Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial

organization and the historical geography of spatial scales

Neil Brenner
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 5828 S.University Avenue, Chicago,
IL 60637, USA; e-mail: NBrenner@compuserve.com
Received 12 March 1997; in revised form 7 January 1998

Abstract. During the last decade, discussions of geographical scale and its social production have
proliferated. Building upon this literature, in particular the writings of Lefebvre and Harvey, I
investigate the implications of the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of
capital—between capital's necessary dependence on territory or place and its space-annihilating
tendencies—for the production of spatial scale under capitalism. I elaborate the notion of a
'scalar fix' to theorize the multiscalar configurations of territorial organization within, upon,
and through which each round of capital circulation is successively territorialized, deterri-
torialized, and reterritorialized. These multiscalar configurations of territorial organization
position geographical scales within determinate, hierarchical patterns of interdependence
and thereby constitute a relatively fixed and immobile geographical infrastructure for each
round of capital circulation. Drawing upon Lefebvre's neglected work De I'Etat, I argue that
the scalar structures both of cities and of territorial states have been molded ever more directly
by the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital since the late
19th century, when a 'second nature' of socially produced sociospatial configurations was
consolidated on a world scale. On this basis a schematic historical geography of scalar fixes
since the late 19th century is elaborated that highlights the key role of the territorial state at
once as a form of territorialization for capital and as an institutional mediator of uneven
geographical development on differential, overlapping spatial scales. From this perspective,
the current round of globalization can be interpreted as a multidimensional process of re-scaling
in which both cities and states are being reterritorialized in the conflictual search for 'glocal'
scalar fixes.

Introduction: the 'scale question'

During the early 1970s, the 'urban question' (la question urbaine) formulated in Castells's
(1972) classic book became a lightning rod for a wide range of critical analyses of the
production of space under capitalism. Shortly thereafter, in his neglected work De I'Etat
(1976a; 1976b; 1977; 1978), Lefebvre proposed to embed the urban question—to which
he had himself already devoted four books—within the still broader question of geo-
graphical scale, its social production, and its sociopolitical contestation. As Lefebvre
(1976a, page 67) declared, "Today the question of scale [la question d'echelle] inserts itself
at the outset—at the foundation, as it were—of the analysis of texts and the inter-
pretation of events".
More than a decade later, however, when the theme of the production of space had
stimulated a considerable body of innovative research, Soja (1989, page 149) noted that
geographical scale remained an "understudied" subject, despite the "initial probes" of
writers such as Smith (1984) and Taylor (1981; 1982). Indeed, with a few important excep-
tions—such as Lefebvre's own studies of state space in the four volumes of De I'Etat;
Harvey's analysis of 'hierarchical arrangements' in the concluding chapter of The Limits
to Capital (1982); Smith's (1984) 'see-saw' theory of uneven geographical development;
and Taylor's (1985) geographical reformulation of world-system analysis—the prob-
lematic of spatial scale and its social production was still generally subordinated to
analyses of spatial practices positioned within fixed geographical scales: the local, the
urban, the regional, the national, and/or the global. Scales were viewed as relatively
stable, nested geographical arenas inside of which the production of space occurred
rather than as constitutive elements of this process.
The 'scale question' posed by Lefebvre over two decades ago is still acknowledged
more frequently in the social sciences through implicit, uninterrogated assumptions
than through explicit theorization and analysis. Nevertheless, throughout the 1990s
there has been a remarkably rapid intensification of critical research on 'the difference
that scale makes' (Cox, 1996) both within and beyond the disciplinary parameters of
geography. As the state-centric geographical foundations of the postwar era have been
radically unsettled, deconstructed, and reworked during the past two decades, spatial
scales can no longer be conceived as pregiven or natural arenas of social interaction,
but are increasingly viewed as historical products—at once socially constructed and
politically contested (Agnew, 1997; Smith, 1995; Swyngedouw, 1997; Taylor, 1996).
Under these circumstances, Lefebvre's scale question has acquired a renewed salience,
if not urgency, in a vast range of social-scientific discussions.
First, various researchers have analyzed geographical scale in the context of meth-
odological debates concerning the appropriate spatiotemporal unit of analysis and level
of abstraction for empirical - historical research/ 1 ' Second, reconfigurations of scalar
organization (processes of 're-scaling') have been analyzed as central dimensions of
the currently unfolding wave of worldwide capitalist restructuring/ 2 ' Third, many
authors have emphasized the importance of scale for strategies of social and political
transformation/ 3 ' Fourth, scale has been analyzed as a metaphorical weapon in
discursive - ideological struggles for hegemonic control over social and political space/ 4 '
Fifth, various authors have analyzed the political construction of scale—that is, the
changing scales on which political processes are organized and the concomitant strug-
gles of social actors, movements, and institutions to influence the locational structure,
territorial extension, and qualitative organization of those scales/ 5 '
Delaney and Leitner (1997, page 93) have summarized concisely the common
methodological agenda that underpins these wide-ranging analyses: "[G]eographic scale
is conceptualized as being socially constructed rather than ontologically pre-given ... the
geographic scales constructed are themselves implicated in the constitution of social,
economic and political processes". From this perspective, spatial scale is not to be
construed as a timeless, asocial container or platform of social relations, but—much
like 'structures' in the work of Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984)—as their historical
presupposition, medium, and outcome, continually produced, reconfigured, and trans-
formed as the "geographical organizer and expression of collective social action"
(Smith, 1995, page 61). As Smith (1993, page 101) argues, scales must be viewed at
once as the "materialization of contested social forces" and as their active "progenitors":
"Scale demarcates the sites of social contest, the object as well as the [spatial] resolution
of the contest." In Swyngedouw's (1992a, page 60) analogous formulation, "geographical
scales are both the realm and the outcome of the struggle for control over social space."
(1)
For example, see Agnew (1993; 1994), Beauregard (1995), Cox (1993); Cox and Mair (1989; 1991),
Sayer (1991), Smith (1987), and Wallerstein (1991).
<2' For example, see Brenner (1997b; 1998), Cerny (1995), Herod (1991; 1997), Jessop (1994), Lipietz
(1993; 1994), Peck and Tickell (1994; 1995), Smith (1995), Smith and Dennis (1987), and Swyngedouw
(1989; 1992a; 1997).
<3) For example, see Connolly (1991), Held (1995), Marden (1997), Panitch (1994), Smith (1992),
Staeheli (1994), and Taylor (1987).
*4' For example, see Agnew (1997), Debarbieux (1996), Jonas (1994), Kelly (1997), Massey (1993),
and Smith and Katz (1993), .
*5> For example, see Agnew (1994,1997), Brenner (1997a), Cox (1990), Herod (1997), Leitner (1997),
Mayer (1992), Miller (1997), Swyngedouw (1996), Taylor (1994), and Tommel (1996).
 These social-constructionist methodological injunctions provide a crucial starting
point for any approach to the scale question under capitalism. By building upon these
recent contributions to the theory and analysis of geographical scale, my goal in this
paper is to investigate the implications of the contradiction between fixity and motion
in the circulation of capital—between capital's necessary dependence on territory or
place and its space-annihilating tendencies—for the changing scalar organization of
capitalism. On the one hand, in its drive to accumulate surplus value, capital strives to
"annihilate space through time" (Marx, 1973, page 539) and thereby to overcome all
geographical barriers to its circulation process. Yet to pursue this continual dynamic of
deterritorialization and 'time-space compression' (Harvey, 1989a), capital necessarily
depends upon relatively fixed and immobile territorial infrastructures, such as urban-
regional agglomerations and territorial states, which are in turn always organized upon
multiple, intertwined geographical scales. When overaccumulation crises erupt, each
of these forms of territorialization for capital is restructured, reterritorialized, and,
frequently, re-scaled. Therefore, the contradiction between fixity and motion in the
circulation of capital translates into a dialectical tension under capitalism between
the territorialization of social relations within relatively stabilized scale-configurations
and their recurrent re-scaling through capital's deterritorializing drive towards time-
space compression.
To be sure, the contradiction between fixity and motion hardly exhausts the scale
question. Geographical scales are produced, contested, and transformed through an
immense range of sociopolitical and discursive processes, strategies, and struggles that
cannot be derived from any single encompassing dynamic (Agnew, 1997; Cox, 1990; Cox
and Jonas, 1993; Herod, 1997; Jonas, 1994; Smith, 1993; Swyngedouw, 1997). Nevertheless,
I consider the basic geographical contradiction "between the rising power to overcome
space and the immobile spatial structures required for such a purpose" (Harvey, 1985,
page 150) to be an extremely useful analytical 'window' (Harvey, 1982) through which
the changing longue duree scalar organization of capitalism can be deciphered, and
thus an important basis for theorizing the 'politics of scale' (Smith, 1992) in the current
era of capitalist restructuring.
I begin by presenting the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation
of capital, as theorized in Harvey's (1982; 1985; 1989b) account of capitalist territorial
organization, as a central analytical lens for conceptualizing geographical scale. I
elaborate the notion of a 'scalar fix' (Smith, 1995) to theorize the multiscalar config-
urations of territorial organization within, upon, and through which each round of
capital circulation is successively territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized.
These scalar fixes for capital position each geographical scale within determinate
hierarchical patterns of interdependence and thereby constitute relatively fixed and
immobile infrastructures of territorial organization for each historical round of capital
circulation. Lefebvre's (1991) 'principle of superimposition and interpenetration of
social spaces' is then introduced to analyze the roles of geographical scales as hier-
archies and as boundaries of densely intertwined, overlapping forms of territorial
organization.
This conceptual framework leads to an account of two specific forms of territorial
organization—cities and territorial states—as the essential geographical components
of each scalar fix for capital. Drawing upon Lefebvre's De I'Etat, I argue that the scalar
structures both of cities and of territorial states have been molded ever more directly
by the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital since the
late 19th century, when a 'second nature' of socially produced sociospatial configura-
tions was consolidated on a world scale. On this basis I elaborate a schematic historical
geography of scalar fixes since the late 19th century that highlights the key role of the
territorial state both as a form of territorialization for capital and as an institutional
mediator of uneven geographical development on differential spatial scales. From this
perspective, the current round of globalization can be interpreted as a multidimen-
sional process of re-scaling in which the scalar organization of both cities and states is
being reterritorialized in the conflictual search for 'glocal' scalar fixes.

