Chapter
Published:
“Roving Elites and Sedentary Subjects: The Hybridized Origins of the State”
Written by
Iver B. Neumann
Former employee
Ole Jacob Sending
Research Professor, Head of Center for Geopolitics
Ed.
Summary:
In the introduction to this volume, Hurt and Lipschutz ask about historical precedents for the present-day hybridization of state power and capitalist accumulation strategies and practices. As is well known, the emergence of capitalism was marked by a number of earlier and relevant shifts of governmental rationality, leading back to the break with mercantilism, which was decisive in singling out economics as a separate sphere in western societies. This process was a key drama in western state building during the mercantilist seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was indigenous to those states. Similar processes emerged in other states only as a result of contact (trade, conquest, colonization etc.) with western states. Characteristically, at present non-western states have a less clear division of political and economic spheres than do western states, and in some states, it makes little sense to talk about separate spheres at all. One of the defining features of what are often called “fragile states” is precisely that the public and the private is not separate, thus contradicting the ideal-typical model of a Weberian state on which the category rests (Eriksen 2011).
- Published year: 2016
- Publisher: Routledge
- Page count: 258
- Language: Engelsk
- Pages: 39 - 58
Written by
Iver B. Neumann
Former employee
Ole Jacob Sending
Research Professor, Head of Center for Geopolitics