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doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.

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Critical Theories of the State: Governmentality and the Strategic-Relational Approach


Thomas Biebricher
Introduction
Until the onset of the financial and economic crises some years ago there was a long time when the state was largely considered an anachronism bound to fade into relative political insignificance. This has changed over the course of recent months and years. Statesoften in uneasy alliances with one another, international organizations, and central bankspresented themselves as crucial actors in managing crises and mitigating their fallout. In this context of states at least seemingly proving the diagnosis of their incapacity wrong and casting themselves as the protectors of society and the greater good, it is one of the more pressing tasks of political theory not only to return to renewed efforts at theorizing the state but to do so in a critical fashion in order to problematize this image and the underlying assumptions. In this paper I intend to contribute to such endeavors through a comparative and critical analysis of Bob Jessops Neo-Marxist account of the state and Foucaults governmentality perspective. Initially, this selection may appear questionable because in too many ways this project appears to be at odds with conventional views about the relationship between Marx and (Neo-) Marxists on the one hand and Foucault on the other, let alone their (non-) existent views on the state. Is a systematic account of the state not conspicuously absent from Marxs own enormous oeuvre that covers just about everything else from philosophical and epistemological to sociological and economic issues? Did not Foucault famously declare that the kings head needed to be cut off in political theory, thus targeting especially those who view the state as a privileged site or even a center of power, only to add later on that he would have to avoid state theory like one must forgo an indigestible meal?1 Furthermore, even if there was anything significant to be found in these supposedly stateless approaches that might contribute to a critical theory of the state, what insights could a comparison of these two loosely defined paradigms possibly yield, given their widely remarked mutual disregard or even outright contempt? Still, while all of these reservations capture something about Marx(ists), Foucault(ians) and their relation to each other, they do not tell the whole storyor at least this is what I will try to argue in the following. To be sure, it is only in passing that Marx himself engages in explicitly state theoretical analyses. Yet Neo-Marxists like Nicos Poulantzas and Bob Jessop have developed powerful accounts of the state on the basis of these considerations, in fact establishing Neo-Marxism as one of the most vibrant paradigms of state theory. With regard to Foucault it is also largely true that he explicitly brackets questions regarding the state in his archaeological as well as genealogical works. Nevertheless, in his now widely discussed so-called governmentality lectures from 197879 Foucault indeed develops an approach to the state based on the reflected practices of governing, or what he refers to as governmentality. So let me spell out the specific purpose and structure of the paper. As the title suggests I am interested in a comparative analysis of critical approaches to the state, and my starting

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assumption is that Foucaults governmentality perspective and Jessops strategic-relational approach are two of the most promising frameworks in this regard. What a critical approach to the state should entail is obviously a contested question; in my view, the following aspects are of crucial importance. They provide a minimal list of features I consider indispensable, and they provide the criteria for my own critical engagement with these approaches. While I will not be able to provide an exhaustive theoretical justification for settling on these particular features, let me provide a brief defense instead of just stating them, or not addressing the question what is meant by critical at all.2 First, a critical approach to the state must not take for granted or at face value the state and what it claims to do/be. This implies a certain level of skepticism with regard to what could be called the mystique of the state and the quasi-theological claims regarding its actions. While state discourse tends to portray the state as something necessary, solid, unchangeable, and almost timeless that maintains societal order as the representative of the common good, each of these assumptions should be subject to closer scrutiny by a critical approach to the state. A critical understanding of the state thus would have to entail a problematizing thrust in the sense that it questions established and seemingly self-evident notions. Moreover, a critical approach to the state is not only characterized by its level of skepticism regarding its object, it should also display an ability to account for the (trans-) formation of the state, which denotes the analytical potential of such a framework. An account that just doubts the self-image of the state but is unable to explain processes of state restructuring, for example, runs the risk of inadvertently contributing to the mystification of the state mentioned above, with the latters inner workings remaining inscrutable and opaque to the eyes of scholars and citizens alike. In short, if the state remains an enigmatic entity that subtly evades analytical scrutiny, it is difficult to imagine how such an approach could possibly contribute to a critical understanding of the state. Finally, a critical approach to the state has to give a certain weight and be able to theoretically account for (collective) agency and its contribution to the (trans-) formation of states even if such agency is narrowly circumscribed. Strictly functionalist or structuralist accounts turn state restructuring into quasi-natural processes entirely beyond the control of actors and it is hard to see how such frameworks could serve a critical purpose. The question whether and how a critical understanding of the state can inform respective critical practices is highly complex and the relation ought not to be theoretically short-circuited too easily. Still, without any account of the influence of (collective) agency on what the state is and how it is transformed a critical approach is ultimately self-defeating in my view. Of course, any putatively critical approach to the state exhibits the aforementioned traits only to a certain extent, therefore I will often refer to its critical-analytical potential. Using these criteria I will offer a comparative critical analysis that aims to show that both of the approaches in question indeed can be considered to provide important contributions to a critical understanding of the state and that they are, at the same time, haunted by a number of problems that compromise this critical potential. Finally, it aims to show that the two approaches display a somewhat surprising degree of similarity in certain regards although this is obviously not to say that they amount to the same view. I will proceed in the following way. First of all, Foucaults notion of governmentality will be examined. The emphasis will be on its implications for a conceptualization of the state, leaving out most of the rich historical narrative developed in the respective lectures. From there I will turn to an examination of Bob Jessops strategic-relational approach to the state, or at least some of the core tenets of his complex and eclectic framework. In these first two sections the main purpose will be to introduce some of the main features of the respective
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approaches and highlight the characteristics that enable a critical understanding of the state along the lines laid out above. The following section adopts a more critical and genuinely comparative perspective. With reference to the criteria mentioned above, I try to show that the critical potential of both approaches is compromised in certain ways and, furthermore, that there are some interesting if not surprising correspondences and similarities between these two approaches that are often placed in allegedly mutually hostile Neo-Marxist and Poststructuralist camps respectivelyeven in the problems haunting them. In my concluding remarks, I will return to the significance of critical theories of the state at the current conjuncture and outline a future research agenda that I consider to be promising and that could be pursued with this paper providing a first step.

