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PSIR554 THEORIES OF THE STATE

Course Objectives

This course will consider diverse and competing concepts, theories, approaches to, and definitions of, the state in contemporary political and social sciences.  A key difficulty in state analysis concerns the scale and scope of the study.  What is or should be included in state analysis, and what is or should be excluded, and why?  Indeed, stabilising the discussion by attempting to mark off the boundaries of the state, its powers and its activities remains one of the most necessary, but also one of the most elusive and vexed, enterprises in the social sciences.  Nevertheless, the concept of state is pivotal to the study of politics such that in the ancient classical world, when the concept was first interrogated, the ‘state’ was merely a byword for community or indeed ‘politics’ itself.  The advent of modernity however unleashed a host of new and very urgent questions concerning the state’s role, function, power, and so on, on local, national and international levels, for which we still search for definitive answers.  The modern state expanded dramatically in terms of its scale and institutional powers, and became embroiled immediately in questions concerning its role and purpose and the scope and nature of its activities.  To discover these, scholars of the modern era from various theoretical perspectives have employed a highly diverse set of analytical tools.  Some scholars emphasise the state’s historical origins, others its powers and processes, its institutional structures, its organisational function, its correspondence to the wider distribution of social and economic power, and so on.  It follows that the variations in the scholarly accounts of the state derive largely from the fact that it has been studied in different ways, with emphases on its different aspects and attributes.  This provides us with rich research resources, but also an awareness of the fundamental contradictory nature of state theory today.  Like much else in the social sciences, the concept of the state is deeply contested. Although political and social theorists are generally in agreement as to the pivotal importance of the state to the organisation and administration of modern society, there is nonetheless no universal agreement as to what exactly the state is, what it does, and why it does it.  The variety of ontological claims encountered derive axiomatically from epistemic/methodological variations which underwrite such claims and assertions, and we need to be aware of them.  We shall attempt to establish the validity of the claims of liberals, elitists, Marxists, feminists, and so on, and naturally some understanding of their philosophical differences has to be assumed before making sense of their arguments.  Studying the state raises many of the fundamental conflicts of the social sciences in this regard, of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, of ‘science’ (with its differing procedural approaches and assumptions) and ‘ideology’ (of those things we might wish for), culminating more recently of course in the postmodern retreat from the possibility of objective knowledge altogether. 

Course Content

This course focuses on the analysis of various historical forms of the state based on the views of different schools of thought. Also, a considerable part of the course dwells upon the modern debates on the controversial aspects and functions of the same phenomenon.

Course Learning Outcomes

Students will engage in the course reading and intensive seminar discussions in order to broaden and deepen their appreciation of the role, function, structure, processes, and power of the state in the contemporary world.  We shall examine from a range of perspectives and competing theories what the state is, what it does, how it does it, and why it does it. 

Students will gain:

General

• Enhanced skills of academic enquiry and independent library research relevant to the subject;
• Enhanced ability to communicate in writing and orally, and to work independently;
• Enhanced time-management and self-organisation skills;
• Advanced skills of analysis and argumentation;
• The opportunity to further hone critical skills.

Subject Specific

• A comprehensive appreciation of the nature, development, function, structure and power of the state;
• A critical appreciation of a variety of theoretical approaches to state analysis;
• An enhanced appreciation of ontology and epistemology;
• An enhanced appreciation of the scale and scope of state analysis.