Scaling capital: territorial organization and the scalar fix

The starting point for this analysis is the endemic problem of territorial organization
under capitalism, as theorized by Harvey in various works (such as 1982; 1985; 1989b).
According to Harvey, an irresolvable tension between fixity and motion in the circulation
of capital lies at the heart of each configuration of capitalist territorial organization.
On the one hand, capital is inherently globalizing, oriented towards the continual
acceleration of turnover times, the overcoming of all geographical barriers to expanded
accumulation, and the "annihilation of space through time" (Marx, 1973, page 539). In
Marx's (1973, page 408) famous formulation, "the tendency to create the world market is
inherent to the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be over-
come". On the other hand, however, the impulsion to reduce the socially necessary
turnover time of capital (the moment of deterritorialization) can only be pursued
through the production of relatively fixed and immobile configurations of territorial
organization that enable such accelerated movement (the moment of reterritorialization).
Therefore, as Harvey (1985, page 145) notes, "spatial organization is necessary to over-
come space". Capital's endemic drive towards 'time-space compression' is intrinsically
premised upon the production, reproduction, and reconfiguration of relatively fixed
and immobile configurations of territorial organization, including urban - regional
agglomerations, transportation networks, communication systems, and state regulatory
institutions. Consequently, as Swyngedouw (1992b) has more recently argued, territorial
organization operates as a crucial force of production under capitalism through its
integration and coordination of technological capacities, natural goods, public and
private forms of fixed capital, infrastructural configurations, the social relations of
production, institutional - regulatory frameworks, and other externalities within geo-
graphically localized production systems (see also Gottdiener, 1987).
According to Harvey (1985; 1989b), this endemic tension between fixity and motion
in the circulation of capital has underpinned the construction, deconstruction, and
reconstruction of geographical landscapes throughout capitalism's long-run history.
Configurations of territorial organization are continually produced as basic geographical
preconditions for capital's globalizing dynamism, only to be torn down, reconfigured,
and reterritorialized during each period of systemic crisis, as capital strives to create
new infrastructures of territorial organization for the next round of expanded accumu-
lation. Harvey refers to the provisionally stabilized, geographically fixed configurations
of territorial organization that emerge through this dynamic of continual de- and
reterritorialization as capital's 'spatial fix', a "tendency towards ... a structured coher-
ence to production and consumption within a given space" (1985, page 146). A spatial
fix is secured through the construction of relatively coherent, provisionally stabilized
territorial configurations upon, within, and through which expanded capital accumula-
tion can be generated; it entails "the conversion of temporal into spatial restraints to
accumulation" (Harvey, 1982, page 416). However, as no spatial fix can ever definitively
resolve the endemic problem of overaccumulation under capitalism, each configuration
of territorial organization within capitalism's geographical landscape is merely tempo-
rary, a chronically unstable "dynamic equilibrium" (Harvey, 1985, page 136) within a
broader, chaotic seesaw of perpetual de- and reterritorialization.
 Harvey's theorization of the spatial fix is focused less on the scalar morphologies
of capitalist territorial organization than on its provisional 'structured coherence'
relative to periods of accelerated crisis-induced restructuring and 'creative destruction'.
Indeed, Harvey's analysis is ambiguous regarding the scalar composition of each
historical spatial fix. Various competing accounts coexist somewhat uneasily in his
framework. First, Harvey frequently implies that the urban scale has been the funda-
mental geographical anchor for every spatial fix. From this point of view, spatial fixes
have been rooted above all in long-term investments in the built environments of cities,
and the urban process is the locational key to capitalist spatiality. Harvey (1989b)
pinpoints four distinct forms of urban spatial configuration that have secured a spatial
fix for capital during each successive wave of industrialization—mercantile cities;
industrial cities; Fordist - Keynesian cities; and post-Keynesian cities. In the wake of
each wave of crisis-induced restructuring, Harvey argues, built environments on the
urban scale have been reconstituted to serve as the geographical foundation for a new
wave of capital accumulation.
Second, Harvey elaborates various discussions of the spatial fix that transcend this
rather physicalist conception of geographical fixity and highlight its specifically
sociospatial aspects, above all with reference to the regional scale. Thus Harvey (1985,
page 146) introduces a capital-theoretical definition of "structured coherence" as "that
space within which capital can circulate without the limits of profit within socially-
necessary turnover time being exceeded by the cost and time of movement". Elsewhere,
Harvey emphasizes the importance of local labor markets, interfirm relations, class
struggle, class alliances, state regulatory institutions, and technological change in
defining the geographical boundaries of each regionalized spatial fix (for example,
see Harvey, 1985; pages 146-157; 1989b, pages 139-144). In this manner, Harvey
implies that spatial fixes are established above all through the "regional spaces within
which production and consumption, supply and demand (for commodities and labor
power), production and realisation, class struggle and accumulation, culture and life
style, hang together" (1985, page 146; my italics).
Third, and most crucially for the present analysis, Harvey also deploys the notion of
the spatial fix in a broader, multiscalar sense to describe various overlapping forms
of territorial organization that encompass all circuits of capital and multiple inter-
twined geographical scales. This conceptualization underpins Harvey's discussion of
'hierarchical arrangements' in the concluding chapter of The Limits to Capital (1982), in
which he investigates the implications of capital's geographical contradictions for
various territorial-organizational structures, including the spheres of production and
finance, the territorial state, and world urban hierarchies (1982, pages 413-445, espe-
cially 422-424, 429-431). From this point of view, each spatial fix is secured through
the coordination of social processes articulated upon multiple, overlapping scales and
through the "meshing" of various "hierarchical arrangements" such as transnational
corporations, monetary regimes, legal codes, interurban networks, and state regulatory
institutions (Harvey, 1982, page 423). Harvey describes this 'meshing' of intertwined
geographical scales as a constitutive moment of the tension between fixity and motion:
"The tensions between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital, between
concentration and dispersal, between local commitment and global concerns, put
immense strains upon the organizational capacities of capitalism. The history of
capitalism has, as a consequence, been marked by continuous exploration and
modification of organizational arrangements that can assuage and contain such
tensions. The result has been the creation of nested hierarchical structures of
organization which can link the local and particular with the achievement of
abstract labor on the world stage. Crises are articulated, and class and factional
 struggles unfold within such organizational forms while the forms themselves often
require dramatic transformation in the face of crises of accumulation" (1982,
page 422, my italics).
Geographical scales are viewed here as tightly intertwined territorial-organizational
arrangements that serve as "transmission devices" between localized, concrete forms
of social action, national political-regulatory systems and the global space of abstract
labor and the world market (1982, page 424). This aspect of Harvey's analysis of capitalist
urbanization indicates that the construction of each spatial fix on the urban scale is
itself a supra-urban process in which "various hierarchically organized structures ...
mesh awkwardly with each other to define a variety of scales—local, regional, national
and international" (1982, page 421).
This latter theorization of the spatial fix as a scale-configuration is also implicit in
Harvey's (1989b, pages 23 - 53) periodization of capitalist urbanization, if largely as
a backdrop to his discussion of changing forms of urban built environment and
regional spatial configuration. If the mercantile form of urbanization was premised
upon the city-state as the basic territorial unit of the world system, the industrial and
Fordist - Keynesian forms of urbanization entailed an increasingly centralized role for
the territorial state in organizing capital accumulation and class relations on urban,
national, and global scales. The most recent round of post-Keynesian urbanization has
unraveled the apparent spatial isomorphism between capital accumulation and state
territoriality which has obtained for well over a century and embedded cities ever more
directly within global flows of capital, money, commodities, and labor power.
We thus arrive at the following result: the forms of territorialization for capital are
always scaled within historically specific, multitiered territorial-organizational arrange-
ments. The resultant scale-configurations, or 'scalar fixes' (Smith, 1995), simultaneously
circumscribe the social relations of capitalism within determinate, if intensely contested,
geographical boundaries and hierarchize them within relatively structured, if highly
uneven and asymmetrical, patterns of sociospatial interdependence. Each scalar fix
for capital is premised upon historically specific configurations of overlapping geo-
graphical scales, which are in turn produced through the intertwined dynamics of
differential "hierarchical structures of organization" (Harvey, 1982, page 422). Thus
defined, spatial scales constitute a hierarchical scaffolding of territorial organization
upon, within, and through which the capital circulation process is successively territor-
ialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. In what follows I deploy the notion of a
scalar fix to characterize the distinctive scalar patterns through which the territorializa-
tion of capital is successively established, dismantled, and reconfigured during each
round of capitalist development.
These considerations suggest two initial insights concerning the character of spatial
scales as essential dimensions of territorial organization under capitalism. First,
because geographical scales operate as sites of capitalist territorial organization, each
must be viewed at once as a presupposition, a medium, and a product of the contra-
dictory social forces associated with the capital relation (the dynamic of continual
de- and reterritorialization). Therefore, scales are not merely the platforms within which
spatial fixes are secured, but one of their most fundamental geographical dimensions,
actively and directly implicated in the historical constitution, reconfiguration, and
transformation of each successive configuration of capitalist territorial organization.
Second, differential forms of territorial organization—'hierarchical arrangements' in
Harvey's terminology—interact and intertwine to territorialize capital upon each geo-
graphical scale. From this point of view, each geographical scale under capitalism must
be viewed as a complex, socially contested territorial scaffolding upon which multiple
overlapping forms of territorial organization converge, coalesce, and interpenetrate.
Table 1. The 'scale question': forms and scales of capitalist territorial organization.
Scales of Forms of territorial organization
territorial
organization cities
Urban the urbanization of capital; urban
built environments; urban labor
markets; the urban land nexus
Regional urban - regional agglomerations;
industrial districts; regional labor
markets; regional infrastructure
National national urban systems;
national urban hierarchies
Global world urban hierarchies;
interurban networks
states
municipal government; local states;
local modes of regulation
regional state institutions and
modes of regulation; metropolitan
governance
state territoriality; nationally
scaled regimes of accumulation
world interstate system;
international divisions of labor