Governmentality Analytics of the State


Despite the fact that the debate over the interpretation of the dynamics in Foucaults oeuvre has far from subsided even more than twenty-five years after his death,3 there is widespread agreement that the state was never one of Foucaults primary interests well into the works of the 1970s. In fact, in Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, Foucault argues vehemently for a de-centered analysis of power summed up in the famous call for the kings head in political theory, i.e., an analysis that would not take state sovereignty and the accompanying monopoly of legitimate violence as a starting point for an analytics of power. Instead, Foucault contends, power comes from below and it is everywhere; if anything, the common sense perception of the state as a center of power is already one of its effects. It is only in the 1990s that Foucault scholars start to note that the transition from these genealogical analyses to his late works on ethics and technologies of the self contains a short but important episode where Foucault explicitly takes aim at the state itselfthe socalled governmentality lectures he delivers at the Coll` ege de France 1978/79. Based on his embrace of the notion of conduct to characterize relations of power (the conduct of conduct), Foucault consecutively broadens the scope of his analyses to include the state and, later on, the individual and its self-relations, both of which had been largely absent from his earlier works.4 It is the very ambiguity of that notion, which can be applied to the self and others, that makes it appealing for Foucault, thus forming a hinge between his state analytical and ethical works. The conduct of conduct in Foucaults interpretation amounts to government and it is the reflected practices of government that Foucault sees at work in and through the state. He even goes as far as to refer to the state as a correlate or an effect of these reflected practices that he comes to call governmentalities.5 These practices, then, are the angle through which Foucault approaches the problem of the state.
Is there an encompassing point of view with regard to the state, as there was with regard to local and definite institutions? [ . . . ] Can we talk of something like a Governmentality, that would be to the state what the techniques of segregation were for psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to the medical institutions?6

Let me dwell on this mission statement for a moment in order to clarify my reading of the governmentality approach and how it may differ from alternative interpretations. Obviously, Foucaults project is no longer to cut off the kings head by explicitly bracketing the state but neither is it to dissolve the state into multiple societal power centers and governmentalities, which is largely the way the Foucaultian agenda has been interpreted by the Governmentality Studies.7 A good example is the seminal article by Rose and Miller on political power beyond
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the state8 where the governmentality approach is first introduced as a way to bring the state back in to a Foucaultian analysis only to take it back out again by focusing exclusively on phenomena beyond the state. This tendency has received criticism from other scholars9 who argue for an alternative interpretation of the governmentality research agenda that gives due weight to Foucaults avowal not to dissolve the state theoretically but to analyze it, using governmentality as a conceptual tool: Having removed the states status as the central concern of political thought in his earlier work, Foucault now moves towards understanding the state in the specific role that it actually does have in networks of power.10 Aside from very few exceptions,11 this interpretation of the Foucaultian research agenda that also informs this paper has only been begun to be explored fairly recently.12 But trying to gain an understanding of the state on the basis of governmentality obviously prompts the question: what exactly does Foucault try to capture through the notion of a reflected practice of government or governing rationality (i.e., governmentality)? Foucault attempts to tie together two aspects he believes are integral to government but are mostly kept separate in the more conventional accounts. Governmentality denotes a way of reflecting on and thinking about government that adheres to a specific rationality. One might say that it is a way of constructing the (political) world. At the same time, this way of constructing the political world is not a detached contemplation of its nature, it is rather already oriented towards the question of what practices of government would provide the adequate tools for a given political material. Thinking and doing, as it were, constantly refer to and inform one another. Reflection suggests certain ways of doing thingswhat Foucault sometimes refers to as technologiesfrom administrative procedures to the set-up of apparatuses. Conversely, existing practices of government prompt questions and pose problems that, in turn, inform ever renewed attempts of developing frameworks of thinking about government. Accordingly, Foucault is more interested in the police science of Justi than Bodin, and more intrigued by the Physiocrats than by Grotius. In Foucaults own words,
One is not assessing things in terms of an absolute against which they [rationalities] could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it is true that practices do not exist without a certain regime of rationality.13

