stimson rethinking the state

Rethinking the State: Perspectives on the Legibility and Reproduction of Political SocietiesSeeing like a State by James C. Scott; Reproducing the State by Jacqueline Stevens; The MoralPurpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in InternationalRelations by Christian Reus-SmitReview by: Shannon StimsonPolitical Theory, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Dec., 2000), pp. 822-834Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192222 .

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RETHINKING THE STATE Perspectives on the Legibility and Reproduction of Political Societies

SEEING LIKE A STATE by James C. Scott. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 445 + xiv pp.

REPRODUCING THESTATEby Jacqueline Stevens. Princeton, NJ: Prince- ton University Press, 1999. 307 + xiv pp.

THE MORAL PURPOSE OF THE STATE: CULTURE, SOCIAL IDENTITY, AND INSTITUTIONAL RATIONALITY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS by Christian Reus-Smit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 208 pp.

We learn from the very outset of Seeing Like a State that James C. Scott intended to write another book-one with a more narrowly focused comparative question. It would have been a book about sedentarization, that is, a look at governments' efforts to settle mobile or nomadic peoples-slash-and-burn hill peoples of Southeast Asia, hunter-gathers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves and serfs-and a consideration of why these efforts were "a perennial project-perennial, in part, because it so sel- dom succeeded" (p. 1). But Scott has opted for an even larger project. He has chosen instead to focus the book on the conceptual and practical problem of "legibility" as a central metier of statecraft, where legibility may be understood as the need of a state to "map" its terrain and its people. One can imme- diately see that sedentarization is but a subset of this much larger legibility issue.

Of course, rendering both landscapes and peoples "legible" to political ends is a time-honored preoccupation of political rulers, as Scott's references to Plato's city planning outlines in The Laws (p. 382) or the Roman castra (p. 55) would suggest. However, he seeks initially to distinguish the needs of the premodern state to "discover" the identity of its people, much like a voy- age of discovery of a colonizing imperial power, and to "arrange the population in ways that simplified its classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion" (p. 2) from those "high modern" schemes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly those twentieth-century

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 28 No. 6, December 2000 822-834 ? 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

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Stimson / REVIEW ESSAY 823

totalistic state planners, whose aim was nothing less than a utopian recon- struction of society. Just as often, however, Scott characterizes all state metrics of legibility as efforts not to "read" a people so much as "write" them:

Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of free-hold tenure, the standardization of language and legal dis- course, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensi- ble as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. (P. 2)

The creative aspects of such metrics become all the more apparent, Scott suggests, when we recognize that such efforts at legibility are necessarily partial, "abridged maps," intended to represent "only that slice of it that interested the official observer," and that the intended purpose of such grids is more to remake than to reflect reality (p. 3). "Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law" (p. 3). Of course, this process of creation is also one of destruction, since, as Scott notes, "most states are, broadly speaking, 'younger' than the societies they purport to administer" (p. 183), and as such these societies will typically have "independently" evolved "a diversity, complexity, and unrepeatability of social forms that are relatively opaque to the state, often purposely so" (p. 184). Thus, every such community legibly rewritten involves the destruction of a preceding one, and the more comprehensive the plan, the greater the destruction. By far, Scott continues, the greatest destruction has been perpetrated by those "high modernist" social engineers of the twentieth century such as Lenin, Mao, Julius Nyerere, and Le Courbusier, and the utopian planning schemes they respectively imposed (or directly influenced): collectivization in Russia; China's Great Leap Forward; compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia; and urban planning theory as realized in such new model cities of Chandigarh and Brasilia.

What is high modernism? Scott characterizes it as a totalistic "aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society" inspired by a hubristic, scientific self-confidence (p. 88). Scott labels it an ideology, or rather an uncritical faith in technological and scientific "progress" shared by a spec- trum of political ideologies of the Left and the Right, whose effort is to "ratio- nally engineer all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition" (p. 88). For Scott, high modernism provides the desire, the modern state



824 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2000

(understood in Webenran terms as the monopolizer of the legitimate use of force) provides the means, and the legible and "incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias" (p. 89).