As noted above, cities, urban regions, and urban hierarchies constitute one crucial
multiscalar form of territorial organization under capitalism—hence the preoccupation
of Castells, Harvey, and many other critical geographers in recent decades with the
historical geography of the 'urban question' (Gottdiener, 1985; Katznelson, 1993).
However, I argue below that territorial states have likewise operated as major forms
of territorialization for capital. Though state territoriality is tied intrinsically to the
national scale, state institutions are also configured in significant ways upon various
subnational and supranational scales, from the urban and regional scales of local and
regional states to the global scale of the world interstate system (Lefebvre, 1976b; 1977;
Taylor, 1985; 1994). In my view, the scale question under capitalism encompasses the
role both of cities and of territorial states as distinctively 'scaled' yet closely intertwined
forms of territorialization for capital. To illustrate this way of conceptualizing scale-
configurations, listed schematically in table 1 are various ways in which these two key
forms of territorial organization under capitalism (cities, territorial states) are config-
ured simultaneously upon differential geographical scales (urban, regional, national,
global). <6>
Therefore, scales are not to be understood merely as the geographical imprints of
capital's moment of territorialization. As sites of differential forms of capitalist terri-
torial organization, each geographical scale represents a contested arena in which the
spatiotemporal contradictions of the capital relation are continually reproduced and
fought out.
To elaborate this theorization of the scale question, I turn now to the analysis
of geographical scale developed by Lefebvre in two of his major works of the 1970s,
The Production of Space (1991) and De I'Etat (1976a; 1976b; 1977; 1978). In a first step,
(6)
In addition to these scale-configurations. Swyngedouw (1997) emphasizes the wage nexus, the
form of competition, monetary and financial regulation, and the international configuration as
distinctive 'scalings' of social relations within contemporary capitalism. My focus here on cities
and territorial states is not intended to deny or underplay the importance of these (or other)
agents and sites of scale-production and scale-reconfiguration. My goal, rather, is to conceptua-
lize scale through the specific analytical lens of capitalist territorial organization and its contra-
dictions. It should also be emphasized that the hierarchy of scales presented in table 1 is in no
way exhaustive. For instance, the body, the home, the neighborhood, and the transnational
superregion are also highly significant geographical scales (Smith, 1993). Moreover, the meaning
and structure of these geographical scales and the scale-hierarchies in which they are embedded
change historically, at once through the dynamic of de- and reterritorialization and its nearly
continual sociopolitical contestation in diverse historical - geographical contexts.
I elaborate Lefebvre's notion of 'the superimposition and interpenetration of social
spaces' to theorize the relational, mutually interdependent character of geographical
scales under capitalism. In a second step, I examine the contradictory role of the
territorial state as a multiscalar form of territorialization for capital and as an institu-
tional mediator of uneven geographical development. This leads, finally, to a schematic
historical account of the role of cities and territorial states in the production of scalar
fixes for capital since the late 19th century.

