The State

This is an exceedingly rich book. I know of no one who could have written it but Philip Pettit, a thinker of astonishing breadth and erudition. It contains nuanced accounts of individual and group agency, of the emergence of norms through conventions, of the transition from norms to laws, and of the development of secondary rules in legal systems, as well as illuminating excursions into the history of systematic thinking about the state, with insightful comments on the work of a number of ancient and modern theorists. To take only one example, Pettit provides a probing analysis of the Absolute Sovereigntist doctrines of Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau, arguing that what is correct in their thinking, the case for sovereignty, does not support their rejection of mixed constitutions. He also advances a plausible argument for the bold claim that the state itself (not the people) is the sovereign.None of this is history of political thought for its own sake. It is all supposed to be in the service of Pettit’s main two-pronged project in this book: developing a theory of the function of the state and showing that the state’s ability to perform this function makes the state “in principle” an effective agent of justice. He employs a genealogical method to identify the function of the state, constructing a hypothetical (indeed extremely counterfactual) account of how the state could emerge, not from deliberate efforts at state-making but through an unplanned process in which various agents pursue their own interests in adjusting to changing circumstances over time. According to Pettit, the function of the state—specifically, the modern state—“is that of individually assuring its citizens against one another under a regime of law that it safeguards against internal and external dangers” (26). He says that the performance of this function entails the satisfaction of “a subset of the demands of justice, but not full justice” (9). So the central thesis of the book is that the state can “in principle” serve as effective agent in satisfying at least some of the demands of justice that exceed those satisfied by its performance of the defining function of states.Both Pettit’s reliance on the concept of a function and the counterfactual genealogy are questionable. If the goal is to understand whether states have the capacity to be agents of justice, one need only discern what their capacities actually are and determine whether, if exercised appropriately, they can contribute to the achievement of justice. If the ultimate aim is to achieve progress toward full justice, then what matters is the capacities of states as they are or as they might be, given feasible modifications—and whether and if so under what conditions those capacities will be exercised in the pursuit of justice. Doing that does not require employment of a distinctive functionalist explanation. We may use “the functions of the state” interchangeably with “the characteristic activities of the state” in explanations that are in no significant sense distinctively functional. We can try to determine whether the state’s engaging in its characteristic activities is compatible with it promoting justice without invoking a distinctive “functionalist explanation.”Petit thinks that the fact that states have a function explains their resilience—the fact that they can persist in the face of changing, unpredictable challenges. Yet one can explain resilience without employing the concept of a function. Instead, one can show how the needs and interests that are served by the state are so important in human life that states will continue to receive sufficient support from individuals and groups even in adverse circumstances. Saying that it is the function of the state to satisfy important and pervasive needs and interests adds nothing to the statement that the state is resilient because it has the capacity to meet emerging challenges in ways that enable it to continue to satisfy them.Petit might reply that without identifying the function, we have no principled way of determining whether an institution is a state. It appears, however, that we can, at least provisionally, identify as states those institutions that maintain or have maintained control over a bounded territory in which they impose laws and that make plausible claims to being recognized as juridical equals in and primary members of the international system, entitled to enter into treaties, engage in diplomacy, and so on.Nor is it at all clear why a counterfactual history of the emergence of states is relevant for determining whether states can be effective agents of justice. How states actually came about might be relevant if they exhibit path-dependency—that is, if events in the history of their emergence, especially events that occur early on, constrain their current capacities or the ways in which those capacities will in fact be exercised. What matters is what they are like, where this may be in part due to how they actually came about, not the fact that something like what they are like could have emerged from a history that is radically different from their actual history. Most states came about in part through deliberate, intentional efforts to gain and consolidate power. The kinds of states that have resulted from revolutions, including the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions, have been stronger and more centralized than their predecessors and have also been authoritarian (Skocpol 1979: 285). That this is so indicates that how states actually come about (not how they might have come about) is relevant to determining whether they will act as effective agents of justice.Just how limited Pettit’s central thesis really is bears emphasis: his claim is that “in principle” the state can be an effective agent for achieving justice. This is where Pettit’s lack of attention to Marx in his historical excursions is quite revealing. Contrary to Marx, Pettit proceeds as if the state is autonomous, exogeneous to society. He has much to say about how key aspects of the economy, including markets and property rights, depend on state action, but he never takes seriously the fact that vast concentrations of wealth and correspondingly of power in private hands constrain what states actually do, limiting their ability to serve as agents of justice. For those who care about justice, the fact that “in principle” states can advance justice—that as states they have the capacity to do so—is of little consolation if there is good reason to believe that they will not exercise the capacity in that way in the sort of society we actually live in and are likely to continue to live in. In brief, Pettit ignores what may be Marx’s single most important insight—namely, that the state is not exogenous to society.It will not do for Petit to reply that the gap between “in principle” and “in our world” will be addressed in the companion volume on justice. It should have been addressed in The State; otherwise, the project of that book is of very limited value. If Pettit intends to address the Marxian point in the companion volume on justice that he is now writing, he should have at least acknowledged in the present work the fact that in our world states are not autonomous, if only to be frank about just how limited the significance of his main thesis is.If Pettit addresses the Marxist point that the inequalities that capitalism generates constrain the state as an agent of justice, he might try to show that certain institutional innovations—for example, constraints on lobbying and campaign contributions—could lessen the distorting effects on state behavior of the vast inequalities of wealth that exist in countries like the United States. My surmise, however, is that no such measures will be adequate. If I am right about that, then the companion volume should consider a rather depressing possibility: if we want to enjoy the prosperity that the unrivaled productivity of advanced capitalism provides, we must accept the fact that capitalism significantly constrains progress toward justice. We cannot have both capitalism’s high levels of welfare and full justice. Unless we are willing to try to scrap the capitalist system, we must face up to a justice/welfare trade-off.Another surprising omission is the absence of a discussion of state legitimacy—surprising since one would think that a book on the state would provide an account of what a state must be like to be legitimate. The terms legitimate and legitimacy do not occur in the book’s index. There is one rather elusive passage where one of these terms occurs, but the reference is to Bernard Williams’s “legitimacy demand” (11). Given the recent burgeoning of a rich philosophical literature on institutional legitimacy, this omission is questionable. Nevertheless, one can read Pettit’s claims about the function of the state as implying that an entity is a legitimate state if and only if performs the function of states.1 Still, it would have been helpful had this been made explicit and had Pettit engaged the best of the current literature on legitimacy, showing why his conception is superior to rival conceptions. One hopes that in the companion volume on justice, he will deal more fully and explicitly with questions of legitimacy and articulate the connection between legitimacy and justice.In closing, I must acknowledge that there is a sense in which my major concerns about this marvelous book may only be pro tanto. The problematic features of The State I have identified may be addressed satisfactorily in the companion volume on justice. Even if they are not, I have no doubt that when taken together, The State and that book will constitute a major contribution to political philosophy.I thank Nate Adams for his constructive comments on a draft of this review

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• States and Social Revolutions

  Open Access•T Skocpol•States and Social Revolutions•1979

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