If it is true, as Foucault contends with only mild hyperbole, that the state is but the correlative of a particular way of governing14 then it becomes possible to write a history not the historyof the state and its (trans-)formation by writing a history of governmentality; and this is what Foucault undertakes in his lectures. The narrative that unfolds harks back to ancient Middle Eastern notions of what Foucault calls pastoral power. It traces the transformation and insertion of this power into secular forms of government in the 16th Century, which is when the statein contrast to the polis or res publicafor the first time appears in political discourse. In the wake of Machiavellis work, Foucault argues, the first governmentalities develop, which are variations of Reason of State from Mercantilism to Cameralism. Doctrines of the Police State and the Physiocrats follow consecutively, leading up to a landmark shift towards liberalism. Supposedly, this is the first governmentality that contains an inherent limit to government in its very rationality. Finally, the twin heirs of liberalism rising to dominance in the latter half of the 20th Century are the Ordo-liberalism of the Freiburg School and the American version of neoliberalism arising out of the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. Rather than going into the fascinating details
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and numerous detours of Foucaults account, let us examine the implications of an analytics of state based on the notion of governmentality for its conceptualizations. As is often the case with Foucault, negative characterizations are most easily attainable. If it is true that the state is best understood through historically shifting governmental rationalities this leaves no room at all for essentialist notions of the state that would ascribe an immutable nature of some sort to it, e.g. the radical feminist view that the state is essentially male.15 This signifies a departure from a lot, albeit not all of pre-20th Century theorizing of the state. Incidentally, it is such essentialist conceptions of the state that Foucault refers to as state theoryand that he would like to forgo like an indigestible meal. For similar reasons the governmentality approach is also at odds with theories that consider the state to be a subject, endowed with its own will, interest, and/or autonomy. Easily the most important and influential of such views is developed in Hegels Philosophy of Right with more recent attempts to bring the state back in still resonating with some of the same themes.16 Furthermore, from a Foucaultian point of view, the state cannot be treated as a thing or an instrument. One crucial presupposition for the plausibility of both the notion of the state as subject or a thing is the theoretical possibility of demarcating the state from its surroundings and giving an account of it as self-sustaining. It is exactly this presupposition that Foucault wants to attack with the help of the notion of governmentality. For him, the conventional distinctions between state and civil society that any number of political/state theories takes as a given starting point are already effects of a particular way of governing. The lines drawn between these two seemingly separable entities are neither immovable nor are they natural. Implicit in what has been said so far is an aspect of the governmentality approach that is of major importance for its potential as a critical approach to the state: since the lines drawn around the state are not natural and the state does not have an immutable essence, it follows that the state is not natural either in the sense that it is static or would be the way it is by necessity. From the standpoint of governmentality, the state appears as an almost protean entity, a shape-shifter that comes to include different apparatuses, spheres, and people at different times. Strictly speaking, therefore, the notion of state formation loses its significance because this process never comes to an end. Rather, the state is liquefied into incessant transformations of varying degrees and speed. All of this amounts to a thorough de-naturalization and de-reification of the state, which underlines the potential for critical-oppositional strategies that aim at a transformation of a certain way of governing. Like the genealogies of penal and other institutions that Foucault develops in the early 1970s, the history of governmentality, in its finest moments, shows the sheer contingency of what has come to be seen as natural and necessary and thus opens up a space of possible transformation.17 This potential is reinforced by the inherent instability of the state that the governmentality approach suggests. States are not monoliths animated by a single governmentality. While there might be a dominant governmentality at a given time, they are never beyond contestation, which is an important factor to the dynamics of state transformation. State and non-state actors challenge established modes of governing for a variety of reasons and develop alternative modes. Thus, the state is traversed by varying and often conflicting governmentalities, which turns the substantive unity and coherence of state apparatuses and policies into the exception rather than the norm. There is one last set of implications that stem from the focus on governing technologies/rationalities. If it is true that states can be considered to be the correlate or effect of such reflected practices that also manifest themselves in certain forms and contents of public policy, then one last conventional distinction, namely the one between public policy and state
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transformation, becomes questionable. Policies, in that case, could be said to constitute and transform the state.18 Furthermore, for Foucault the focus on the technology of governing entails a shift away from institutional-centric analyses to strategic ones.19 In a certain way this is already implied in the de-reification of the state that comes to be seen as a set of practices that produce and reproduce the state more or less successfully. From this point of view, neither the state nor individual institutions can serve as an unproblematic explanatory variable. Finally, one major implication of the governmentality approach needs to be addressed here. As mentioned at the very beginning of the section, Foucault derives the notion of government from the notion of conduct that can be used transitively and self-reflectively, i.e., conduct of others or conduct of self. At one point, Foucault argues that it is this very intersection of the two forms of conduct that governmentality is supposed to capture, where attempts to conduct others meet with others conduct of their selves.20 This means that governing technologies employed by and through state apparatuses have to engage with and take into account what Foucault refers to as technologies of the self or, a bit more broadly, self-relations or identities. To be sure, governing technologies may attempt to mould identities according to the assumptions built into these rationalities. It is of major importance to point out, though, that these attempts never reach any closure in the sense of an identity that would fit like hand in glove with a governing rationality. There are many reasons for this necessary misfit, one of them being the above-mentioned multiplicity of governmentalities at a given time, each of which entails attempts to mould identities in differing and possibly contradictory ways. Furthermore, Foucault assumes that the governed possess agency, if only in circumscribed forms. To be more concrete, a certain form of neoliberal governmentality might provide strong incentives to turn oneself into the kind of individual that neoliberalism assumes, i.e., a rational utility-maximizing and responsible one. But these incentives or pressures do not constitute an irresistible forceat least not for everyone all the time. Potential rewards can be rejected; individuals can be unwilling or unable to transform themselves into the homo economicus envisaged by neoliberalism, although, of course, this might result in negative repercussions for them. Conceptually, this link between governing others and governing oneself implies that the scope of state analytics is much broader than forms of state theory that would focus exclusively on the state, its apparatuses, and institutions. The governmnentality approach calls for an analysis of this interplay of the two forms of governing and an examination of different forms of subjectivities that act as relays and potentially transformative obstacles of governing technologies. A comprehensive account of states and the transformations they undergo thus would have to include an analysis of these forms of subjectivation. This does not imply that the state is ultimately dissolved into political power centers beyond the state as Rose and Miller seemed to suggest at some point;21 it means that in order to grasp the state conceptually we also have to look beyond it. Strategically, it suggests that resistance and opposition are not confined to the arena of state institutions and apparatuses, be it through a Leninist strategy of seizing and smashing the state or through democratic contestation in parliament. It can also be a matter of ordinary individuals rejecting a certain form of governing rationality. Let me sum up. Aside from outlining the general contours of the governmentality approach I have focused more specifically on highlighting the aspects that contribute to a critical understanding of the state. In contrast to more conventional approaches the governmentality perspective offers a non-essentialist and de-reified account of the state that refuses to take the self-description of state discourse at face value. Its focus on reflected practices of governing
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provides innovative analytical tools to account for stateness and its transformations while at the same giving due weight to agency vis-` a-vis structuresalthough I will try to show further below that the latter feature turns out to be more questionable at closer inspection. Having thus spelt out what I take to be the most important implications of the governmentality approach for a theory, or, an analytics, of the state, let me now turn to Bob Jessops strategic-relational account.

