Mutual Empowerment of State and Society Its Nature, Conditions, Mechanisms, and Limits

Nearly two decades have passed since the state was brought back in to the comparative social sciences. During this period the autonomy of the political has been emphasized, and a consensus has been reached that the state has always been a critical agent of socioeconomic change. Statism, as an antidote to the social reductionism embodied in the liberal-pluralist and Marxist perspectives that prevailed during the first thirty years after World War II, is now a dominant theoretical paradigm in the field of comparative politics.1 In recent years, however, a voice of criticism has emerged from within the statist school itself, arguing that some statist claims have been pushed too far. Especially, more and more state theorists have come to realize that it is an error to equate the strength of the state with its autonomy from society and with the ability of state elites to ignore other social actors or to impose their will in any simple manner on society. Scholars find that some dimension of state power has more to do with the state's ability to work through and with other social actors and therefore that a state's apparent disconnectedness from social groups turns out to be associated in many cases with weakness rather than strength. In other words, the state, for its parts, needs society to achieve its objectives.2 This revisionist statism is clearly developed in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, edited by Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue. In this seminal book, scholars working in the Weberian tradition of political sociology suggest a more balanced state-in-society perspective