Framing the scale question: the superimposition of social spaces

Throughout The Production of Space and De VEtat, Lefebvre argues that spatial scales
operate at once as boundaries and as hierarchies of social relations. On the one hand,
Lefebvre suggests that scales circumscribe social relations within determinate, socially
constructed, organizational-territorial boundaries or 'space envelopes' (1991, page 351).
As Lefebvre notes in an extended methodological discussion of scale in volume 2 of
De VEtat, each geographical scale must be conceptualized in terms of three intertwined
"conditions": those of its historical "formation", those of its provisional "stabilization",
and those of its possible "rupture" or transformation (1976b, page 69). In this sense, spatial
scales under capitalism organize social relations into historically specific patterns of
interdependence at a given territorial extension; in so doing, scales are implicated in
those relations by contributing directly to their historical reproduction, reconfigura-
tion, and transformation.
On the other hand, Lefebvre insists that spatial scales cannot exist in isolation
from other scales, in relation to which distinct levels of interaction and forms of
interdependence are simultaneously distinguished from one another and hierarchically
intertwined. As Lefebvre argues, "Social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or super-
impose themselves upon one another. They are not things, which have mutually limiting
boundaries and which collide because of their contours or as a result of inertia" (1991,
page 86, italics in original). Thus Lefebvre (1976b, pages 67-69; 1978, pages 293-297)
proposes that spatial scales must be conceived as the components of a 'hierarchical
stratified morphology' (une morphologie hierarchique stratifiee): they are not additive,
cumulative 'blocks' of space defined in terms of absolute territorial size, but mutually
constitutive and intrinsically related levels within a single, world-encompassing socio-
spatial totality. In this sense, spatial scales are arranged within nested territorial
hierarchies whose structure and form are socially produced and thus historically
variable. It is through an analysis of these two closely intertwined aspects of geo-
graphical scale—its role as a relatively bounded, territorially circumscribed 'space
envelope' (Lefebvre, 1991, page 351) and its role as a multitiered 'hierarchy of scales'
(Lefebvre 1978, page 295)—that differential historical scalar fixes can be distinguished.
According to Lefebvre, the historical geography of capitalism must be interpreted
in terms of an epochal transformation from the production of individual commodities
in space ('competitive capitalism') to the production of space itself, a socially produced
'second nature' of territorial-organizational infrastructures through which capital is
continually territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized ('neocapitalism').
Lefebvre conceives this second nature as a worldwide scaffolding of overlapping socio-
spatial networks:
"... The places of social space are very different from those of natural space in that they
are not simply juxtaposed: they may be intercalated, combined, superimposed—
they may even sometimes collide. Consequently the local ... does not disappear, for
it is never absorbed by the regional, national or even worldwide level. The national and
regional levels take in innumerable 'places'; national space embraces the regions;
and world space does not merely subsume national spaces, but even ... precipitates
 the formation of new national spaces through a remarkable process of fission. All
these spaces, meanwhile, are traversed by myriad currents. The hypercomplexity of
social space should now be apparent, embracing as it does individual entities and
peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements, and flows and waves—some inter-
penetrating, others in conflict, and so on" (1991, page 88, italics in original).
Yet Lefebvre (1991, page 85) insists that this hierarchical stratified morphology of
superimposed, interpenetrating spaces is not to be conceived as a kaleidoscope of
randomly intersecting processes, as in the 'instant infinity' evoked by Mondrian's
paintings. Indeed, Lefebvre's conception of the 'superimposition and interpenetration
of social spaces' is above all an historical hypothesis, according to which the spatial scales
of capitalist territorial organization have become ever more tightly intertwined, inter-
woven, and interdependent during the course of capitalism's historical - geographical
development. It is, in other words, the specifically social character of geographical scale
under neocapitalism that underpins this 'polyscopic' mosaic of intertwined, overlap-
ping spaces (Lefebvre, 1991, page 308). As the process of capital circulation becomes
increasingly dependent upon and embedded within a socially produced 'second nature'
of territorial organization, the interdependencies among geographical scales are radi-
cally expanded and intensified: "The space engendered [under neocapitalism] is 'social'
in the sense that it is not one thing among other things, but an ensemble of links,
connections, communications, networks and circuits" (Lefebvre, 1978, page 305). By
simultaneously crystallizing forms of territorial organization within their boundaries
and positioning them within multitiered geographical hierarchies, spatial scales come
to operate at once as arenas, scaffolds, and outcomes of capital's dynamic of de- and
reterritorialization. Under these circumstances, the production and reconfiguration of
capitalist territorial organization is expressed ever more directly through the establish-
ment and continual reshuffling of interdependencies among geographical scales. The
major consequence of this development is a growing social 'density' of geographical
space. As Lefebvre (1991, page 88) notes, "each fragment of space subjected to analysis
masks not just one social relationship but a host of them that analysis can potentially
disclose".
Throughout both The Production of Space and De I'Etat, Lefebvre deploys this
model of superimposed, overlapping geographical scales to examine how differential
forms of territorial organization—in particular, cities and territorial states—have been
intertwined to constitute a relatively fixed scalar scaffolding for each historical round
of capital circulation. Lefebvre describes the initial conjuncture of capitalist scale-
differentiation during the 16th century as a violent consolidation of centralized
territorial infrastructures for commodity production and circulation:
"Society in the sixteenth century stood at a watershed. Space and time were
urbanized—in other words, the time and space of commodities and merchants
gained the ascendancy, with their measures, accounts, contracts and contractors.
Time—the time appropriate to the production of exchangeable goods, to their
transport, delivery and sale, to payment and to the placing of capital—now served
to measure space. But it was space which regulated time, because the movement of
merchandise, of money and of nascent capital, presupposed places of production,
boats, and carts for transport, ports, storehouses, banks and money-brokers. It was
now that the town recognized itself and found its image" (1991, pages 277-278).
Lefebvre subsequently interprets the earliest wave of capitalist industrialization as the
outgrowth of an intense struggle between interurban networks and territorial states for
hegemonic control over the scales of capitalist territorial organization. It is the centralized
territorial state that ultimately prevails over decentralized interurban configurations
and late medieval political forms: "The nation state, based on a circumscribed
territory, triumphed both over the city state ... and over the imperial state, whose
military capacities were overwhelmed" (Lefebvre, 1991, page 280). Thus ensues a terri-
torialization of social relations within state borders according to the "rational and
political principle of unification, which subordinates and totalizes the various aspects
of social practice ... within a determinate space" (Lefebvre, 1991, page 281, italics in
original). Yet, as Lefebvre proceeds to argue, this apparent victory of state territoriality
is only partial, for political sovereignty is only one among many highly contested
methods of producing and 'parcelizing' geographical scales. Accordingly, Lefebvre
(1970; 1995) analyzes the changing geographical parameters of capitalist urbanization,
which quickly transcend the national scale of territorial states to create worldwide
interurban networks and hierarchies. In an argument that anticipates recent contribu-
tions to world city theory, Lefebvre (1991, page 347) insists that cities have remained
key sites of coordination among "flows of energy and labor, commodities and capital"
on a world scale, even as surplus value is increasingly being realized within apparently
deterritorialized circuits of money and finance.
I suggest that the historical instances of scale-differentiation to which Lefebvre refers
in these passages—the urbanization of capital, the territorialization of state power,
and the globalization of urbanization—exemplify a fundamental process of scale-
construction and scale-deconstruction that is endemic to capitalism as an historical-
geographical system. As Lefebvre's analysis indicates, these re-scaling processes result
from the contradictory dynamics of state territorial power and urbanization as inter-
twined, multiscalar forms of territorialization for capital. One of the central tasks for
any theorization of geographical scale and its social production under capitalism is to
construct "dynamic representations" (Harvey, 1985, page 145) of how scales envelop,
circumscribe, and hierarchize the intensely conflictual social relations of capitalism
while simultaneously coevolving historically in conjunction with the latter. To this
end I now examine more closely the neglected but crucial role of territorial states in
producing territorial infrastructures and scalar fixes for capital circulation.

