Chapter One

State and Ideology

The state has in recent years become a focus of interest to American political
scientists, as well as to others within the historical and social sciences. That
interest was ever lost is itself interesting, a uniquely American phenomenon.
In Europe, at least until the postmodern period, interest in the state never
really waned, and for good reason. Not only did the modern state first
emerge there and thus initiate and sustain a state tradition of political
thought, but also its subsequent history of violence and, in the last century,
totalitarianism made the state a very real presence in European conscious-
ness. The two world wars and all that was associated with them further
confirmed the reality of the state. In Europe, few thinkers doubted that the
horrors of the last century were rooted in a political reality that went much
deeper than the ideologies or insanities of a few particular leaders.
All the more paradoxically, therefore, that in the United States the state
ceased to be a primary focus of theoretical interest precisely when one
would think interest would be highest: in the immediate postwar era. What
explains this paradox? To be sure, the American intellectual soil has always
produced odd hybrids of political consciousness, but this alone does not
explain the postwar loss of interest in the state. Despite the terrible reality of
state power manifested so clearly in the last century, there existed certain
historical and cultural factors that supplanted this reality in American political
consciousness with a more benign and stateless view of politics.
One of these has been there from the beginning. Although we have had a
state in the formal sense ever since the adoption of the constitution, and in
a more or less real sense since the end of the Civil War, until at least the New
Deal and World War II, it has not looked much like a state in the European
sense. In Europe, the state was formed by absolute monarchs who early on
centralized a permanent, and for the subjects quite visible, structure of legal
and administrative power. In this country, the state was formed by a variety
of factions into what was originally a loose knit federal and quasi-democratic
structure. American citizens recognized that they possessed a government,
or rather governments, but had little sense of the existence of a centralized
state.
Other factors unique to American political life also contributed to a lack
of state consciousness, most notably the dominance of the liberal ideology.
Liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and limited government has

B. R. Nelson, The Making of the Modern State

© Brian R. Nelson 2006
2 The Making of the Modern State

conspired against a state-centrist view of political life. To the American

mind politics appears to be little more than competing groups and individuals,
and the state, to the extent it is thought of at all, as a mere umpire established
to insure the political game is played fairly.
More profoundly, the early or classical liberal ideology, no less than later
Marxism, viewed the state as subordinate and epiphenomenal to civil society,
and liberal democracy the ideal political structure for capitalist accumulation.
Indeed, capitalism came to be seen as the necessary prerequisite for a liberal-
democratic system, an idea that, however theoretically suspect, remains the
cornerstone of American foreign policy to this day. From this perspective,
the state is at best a “necessary evil,” an unfortunate necessity to insure the
sanctity of contract and other legal requirements of a capitalist free market.
In the classical liberal view, the state as such never possessed a purpose, a
substance, a reality of its own.
But why, until quite recently, did postwar American political science so
uncritically share the broader culture’s stateless perspective? The answer
appears to be as obvious it is perplexing. American political science was
never able to escape its own cultural milieu. Despite its desire early on in its
development, and particularly in the postwar period to found a genuine
science of politics, its most fundamental theoretical tenets remained tied to
the popular vision of politics. Hence, it carried into its theoretical frame-
work much of the corpus of the American liberal ideology, not only a belief
in the value of capitalism and liberal democracy, but also a focus on indi-
viduals and interest groups rather than the larger legal and institutional
framework we call the state. And when, subsequently, American political
science did attempt to broaden its focus to include these factors, it did so by
creating models of political analysis that explicitly rejected the state model.
Yet, while it is true that American political science has always been less
tied to a state-centric view of politics than its European counterpart has,
there was until the postwar period at least some interest in the institutional
framework of government if not in a full-blown theory of the state. Interwar
political scientists such as R.M. MacIver and Woodrow Wilson certainly did
not consider the state an irrelevant topic.1 But it became a matter of doctrine
among postwar political scientists that the concept of the state is incompat-
ible with a true science of politics.2 In this, they drew upon some of the key
thinkers of the interwar period who had already begun to break from the
more institutional political science of MacIver and Wilson. Most notable
among this group were Arthur Bentley, Charles Merriam, and David
Truman who proposed that the scientific study of politics should focus not
on the state, or on constitutional and legal institutions, but on the empirical
processes of political activity.3 This would mean, among other things, that
individuals, groups, and political parties should be the basic subject matter
of political science. Whatever value this may have had in the development of
the discipline, there is little question that this new science of politics looked
suspiciously American and liberal in its rejection of the state and in its
concomitant focus on individual and group interests.