Bob Jessop The Strategic-Relational Approach to the State


Ever since the early 1980s when he was about to finish his seminal intellectual biography of Poulantzas,22 Jessop has continually stressed the influence of Poulantzass work on his own thinking about the state. Known for his eclecticism, he has also tried to incorporate elements from Luhmanns systems theory, the critical discourse analysis of Laclau and Mouffe as well as the insights from the Parisian Regulation School developed by Michel Aglietta and others into his strategic-relational approach to the state. It is impossible to do justice to such a multi-faceted framework of thinking in an article; therefore I will try to narrow it down to what I take to be some of the central tenets. For Jessop the state can be described as a strategy in an only slightly metaphorical way.23 (Non-) state actors choose certain strategies vis-` a-vis the state in pursuit of their political goals and thus shape the structure of the state, its institutions and apparatuses. The state, thus, is the result of past strategies. In return, the existing structures prove to be strategically selective and favor certain actors, strategies, discourses, etc. over others. However, while actors identities and strategies, etc. are shaped by those structures along the lines of Lukess radical account of power,24 they are not determined by them. Actors are endowed with agencythey are able to learn and adapt their strategiesthus reshaping structures, which then have a different set of strategically-selective effects on actors. Hence, it is a strategic-relational approach that assumes that actors shape structures and vice versa. Following Poulantzas in treating the state as a social relation that is ridden with countervailing strategies and structures that are the resultant of a parallelogram of forces and hence far from inherently unified, Jessop adds that any substantive unity of the state can only be achieved temporarily. This takes place through more or less successful state projects that typically originate from within the state and aim to give state action a certain degree of coherence and avoid contradictions (among other things).25 To the extent that these projects are successful one can speak of state effects.26 However, Jessop is quick to add that there probably exists a multiplicity of state projects at the same time and that, even in the case of the dominance of any particular one, there is never a point when the state is finally built within a given territory and thereafter operates, so to speak, on automatic pilot according to its own definite, fixed and inevitable laws. Nor, to be somewhat less demanding, is there ever a moment when a single state project becomes so hegemonic that all state managers will simply follow universal rules to define their duties and interests as members of a distinct governing class.27 But it is not only the state that has to be constantly (re-)produced through precarious processes without ever reaching some kind of full presence. Jessop concurs with Laclau and Mouffe in their emphasis on the inability of society to reach closure andeven more importantly for his approachassumes the same with regard to the (capitalist) economy. The circuit of capital is not closed, which means that capitalism cannot secure through market forces alone all the conditions needed for its own reproduction, and therefore it cannot exercise any sort of economic determination in the last instance over the rest of the social formation.28 The reproduction of capitalism turns out to be an equally precarious process
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as that of the state, depending on the (mis-)fit between accumulation regimes (e.g., variants of Fordism) and modes of regulation, as well as what Jessop calls hegemonic projects.29 To elaborate, accumulation regimes (i.e., growth models) can only become hegemonic to the extent that they gain acceptance not only by the various fractions of capital but also by the dominated classes, which requires concessions and compromises. Furthermore, since the economic sphere can never reach full closure, any growth model presupposes certain forms of state intervention, or more generally, a mode of regulation as the Parisian Regulation School argues and as the Varieties of Capitalism (Hall/Soskice) literature would agree. However, the state structures and institutions existing in the dialectic described above do not necessarily conform to the functional needs of a given accumulation regime. In that sense form does not follow functions, it rather problematizes function; and because of all of these factors, the smooth reproduction of a capitalist economy, far from being guaranteed, is a matter of contingency. One final crucial ingredient to Jessops approach can also be traced back to the influence of Laclau and Mouffes work on Hegemony and Socialist Strategywhich he nevertheless criticized harshly in other respects.30 The processes described so far are all more or less mediated through discourses: At the most fundamental level, it is various discourses that contribute decisively to the construction of the capitalist economy as an object of regulation and of the national state as an imagined institutional ensemble.31 In addition, hegemonic and state projects need to be formulated and communicated discursively. The crises that haunt the precarious processes of reproduction and restructuring of capitalism are not simply given, they are perceived through particular crisis narratives that suggest the specific nature of problem(s) and appropriate remedies. Therefore, critical discourse analysis plays an indispensable role in Jessops framework according to which discourses that interpret crises structure the effects of the latter in the most significant manner.32 Having only scratched the surface of the complex architecture of Jessops approach it should already be clear that it defies any easy answer to the conceptual and analytical questions that state theory is concerned with. Jessop himself notes a number of reasons why the state remains a somewhat enigmatic phenomenon. First, any actually existing state comprises a more or less distinct ensemble of multifunctional institutions and organizations which have at best a partial, provisional and unstable political identity and operational unity and which involve a complex overdetermined dynamic.33 Therefore it is all too understandable that different theories and scholars emphasize different aspects, and legitimate controversies over which aspect to focus on persist.34 Furthermore, not the least due to its immense importance for political life, the concept of the state remains essentially contested;35 the dominant conceptions can [even] influence the nature of the state itself.36 Therefore, it is symptomatic that in State Theory Jessop tries to do without offering a definition of the state up to page 340. The one he finally offers is an ideal-typical one: the core of the state apparatus comprises a distinct ensemble of institutions and organizations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their common interest or general will.37 To be sure, Jessop hastens to add six qualifiers immediately that need to be taken into account if this cluster definition ought to be helpful in organizing research.38 Echoing Marxs research strategy, Jessop argues that state theory would have to move in spirals from the abstract ideal-typical definition of the state towards concrete-complex explanations of particular states and back to incorporate these insights into a re-defined ideal type. What I have tried to show in this section is that the strategic-relational approach has a lot to offer to a critical understanding of the state. It questions the apparent naturalness of the state
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with its emphasis on the need to produce and reproduce stateness and thus also affirms the importance of (collective) agency in these more or less precarious processesat least at the programmatic level. It also challenges any claim to act on behalf of the common good raised by states or state theorists by emphasizing the ineradicable selectivity of state structures as well as policies and the particularistic nature of any hegemonic project. Finally, the approach obviously displays a significant degree of analytical sophistication that promises to provide a considerable explanatory potential. Having described the two approaches and why they should be considered valuable contributions to a critical understanding of the state, let us now proceed to the comparative section of the paper that also addresses some of the problems haunting the two perspectives.

