Duncan Kelly

The Strategic-Relational View of the State:

This paper seeks to highlight the main elements of the ‘strategic-relational’ approach to (Marxist) state theory, developed particularly by Bob Jessop. The legacy of Nicos Poulantzas in particular is singled out for its importance in laying the foundations for such an approach. This is followed by a discussion of Jessop and his development of many ideas bequeathed by Poulantzas, culminating in various moves toward a strategic-relational analysis. These moves are then critically assessed, with some wider thoughts on the approach offered in conclusion

Revisiting the Rights of Man: Georg Jellinek on Rights and the State

A century has passed since the publication in Germany of a now famous essay on the rights of man by the Heidelberg professor of public law, Georg Jellinek. Over the course of that century, although a “rights revolution” has undoubtedly taken place, numerous practical problems remain in trying to enforce the basic proposition that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Such problems have led one recent commentator to suggest that perhaps the only meaningful defense of human rights is one based on “moral reciprocity” and secular humanism because any attempts to prioritize human rights on either religious grounds, for example, or that of intrinsic human value, are doomed to failure.

Between Description and Explanation in State Theory: Rethinking Marx and Weber

Although studying the state occupies a central place in historical sociology. traditional conceptualizations have tended to be an ‘either-or’ choice between Marxist or Weberian approaches. The differences between contemporary versions of these paradigms, however, seem greatly overstated. Indeed, sophisticated development of state theory in recent years has been precipitated by a convergence between the two schools of thought. After examining leading contemporary scholarship, a mixture of intellectual, political and economic trends are examined to help explain and interpret this dialogue. I conclude by offering some thoughts on the current challenges facing state theory.

From moralism to modernism:: Robert Michels on the history, theory and sociology of patriotism

Robert Michels is best known as the author of a classic work of political sociology, Political Parties. However, not only are his voluminous other writings typically sidelined in most commentary, but his quite substantial writings on the subject of patriotism have been the subject of almost total neglect. This paper examines these writings and suggests that Michelss analyses of patriotism can indeed best be interpreted within the context of his general intellectual trajectory from socialist to ‘elite theorist’. However, one important consequence of illustrating Michelss account of the history, theory and sociology of patriotic thought in particular is that the picture of the transition in his writings towards elite theory appears to be rather more complex than is normally appreciated. A corollary of this is that the descriptive tag of ‘elite theorist’ actually obscures important aspects of Michelss position in the history of European ideas.

Time for Sympathy: Some Thoughts on the 250th Anniversary of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments

Students of political economy are of course very familiar with Adam Smith, but often in the same way that students of sociology are familiar with the works of Max Weber. He is canonical, a founding father, someone who can be located as a ‘classic’. Yet although such conceptual genealogies often express something important, they just as often occlude and obfuscate. Debates about the real concern of Weber’s enterprise continue, for example, and it is right that they should. For who could say with absolute confidence, when confronted with such a vast, incomplete and fragmented corpus, that his is a settled legacy with uncontrovertibly obvious aims. The case is similar with Smith. Even if (despite the vast bulk of his treatise on the Wealth of Nations in particular) fewer words are involved, the complexities of reconstructing his intentions, aims and achievements remain profound. He is conventionally placed at the foundation of a discipline of political economy (itself a nineteenth-century construction), typically regarded as a liberal; his birth place apparently affords some kind of mystical legitimacy to prime ministers who share it, or so they would have us believe; and he believed in the invisible hand of the free market. This is, it seems fair to say, often as far as students of Smith get. But as sophisticated interpreters have consistently shown, Smith’s own intellectual genealogy is far from obvious, and the implications of his work receive no uniform assent from those who have delved deeply into its riches. Investigations into the intellectual origins of the idea of the invisible hand or of self-interest, to take two illustrations, highlight both the radical tenor of Smith’s writings as well as his classical borrowings and intellectual sophistication (Vivenza 2001; Force 2004). In fact, shortly after his death many found his opinions practically seditious (Rothschild 2001, especially chapters 2 and 5; Winch 1996). Moreover, the notion of an invisible hand only appears New Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2009

Max Weber and the Rights of Citizens

The importance of ‘rights talk’ to contemporary political and social theory is clear. What is less often recognized, however, is the importance that the idea of rights plays in Max Weber’s political thought. For although there are few explicit references to the concept in his writings, once it is realized that his account of rights is dependent upon an understanding of the rights-bearer as a citizen, then this can be used to illuminate the importance of citizenship and rights for Weber. This paper discusses Weber’s conception of citizenship in terms of his distinction between the homo politicus of the ancient world, and the homo economicus of the medieval commune. The latter type was the citizen who, according to Weber, laid the foundations for the possible future development of a rational capitalism. Reflecting on the transformation from communal to individual rights in his writings on Protestantism and Russian politics, I then discuss the type of citizenship Weber promoted under the modern nation-state, concluding with some remarks on the comparative relationship between Weber’s thoughts on citizenship rights with contemporary political theory.

