For a Historical Sociology of State–Society Relations in the Study of Subaltern Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID23201147
AuthorsAlf Gunvald Nilsen (0000-0003-4038-4400, corresponding author)
Year2015
Pages31-53
Publication date2015-07-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueNew Subaltern Politics (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199457557.003.0002
OpenAlexW2498002300
ISBN9780199457557
LanguageEN
Citations received8

This chapter presents a dense historical and theoretical discussion of how state-society relations have been theorized in both the Subaltern Studies project and in more recent Foucauldian studies of subaltern politics. The chapter argues that both perspectives fail, to fully appreciate the production of subaltern political agency and its containment in and through the state, and how subalterns use the full resources of ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’ available to them, traversing Chatterjee’s spatial divide of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society. The chapter turns to Gramsci to provide a conceptual armoury capable, on the one hand, ‘of grasping how subaltern politics is always-already imbricated in state-society relations, and how, on the other hand, state-society relations simultaneously enable and constrain subaltern politics’.

Agency (philosophy) · Civil society · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subaltern · Law · Political Economy and Marxism

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