The sweep of historical examples and case studies with which Scott sup- ports this cautionary logic is extraordinarily rich, if occasionally a little con- fusing. For example, he initially states that high modernism is best conceived of as "a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until World War I" (p. 89). In this way, the fascinating examples of Scott's first two chapters, detailing scientific forestry in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ger- many (Prussia and Saxony), Russian schemes of compulsory scientific farm- ing and model village construction under the Czarist government that were "repeated after the October revolution during the period of War Commu- nism" (p. 44), and, finally, Baron Haussmann's vast schemes (1853-69) under Louis Napoleon for redesigning Paris, were simply "forebears" of what was to come. Alternatively, however, Scott describes the high moderns as an eclectic group of the "avant garde among engineers, planners, techno- crats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries," who cover a vast historical range. Plato, Descartes, Saint Simon, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, the Shah of Iran, Trotsky, Jean Monnet, Julius Nyerere, and David Lilienthal, as well as Lenin and others, are placed comfortably in the same pantheon (p. 88). Indeed, there are a number of seemingly "authorless" high-modern practices in this pantheon, such as "the credo of American agri- culture" (p. 271) and some problematic analogies-Robert Owen's New Lanark is said to "share" Mao's vision of man, "although on a civic rather than a national level" (p. 341). Such vague references and inapt comparisons serve to challenge the concept of high modernism as being itself too simplified or vague an "optic," creating straw men and arguments that dilute one of Scott's central arguments: "the idea of root-and-branch, rational engineering of entire social orders" perpetrated by twentieth-century high-modern authoritarians is of both a quantitatively and a qualitatively different order than earlier utopian schemes (p. 97). Quantitatively, Scott argues, the tech- niques and capacities for societal organization and intervention took a giant leap forward in the aftermath of World War I, and lessons learned from Wal- ter Rathenau's unprecedented German economic mobilization were not lost on Lenin and others. Qualitatively, they turned their sites from the conquest and transformation of nature in the service of eliminating scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamity (p. 96) to engineering the transformation of human nature itself.




While emphasizing the destructiveness of later (or genuinely high-modernist) schemes, Scott's account is also sensitive to the shortcomings of an acontextual or a rigidly unsympathetic rendering of their intended aims or partial successes. Indeed, he implicitly recognizes that it is no more true of high modernism than of any attempted prognostication that nothing ages so quickly as the future, or at least our idea of it. Urban planners sought to create urban housing that was "cheaper, more healthful, and more convenient" (p. 96). And despite the manifest aesthetic or communal shortcomings of a planned city such as Brasilia, Scott recognizes in an endnote that "there are, of course, some things that residents do like about living in Brasilia: the government facilities, the high standard of living, and the fact that it is a safe envi- ronment for children" (p. 385 n. 65). The aim of Nyerere's ujamaa villages in Tanzania was a development and welfare project for the "efficient delivery of schools, clinics and clean water" and was "not, as has often been the case, a part of a plan of punitive appropriation, ethnic cleansing or military security" (p. 223). However, in a seeming effort once again to sharpen a contrast between earlier and later versions of the faith, Scott claims "two important facts" about the nineteenth-century "high modern forebears": "first, that virtually every high-modernist intervention was undertaken in the name of and with the support of citizens seeking help and protection, and, second, that we are all beneficiaries in certain ways, of these various high-modernist schemes" (p. 96). The first fact is certainly not supported in the book by any historical or textual evidence; the second is so vague as to be as unexceptional as it is unobjectionable.