Jessop and Foucault: Comparisons, Convergences and Criticisms


In my juxtaposition of the two approaches to the state I will start out with a discussion of the basic conceptual positions regarding the nature of the state: whether there is a state, its ontological status, and its boundaries. In the following I will explore some other themes that are equally as important to their respective critical potentials, such as their ability to account for state restructuring processes in a way that is not inherently defeatist with regard to the agency of collective actors and the respective possibility of steering such transformations to a certain extent. With regard to the basic conceptual questions that have to be addressed in any attempt to study the state, what needs to be noted, first and foremost, is the convergence of both approaches with regard to what they think the state is/has not. There is little room for a notion of the state that involves reference to an essence, an immutable nature or it being even an intrinsic entity in either Jessops view of the state as strategy or Foucaults view of the state as an effect of shifting governmentalitiesat least in the programmatic outlines of their approaches. For both theorists the state is far from an unproblematic unified entity. It is ridden with internal conflicts, which turns the very appearance of the state as a monolithic leviathan into something that needs to be explained rather than a triviality. Order, coherence, and intentional state restructuring and/or state action appear to be the exception rather than the rule from their point of view, with both stressing the convolution of strategies of various actors that lead to an overall outcome, which can possibly be accounted for retrospectively but does not lend itself to easy generalizations and predictions. In line with this indeterminacy of the state at an abstract level is the caution both share regarding clear-cut boundaries between the state and its environment. These boundaries, whether they are termed in state-society or public-private distinctions, are constantly shifting according to particular governmentalities (Foucault) or hegemonic projects and accumulation regimes (Jessop). They are by no means to be taken for granted as unproblematic and immutable. This general de-reifying thrust finally leads to equally cautious positions regarding the ontological status of the state; that is whether it can be said to exist at all. Foucault has referred to itand to civil society as well as madness and sexualityas transactional realities [ . . . ] which, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, [ . . . ] born precisely from the interplay of relations of power [ . . . ] at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed.39 But this reality, one can add, is one that has to be produced in the first place, one that does not exist by itself, and, hence, has an ambiguous status.40 In the case of Jessop it has already been noted that, strictly speaking, the state only exists to the extent that state projects succeed. Hence, stateness is a construct for both thinkers, and these state effects, if produced successfully have important
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power effects. In Jessops words, then, the state needs to be seen as a complex mix of political fiction and political reality.41 In this section, to be sure, I have deliberately glossed over many important differences between the approaches to pinpoint some of their broad commonalities.42 I take this to be of importance because Foucaultians in particularbut not only themhave occasionally been guilty of overstating the novelty and methodological innovativeness of the governmentality approach as if it was the first one to break with essentialism and various kinds of reductionism.43 It should have become clear, that these efforts are shared by Jessop although this does not necessarily imply that they accomplish what they attempt, as the next section will show. These similarities might also be attributable to the relations of theoretical influence that link the two thinkers via the work of Nicos Poulantzas. Jessop has gone so far as to argue that Poulantzas was actually far less Marxist and far more Foucauldian than most of his critics suggest,44 and Poulantzas, in turn, is easily the most influential individual thinker for Jessop. Therefore, certain general convergences between the approaches are to be expected. Interestingly, despite some obvious differences there are also some broad similarities when it comes to the respective problematic aspects that tend to compromise their critical potential. Among other things, Jessops account highlights the improbability of the state and its constant reshaping through conflicts between (non-) state actors that align themselves along state and hegemonic projects and at least at the programmatic, abstract level he willingly accepts the indeterminacy or contingency that arises from such a conceptualization. There are no guarantees in Jessops account about whether states are reproduced successfully and whether state power does indeed serve capitalist purposes. Furthermore, ever since the early 1990s he has consistently stressed that class, capital, and labor form just one dimension of the state and that the latter could be analyzed on different axes, most notably gender selectivities.45 However, his theoretical openness in this regard comes at a price that has been noted by several commentators. While lauding the theoretical sophistication of Jessops approach, Colin Hay has wondered what exactly is Marxist about an approach that draws on everything from systems theory to discourse analysis and treats class as just one possible angle among others to explore the strategic selectivities of the state.46 Along these lines, the normative thrust of Jessops approach has been questioned by some commentators, noting that there is hardly ever any discussion of the possibility of a transformation of the state according to emancipatory ideals. To this, Kelly has added that many of Jessops theoretical influences, systems theory in particular, are much better suited to theorize the status quo of societal order than transformation.47 While this latter claim can be defused to some extent with reference to the evolutionary and thus explicitly dynamic nature of the systems theoretical dimension of his work, it is safe to say that the uneasy blend and conflict between social science and normative philosophy that Marxs thought incorporated has been resolved at the expense of any clear normative foundation in Jessops. Still, despite the clear priority of analytical goals, it would be inaccurate to claim that thoughts regarding a socialist transformation are entirely absent from Jessops work.48 Given this emphasis it is not surprising that criticisms of his approach focus less on (non-existent) socialist commitments and strategic considerations but rather on the conceptual and analytical merits and shortcomings of his approach to which I will turn in the following section. To begin with, assuming that Jessop as a self-proclaimed critical realist49 shares the commitment of this philosophy of science to (causal) explanation50 and, hence, is not just interested in a highly stylized, ideal-typical taxonomy of state forms and a purely descriptive account of the transition from Keynesian National Welfare State (KNWS) to Schumpeterian
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Post-national Workfare Regime (SPWR) but rather wants to develop an explanation of this transition, there are some concerns to be had. As mentioned before, Jessop has become increasingly influenced by Luhmannian systems theory and has even adopted certain terms and concepts such as structural coupling and co-evolution to account for the transformation of the economic and the political. Although Jessop at times has been explicitly exempted from charges of functionalism with reference to his overall state theoretical approach,51 I find it hard to deny that there is at least a rudimentary functionalism to these concepts. And indeed, Jessop at times seems to suggest that it is for reasons of superior economic efficiency/functionality that a certain state form comes to be selected and retainedto put it in the evolutionary language of systems theory:52 . . . a Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime will provide the best possiblebut still imperfect and always provisionalspatiotemporal fix for a globalizing, knowledge-based, post-Fordist economy.53 Assuming that best has no genuinely normative connotations in this context, it has to refer to functionality. However, it is unclear how the SPWR emerges as the most functional response to the crisis of the KNWS because, as Jessop notes himself with reference to discourse analysis, solutions are only developed for crises as they are narrated, interpreted and thus perceived.54 Hay, who has developed these arguments with great clarity, comments that no compelling mechanism is presented for this transition.55 If we accept this point for the moment a number of calamities follow with regard to the critical-analytical potential: The avowed indeterminacy or contingency that I consider an asset to Jessops approach is put into question. It seems as if we might still be left with a veiled evolutionary functionalism, according to which the reproduction of capitalism is miraculously ensured. In this context Hay also points to the conspicuous absence of concrete struggling actors from Jessops analyses as corroborating evidence of such a functionalism: What would actors do, when the contingent politics, say, of neo-liberalism is presented as a necessary adaptation, imposed upon unwitting states by an almost natural process of competitive selection, to the external economic environment.56 As suggestive as it may seem, though, I believe it is not clear whether this absence of actors is entirely due to systematic reasons or rather owed to the high level of abstraction characterizing most of Jessops work. After all, in some of the more concrete works like his analyses of Thatcherism concrete actors certainly do appear.57 However, this, in turn, prompts the concern that there might be a problematic disconnection between abstract research agendas and concrete analyses in Jessops work that would also question the success of his research strategy of spiraling back and forth between abstract-general and/or the concrete-complex levels mentioned in the exposition of the approach.58 I imagine that Jessop would respond to the charge of functionalism by pointing out the importance he accords to path-dependencies as well as various selectivities of the discursive and institutional strategic terrain. As he notes, . . . this does not justify a simple, one-sizefits-all account of the restructuring of the capitalist type of state. Instead, proper comparative analyses are required to comprehend and explain variations as well as similarities across the advanced capitalist economies.59 In other words, while there is a general trend towards the SPWR, contingent conditions, actors, and struggles still make a difference and lead to widely varying national outcomes that Jessop even tries to capture in a typology of various neoliberalisms that consist of combinations with neostatism, neocommunitarianism and neocorporatism.60 However, what is the use of such a high-level ideal-type as the SPWR then, and, moreover, if it is true that variations are significant, is it plausible to assume that they are all brought about by the same triggering mechanism, namely the crisis of the KNWS? What is at stake here is not only the seemingly dry question of the use of ideal-types and proper classification. The question is whether there are any alternatives to
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the politico-economic conditions of industrialized capitalist societies that could be pursued through collective political projects or whether our present is what it is by necessity brought about through ultimately inscrutable and quasi-natural processes.61 To the extent that the latter is affirmed in Jessops thought the critical potential is put in question despite its general sophistication, which is beyond doubt. Just like Jessop, Foucault is committed to a no guarantees approach at the programmatic level. As mentioned in the discussion of governmentality, the state appears as a non-monolithic and mutable effect of governmentalities that makes it possible to envisage alternative ways of governing and being governed. But the analogies between Jessop and Foucault also extend to a more problematic disconnect between the programmatic and the substantive. In Foucaults case this takes the form of serious theoretical tensions between the still fairly genealogical commitments he makes at the programmatic level when laying out the grammar of the history of governmentality on the one hand and the substantive history on the other: According to the programmatic level the emphasis would have to be on the contingency of state (trans-)formation due to the erratic logic of incessant struggles traversing the state fought in the name of and through conflicting governmentalities. A closer look at the actual history Foucault offers proves that struggles only play a marginal role and when scrutinizing the succession of different dominant governmentalities one can arrive at the conclusion that despite all the turmoilit is a rather logical process that leads from the first reason of state governmentalities up to contemporary neoliberalism.62 The constellation amounts to the converse of Jessops case. Foucault avows the importance of contingent struggles for state restructuring on the programmatic level only to let those struggles and the concrete actors that are engaged in them all but disappear in the substantive analyses.63 Furthermore, Foucault shows little regard for empirical differences, not only in institutional design but also in concrete manifestations of governmentalities. It should be clear that neoliberalism is not the same in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, but Foucaults history of governmentality is a history that operates at the macro level and hence fails to theorize those differences. Conversely, the Governmentality Studies in focusing on particular societies or even specific contexts of these societies often plunge into an empiricism of particulars. Hence, there is an uneasy oscillation between a theoretically interesting macro-history of Western political rationality that remains insensitive to national variation and the just mentioned empiricism of the Governmentality Studies that sometimes pays hardly more than lip service to Foucaults approach. Finally, there is the question of how to account for the transformation and displacement of various governmentalitites, which has to be considered one of the crucial tasks of a history of governmentality. I have already mentioned that an uncharitable reading of this history would find the overall trajectory of the history of governmentality to be of a slightly too teleological nature. Moreover, the few times when Foucault does talk about concrete transformations, the actors involved and the conjunctural factors structuring these processes, he shows the utmost caution to the point that it becomes questionable whether he is able to explain these transformations in the strong sense of the term. Let me elaborate with reference to only one example in the governmentality lectures. Foucault argues that in order to account for how the market became a place of veridiction paving the way for liberalism, etc.:
We would have to establish what I would call a polygonal or polyhedral relationship between: the particular monetary situations of the eighteenth century, with a new influx of gold on the one hand, and a relative consistency of currencies on the other; a continuous economic and demographic growth in the same period; an intensification of agricultural
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production; the access to governmental practice of a number of technicians who brought with them both methods and instruments of reflection; and finally a number of economic problems being given a theoretical form. In other words, I do not think we need to look forand consequently I do not think we can findthe cause of the constitution of the market as an agency of veridiction.64

