The Committee on States and Social Structures was an initiative of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) that officially lasted between 1983 and 1990. Motivated by a conviction that much of the postwar social sciences had neglected the importance of state structures and institutions, it openly called for a cross-disciplinary return of this subject to research agendas. Despite its relatively brief existence, the Committee had a significant influence on the development of US political science and sociology. For decades now, Bringing the State Back In, the 1985 edited volume that crystallized the Committee’s research agenda, has been a mainstay on graduate syllabi.1New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985More Info →

Any discussion of the development of social scientific thinking about the state in the second half of the twentieth century would thus be incomplete without acknowledging the important role played by the Committee. However, its influence has been so diffused throughout political science and sociology that the breadth of its intervention at the time has been somewhat forgotten today. Tracing the history of the Committee’s origin and motivations also reveals a larger story about the trajectory of US social science in the twentieth century. For one, its intellectual and methodological intervention can be seen as part of a longer history of social scientific grappling with that elusive object known as “the state.” Furthermore, the history of the Committee is an example of how the establishing of an influential research agenda at a critical juncture created a framework of knowledge production that outlasted it.

Intellectual origins

The Committee emerged out of the period of intellectual rebellion in the US social sciences during the 1960s. Postwar sociology and political science had been heavily influenced by two paradigms. The first was structural-functionalism, which largely treated social change—or “modernization”—as a process marked by the increasing division of labor, the evolution of market economies, and a political convergence on liberal democracy. The second was the behavioral revolution. This movement, whose roots lay in the 1930s, attempted to apply the methodologies and allegedly value-neutral outlook of the natural sciences to the study of social phenomena, and in doing so, to place all social sciences on a common meta-theoretical and methodological footing.

“The state itself was downplayed, partially as a recoil from the overt statism of totalitarian regimes.”

From 1954 to 1972, projects like the SSRC’s Committee on Comparative Politics helped advance both modernization theory and behavioralism to the forefront of social scientific research. Yet, in contrast to the origins of the US social sciences as explicitly concerned with the modern state-building project, these approaches contributed to a general decline of interest in “the state” as such. This research undoubtedly had political institutions, mass behavior, and legitimation as its focal points.2New York: Columbia University Press, 2003More Info → However, the state itself was downplayed, partially as a recoil from the overt statism of totalitarian regimes. The result was a strong affinity between the positivist bent of the behavioral movement, which saw the state as too amorphous of a concept to be useful for scientific analysis, and the perpetuation of the commonplace myth of the United States as a “stateless society.”

As the social and political unrest of the 1960s began to resonate within the academy, younger scholars became more critical of the underlying values and normative assumptions of these frameworks. With a newfound interest in engaged scholarship, they questioned the role of the social sciences in upholding both the implicit exceptionalism of Cold War liberal democracy and the political-military-industrial complex that sustained it. In this context, references to the state were a convenient way to express the systematic critique of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of postwar corporate liberalism that were coming under strain.

In the following years, further interest in the state, particularly in sociology, was prompted by the experience of the New Left and the economic and legitimacy crises of the early 1970s. During this time, scholars drew on a theoretical background formed by the convergence of two distinct lines of inquiry.

“At stake in the debate were a number of interlinked questions, including the theoretical grounds for the critique of mainstream social science (pluralism and elite theory), the basis of the state’s relative autonomy from capitalist class power, and the relationship between state power and the institutions of civil society.”

The first was a growing interest in Marxist analysis, particularly stemming from the influential New Left Review debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, which took place from 1969 to 1976.3→Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” New Left Review I, no. 58 (1969).
→Ralph Miliband, “The Capitalist State—Reply to N. Poulantzas,” New Left Review I, no. 59 (1970).
→Ralph Miliband, “Poulantzas and the Capitalist State,” New Left Review I, no. 82 (1973).
→Nicos Poulantzas, “The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau,” New Left Review I, no. 95 (1976).
At stake in the debate were a number of interlinked questions, including the theoretical grounds for the critique of mainstream social science (pluralism and elite theory), the basis of the state’s relative autonomy from capitalist class power, and the relationship between state power and the institutions of civil society. These exchanges on the capitalist state had introduced many Anglophone scholars to contemporary Marxist debates, and especially the critique of pluralism. By the mid-1970s, both authors were drawing increasing interest in US sociology and political science.

An additional influence came through the nascent field of “historical sociology,” as represented in influential studies by Reinhard Bendix, Barrington Moore Jr., Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Perry Anderson.4→Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order (University of California Press, 1977).
→Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Beacon Press, 2015).
→Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (McGraw-Hill, 1978).
→Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 2011).
→Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Verso, 2013).
To varying degrees, these authors drew on both Marx and Weber to explore the formation of the modern state, the historical transition to capitalism, and the divergences in social structures enacted by these processes.