August Ludwig von Rochau and Realpolitik as historical political theory

ABSTRACT Neither self-styled radical ‘realists’ who reject the sort of liberalism inspired by John Rawls, nor liberal ‘realists’ who reject other forms of apparently utopian politics, properly take the measure of how far their accounts of realism recall the historical political theory of nineteenth-century European Realpolitik. This article sketches the evolution of that style of political theory in the thought of its conceptual pioneer, August Ludwig von Rochau, and outlines the bases of his understanding of state power. Reconstructing his argument not only suggests an alternative genealogy for modern realism in political theory, but it also offers a challenge. For behind Rochau’s Realpolitik lies a strong judgment about how ideas are politically consequential only when aligned with state power under modernity, and that such alignments are both historically conditioned and difficult to judge. Rochau’s challenge for realism in contemporary liberal political theory implies that its general antipathy towards writing about the historical evolution of the state and its structural power threatens to leave it as unmoored from practical politics as the so-called ideal-theorists that realists so often profess to criticize.

The Weimar Century: German Emigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War

Fascination with the dramatically diverse but hugely influential band of German emigre scholars who fled persecution for the shores of America has been a subject of scholarly interest for decades. ...

the politics of intellectual history in twentieth-century europe

Reviewing so much more than Professor Wegele’s Deutsche Historiographie in the first edition of the English Historical Review of 1886, in what has since become a justly famous essay, Lord Acton critically evaluated various German ‘schools’ of history in the nineteenth century. Of course, although Acton was the most cosmopolitan of scholars, the fact that the first edition of what would quickly become the premier English historical periodical should be so concerned with the state of German scholarship suggests something more than passing historiographical interest. For at root, Acton’s discussions of these schools of history were underpinned by an account of the political implications of different versions of historical enquiry. Indeed, he even suggested — in what had by 1886 already become a standard trope of political discourse — that although German ‘historical writing was old’, strictly ‘historical thinking was new in Germany when it sprang from the shock of the French Revolution’.1 In conclusion, as well as fulfilling his aim to outline the ways in which these schools ‘break new ground and add to the notion and the work of history’, the general tenor of the essay offered nothing less than a full-blown evocation of the historical spirit of the age: The tendency of the nineteenth century German to subject all things to the government of intelligible law, and to prefer the simplicity of resistless cause to the confused conflict of free wills, the tendency which Savigny defined and the comparative linguists encouraged, was completed in his own way by Hegel.2

Book Review: Coming to Terms with Carl Schmitt’s Past?

In his oft-quoted account of the nature of the political, Carl Schmitt declared that an entity was political to the extent that it made decisions about friends and public enemies.1 Furthermore, for a body to be considered as capable of making such decisions in the first place, it would have to have sovereignty. And this in turn required that the entity have the capacity to ‘decide’ upon what he termed the state of exception, a central moment in the history of western political thought, concerning the period within which extant decisionmaking procedures are either suspended or transformed.2 Historically, of course, the major focus of such inquiries has been to reflect on something like the position of the Roman dictator, brought in with constitutional emergency powers to restore and maintain traditional political authority when it had broken down, only to then revert back to a normal, subsidiary position. Machiavelli perhaps offered the most telling illustration of its import in his Discorsi.3 It is, though, a persistent theme in earlymodern political thinking about the possibility of resisting tyrannical rulers, which discuss rights of resistance within often elaborate constitutional protocols that resemble in certain aspects contemporary representative government, but which were typically bound up with claims about what it meant to be a part of the Monarchia Christiana.4 In his attempt to reconcile questions of sovereignty with political decision-making, Carl Schmitt made the two spheres come together in the same body, a theme outlined in his most famous work of constitutional theory, Verfassungslehre.5 This body was the state. However, although his account seems then to be a tautology, where state, sovereignty and the political are conjoined, the glue that holds it together is the concept of representation, a theme foundational to Schmitt’s early Catholic-inspired critique of contemporary politics and romanticism.6 As Hanna Pitkin argued in her seminal book on the subject, representation involves the ‘making present’ of something that is not ‘literally present’.7 For Schmitt, representation was the principle that allowed him to make present the political unity that he desired, particularly in his early thought, as lacking under the dying embers of the Kaiserreich and then certainly not literally present under the strife-ridden Weimar Republic.8 It could do so thanks to his fusion of the ideas of representation found both in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and the Abbé Sieyès. Their ideas concerning the