However, there is an important reason Scott wishes to stress the distinc- tiveness of the twentieth-century high-modernist schemes. Unlike their forebears, centrally planned and directed collectivization, villagization, and urban design systematically eradicated the sources of local expertise and initiative in the organization of communal and political life. Metis is the Greek term that Scott uses to refer to that knowledge embedded in local experience or the accumulated skill that a worker possesses of his own craft and is composed of contextual knowledge that is described as "plastic, local, and divergent" (p. 332). Metis is a form of traditional knowledge, but that does not mean it is rigid or fixed. Rather, paraphrasing Michael Oakeshot's critique of rational- ism, Scott suggests that "no traditional way of behavior, no traditional skill ever remains fixed" (p. 332); it undergoes continual, if gradual, change, or "step by step 'muddling through"' (p. 328). Metis is thus seen as the "dark twin" of high modernism, which must be presented contemptuously as "back- ward," "superstitious," or "irrational" by central planners in order to legitimate the imposition of a new and more legible grid (p. 331). Paradoxically,




then, it is traditional metis-with its diversity, dynamism, and fluid- ity-rather than rational uniformity of centralized planning that Scott believes holds the greatest possibility for economic and political "progress" (p. 335). He ends the book with a call for "metis-friendly institutions," by which he basically means liberal democratic politics, private spaces, and liberal political economy.

What are we to make of Scott's proposal? The concept of metis leads Scott to favor pushing decision-making authority concerning economic and development policy away from the center and out to local actors at the periphery of the state, and to favor market-driven analogies. Few economists today would oppose this. However, Scott has a preprepared response to those who would suggest that such analysis is but recycled Hayekian principles: Hayek mis- took the market as synonymous with a "spontaneous order," whereas Scott recognizes it as an "imposition" of the nineteenth-century state and would resist "politically unfettered market coordination" (p. 8). Nevertheless, the third anchor of Scott's proposed resistances to high-modernist planning, "liberal political economy" (p. 101), itself rests on a vision of the "science" of economics and the expertise of economic advisers. Scott may in fact be com- mitting a second Hayekean fallacy of believing that in their present incarna- tion, market (i.e., nonstate-controlled) networks of knowledge are necessarily autonomous, diverse, and plastic. Hayek is surely thought as well to be an inspirer of such economic metis, and even a reader sympathetic to Scott's critique is bound to ask what form his resistance to the politically unfettered market would take. Scott's analysis clearly implies a weakening of state power and involvement in national and particularly local economies in order to make way for the plurality of metis-based solutions. If this is his message, Scott may be preaching to the largely converted. It is interesting to see a critique of state-inspired planning, even one so admittedly elegant, appearing at this time. Without prognosticating the future, ours would seem to be an era in which the end of "big government" solutions has been declared and in which the language of the market mechanism, privatization, liberalization, and globalization is triumphant. Even the most meager government intervention in the economy now meets with organized political resistance, and few legis- lators (here and in much of Europe, at least) have met a market mechanism they didn't like.

In all fairness, Scott certainly recognizes that some forms of metis are dis- appearing every day, and he recognizes as well that commodity markets are in some part responsible (p. 335). Liberal political economy (along with liberal democratic politics and private spaces) may be the barrier to state-inspired planning, but one wonders whether the greatest threats to metis now come from the state. After all is said and done, the push for high-modernist solu-




tions in Tanzania and Ethiopia came as clearly from the World Bank as from the states themselves (p. 410 n. 86, p. 411 n. 99). Indeed, a question to consider might be the extent to which states are now more or less impotent in the face of the IMF, the World Bank, and the regulatory and "homogenizing" demands of competitive capitalism. Unquestionably, the outcomes of the twentieth century's most notorious high-modern utopias were nightmares of history. However, this does not preclude the thought that the nightmares of the future might flow from a near-utopian pretense that the natural or the small and fluid is powerful enough to resist the juggernaut of the market. Cer- tainly, one question that Scott's powerful and provocative book might lead us to consider is whether efforts at politically supported metis are sufficient to resist, or whether (as in some Borgian future) "resistance is futile."

In several important respects, Jacqueline Stevens's book Reproducing the State offers a powerful, alternatively focused but equally cautionary perspective on the state compared with that of Scott. Their projects, while signifi- cantly different in substance and approach, nevertheless make for an interesting comparison.