Rather, Foucault continues,


. . . we should simply establish the intelligibility of this process [ . . . ]. This would involve showing how it became possiblethat is to say, not showing that it was necessary, which is a futile task anyway, nor showing that it is a possibility, one possibility in a determinate field of possibilities . . . 65

In an interview from around the same time, Foucault calls this method eventalisation, which he describes as a way of lightening the weight of causality.66 Initially, one may think that this is tantamount to a rejection of causal analysis, because the polygonal structure indicates no more than an unspecified interrelationship between these factors. Furthermore, the interactive effects and the relative weight remain unexamined and it is equally unclear, whether there is any criterion for the list of highly heterogeneous factors. However, Foucaults position entails considerably more nuance. There is no explicit rejection of causal analysis to be found anywhere in the lectures or interviews of this time. Foucaults aim is that of a causal multiplication, that is analysing an event according to the multiple processes that constitute it.67 From his perspective this would provide the necessary antidote to a deplorable trend of de-eventalization in mainstream historiography: The way they [historians] work is by ascribing the object they analyze to the most unitary, necessary, inevitable, and (ultimately) extrahistorical mechanism or structure available.68 But is there no alternative to only listing a polygonal array of factors? After all, Foucault himself calls for an unpacking of these complex causal relations through a rediscovery of connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on69 and sketches out a whole agenda of analysing the bundle of processes that brings about global effects such as the state in one lecture.70 With reference to the aforementioned emergence of the veridictional market he explicitly adds that what one would have to do in order to analyze this phenomenon is describing the connections between the different phenomena I have just referred to.71 The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that Foucault is not fundamentally opposed to making causal claims per se, only to reductionist frameworks that would assume that whenever E, then F, like the D-N model of explanation commonly assumed in contemporary social science. That the work of unpacking the complex causal relations alluded to in the lectures remains undone seems attributable to the main thrust of Foucaults argument to posit this complexity against simplistic accounts and, more importantly albeit theoretically trivial, to the lectures supposedly being a medium ill-fit for such a meticulous analysis. This means that the work of analyzing the polygonal relations still should and could be done if only suitable models of (causal) explanation in history were available. Assessing this question in a thorough manner obviously lies beyond the scope of this paper. At this point I will have to confine myself to pointing to work that is done in Historical Comparative Analysis, Historical Institutionalism, Critical Realism, and other theoretical and methodological traditions that might placate Foucaults concern over a de-eventalisation of history.72 For the time being, though, it has to be concluded that both Jessop and Foucault struggle with an account of historical transformations that stays true to their programmatic commitments to developing historical arguments that are neither functionalist/teleological nor abstain from any meaningful explanatory claims at all. This has repercussions for a critical understanding of the state because the twofold implications of
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an overly functionalist account are a discounting of (collective) agency and a naturalization of what the state is and how it evolves that is at odds with the problematizing thrust of a critical approach. In the case of Foucault abstaining from any substantive explanatory account of state transformations has similar repercussions because mechanisms of change remain opaque which can contribute to the mystique of the state often found in official state discourse rather than the questioning of it. To the extent that Foucault does offer an implicit account of how varying governmentalities replace one another in relative dominance, he describes it as a process that hardly seems to involve (struggling) actors and thus also fails to give due weight to (collective) agency. Furthermore, the slightly teleological ring of the historical narrative contributes to the impression that what the state is and how it changes is a matter of necessity, which would, again, be the opposite of a problematization of stateness. Finally, let us take a brief look at two less technical issues that are of some importance for the respective critical potentials of these approaches. They concern the significance of democracy and the scalar transformation of statehood. Now, it is true that, in principle, state theory can do without an account of democracy. Systems theorists like Easton, for example, were interested in an account of the political system located on an extremely high level of abstraction that was consequently and deliberately indifferent to the prevalent political regime, be it dictatorship or democracy. However, it seems to me that a critical understanding of the state does not have the option of entirely disregarding the effects of organized political representation, specifically some form of democracy, on the state.73 One can argue that Jessop still considers the theoretical nexus between forms of political representation, social bases and state forms to be crucial for an adequate understanding of contemporary states.74 Foucault, on the other hand, lays out the history of Western governmentality without ever mentioning the world-historical democratic transformations taking place between the 18th and the 20th century aside from a couple of sentences. Of course, this is no accident. After all, Foucault intended to talk about the state without relapsing into conventional state discourse and its preoccupation with matters of legitimation. An inquiry into whether state power can be legitimated/justified through certain forms of political representation is exactly what Foucault wants to avoid. The question remains, whether this is feasible. Even according to his own approach that focuses heavily on governing rationalities/technologies, would it not be necessary to address democracy as an important element of these, if nothing else? And if this is denied, there is still the broader concern that Foucaults image of the state is one that is heavily tilted to the output side and disregards the input side entirely. One does not have to be a social-democratic instrumentalist to be afraid that this might lead to an underestimation of the potential for collective action inherent in democratic states. In other words, this furthers the impression that despite all of its emphasis on reflected practices of governing Foucaults governmentality approach at the same time underplays the significance of collective agency. Finally, any contemporary theory of the state has to be scrutinized with regard to a potential methodological nationalism. This is to say that statehood undoubtedly has been transformed in multiple ways over the last thirty years, leading to upward delegation of tasks on a supranational scale or downward delegation to sub-national scales. Furthermore there has been a growing delegation of tasks to civil society organisations. While this by no means implies that the nation-state is about to vanish, it still changes the mode of its power and its overall role significantly. Hence, the question is to what extent the two approaches discussed here take these developments into account or at least would in principle be capable of doing so. What is at stake here is the ability to provide an explanatory account for transformations in
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statehood and capture significant developments theoretically, which is of crucial importance for a critical understanding of the state. Obviously, Jessop is at a clear advantage in this respect given the fact that his work falls into the era of globalisation, internationalisation, and the concomitant transformations of statehood just described. His account gives ample room to what he calls the political economy of state rescaling75 and also draws attention to the respective power effects, i.e., the reshaping of the strategic terrain. In the case of Foucault I would argue that his analytics are not necessarily tied to the Westphalian nation-state although his studies of the 1970s largely focus on it. Still, applying Foucaultian themes to the EU, for example, is a task yet to be tackled by scholars, some important exceptions notwithstanding.76