Fixing scales: the territorial state and the scalar fix

In the literature on geographical scale, the state has been understood largely through
its role as the organizational-territorial locus of the national scale—conceived variously
as a distinctive level of capital circulation and/or as the site of class struggle and
nationalist - statist ideologies. In this section I elaborate a broader conceptualization
of the territorial state not only as a site within which geographical scales are produced
but as an important institutional precondition, agent, mediator, and outcome of this
highly conflictual process. First, as indicated previously (see table 1), the territorial
state is itself a multiscalar form of capitalist territorial organization that encompasses
national, subnational, and supranational scales. Second, the state plays a central role
at once in the production of capitalist territorial organization and in the mediation of
uneven geographical development on multiple geographical scales. Third, as these roles
intensify during the course of capitalist development, the scalar structure of the state is
in turn significantly modified in conjunction with each round of crisis-induced capi-
talist restructuring. In this sense, much like urban spatial configuration in Harvey's
analysis of the spatial fix, the scales of state territorial organization can be viewed as
preconditions, arenas, and outcomes of capital's contradictory dynamic of de- and
reterritorialization. These interlinked claims can be developed through the lens of
Lefebvre's conceptualization of the 'state mode of production' (le mode de production
etatique) in volumes 3 and 4 of De I'Etat (1977; 1978).
In an argument that closely resembles Harvey's conceptualization of the spatial fix,
Lefebvre (1978, pages 278 - 280) suggests that the territorial state plays a crucial role as
a relatively fixed and immobile territorial configuration upon which each round of
capital circulation is grounded. According to Lefebvre (1991, page 388), the geograph-
ical "fixity" of state territorial organization provides a stabilized scaffolding for the
increasing "mobility" and "transience" of labor power, commodities, and capital both
within and beyond state borders. The territorialization of political power within "dur-
able" institutional infrastructures is therefore an essential precondition for the state's
ability to regulate "flows":
"Political power as such harbours an immanent contradiction: It controls flows and it
controls agglomerations. The mobility of the component parts and formants of social
space is constantly on the increase, especially in the 'economic' realm proper: flows
of energy, of raw materials, of labour, and so on. But such control, to be effective,
calls for permanent establishments, for permanent centres of decision and action ...
A novel and quite specific contradiction thus arises between what is transient and
what is durable" (Lefebvre, 1991, page 389, my italics).
According to Lefebvre, the state's role as a form of territorialization for capital has
radically intensified since the consolidation of capital's 'second nature' of socially
produced territorial infrastructures during the late 19th century. Since this period, the
state has constructed a wide range of "permanent centers for decision and action"
(Lefebvre, 1991, page 388) to provide relatively fixed, durable, and stabilized territorial
frameworks for the accelerated global circulation of capital. Consequently, with the
construction of national-developmentalist growth models throughout the older indus-
trialized world in the early 20th century, state institutions no longer operated as merely
external regulatory frameworks for capitalist market exchange relations, but acquired
increasingly fundamental roles as territorial components of circuits of capital on multi-
ple geographical scales. In this context, Lefebvre argues, the geography of state power
becomes an essential moment of capitalist territorial organization and thereby a
crucial force of production for each successive round of accumulation.
Throughout the 20th century, the state has operated as a form of territorialization
for capital above all through the planning, production, and regulation of large-scale
infrastructural configurations that serve as 'general conditions of production' (Lapple,
1973) on differential geographical scales. As Lefebvre (1978, page 298) notes, "Only the
state can take on the task of managing space 'on a grand scale'". These state-produced
investments in the productive force of capitalist territorial organization have entailed,
most importantly, the construction of transportation infrastructures such as highways,
canals, ports, tunnels, bridges, railroads, airports, and public transport systems; the
management of public utilities and energy resources such as gasoline, electricity, and
nuclear power, as well as water, sewage, and waste disposal systems; the subsidization of
public housing, schools, universities, and other research facilities; the maintenance of
communications networks such as postal, telephone, and telecommunications systems;
and the planning and construction of 'grands ensembles' and other infrastructural
configurations on urban - regional scales to coordinate the reproduction both of labor
power and of capital (Lefebvre, 1976a, pages 55-57; 1978, pages 296-303; see also
Castells and Godard, 1974; Dunford, 1988; Lapple, 1973; Lipietz, 1977). A crucial
feature of these large-scale state investments in the infrastructure of capitalist territorial
organization is their extremely long turnover time relative to all other forms of capital
(Harvey, 1982, pages 398 - 405). The state is particularly well equipped to channel flows
of value on this spatiotemporal scale through its power to allocate tax revenues, its
capacity to mobilize debt-financed forms of investment, and its legal - regulatory
control over the distinctive spatial configurations within which such investments are
mobilized. Moreover, as Harvey (1982, page 404) indicates, the state's multiscalar
territorial structure is essential to its ability to channel infrastructural investment
differentially among global, national, regional, and local flows of value: "The territorial
organization of the state ... becomes the geographical configuration within which the
dynamics of the [infrastructure] investment is worked out".
This intensified mobilization of state institutions in the production, reproduction,
and regulation of capitalist territorial organization is at the heart of Lefebvre's (1977;
1978) conception of the 'state mode of production' (SMP). According to Lefebvre, the
SMP is oriented simultaneously towards expanded capitalist growth, the extension of
urbanization, and the territorialization of social relations within state boundaries:
"The state tends to control flows and stocks, assuring their coordination. In the course
of this triple-faceted process (growth ...—urbanization...—spatialization), a qual-
itative break takes place: the emergence of the SMP (state mode of production) ...
Something new appears in civil society and in political society, in production and in
state institutions, which must be named and conceptualized. The rationalization
and the socialization of society took on this form: politicization, statism" (1978,
page 263).
Yet the drive of the SMP towards the simultaneous valorization, urbanization, and
spatialization of social relations on a national scale is closely intertwined with various
new forms of uneven geographical development. Once the global geographical exten-
sion of capitalism has been completed, the possibility for scale-expanding strategies of
crisis-displacement is exhausted and capital is increasingly forced to recolonize, reter-
ritorialize, and redifferentiate social space on subglobal scales—that is, within the
second nature of territorial organization it has already produced—in search of new
sources of surplus value. Under these circumstances, territorial states are confronted with
new regulatory problems as their 'internal' spaces are continually remolded through new
patterns of industrialization, urbanization, regional development, underdevelopment,
and sociospatial polarization on differential geographical scales. To regulate these new
mosaics of socially produced geographical unevenness, the territorial state deploys a
wide range of geographically specific policies oriented differentially towards cities,
industrial districts, regions, growth poles, peripheries, 'underdeveloped' zones, rural
areas, and so forth. In each case, Lefebvre argues, the state strives to construct "a
hierarchical ensemble of places, functions and institutions", a task that entails at once
biological reproduction, the reproduction of the labor force, the reproduction of the
means of production, and the reproduction of the social relations of production and
domination (1978, pages 307-308; 1991, page 32; my italics). In this sense, Lefebvre
argues, the SMP must be understood not only as a form of territorialization for capital,
but also as the most important institutional mediator of capital's uneven geographical
development as it is expressed on multiple, intertwined scales.
On this basis it can be argued that, since the consolidation of the SMP in the early
20th century, the state has played an essential role in establishing scalar fixes for capital
through its continual reconfiguration and regulation of social space. As Lefebvre
(1976b, page 56; italics in original) notes, "The state intervenes in multiple, increasingly
specific ways ... It transforms virtually destructive conflicts into catalysts of growth ...
It preserves the conditions of a precarious equilibrium". However, a scalar fix for
capital circulation can only be secured to the extent that both of the dimensions of
state power discussed above—its role as a form of territorialization for capital, and its
role as an institutional mediator of uneven geographical development—have been
coherently intertwined within a temporarily stabilized regulatory matrix of state space
(lespace etatique) (Lefebvre, 1978, page 271). The 'precarious equilibrium' produced by
the state is therefore premised intrinsically upon its ability to command and control
differential scale-configurations within its territorial space: "The state tends to impose
its own rationality—which uses space as its privileged instrument—onto the chaos
of relations between individuals, groups, class fractions and classes" (Lefebvre, 1978,
page 262). Most crucially, Lefebvre maintains that the state deploys historically specific
forms of the "political principle of unification" in order to mold capital's uneven
geography into relatively stabilized hierarchical territorial-organizational matrices for
each round of capitalist expansion (1978, pages 278-280, 307, 388).
Lefebvre pushes this argument one step further to analyze changing configurations
of state territorial organization during the course of the 20th century. According to
Lefebvre, the state's increasingly important role in producing configurations of capitalist
territorial organization has led to the continual reconfiguration of its own sociospatial
structures. We are thus confronted with a specifically statist instanciation of the contra-
diction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital. As the territorial state
operates ever more directly as a form of territorialization for capital and as an
institutional mediator of capital's uneven historical geography, the scalar architecture
of state power becomes directly ensnared within capital's dynamic of de- and reterri-
torialization. Under these circumstances, the state's spatial form is no longer defined
merely through its geopolitical parcelization of space on a national scale within the
world interstate system, but is molded increasingly directly through its major role in
the production, regulation, and transformation of social space within its own territorial
boundaries.
The periodic reconfigurations of state territorial organization which ensue are
formally analogous to those shifts on the urban scale traced by Harvey in his analysis
of industrial urbanization. As Harvey (1989b, pages 32 - 33) suggests, the emergence of
the industrial city signals the increasing structuration of urban built environments by
capital's developmental dynamic. Likewise, as the state has become ever more crucial
as a mechanism and as a site of crisis management, configurations of state territorial
organization have been enmeshed within circuits of capital on all scales.(7) As a result,
particularly since the consolidation of the SMP, overaccumulation crises have generally
entailed major reconfigurations and re-scalings of state territorial organization. Much
like changing forms of capitalist urbanization since the first industrial revolution of the
early 19th century, changing forms of state territorial organization since the second
industrial revolution of the late 19th century can be analyzed in terms of their highly
contradictory role in the territorialization of successive regimes of capital accumu-
lation. Like cities, territorial states have been enmeshed ever more tightly within
capital's dynamic of continual de- and reterritorialization during the course of capi-
talist development/8*

