The Critique of the State. By Jens Bartelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 212p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper

Extract

Jens Bartelson's book is a history of the futility of the attempts of Anglo-American political scientists to come to grips with the concept of the state. The evidence it provides of this futility is overwhelming, and it should make chastening reading for anyone still engaged in the enterprise. The concept of the state lies at the foundations of modern political science, but Bartelson shows that it also lies at the heart of attempts to emancipate political science from its foundations. As a result, this is a book of paradoxes: The various critiques of the state that Bartelson describes, each characteristic of some of the most assertive branches of the discipline—including pluralism, Marxism, behavioralism, and structuralism—have served only to reinforce the centrality of the state to our understanding of politics, by variously reasserting the hold of the concept over our political imaginations. The author lays out these paradoxes end to end, so that their cumulative effect is to leave the reader wondering at the doggedness of so many political scientists in persisting with the problem, and at their dogged willingness to repeat history by attempting to ignore it.