Drawing on these frameworks, a new wave of state-oriented research by younger scholars like Theda Skocpol, Guillermo O’Donnell, Ellen Kay Trimberger, Stephen Krasner, Peter Evans, and Alfred Stepan, among others, pointed to its importance for understanding the development of social and class structures in the contemporary world.5→Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
→Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (University of California, 1973).
→Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (Transaction Books, 1978).
→Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1978).
→Peter B. Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton University Press, 1979).
→Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1978).
Observing state-building projects following decolonization struggles across the Global South, as well as the nascent neoliberal backlash in the Global North, these scholars took an interest in states as unique institutional spaces that could assert their independence from both society and markets. What had been dismissed as an outmoded and unscientific concept just ten years earlier had suddenly become the focal point of a new and growing research agenda.

Framing the state

In 1980, Theda Skocpol (of the University of Chicago), Peter Evans, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (both of Brown University) approached SSRC president Kenneth Prewitt with the proposition to form a committee that could systematically bring together this recent scholarship on the state. The trio suggested that a Committee on States and Social Structures would “clarify approaches and issues that seem most likely to cut across different areas and periods, and to stimulate intellectual coordination of diverse research efforts on the state.”6Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, “States and Social Structures: An Agenda for Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Research,” September 1980, Social Science Research Council, Box 301, Folder 3802, Rockefeller Archive Center.

A milestone in the development of this project was a conference on “States and Social Structures: Research Implications of Current Theories” that was held at Mt. Kisco, New York, on February 25–27, 1982. Organized by Skocpol, Evans, and Rueschemeyer with the support of the SSRC, it brought together an interdisciplinary and transnational group of scholars.7Those in attendance included Alice Amsden (Barnard College), Pierre Birnbaum (University of Paris I), Fred Block (University of Pennsylvania), Atilio Borón (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Richard R. Fagen (Stanford University), Albert O. Hirschman (Institute for Advanced Study), Peter J. Katzenstein (Cornell University), Ira Katznelson (University of Chicago), Stephen Krasner (Stanford University), Claus Offe (University of Bielefeld), Alessandro Pizzorno (Harvard University), Adam Przeworski (University of Chicago), Richard Rubinson (The Johns Hopkins University), José Serra (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), Kenneth Sharpe (Swarthmore College), Alfred Stepan (Yale University), Göran Therborn (University of Lund), and Charles Tilly (University of Michigan).

Over three days, the participants discussed existing theoretical frameworks for studying the state, the influence of state capacity on economic development and redistribution, the transnational dimensions of state activity and the networks they were embedded in, and the relationship between states and social conflict. These thematic clusters formed the project’s theoretical and empirical core, as many of the papers presented at the Mt. Kisco conference were eventually included in Bringing the State Back In.

“Revealing its roots in the New Left, the Committee’s statements and documents from this period note the importance of contemporary Marxist research for posing questions about the relationship between social classes, state power, and capitalist development.”

Revealing its roots in the New Left, the Committee’s statements and documents from this period note the importance of contemporary Marxist research for posing questions about the relationship between social classes, state power, and capitalist development. However, the Committee distinguished itself by rejecting both liberal-pluralist and Marxist approaches to the state as “societally reductive,” suggesting these did not convincingly account for the autonomy of the state as a unique form of political organization. Drawing its theoretical inspiration from Weber, the Committee argued that states were not functions of class or social relations, but instead distinct organizations defined by territorial integrity, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and bureaucratic-administrative apparatuses aiming at the maintenance of social order and economic development.

Beginning from the premise that states were aggregates of institutions that had their own organizational forms and existed at the intersection of domestic and international environments, the Committee honed its focus on how these entities affected processes like class formation, economic modernization, and social policy. It was especially interested in cases where states assumed the role of autonomous actors, whether in instances of military coups, the influence of bureaucratic and administrative organizations on the formation of social policies, state intervention in monetary and fiscal matters, and the various pathways of state-led industrial development and trade.

In addition, the Committee claimed that contemporary discussions of the state were too prone to theoretical abstraction—especially Marxist accounts that identified specific state forms with modes of production and class structures. In rejecting the alleged “grand theory” of both structural-functionalism and Marxism, the Committee advanced a comparative-historical framework that aimed to begin with detailed studies of a small number of cases. This “bottom-up” approach would facilitate the eventual “development of hypotheses about the variable conditions for autonomous and effective state action and to the advancement of comparative research.”8Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, “States and Social Structures: An Agenda for Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Research,” September 1980, Social Science Research Council, Box 301, Folder 3802, Rockefeller Archive Center.