<7)
An analogous point is elaborated by Braudel (1984, page 51): "Without ever being swallowed
up, the state was thus drawn into the intrinsic movement of the world-economy. By serving
others and serving money, it was serving its own ends as well". Whereas Lefebvre focuses his
analysis of the state mode of production primarily on late 19th and early 20th century European
states, Braudel suggests that a coevolution of state structures and patterns of capital accumula-
tion has occurred throughout capitalism's long-run history, above all within the hegemonic states
of the core zones. However, for Lefebvre, the coevolution of the state and capital since the late
19th century stems not merely from a relationship of mutual benefit (Braudel's focus), but from a
situation in which configurations of capitalist territorial organization are actively produced by
state institutions. ,
(8)
Though his work focuses more directly on the role of class struggle than on the tension
between fixity and motion, Cox (1990; 1993) is one of the few authors to have theorized changing
structures of state territorial organization under capitalism. In focusing on the structural tension
between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital, 1 do not deny the importance of concrete
configurations of sociopolitical struggle, class-based or otherwise, in molding the territorial
structure of the state. My goal here is rather to situate such conflicts within the broader,
macrohistorical context of capital's recurrent dynamic of de- and reterritorialization.
 The central hypothesis that emerges from these considerations is that the tension
between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital has periodically triggered major
transformations in the scalar organization of the territorial state. Despite the substantial
tensions and antagonisms that have permeated state - capital relations throughout
capitalism's long-run history (see for example, Arrighi, 1994; Jessop, 1990), this gen-
eralization appears particularly valid for the last century of capitalist development.
When configurations of state territorial organization have proven severely ineffectual
for promoting the continued accumulation of capital—as they did during the world
economic crises of 1873-96, the 1930s, and, most recently, the 1970s—they have
generally been reconfigured in significant, if always highly contested, ways.(9) This
hypothesis can be elaborated more concretely through an analysis of the successive
waves of re-scaling that have underpinned the historical geography of scalar fixes since
the consolidation of the SMP in the late 19th century.

Re-scaling capital: cities, states, and the historical geography of spatial scales
In the final chapter of The Limits to Capital Harvey proposes that the tension between
fixity and motion in the process of capital circulation is one of the structuring principles
underlying changing historical forms of capitalist territorial organization and their
associated scale-configurations. Harvey (1982, page 431) describes this continual pro-
duction, differentiation, and reconfiguration of capitalist territorial organization as
follows:
"The stability of co-ordinating arrangements [scale-configurations] is, after all, a
vital attribute in the face of perpetual and incoherent dynamism. At some point
the tension between [fixity and mobility] is bound to snap. At such points a crisis in
the co-ordinating mechanisms ensues. The nested hierarchical structures have to be
reorganized, rationalized and reformed. New monetary systems, new political
structures, new organizational forms for capital have to be brought into being.
The birth pangs are often painful. But only in this way can institutional arrange-
ments grown prolifigate and fat be brought into tighter relation to the underlying
requirements of accumulation. If the reforms turn out well, then co-ordinations
that absorb overaccumulation through uneven geographical development at least
appear possible. If they fail, then the uneven development that results exacerbates
rather than resolves the difficulties. A global crisis ensues."
Harvey's central argument in this passage is that overaccumulation crises frequently
induce major transformations of scale-configurations, the "nested hierarchical structures"
upon which capitalist territorial organization is grounded. These processes of re-scaling
rearrange scale hierarchies and the forms of territorial organization through which
these hierarchies are constituted. Harvey thereby implies that processes of re-scaling
are an important, geographically based strategy of crisis displacement and crisis reso-
lution under capitalism, structurally analogous to those discussed in "The third cut
at crisis theory" in The Limits to Capital—for example, the geographical relocation
(9>
An obvious problem with this schematic macrohistorical formulation is that it brackets the
highly contradictory character of state - capital relations during each of these moments of crisis-
induced restructuring. Shifts in state territorial organization are not to be understood as a 'reflex'
of capital circulation but rather as highly contested, often experimental, strategies of crisis
management that by no means necessarily benefit capital or resolve crises of accumulation.
The much-debated 'imperative' for states to contribute to capitalist growth is not the result of
some functionalist necessity but rather an historically specific systemic constraint induced by the
nature of capitalism as an historical-geographical system. Insofar as profitability crises for
capital also trigger financial, social, and political crises for states, the latter have generally evolved
in ways that are broadly compatible with—if not always actively beneficial to—the capital
accumulation process (see Jessop, 1990).
of workers and firms, interregional 'switching crises', the export of devaluation, and
imperialist expansion (1982, pages 424-431). Particularly in the face of capital's grow-
ing dependence upon a socially produced geographical infrastructure to accelerate its
circulation process, the re-scaling of capitalist territorial organization has provided an
increasingly significant geographical form of crisis-induced restructuring.
The historical geography of state - capital relations since the late 19th century
provides abundant examples of re-scaling processes, particularly during periods of
systemic global crisis. Appropriately detailed empirical verification cannot be provided
here, but I will nevertheless schematically outline three waves of re-scaling that have
occurred in conjunction with each of the global economic crises of the last century—
that of 1873-96; that of the 1930s; and that of the post-1970s period. A wave of
re-scaling can be identified when structurally analogous reconfigurations of scalar
hierarchies occur within multiple forms of territorial organization during or imme-
diately following a period of sustained global economic instability. During each of
these crises, it can be argued, a relatively stabilized scalar fix became increasingly
ineffectual for purposes of sustaining capital accumulation. Subsequently, new scale-
configurations were constructed and eventually generalized—albeit at different moments,
by diverse means, and always through intense sociopolitical contestation—which retro-
spectively appear to have proven more viable for regulating and promoting capital
accumulation during the ensuing long wave of growth.
As noted above, territorial states have played fundamental roles in the production
of scalar fixes for capital throughout the last century. Indeed, it can be argued that
configurations of state territorial organization have operated as preconditions, arenas,
and outcomes of each successive wave of re-scaling. The territorial state's changing role
in circumscribing scalar fixes for capital can be delineated in terms of a sequence of
three distinctive scale-configurations: the encagement of capitalist territorial organiza-
tion within the national scale of state territoriality (1890s-1930s); the entrenchment of
nationally scaled forms of territorial organization as scalar fixes for the Fordist-
