-level connections of the polity, the society, and the economy that cannot otherwise be adequately analyzed in isolation from one another. In particular, the state provides a focus for the study of statecraft within a given constellation of institutional and interest formations and public cultures. And yet statecraft itself cannot be detached from an analytic focus on the role of incentives, which must be effectively manipulated in order to preserve the fundamental functions of the state.