Concluding Remarks
There was a time, not too long ago, when the question of whether it is necessary to have a theory of the state received little attention and was routinely answered in the negative. As the last four years have shown, this turned out to be a misjudgment. At this point premature obituaries of the state seem strangely out of place. To be sure, this is not to say that we are about to return to a Westphalian world and the unrivaled dominance of sovereign nation states. Still, the national scale and the respective governing apparatuses remain neuralgic points in the newly emerging networks of transnational governance. Given this continued significance and, moreover, the self-representation of the state as the guardian of society it is even more important at this particular juncture to reflect on a critical theory of the ` la Hayek affirms the notion of a state that state. Just as the idea of the neoliberal state a hovers over society as a minimally interventionist umpire,77 so does the social-democratic instrumentalism that is revived whenever there is need for stimulus and bailout packages assume that the state can and should protect societies from the fallout of financial crises in the name of the common good. As I hope to have shown in this paper, the approaches to the state of Jessop and Foucault provide at least good starting points to question these assumptions on all levels. They enable us to ask questions regarding the differential impact of the crisis management by governments on state and non-state actors or about how the impression is produced that state and banking sector are clearly separable entities to name but two examples. Furthermore, I have tried to show that despite the seemingly vast crevice between Neo-Marxism and Foucaultian Poststructuralism there are actually considerable similarities between Jessops and Foucaults respective accounts of the state especially with regard to the de-naturalizing aspects of their approaches that undermine the mystique of the state. Finally, I have offered a critical examination of these two perspectives on the state that addresses a number of problems that may compromise their critical-analytical capacity, for example a potential functionalist undertow in the strategic-relational approach and a certain neglect of (collective) agency in Foucaults governmentality perspective. Based on the analytical work done in this paper, future research might tackle the more synthetic question: whether certain elements of the two approaches might be combinable or whether one might even be fully integrated into the other. These are contentious and complex questions as the debates over the relation between Marx and Foucault show.78 But whether it is separate or in a feasible and useful combination, assuming that the theoretical problems discussed here can be addressed in an adequate way, the governmentality perspective and the strategic-relational approach have to be considered two of the most promising resources for gaining a critical understanding of the statea task that is as urgent as ever.
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The author wishes to thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments. 1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Coll` ege de France 197879 (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 77. 2. Clyde Barrows otherwise highly instructive study entitled Critical Theories of the State somewhat surprisingly never addresses the question of what is meant by critical. 3. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault. Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 4. See Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997). 5. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 77. There are multiple questions with regard to the meaning of the term governmentality. While it was agreed on for a long time to view it as a compound neologism consisting of government and mentality, Senellart has shown persuasively that it is actually derived from the adjective gouvernemental in contrast to souvereign. Michel Senellart, Course Context for Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Coll` ege de France 197778, by Michel Foucault (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 369391. Arguably the more important issue concerns the way the concept is used by Foucault. At times, he seems to reserve the term for a specifically contemporary practice of governing, however, an interpretation that I find more compelling and that will be followed here treats it as a generic concept, i.e., there are multiple governmentalities like mercantilism or neoliberalism. 6. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Coll` ege de France 197778 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 118; 120. 7. See Bob Jessop, Constituting Another Foucault Effect, in Governmentality. Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. Ulrich Br ockling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (New York: Routledge, 2010), 5673. 8. See Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992), 173205. 9. See Bruce Curtis, Taking the State Back Out: Rose and Miller on Political Power, Canadian Journal of Sociology 46 (1995), 575589; Thomas Lemke, Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien. ber die governmentality studies, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 41 (2000), 3147. Ein kritischer Uberblick u 10. Mark Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2009), 6162. 11. See Timothy, Mitchell, The Limits of the State: Beyond State Theories and their Critics, American Political Science Review 85 (1991), 7796. Mitchell actually tries to analyze the state on the basis of Foucaults genealogical works, but he also argues for the need of a (critical) understanding of the state rather than its theoretical dissolution. 12. See Thomas Lemke, An Indigestible Meal. Foucault, Governmentality, and State Theory, Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15 (2007), 4364; Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011) and Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann, Governmentality and State Theory: Reinventing the Reinvented Wheel? Theory & Event 15, no. 3 (2012). 13. Michel Foucault, Power. Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, ed. James Faubion, (New York: The New Press, 1994), 22930. 14. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 6. 15. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 16. See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 17. This does not imply that such a view of the state is necessarily accompanied by a commitment to transform it. Interest group theory or Pluralist accounts of the state share some of the de-naturalizing features of the governmentality perspective, still they tend to be strongly status-quo oriented. 18. See Lemke, An Indigestible Meal. 19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 116. 20. See Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, ed. Mark Blasius. Political Theory 21 (1993), 203. 21. Rose and Miller, Political Power Beyond the State, 1992. 22. Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas. Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985). 23. See Bob Jessop, State Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 367. 24. See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View. 2nd Edition. (New York: Palgrave, 2005). 25. See Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 42. 26. Bob Jessop, State Theory. Putting Capitalist States in their Place (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 7.