Stevens focuses equally on what she takes to be the immemorial practice of states to make the people and geographical landscapes under their rule "legible." However, while Scott is concerned about the influence that utopian ideas of the future exercise on the present, Stevens is primarily concerned with precisely the opposite-that is, the presence of the past (or at least invo- cations of it) and those constraints that conventional conceptual frameworks of ideas of the past continue to exercise on our present and future political life. Specifically, Stevens focuses on "the conditions that yield the particular minorities and majorities" (p. 5), such as those of race, ethnicity, nationality, or gender, that contemporary political theorists and philosophers have sub- jected to scrutiny. Her concern is with the conditions that she believes make possible certain forms of inequality. She begins with the observation that while contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls understand political society "as the location that settles differences" (p. 4), it is also useful to consider political society as a form of membership organization that necessarily gives rise to such differences in the first place.

A second contrast with Scott is readily observable in the fact that Stevens expressly chooses not to "define" the state in Weberian terms, as possessing a monopoly over the legitimate use of force, or even "as a close synonym for government" as the institution of coercion (p. 56). "Rather," she claims, "here the 'state' refers to one form of a political society. A state as a membership organization has rules for individuals' inclusions and exclusions" (p. 56). While Max Weber would see the state as the ultimate decision maker over the population within its borders, Stevens claims he is "more interested in the




abilities of regulatory and punitive bodies to control populations and markets than in the membership provisions that set off the individuals in one political society from those in another" (p. 57). So, for Weber, the various subgroups within a state based on their differing "ethnicity"-which in Economy and Society at least is rendered to include heredity, tradition, language, religion, "and especially the belief in the affinity or disaffinity of blood" (p. 57)-are considered to be preconstituted, in some cases "natural" phenomena, and thus membership in such a group would be "separate from the imperative of the state's sovereignty and legitimacy" (p. 57).

Political scientists, Stevens argues, tend to incorporate this Weberian approach to membership when they "treat identities of gender, race, and ethnicity as already coherent independent variables," or "view affiliations of family, nationality, and race as pre-constituted groups that come into the public spheres (or are blocked from these arenas) to fight for their particular inter- ests" (p. 56). Such an approach is present, for example, in Scott's suggestion that most states are "younger" than the societies they purport to administer or that high-modern planned communities superceded prior communities "whose cohesion derived mostly from nonstate sources ... however objec- tionable they may have been on normative grounds" (p. 191). While on a strictly temporal grid there is something obviously true in such statements, Stevens's aims to at least disrupt the "naturalizing" character of such implicit claims to self-determination and to raise problems for unalloyed celebrations of society against the state such as Scott might appear to be making. Indeed, she claims that insofar as it means "not political," no prepolitical or "natural" associations exist as such. Rather, it is only recognition by a political society, in this case the state, that gives such associations a "form of being" (p. xiii). The state thus taxonomizes the "orderly and disorderly forms of being of its population-through the reproduction of kinship rules on birth certificates, marriage licenses, passports, and so forth" (p. xv). On Stevens's account, the state makes us "legible" all the way down, determining who is 'deviant,' 'out- law,' or 'alien' (p. xv). Of course, understood in this way, as the ultimate cre- ator and legitimate enforcer of membership norms of conformity and devi- ance, Stevens's taxonomizing state also sounds strangely Weberian.

In a series of densely packed chapters, Reproducing the State is a complex look at the concepts of affiliation based on nationality, ethnicity, race, and family and suggests how each is a corollary of a more basic form of political society based on kinship. Not all societies that regulate membership, as it turns out, are political societies. Rather, Stevens claims, it is a group's regula- tion of membership by controlling kinship, which "paradigmatically requires entry at birth" (p. 95), that renders it a political one (p. 93).