Keynesian round of capitalist growth (1950s-early 1970s); the denationalization of
capitalist territorial organization and the pursuit of alternative glocal scalar fixes
(post-1970s). In each case, I argue, territorial states have played central roles in produc-
ing, regulating, reconfiguring, and eventually transforming the scalar scaffolding of
capitalism.
Encagement Until the late 19th century, uneven geographical development within the
core capitalist states assumed the form of spatial polarization between industrializing
city regions and predominantly rural agricultural peripheries. This internal spatial
division of labor within the core states was replicated on a global scale through
imperialist expansion and colonialism (Soja, 1985). The global depression of 1873-96
reinforced this imperialistic, scale-expanding search for superprofits and culminated in
the consolidation of a new form of state-managed 'organized capitalism' (Lash and
Urry, 1987). However, despite the continued exploitation of peripheralized zones in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this configuration of state - capital relations also
entailed an increasing encagement of social relations within the territorial state
(Mann, 1993) and a growing structural convergence between the scales of capitalist
industrial organization and those of state institutions (Cerny, 1995). As Mann (1993,
pages 61, 493) notes, during this period industrialization assumed a "relatively statist"
form, based upon centralized territorial planning and an intensified "infrastructural
interpenetration" of civil society by state bureaucracies. Though a global urban hier-
archy had been constructed by the late 19th century through imperialist expansion
(King, 1990), the geoeconomic role of cities depended above all upon the geopolitical
power of the states or colonial empires in which they were located (Taylor, 1995).
This state-centric scale-configuration entailed an apparent spatial congruence of the
national economy, state bureaucracies, civil society, and the national culture (Agnew,
1994; Taylor, 1996). The territorial state had come to operate "like a vortex sucking
in social relations to mould them through its territoriality" (Taylor, 1994, page 152),
continually reinforcing a nationally scaled spatial congruence and institutional iso-
morphism among differential forms of capitalist territorial organization.
State territorial power under organized capitalism was grounded upon large-scale
investments in industrial infrastructures, highly centralized national economic planning,
expanding state bureaucracies, and a growing reliance on corporatist bargaining arrange-
ments to mediate labor - capital disputes (Cerny, 1995; Mann, 1993, pages 467-502).
The urban scale was also integrated more directly into the apparatuses of state
territorial power as a site of local state service provision, economic crisis-management,
and class politics. In many of the core states, the local - municipal tier of the state was
substantially reorganized and bureaucratized during the late 19th century as a means
to rationalize intergovernmental relations and to provide crucial collective goods on
urban - regional scales. In this manner, the state acquired a major role in the construc-
tion of large-scale urban territorial infrastructures—public transportation, education
and housing facilities, communications networks, utilities supplies and the like. As
noted above, this simultaneous centralization, rationalization, and territorialization
of social relations on the national scale of state territoriality is one of the fundamental
features of Lefebvre's notion of the state mode of production: "The state defines itself
as the most general form—the form of forms—of society. It encompasses and develops
all other forms ... In this manner the state becomes coextensive with society" (1977,
page 179, my italics).
Entrenchment. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, yet another wave of crisis-
induced capitalist restructuring ensued that likewise entailed various forms of re-scaling,
though many of the latter did not unfold until the decade after the Second World War.
However, these transformations occurred primarily within the geographical scaffolding
of state-centric scalar fixes that had been secured following the consolidation of
organized capitalism in the early 20th century. Indeed, the large-scale geographical
infrastructures for capital circulation which were constructed during the initial burst
of growth under organized capitalism—including those both of urban systems and of
state bureaucracies—were now modernized, rationalized and re-scaled to ground a
new wave of capitalist expansion rather than being dismantled. Consequently,
throughout the Fordist - Keynesian period, roughly from the 1950s to the early 1970s,
the role of the territorial state as the geographical 'container' of capital accumulation
actually intensified (Taylor, 1994). Though propelled by the dynamism of large-scale
manufacturing regions in Northeastern USA, the English Midlands, Northern France,
Belgium, and the Ruhr district, the Fordist - Keynesian regime of accumulation was
parcelized into distinctly national space economies within a world system organized
under the geopolitical and geoeconomic hegemony of the USA (Peck and Tickell, 1994).
Transnational interurban linkages were likewise crucial to the North Atlantic Fordist
space economy, but a relatively tight fit was established between urban dynamism
and the growth of autocentric national economies (Sassen, 1991). The Bretton Woods
monetary regime ensured the close regulation of national financial markets, and the
General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) served to regulate trade relations in
a manner consistent with continued US global economic hegemony (Altvater, 1992).
National-developmentalist practices were established throughout the world economy,
grounded on the notion that sovereign states would guide their 'societies' through a
linear, internally defined process of endless 'modernization' (Agnew, 1994).
Already during the 1930s states had begun to engage directly in the attempt to
devalorize and revalorize capital, at once through subsidies, grants, loans, tax advan-
tages, public investments, and state ownership of production facilities (Gourevitch,
1986, pages 124-180). Shortly thereafter, in postwar Europe and North America,
Keynesian socioeconomic policies were deployed to institutionalize demand manage-
ment, deficit spending, collective bargaining, monopoly pricing, and countercyclical
monetary policies, all of which presupposed the geographical - political space of the
sovereign nation-state and nationally scaled infrastructures for capital circulation
(Radice, 1984). Regional and local state institutions thereby became 'transmission belts'
for central state policies; their goal was simultaneously to maximize growth and to
redistribute its effects as evenly as possible on a national scale. Between the 1950s
and the 1970s, a range of regional industrial policies were introduced to promote
industrialization within each state's 'underdeveloped' peripheries. Under these circum-
stances, the state's role, as a form of territorialization for capital and in securing a
scalar fix for the social relations of capitalism, converged around the national scale. In
this manner, the national scale came to operate as the most fundamental geographical
framework for capitalist production and exchange, as the key institutional site of
sociospatial polarization and as the most central arena of sociopolitical contestation.
As Lefebvre argued, the goal of state spatial intervention throughout this period was
the "indefinite extension of the centres, nuclei and growth poles" within the state's
delimited territorial boundaries (that is, the territorialization of capital on a national
scale) and to "establish harmony between the multiple markets on national and inter-
national scales" (the mediation of capital's postwar forms of uneven geographical
development to preserve a nationally scaled institutional fix) (Lefebvre 1976c, page 112;
1977, page 228).