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27. Ibid., 9. 28. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, 12. 29. Ibid., 12. 30. See Jessop, State Theory, 289306. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. This emphasis on the discursive level has become even more pronounced with Jessops more recent turn to a cultural political economy. 33. Ibid., 339. 34. Margaret Levi, The State of the Study of the State, in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 3355. 35. Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State. Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 1011. 36. Jessop, State Theory, 340. 37. Ibid., 341. The definition offered in Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State already appears on page 6: . . . one can define the state as an ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized and strategically selective institutions, organizations, social forces and activities organized around (or at least actively involved in) making collectively binding decisions for an imagined community. 38. Jessop, State Theory, 342. 39. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 297. 40. See Mitchell, The Limits of the State, for thoughtful elaborations on this point. 41. Jessop, State Theory, 361. It is important to note that Jessop and Foucault are by no means the only theorists questioning the myth of the state. One can find a similar thrust in accounts of the state developed in critical international relations research or more poststructuralist-oriented scholarship. See for example Justin Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994); Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); and especially Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 42. See Lemke, An Indigestible Meal for an instructive account of the specificity of the governmentality approach vis-` a-vis others and Jessop, State Power, 140156 for a comparison of Poulantzas and Foucault that also highlights various points of convergence and conflicts between them. 43. See Lemke, Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien, 3147. For an extensive discussion of this point and a thesis regarding the question what exactly constitutes the novelty of governmentality perspective vis-` a-vis other state-theoretical frameworks see Biebricher and Vogelmann, Governmentality and State Theory. 44. Jessop, State Theory, 223. 45. See Jessop, State Power, 157177. 46. See Colin Hay, (Whats Marxist about) Marxist State Theory? in The State. Theories and Issues, ed. Colin Hay, Michael Lister, and David Marsh (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 7778. 47. Duncan Kelly, The Strategic-Relational View of the State, Politics 19 (2002), 114. 48. See for example Jessop, State Theory, 189. 49. See for example Bob Jessop, Critical Realism and the Strategic-Relational Approach, New Formation 56 (2005), 4053. 50. Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London: Sage Publications, 2000). 51. Barrow explicitly denies any functionalist verbiage and rather emphasizes Jessops structuralist leanings. He problematizes Jessops approach as being antinomic despite claiming to provide a synthesis of state theoretical guidelines and principles. See Barrow, Critical Theories of the State. Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist, 154. 52. This is also problematic because it seems at odds with Jessops Critical Realist commitments that would seem to favor causal over functional analysis. See Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction. The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 113125. 53. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, 268. 54. See Ibid., 124. 55. Colin Hay, Re-Stating Politics, Re-Politicising the State: Neo-liberalism, Economic Imperatives and the Rise of the Competition State, The Political Quarterly Special Issue Restating the State, ed. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (2004), 43. Hay would be particularly sensitive to this inconsistency because it is an article by him called Narrating Crisis in which he analyzes the ascent of Thatcherism as a response to a crisis in Great Britain as it is discursively constructed that Jessop sometimes references when he discusses the importance of discourse analysis for his approach. See for example Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, 93 FN 17 and Colin Hay, Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the Winter of Discontent Sociology 30 (1996), 253257.

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56. Hay, Re-Stating Politics, Re-Politicising the State, 42. For an alternative account that attempts to describe the transition towards what they view as the hegemony of neoliberalism as neither necessary nor unambiguously functional, see for example G erard Dum enil and Dominique L evy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 57. See Jessop et al., Thatcherism. A Tale of Two Nations (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 134183. 58. See Kelly, The Strategic-Relational View of the State, 1134. 59. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, 249. 60. See Ibid., 259267. 61. Hay, Re-Stating Politics, Re-Politicising the State, 445. 62. See Danica Dupont and Frank Pearce, Foucault contra Foucault: Rereading the Governmentality papers, Theoretical Criminology 5 (2001), 123158. 63. The one rare exception is the lecture from March 1st , 1978; here Foucault discusses forms of pastoral counter-conduct associated with concrete groups. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 191226. For a more extensive treatment of this issue, see also Thomas Biebricher, Genealogy and Governmentality, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008), 363396. For a discussion of counterconduct see Thomas Biebricher, (Ir-)Responzibilization, Genetics and Neuroscience, European Journal of Social Theory 14 (2011), 469488. 64. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 33. 65. Ibid., 34. 66. Foucault, Power, 227. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 228. 69. Ibid., 226. 70. At bottom, maybe intelligibility in history does not lie in assigning a cause that is always more or less a metaphor for a source. Intelligibility in history would perhaps lie in something that we could call the constitution or composition of effects. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 239. 71. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 33. 72. See Paul Pierson, Politics in Time. History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas, in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Dietrich Rueschemeyer and James Mahoney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 338; Peter A. Hall, Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics, in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Dietrich Rueschemeyer and James Mahoney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 373404; and Sayer, Realism and Social Science. 73. Ron Johnston and Amy Glasmeier, Neo-liberalism, Democracy, and the State: Temporal and Spatial Constraints on Globalization, Space and Polity 1 (2007), 133. 74. See particularly Jessop, State Theory, 107190. 75. See particularly Jessop, Future of the Capitalist State, 172215 and Jessop, State Power, 198224. 76. See Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London/New York: Routledge, 2004); Mark Doucet G. and Miguel de Larrinaga, eds. Security and Global Governmentality: Globalization, Governance, and the State (New York: Routledge, 2010) and William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters. (London: Routledge, 2012). 77. See Norman Barry, The Rationale of the Minimal State, The Political Quarterly, Special Issue Restating the State, ed. Tony Wright and Andrew Gamble (2004), 1123; Raymond Plant, Neo-liberalism and the Theory of the State: From Wohlfahrtsstaat to Rechtsstaat, The Political Quarterly, Special Edition Restating the State, ed. Tony Wright and Andrew Gamble (2004), 2437. 78. See for example Richard Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault (London: Routledge, 1999).

Thomas Biebricher received his PhD from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universit at Freiburg in 2003. He was a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville and from 2009 to 2012 he worked as a Junior Research Group Director at the Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders at the Goethe Universit at in Frankfurt. He currently holds a temporary professorship for international political theory at the Goethe-Universit at. His work has appeared in Theory&Event, Philosophy and Public Criticism and the European Journal of Social Theory. In 2012 his Introduction to Neoliberalism (Neoliberalismus zur Einf uhrung) was published by Junius. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Political Philosophy of Neoliberalism.
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