The critical aim is of the book is then squarely focused on this conventional, typically marriage-based method of politically establishing ancestral communities: "As long as there are political societies based on kinship forms, there will be far-reaching practices of violence that follow from the corollary forms of nationality, ethnicity, race, and family ties" (p. xv). Stevens insists that she wants to avoid essentialist arguments of identification involving these concepts and instead wishes to explore a "phenomenological argument" about the juridical rendering of the dichotomy between nature and culture and the metonymic associations of certain affiliations such as family, nation, and race with "some primordial dark side of the human condition" (p. 16).

The use of the term family is an archetypal instance of "the phenomenol- ogy of the artificial-as-natural" (p. 57 n. 20). Within differing political societies, families are constructed in notably different ways, and the term itself comes to convey only "the naturalized patina over the structure of group rules for membership" (p. 57). Through a set of wide-ranging explorations into theories of language and linguistic idiom, anthropological studies, Durk- heimian sociology of religion, and a welter of individual historical documents and contemporary case studies, ranging from ligeance by birth in early modern England to American antimiscegenation law, Stevens punches some impressive holes in arguments that suggest (or worse, assume) that lineage, nationality, race, and gender are fixed attributes "of a pre-political, biological individual" (p. 176). Along the way, she performs a deft demolition on the foundations of some current sociologist's arguments for the essential "modernity" of nationalism. She also produces some humorous, if caustic, observations of the lack of disciplinary coordination in some recent research on the concept of race: "While political scientists are busy studying 'races' based on illogical typologies that have been repudiated by the people who developed them, anthropologists are deciding that political communities have something to do with what we call 'race"' (p. 204).

At other points, however, Stevens's critical analysis falters, employing excessive analogizing, caricature, and gratuitous sniping, as when she suggests that Michael Walzer's concept of the family "is like the National Geo- graphic special that cheerfully anthropomorphizes the loving lioness and her cubs" (p. 8), or that his willingness in Spheres of Justice to accept the "prerogatives of political societies to regulate membership according to family ties" implicitly finds acceptable "people starving to death in Ethiopia, dying in cat- tle cars en route to the United States from Mexico, and losing their homes for want of the right ethnicity in Bosnia," since all of these "necessarily follow" from the same prerogatives (p. 7).

In addition, Stevens manages a very broad range of research materials, but commits some basic howlers. The author of Ontological Relativity and Other




Essays, as cited in both the text and bibliography, is the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, not Thomas Quine. The accession of the Scottish King, James VI, to the English throne did not "by extension" make the Scottish people "English," and certainly not by reason of a "conquest" (p. 128). The Scot- tish (James VI) and English (James I) crowns were settled on the same person only by an accidental confluence of two individual laws of succession, and Calvin's case and the natural justice claims that postnati Scotsmen enjoyed through separate political and legal capacities do nothing to support the exag- gerated imposition of such a linguistic misnomer. Likewise, the suggestion that Edward Coke needed to "impute some Englishness to the apparent for- eign character" of Thomas (de) Littleton and his Tenures in order to justify a commentary on it, since the original was written in French, is misleading on several counts (p. 163). The treatise Of Tenures was written in Law-French, which Coke clearly notes in the introduction to his commentary is a technical language-"a vocabula artis"-very difficult to pronounce, and "most com- monly written and read, and very rarely spoken."' What he did not need to tell lawyers of his time was that this was also the language of the English Year Books and Reports upon which Littleton drew as the sources of his work. That would have been common knowledge, as was the fact that Littleton's name and family-which should be of interest to Stevens no less because it was the name of his mother's family, settled on her "issue inheritable" by a prenuptial agreement with her courtier husband Thomas Westcote-was long estab- lished in England, as was his distinguished reputation as judge of common pleas and as certainly the most famous inner templar of the fifteenth century. Coke would have had no need tojustify the domestic relevance of a commentary on the work of a man whose legal and personal legacy in England was equal to or greater than his own. Although such exceptions may be raised to her success in buttressing some arguments concerning the construction of nationality with historical cases, they should not detract from the fact that Stevens has written a very provocative and original book likely to attract a wide audience.