Denationalization The most recent round of crisis-induced capitalist restructuring has

likewise entailed various forms of re-scaling, possibly more profound in their
implications for the geography of world capitalism than either of the two preceding
waves of re-scaling. The expansion in the role of transnational corporations and global
finance capital since the demise of the Bretton Woods currency controls in the early
1970s, coupled with the growing importance of information technology in mediating
worldwide economic transactions, present some of the most obvious signs of capital's
increasing velocity and spatial mobility in the world economy (Agnew and Corbridge,
1995, pages 164 - 210). On suprastate scales, new macrogeographies of capital accumula-
tion have been consolidating as Fordist - Keynesian national economies are superseded
by a configuration of the world economy dominated by the superregional blocs of
Europe, North America, and East Asia (Arrighi, 1994). On substate scales, interspatial
competition has intensified among cities and regions competing with one another to
attract capital investment and state subsidies (Swyngedouw, 1989; 1992a). Meanwhile a
global mosaic of world cities and industrialized urban regions has emerged as a crucial
territorial infrastructure for the activities of transnational corporations (Knox and
Taylor, 1995; Scott, 1996). Consequently, the circulation of capital can no longer be
adequately conceived with reference to autocentric 'national economies' or the image of
a world economy parcelized into distinctive national - territorial spaces.
However, in addition to these globally induced reconfigurations of the national
scale, the current round of time-space compression has also triggered various
highly contested forms of glocal re-scaling and reterritorialization (Brenner, 1997c;
Swyngedouw, 1997). First, as Swyngedouw (1992a; 1997) has argued, strategies of
'global localization' have been adopted by key forms of industrial, service, and finance
capital in order to mobilize locally or regionally specific patterns of industrial agglom-
eration to maintain or acquire global competitive advantages (see also Scott, 1996).
Second, the nationally scaled configurations of state territorial organization that pre-
vailed throughout organized capitalism are likewise being re-scaled to privilege both
supranational and subnational scales. On the one hand, as Cox (1987, pages 290 - 291)
has argued, neoliberal state institutions have become increasingly internationalized as
the world market is viewed as the 'state of nature' according to which national policies
must be deduced. On the other hand, equally important to this increasingly global
orientation of states has been a growing role for regional and local state institutions in
producing the territorial preconditions for capital accumulation on the subnational
scales of major city-regions. These conflictual processes of state re-scaling can be
viewed as yet another form of 'glocalization' through which: (1) the nationally scaled
configurations of fixed capital, industrial infrastructure, and institutional organization
inherited from the Fordist - Keynesian round of capitalist growth are being system-
atically dismantled and restructured; and (2) new forms of industrialization, spatial
configuration, and state regulation are being produced, above all within each state's
key urban - regional growth poles (see also Swyngedouw, 1996).
Despite substantial differences in the political content and timing of their policy
responses, by the mid-1980s all older industrialized states had substantially re-scaled
their internal institutional hierarchies in order to play increasingly entrepreneurial
roles in producing geographical infrastructures for a new wave of capital accumulation
(see Jessop, 1994; Mayer, 1992). These re-scaling processes are intensifying in the 1990s
as various powers of central state institutions are rearticulated upwards towards
supranational regulatory regimes such as the European Union, and devolved down-
wards towards subnational scales of governance such as regional, local, and municipal
state institutions or to newly constructed urban and regional levels of governance
(Jessop, 1994). In stark contrast to the Fordist - Keynesian project of homogenizing
spatial practices on a national scale, a key result of these processes of state re-scaling
has been to intensify capital's uneven geographical development through an internal
redifferentiation and redefinition of national social space. Re-scaled state institutions
are increasingly viewed as central means of delineating locally and regionally specific
growth poles through which capitalist territorial organization can be mobilized 'endo-
genously' as a force of production on the world market.
This highly conflictual re-scaling or glocalization of the state signifies a far more
fundamental structural transformation of modern state power than the apparent weak-
ening of central state regulatory capacities that has preoccupied many accounts of the
future of the nation-state (Brenner, 1997a; 1998). Currently unfolding re-scalings of
state institutions signal not the decline or erosion of the state but rather a specifically
geographical accumulation strategy to promote and regulate industrial restructuring
within major urban regions. Indeed, recent neoliberal strategies to promote deregu-
lated markets and mobile capital have necessarily presupposed the construction of new
local and regional spaces of production and regulation in which capital's moment of
geographical fixity can be secured (Gough and Eisenschitz, 1996). This tension between
deregulation (which favors capital's moment of geographical mobility) and reregulation
(which privileges capital's moment of geographical fixity) can be viewed as one of
the irresolvable contradictions of neoliberalism as an accumulation strategy. In the
current context of neoliberal globalization, therefore, configurations of state territorial
organization—if now significantly re-scaled—continue to play a constitutive role in
circumscribing the spatial orbit of capital, in constructing its territorial preconditions,
and in mediating its uneven geographical development.
Two conclusions follow from this schematic overview of processes of re-scaling
since the late 19th century. First, the scalar structure of capitalist territorial organiza-
tion has been significantly transformed in conjunction with each wave of crisis-induced
restructuring. Arrighi (1994) has analyzed one form of re-scaling that is endemic to
capitalism, namely 'scale-expanding' responses to global economic crises. As Arrighi
argues, each systemic crisis of capital accumulation has been accompanied by the
geographical transfer of hegemony to progressively larger territorial zones, from the
city-states of northern Italy (15th - 16th centuries), the quasiterritorial state of Holland
(17th- 18th centuries), and the nation-states of Great Britain (19th century) and the
USA (20th century), to most recently the emergent East Asian superregional constella-
tion. Focusing on the last century of capitalist development, I have suggested that each
round of expanded accumulation has been premised upon historically specific scale-
configurations or 'scalar fixes'. From this point of view, each of the major economic
crises of the last century has significantly transformed the scalar organization of
capitalism, not merely in terms of the hegemon's absolute territorial size, but above
all with reference to the historically specific forms of 'superimposition' among differ-
ential forms of capitalist territorial organization. During each period of sustained
capitalist expansion, these scale-configurations have constituted the relatively fixed
and immobile geographical infrastructure upon which the accumulation process has
been successively territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. As capital con-
tinually constructs, deconstructs, and reconstitutes its territorial preconditions on
multiple spatial scales, both the urbanization process and the interstate system have
been enmeshed ever more tightly within its globalizing developmental dynamic.
Second, as the state has come to play an ever more active, direct role in organizing
and promoting the accumulation process, configurations of state territorial organiza-
tion have become increasingly sensitive to the rhythms and contradictions of the circuit
of capital (see also Poulantzas, 1978, pages 166-179). This circumstance has become
particularly self-evident during the post-1970s wave of global capitalist restructuring, in
which intensified economic globalization has triggered an historically unprecedented
wave of state re-scaling. Insofar as the territorial organization of the state has been
implicated ever more directly in the circuit of capital, this dynamic of state re-scaling
can be viewed as an important geographical strategy of crisis displacement and crisis
management. Thus emerges a 'politics of scale' (Smith, 1992) in which spatial scales—
including those of state territorial organization—become not only the 'setting' of social
and political conflicts but one of their 'principle stakes' (Lefebvre, 1991, pages 410, 416).
It remains to be seen to what degree, and in which geographical contexts, currently
unfolding processes of state re-scaling might effectively fix the scales of capitalist
territorial organization into a stabilized geographical framework for a new round of
capitalist expansion. What does seem clear in the current round of re-scaling is that the
quest to secure a spatial fix for capital in the late 20th century is being expressed
through a 'trial by space' (Lefebvre, 1991, pages 416-417) grounded upon proliferating
struggles for command and control over the territorial organization of social rela-
tions—including, not least, that of the state and its associated scales. Any future
spatial fix for capital that might be constructed in the aftermath of the current round
of neoliberal restructuring will surely entail some type of temporary geographical
resolution of these conflicts expressed in the form of a new configuration of provision-
ally stabilized spatial scales.
Conclusion: re-scaling and its politics
One of my central concerns in this paper has been to elaborate various theoretical and
historical implications of Lefebvre's 'principle of superimposition and interpenetration
of social spaces'. This concept usefully emphasizes the multifaceted, interlayered, and
contradictory character of spatial scales and forms of territorial organization under
capitalism. I have presented Lefebvre's analytical insight as a fundamentally historical
thesis concerning capitalism's changing scalar structure since the emergence of the SMP
in the late 19th century. It is above all since this period, in conjunction with the
intensifying urbanization of capital and the globalization of the SMP, that the social
spaces of capitalism have begun to be truly superimposed upon one another on all
geographical scales. As urban socioterritorial configurations and territorial states
become increasingly crucial as the geographical preconditions for each round of capital
accumulation, their own patterns of territorial organization have been structured ever
more directly by capital's contradictory dynamic of continual deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. In my view, the specifically social character of geographical space
under capitalism must be understood with reference to this dynamic of spatiotemporal
restructuring as it unfolds on multiple spatial scales.
We thus return to the problem of geographical scale, its social production, its
historical reconfiguration, and its sociopolitical contestation—in short, to Lefebvre's
'scale question' as it appears at the twilight of the 20th century. Even more dramatically
than from Lefebvre's vantage point over two decades ago, today the spatial scales of
capitalist production, urbanization, and state regulation are shifting under our very
feet. It is this recognition that scales have today become sites of constant reshuffling,
restructuring, and sociopolitical contestation that underpins Swyngedouw's (1997,
page 140) recent eloquent plea for a new discourse of scale attuned above all to its
fluidity and mutability as the "product of processes of sociospatial change". In this
contribution I have likewise emphasized the socially produced and politically contested
character of geographical scales under capitalism. Yet my analysis of scales as histor-
ical preconditions, arenas, and products of capital's endemic dynamic of de- and
reterritorialization has led to a somewhat different result. From the point of view of
the preceding analysis, the capacity of geographical scales to circumscribe and
hierarchize social relations within relatively fixed and provisionally stabilized territorial
configurations is central to their role as sources of power and control over social space,
and thus as stakes of sociopolitical struggle. As Smith (1995, page 62) likewise empha-
sizes, it is precisely through the role of geographical scales in freezing social, economic,
and political interaction within relatively stabilized, coherent frameworks of territorial
organization that "highly contentious and contested social relationships become
anchored if not quite in stone at least in landscapes that are, in the short run, fixed".
As in previous waves of capitalist restructuring, the politics of scale in the current era
entails not only the effort to deconstruct inherited scalings of social, economic
and political relations but a wide range of sociopolitical strategies to fix them anew
within relatively stabilized geographical structures and transformed "power-geometries"
(Massey, 1993).
Thus the explosive politics that is emerging around the territorial organization of
geographical scales in contemporary capitalism is to be viewed not only as an attempt
to reshuffle and transform the state-centric scale-configurations which prevailed
throughout the Fordist - Keynesian period, but as a series of relatively uncoordinated
yet concerted strategies to construct new, provisionally stabilized, re-scaled geograph-
ical arenas in and through which post-Fordist forms of power over space and scale
might be deployed. Any progressive theorization and politics of scale must be attuned to
both of these aspects of geographical scale—its (potential) mutability as well as its
(provisional) fixity—for the power to fix geographical scales into stabilized territorial
frameworks can serve not only as a tool of disempowerment, exclusion, and domina-
tion but also as a means to construct empowering, inclusive, and even emancipatory
counterge ographie s.
Acknowledgements. My thanks to Manu Goswami, Gary Herrigel, Moishe Postone, Nathan
Sayre, Bill Sewell, Neil Smith, and the participants in the Red Line Working Group in Chicago
for helpful comments and critical suggestions on previous drafts. I am also grateful to the
reviewers for Society and Space for their incisive criticisms. The usual disclaimers apply.
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