This collection propounds a “state in society” approach to the comparative study of politics in developing countries. It is a reaction both to the modernization-dependency debates, which reduced the state to economic determinants; and to recent attempts to “bring the state back in,” which overstated the state’s centrality by gauging its effectiveness in terms of institutional capacities or relative autonomies. These essays argue for a more interactive, empirically grounded study of relations between state segments and social forces. This perspective, which Joel S. Migdal vigorously propounds in the opening essay, entails several processes: the “disaggregation of the state to see its contentious fragments and its imbrication in social relations; the disassembly of social categories (such as peasants and workers) so that social groups and class fragments can be studied in terms of their relationship to elements of the state; and a shift away from the zero-sum paradigm that pits state against society to see the two as continuously, if partially and unevenly engaged—limiting, shaping, even empowering each other.
All the essays focus on some aspect of this approach, offering case studies from across the developing world. The first section of the book focuses on the state’s impact on society. It includes two studies of ostensibly strong regimes that could not fully control or reshape social relations (Brazil and China), and two studies of the paralysis of state power, by patronage networks (in Africa) and by populist democratic practice (in India). The second part, focusing on the engagement of social forces with state power, demonstrates how various social elements (business elites in Egypt; a divided working class in Shanghai; merchants, migrants, and religious leaders in the Ottoman Empire) conditioned and inflected state capacities. This section includes two essays on rural organizations and association life that emerge from the continuing crisis of the state in Africa. All these essays are interesting and pertinent to the main point, though they offer a curious unevenness in coverage (three on Africa, one on Latin America) and a certain repetitiousness.
The intention—to avoid reifying state powers or reducing the state to other social determinants by studying a conjunctural and interactive dynamic—is certainly well taken. And there are, no doubt, good reasons to focus on the former “third” world. Yet the collection, while rigorously historical, avoids historicizing the problems it addresses. Indeed, the chronological range of the essays, from the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century through colonial Egypt and Kuomintang China to the current crises in Indian and African politics, suggests that the authors see their basic methodology as applicable generally. This implicit claim calls for some explicit comparison with state crises in the socialist and capitalist worlds (Russia jumps to mind) or, conversely, some inquiry into what is historically specific about the state and state crises in the developing world (clarifying, in the process, historical distinctions among its regions). It is also curious that none of these essays engages the problem (or history) of violence, a commodity on surplus display around the world and surely the most visible product of the grinding interpenetration of fragmentary state power and contentious social forces.