In The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institu- tional Rationality in International Relations, Christian Reus-Smit is concerned less with the ways in which states make their lands and populations legible to governmental decision making or membership rules than making legible to theorists of international politics the "fundamental institutions and institutional practices" (p. 5) that structure differing societies of states. Reus- Smit is particularly interested in exploring what he takes to be the failure of realists and neorealists, neoliberals, and constructivists-despite their differing postures on whether the core of international relations lies in the balance and distribution of power, cooperation under anarchy, or the practical imper-




atives of sovereignty-to "adequately account for either the generic nature of fundamental institutions or institutional variations between societies of sovereign states" (p. 4) throughout history. He describes his project as one of "international theory and comparative international history, not contemporary institutional politics" (p. 1 1). However, for a book of scarcely 170 pages, this turns out to be a very ambitious project.

The core of the book spends little time on a thoroughgoing critique of other paradigms of international relations. Reus-Smit reiterates John Ruggie's critique of "Waltzian neorealism" (p. 89)-that it "provides no means by which to account for, or even to describe, the most important contextual change in international politics in this millennium: the shift from the medieval to the modern international system" (p. 89). And Reus-Smit highlights the limita- tions of the "deontological" conceptions of institutional rationality implicit in neoliberal regime theory:

Abstract models of institutional rationality that imagine timeless, context-free rational actors, unfettered and unconstituted by cultural values and historical experience, cannot explain why the ancient Greeks chose arbitration to solve their cooperation problems, why the Renaissance Italians chose oratorical diplomacy, why Europeans of the absolutist period chose naturalist international law and old diplomacy, or why modern states have chosen contractual international and multilateralism. (P. 160)

It is especially useful to quote Reus-Smit at length here because his critique of the failure of deontological neoliberalism to explain why different societies of sovereign states create different fundamental institutions provides a succinct outline for the project he conducts in the book. His aim is "to develop a historically informed constructivist theory of fundamental institutional construction" (p. 5) that places the emphasis on identifying the differing ontological commitments that distinguish societies of states from one another.

Elaborating on Ruggie's development of a historically informed "constructivist perspective on modern international society," as well as the work of the historian Adda Bozeman, Reus-Smit takes an approach to international relations theory characterized as "holistic constructivism" (p. 165). This approach begins with some fairly significant assumptions: throughout history, societies of states enjoy similar structural conditions (i.e., state sovereignty) (p. 160); such societies of states also share a certain homogeneous set of "intersubjective values" reflected in a unique "hegemonic belief about the moral purpose of the state" (p. 6). Reus-Smit's method is then to "find" the single, hegemonic belief that provides the "justifying foundations for the organizing principle of sovereignty and informing the norm of procedural




justice" (p. 6). He does so for four societies of states: ancient Greece (cultiva- tion of bios politikos), Renaissance Italy (pursuit of glory), absolutist Europe (maintenance of divinely ordained social order), and modern society (aug- mentation of individuals' purposes and potentialities).

Reus-Smit promises "enhanced heuristic power" to explain the divergent institutional practices that characterize different societies of states, but here the severe brevity of his project and particularly of the schematic histories of the crucial social and cultural "contexts" putatively giving rise to hegemonic intersubjective moral principles fails to deliver. The analysis of the "substan- tive moral views" of a thinker such as Adam Smith is a cartoon of the "homo economicus" reading of this thinker, suggesting a complete innocence of the fact that Smith has been more recently embraced by theorists of both civic virtue republicanism and "cosmopolitanism." Such revisions should presum- ably complicate any argument about his contribution to the hegemonic moral view of liberalism as stated here.