The Committee was formally approved by the SSRC in May 1983, with Hirschman, Katzenstein, Katznelson, Krasner, and Tilly joining Skocpol, Evans, and Rueschemeyer to form its leadership. Over the course of its existence, the Committee organized working groups on “Contemporary Patterns of State-Led Industrialization”; the “Transnational Diffusion of Policy-Relevant Economic Knowledge”; “States, Knowledge-Bearing Occupations and Social Policy Making”; and “War Settlement and State Structures.” It also oversaw the publication of two edited volumes—Bringing the State Back In and The Political Power of Economic Ideas—as well as organized seminars, published newsletters, and awarded research grants.9Peter A. Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton University Press, 1989). Through these projects, the Committee brought related strands of research under a common umbrella and established institutional networks to circulate it.

Impact and shortcomings

The Committee’s legacy arguably exceeds its output during its years in existence. Backed by the SSRC and the institutional networks of the scholars involved, the Committee’s intervention helped reset and systematize contemporary theoretical and methodological debates about the study of the state. Its greatest contribution was to explicitly center the state as an object for social scientific inquiry and to provide the starting point for future state-oriented research in US sociology and political science.

“Today, most studies in both comparative politics and American political development focusing on state and class formation, democratization, welfare and social policy, and social movements owe some debt to the Committee’s work for highlighting the importance of state institutions to these processes.”

In particular, the Committee served as an important touchstone in the development of the “new institutionalism” in political science during the 1990s and 2000s.10Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms*,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–57. Today, most studies in both comparative politics and American political development focusing on state and class formation, democratization, welfare and social policy, and social movements owe some debt to the Committee’s work for highlighting the importance of state institutions to these processes. Furthermore, while at one point talk of “globalization” appeared to have made the state obsolete, the past decade has again highlighted the persistence and relevance of state structures even when dealing with transnational phenomena such as migration, trade, or global warming.

Part of the Committee’s success in establishing its approach to the state as the baseline for later scholarship was due to its conflation of pluralist and Marxist approaches as equally societally reductive approaches to the study of political institutions. In their place, it openly presented itself as responding to the flaws of thinking about the state in both mainstream social science and among its critical challengers. Its fusion of Marxist and Weberian insights (however, strongly tending toward the latter) largely set aside the metatheoretical and political debates surrounding the state that had emerged from out of the New Left. In effect, its polemic against Marxist reductionism had blunted the politically engaged and self-reflexive character of the same state debates from which it had emerged just a decade earlier.11Theda Skocpol, “States, Revolutions, and the Comparative Historical Imagination,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Coming at the juncture of the late 1970s that marked the crisis of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism, the Committee’s intervention was one moment in a larger debate about the past and future of the modern state. By building on the critiques of Cold War conceptions of democracy and corporate liberalism that had begun to appear within the US social sciences, the Committee appropriated and “translated” them into a form of professionalized, disciplinary knowledge. In effect, we can understand the Committee’s legacy as a double movement: It had largely succeeded in its mission to “bring the state back in,” but it had also set aside critical inquiry into the role played by the social sciences in representing and reproducing the state as a unique social relation. The latter remains an ongoing project for the history of the social sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and political theory today.

Banner image: Groman123/Flickr.

References:

1
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985More Info →
2
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003More Info →
3
→Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” New Left Review I, no. 58 (1969).
→Ralph Miliband, “The Capitalist State—Reply to N. Poulantzas,” New Left Review I, no. 59 (1970).
→Ralph Miliband, “Poulantzas and the Capitalist State,” New Left Review I, no. 82 (1973).
→Nicos Poulantzas, “The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau,” New Left Review I, no. 95 (1976).
4
→Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order (University of California Press, 1977).
→Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Beacon Press, 2015).
→Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (McGraw-Hill, 1978).
→Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 2011).
→Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Verso, 2013).
5
→Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
→Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (University of California, 1973).
→Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (Transaction Books, 1978).
→Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1978).
→Peter B. Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton University Press, 1979).
→Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1978).
6
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, “States and Social Structures: An Agenda for Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Research,” September 1980, Social Science Research Council, Box 301, Folder 3802, Rockefeller Archive Center.
7
Those in attendance included Alice Amsden (Barnard College), Pierre Birnbaum (University of Paris I), Fred Block (University of Pennsylvania), Atilio Borón (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Richard R. Fagen (Stanford University), Albert O. Hirschman (Institute for Advanced Study), Peter J. Katzenstein (Cornell University), Ira Katznelson (University of Chicago), Stephen Krasner (Stanford University), Claus Offe (University of Bielefeld), Alessandro Pizzorno (Harvard University), Adam Przeworski (University of Chicago), Richard Rubinson (The Johns Hopkins University), José Serra (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), Kenneth Sharpe (Swarthmore College), Alfred Stepan (Yale University), Göran Therborn (University of Lund), and Charles Tilly (University of Michigan).
8
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, “States and Social Structures: An Agenda for Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Research,” September 1980, Social Science Research Council, Box 301, Folder 3802, Rockefeller Archive Center.
9
Peter A. Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton University Press, 1989).
10
Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms*,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–57.
11
Theda Skocpol, “States, Revolutions, and the Comparative Historical Imagination,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).