Studying the State through State Formation

or ideal appearance of the state from its material reality, in taking for granted this distinction, will fail to understand it. the task of a theory of the state is not to clarify such distinctions but to historicize them.77 in this view, history is useful not as a reservoir of “cases” but as a reservoir of processes that help researchers overcome analytic dichotomies that were once useful but are now obstructing. historical processes provide the ideal sites for studying mutually constitutive entities such as ideologies and physical forces. State-forming processes are thus central to obtaining a fuller understanding of states. along the same line, Pierre Bourdieu posits that the state is the culmination of a process by which different “species of capital” are concentrated: “capital of physical force” (for example army, police), “economic capital” (for example, fiscal system), “informational capital” (for example, a unitary language, a national identity, or a school system), and “symbolic capital” (for example, honorific title system).78 the concentration of different species of capital goes hand in hand and eventually allows the (modern) state to emerge as “the holder of a sort of meta-capital granting power over other species of capital or their holders.” Similar to mitchell, the historical logic of concentration is at the heart of Bourdieu’s proposed research program for studying the (modern) state.79 Patrick Carroll, who studies the use of modern scientific knowledge by British agents in their colonization of ireland, has recommended a similar step to move beyond the materialist conception of the state. as an alternative to tilly’s oft-cited dictum that “war makes states, states make wars,” it is suggested that “states are made of knowledge, just as knowledge is constituted by states.”80 Carroll develops a concept of culture (of modern science) that includes three interrelated components 77 mitchell 1999, 77. 78 Bourdieu 1999, 56–67. 79 Philosophically, Bourdieu argues that cognitive structures are not forms of consciousness but dispositions of the body. thus the obedience of subjects to rulers should not be understood either as a mechanical submission to an external force or as conscious consent to an order, because orders can function as such only for “those who are predisposed to heeding them as they awaken deeply buried corporeal dispositions, outside the channels of consciousness and calculation.” Bourdieu 1999, 69. this philosophical view assumes that the material and the nonmaterial (and their effects) are inseparable at the individual level. 80 Carroll 2006, 2.