The analysis of why "the ancient Greeks" chose the institutional practice of "interstate arbitration" is similarly based on virtually thumbnail sketches of "The Extraterritorial Institutions in Ancient Greece" (two pages), "The Constitutional Structure of Ancient Greece" (three pages), and "The Practice of Interstate Arbitration," followed by an all too brief rereading of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War "in context" (pp. 55-61). On this reading, the Athenians and Spartans of the Peloponnesian War-irrespective of cultural differences that are simply elided here-are thought to share a homogeneous belief in the moral purpose of the state: "that the city-state existed to facilitate a particular form of communal life, marked by the rational pursuit of justice through action and speech" (p. 62). One might argue that this is a view hedged more toward an Athenian rather than a Spartan perspective, given Thucydides's own comments on how little Spartans were inclined toward speechmaking. In general, Reus-Smit chooses to set aside just how strikingly different were the forms and political structures of communal life of these opposed powers at the time of the war in favor of emphasizing their putatively shared commitments to third-party arbitration as the "core fundamental institution" (p. 49) of interstate dispute resolution. However, the brief account of arbitration offered here is hedged for lack of empirical evidence with the recognition that "it is difficult to generalize from the available evidence, especially when the universe of arbitral cases is unknown" (p. 51). Such an admission would then seem to undermine Reus-Smit's final, counterfactual claim that "if the ancient Greeks had not imagined the state as they did, and not embraced a discursive conception of procedural justice, then there is little reason to believe that arbitration would have emerged as the core fundamental institution" (p. 62). Exactly so.




There is no disagreement expressed here with Reus-Smit's historical claim that forms of arbitration were used to decide cases within Greek interstate relations. And historians such as Victor Ehrenburg have long considered the various unions transcending individual Greek states, characterized either by a religious center (amphictyonies), by the exigencies of political power (hegemonic alliances), or by public law (leagues). In the latter two cases at least, such societies of states employed differing forms of secularized arbitration that probably replaced the "appeals to divine intervention" of an earlier age.2 However, more problematic is Reus-Smit's inability to demonstrate conclusively that the practice of agreement to arbitration implies a substan- tive, shared commitment to one moral principle, particularly that of Aris- totle's philosophically expressed bios politicos (p. 46).

In a concluding afterthought, Reus-Smith notes that Aristotle actually had little to say about relations between states (p. 170). However, he might also have noted that Aristotle's life and thought fail to overlap with that of either Thucydides's own lifetime or the period of the Peloponnesian War. His Con- stitutions ofAthens, which Reus-Smit does not mention, does usefully chron- icle Athens' political and democratic life through this period to the end of the fifth century, at which point Aristotle's study of the independent constitutional life of Athens ended. In historically contextual terms, Aristotle's life paralleled the end of Athenian and city-state dominance. He might therefore be better interpreted in reaction to an evolving international society of "Hel- lenistic" states dominated by the monarchic hegemon, Phillip of Macedon and his son-Alexander the Great-rather than in the context of the wars of a previous century.

It is difficult to compare the relative merits of three such different consid- erations of the state. Despite differences of field and of theoretical perspective, however, it seems fair to say that Scott and Stevens share a desire to submit state-centered processes of reforming and reproducing political association to renewed critical scrutiny. Their efforts are, of course, strikingly at odds with Reus-Smit's proposal to rethink international relations theory based on the shared ontological commitments that he believes not only unify individual states but also inform the institutions of larger societies of states within the international order. This contrast may also reflect the present method- ological fixations of international relations literature on the state such that even a constructivist treats it as a unitary actor based on common values. For Scott and Stevens, it is not too much to suggest that state institutions largely create rather than reflect such values. These two authors, in particular, pro- voke a reconsideration of the state's pervasive and formative power over the identities and the social and political lives of citizens. However, their con- cerns divide over Scott's celebration of society against the state and his




counterposition of state planning to social pragmatic adaptation, as if the engineering state was the only one that mattered. Considered as a group, the three books reflect a range of welcome renewed interest in the theoretical and practical implications of how we conceptualize the state.

-Shannon Stimson University of California, Berkeley

NOTES

1. Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; or A Commentary upon Littleton, revised and corrected by Francis Hargrave and Charles Butler, 19th ed., 2 vols. (London: J. & W. T. Clarke, 1832), 1:xxxix.

2. Victor Ehrenberg, The Greek State (London: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 103-42.

Shannon Stimson is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political philosophy and the history of economic and political thought.



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