and the state’s continuing role in reproducing gender divisions. And yet other
scholars focus on the ‘‘imagined political communities’’ around which nation
states have been constructed (classically Anderson 1991 ).
The best approach is multicausal and recognizes that states change continually,
are liable to break down, and must be rebuilt in new forms, with new capacities and
functions, new scales of operation, and a predisposition to new types of failure. In
this context, as Mann ( 1986 ) notes, the state is polymorphous—its organization and
capacities can be primarily capitalist, military, theocratic, or democratic in character
and its dominant crystallization is liable to challenge as well as conjunctural
variation. There is no guarantee that the modern state will always (or ever) be
primarily capitalist in character and, even where capital accumulation is deeply
embedded in its organizational matrix, it typically takes account of other functional
demands and civil society in order to promote institutional integration and social
cohesion within its territorial boundaries. Whether it succeeds is another matter.
Modern state formation has been analyzed from four perspectives. First, the
state’s ‘‘historical constitution’’ is studied in terms of path-dependent histories or
genealogies of particular parts of the modern state (such as a standing army,
modern tax system, formal bureaucracy, parliament, universal suVrage, citizen-
ship rights, and recognition by other states). Second, work on ‘‘formal constitu-
tion’’ explores how a state acquires, if at all, its distinctive formal features as a
modern state, such as formal separation from other spheres of society, its own
political rationale, modus operandi, and distinctive constitutional legitimation,
based on adherence to its own political procedures rather than values such as
divine right or natural law. Third, agency-centered theorizations focus on state
projects that give a substantive (as opposed to formal) unity to state actions and
whose succession deWnes diVerent types of state, for example, liberal state,
welfare state, competition state. And, fourth, conWgurational analyses explore
the distinctive character of state–civil society relations and seek to locate state
formation within wider historical developments. Eisenstadt’s ( 1963 ) work on the
rise and fall of bureaucratic empires, Elias’s ( 1982 ) work on the state and
civilization, and Rokkan’s ( 1999 ) work on European state formation over the
last 400 – 500 years are exemplary here.
3 Marxist Approaches to the State
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Marx’s and Engels’ work on the state comprises diverse philosophical, theoretical,
journalistic, partisan,ad hominem, or purely ad hoc comments. This is reXected in
state and state-building 115