Timothy Mitchell

THE LIMITS OF THE STATE: BEYOND STATIST APPROACHES AND THEIR CRITICS

The state has always been difficult to define. Its boundary with society appears elusive, porous, and mobile. I argue that this elusiveness should not be overcome by sharper definitions, but explored as a clue to the states nature. Analysis of the literature shows that neither rejecting the state in favor of such concepts as the political system, nor “bringing it back in,” has dealt with this boundary problem. The former approach founders on it, the latter avoids it by a narrow idealism that construes the state-society distinction as an external relation between subjective and objective entities. A third approach, presented here, can account for both the salience of the state and its elusiveness. Reanalyzing evidence presented by recent theorists, state-society boundaries are shown to be distinctions erected internally, as an aspect of more complex power relations. Their appearance can be historically traced to technical innovations of the modern social order, whereby methods of organization and control internal to the social processes they govern create the effect of a state structure external to those processes.

Everyday metaphors of power

Across the different disciplines of social science, studies of power and resistance continue to be dominated by a single, master metaphor: the distinction between persuading and coercing. The metaphor seems as clear as the difference between mind and body, to which of course it corresponds. Power may operate at the level of ideas, persuading the mind of its legitimacy, or it may work as a material force directly coercing the body. Max Weber founded his sociology of domination on this Cartesian and Kantian distinction, and the distinction colonized other theoretical territory in which it had been originally placed in question, including that of Marx. The metaphor survives today even in the growing number of works that realize its limitations and formally renounce it. 1 This essay offers a critique of the metaphor, as a misleadingly narrow approach to understanding modern methods of domination; at the same time, by offering an alternative understanding of those methods, it reveals the metaphor to be their unexamined product. There are at least two reasons for the metaphors persistence. One stems from the fact that it is indissociable from our everyday conception of the person. We tend to think of persons as unique self-constituted consciousneses living inside physically manufactured bodies. 2 As something self-formed, this consciousness is the site of an original autonomy. The notion of an internal autonomy of consciousness defines the way we think of coercion. It obliges us to imagine the exercise of power as an external process that can coerce the behavior of the body without necessarily penetrating and controlling the mind. Power must therefore be conceived as something two-fold, with both a physical and a mental mode of operation. This way of thinking of power in relation to the political subject applies not only to individuals but to any political agent, such as a group or class. Much of the recent theoret

The work of economics: how a discipline makes its world

What is the work of economics? How does it operate to establish facts and make them stable? Is it sometimes able to use the world as a laboratory? If so, what measures are necessary to organize the world as a laboratory for economic experiments? To what extent do these measures rely upon the efforts of nonacademic economists, and of other social agents and arrangements including think tanks, government policies, development programs, NGOs, and social movements? A recent “natural experiment” using the social world as a laboratory, carried out in Peru, produced remarkable results, enthusiastically received by economists in the United States and by international development agencies. The paper examines the work of organizing the socio-technical world required to produce this knowledge, the curious kind of facts that were produced, the connections among those involved in this work, in particular the organized work of the neoliberal movement, and the role of the new facts in making possible further efforts at economic experimentation.

FIXING THE ECONOMY

‘Fixing the Economy’, shows how the modern understanding of ‘the economy’ as the totality of the relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region arose in a mid-twentieth-century crisis of economic representation. The economy, represented as an autonomous domain, participated in the (largely post-Second World War) re-imagining of the nation-state and the postcolonial international order, and provided a concept of development without political upheaval. In considering the economic life of an Egyptian village, however, Mitchell demonstrates that market and domestic production and consumption are irreducibly hybrid and that the practical foundations of the economy as representation make it impossible any longer to see its imagined referent as the very type of the non-discursive and the material.

McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order

istan visited Washington, D.C. Ten days earlier Taliban forces had won control of the countryside around Kabul, and with the south and east of the country already in their hands they were now making preparations to conquer the north. In Washington the Taliban delegation met with State Department officials and discussed the plans of the California oil company Unocal to build a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan. A senior U.S. diplomat explained his government’s thinking: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”1 U.S. support for the Taliban, who received arms and financial assistance from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with the agreement of the United States, ended within a year. But the diplomat’s reference to Aramco—the American oil company that had financed, sixty years earlier, the creation of Saudi Arabia—was a reminder that the United States was accustomed to working with emirs whose power depended upon strict interpretations of Islamic law. By the end of 1997, Washington was describing the Taliban government as “despicable,” but this negative view was not typical of U.S. relations with governments that claimed to rule in the name of a puritanical Islam. In fact, the normal relationship was quite different. As a rule, the most secular regimes in the Middle East have been those most independent of the United States. The more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics. Egypt under Nasser, republican Iraq, the Palestine national movement, postindependence Algeria, the Republic of South Yemen, and Ba’thist Syria all charted courses independent of the United States. None of them declared themselves an Islamic state, and many of them repressed local Islamic movements. In contrast, those governments dependent on the United States typically claimed an Islamic authority, whether ruled by a monarch who claimed descent from the Prophet, as in Jordan, North Yemen, and Morocco, or asserting a special role as protector of the faith, as in the case of Saudi Arabia. When other governments moved closer to the United States—Egypt under Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, Pakistan under Zia ulHaq in the 1980s—their political rhetoric and modes of legitimation became avowedly more Islamic. Timothy Mitchell McJihad

No factories, no problems: the logic of neo‐liberalism in Egypt

Neo‐liberalism is a success of the political imagination. Its achievement is a double one. It makes the window of political debate uncommonly narrow and at the same time promises from this window a prospect without limits. On the one hand it frames public discussion within the elliptic language of neo‐classical economics. The condition of the nation and its collective well being are pictured only in terms of how it is adjusted in gross to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets. On the other, neglecting the actual concerns of any concrete local or collective community, it encourages the most exuberant dreams of private accumulation — and a chaotic reallocation of collective resources.

Going Beyond the State

Timothy Mitchells article “The Limits of the State” in the March 1991 issue of this Review stimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications.

Egypt's desert dreams : development or disaster?

Egypt has placed its hopes on developing its vast and empty deserts as the ultimate solution to the countrys problems. New cities, new farms, new industrial zones, new tourism resorts, and new development corridors, all have been promoted for over half a century to create a modern Egypt and to pull tens of millions of people away from the increasingly crowded Nile Valley into the desert hinterland. The results, in spite of colossal expenditures and ever-grander government pronouncements, have been meager at best, and today Egypts desert is littered with stalled schemes, abandoned projects, and forlorn dreams. It also remains stubbornly uninhabited. Egypts Desert Dreams is the first attempt of its kindto look at Egypts desert development in its entirety. It recounts the failuresof governmental schemes, analyzes why they have failed, and exposes the main winners of Egypts desert projects, as well as the underlying narratives and political necessities behind it, even in the post-revolutionary era. It also shows that all is not lost, and that there are alternative paths that Egypt could take.

Economentality: How the Future Entered Government

In 1947, an Egyptian entrepreneur named Adriano Daninos published a proposal in a scientific journal in Cairo to build a new dam across the Nile. Placed upstream of a smaller masonry barrage built fifty years earlier by the British at Aswan, the new rock-filled structure would be so large that the reservoir it created would stretch more than five hundred kilometers to the south. “Daninos is a man with a mission,” reported an official at the World Bank in Washington, where Daninos later went to pitch his plan. The official noted that the scheme concerned not just the building of the dam but “land reclamation and irrigation connected therewith, production of power, and construction of plants to use that power in mining, making fertilizers, other manufacturing, and possibly iron and steel.”1 Before publishing his plan, Daninos had visited the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US and similar integrated hydroelectric, river control, irrigation, and industrialization projects in the Limousin in southwest France. These gargantuan schemes for reorganizing forces of nature, systems of agriculture,

The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant

Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the post-colonial world, “the peasant” is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction, a category of human being has become a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly journals, and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. “What are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico really like ?” the anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the field. “For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion of others) have searched for answers [to this question] …. living with villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior, describing their findings in books and articles.” At first they called their research the study of “folk” societies, Foster says, but after World War II scholars “came to realize that ‘peasant’ is a more appropriate term, and thus was born the new subfield of ‘peasant studies’.”