Articulating Theories of States and State Formation

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Articulating Theories of States and State Formation
Article in Journal of Historical Sociology · December 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01369.x
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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 22 No. 4 December 2009
ISSN 0952-1909
Issues and Agenda
Articulating Theories of States and

State Formation johs_1369 553..603
PATRICK CARROLL
Abstract Some historical sociologists have, with some justification, described the
development of the sub-discipline in the language of three successive “waves.” This
framing implies that each wave supercedes the other across time. Given that second
and third waves map onto generational distinctions, the whole idea of waves has
been met with consternation from second wavers who are not ready to be super-
seded. In addition, there is some debate, if not confusion, over the criteria that define
the waves. In this paper I suggest that the language of successive waves frustrates
the potential to articulate different approaches with the aim of a more comprehen-
sive understanding of historical societies. This is particularly the case with our
understanding of states and state formation, which is the focus here. Instead of the
waves framing, I suggest a strategy for articulating research agendas on state
formation by conceiving of such in terms of their “centers of gravity” (or COGs)1
rather than their boundaries. I pay particular attention to the body of work that can
be said to have a concern with culture as its center of gravity, a body of work that
while overlapping considerably is not co-extensive with that identified as third wave.
In this context I elaborate a broad conceptual architecture of culture, at the
foundation of which is the distinction between meaning, practice, and materiality.
This triangulated conceptualization of culture can, I argue, clarify some ambiguities
in the literature and aid articulation of three COGs in state theory. In addition, I
suggest that many questions taken to be theoretical are actually empirical. I con-
clude by briefly illustrating the approach in the case of science and modern state
formation in Ireland.
*****
A growing number of historical sociologists are following the lead of

Julia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff and are speaking
of the development of the sub-discipline in terms of three “waves”
(Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005).2 Adams et al. lay out an
extremely detailed map of the second two waves, and the delinea-
tion now seems destined to become part of the vernacular of the
field. The first wave appears to include anything published prior to
circa 1965, the second wave to work that began to emerge in the
late 1960s, and the third wave to work that appears from the early
1990s. Second wave work is characterized by an emphasis on
comparative methods, political economic analysis, determinism,
and structuralism, in contrast to third wave emphasis on case
studies, cultural analysis, contingency, and agency.3 However, a
© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
554 Patrick Carroll
symposium on the book in which this framing was presented

demonstrated that it has come in for serious criticism by some
“second wavers” (Lachmann et al. 2006). Adams et al. dispatch
much of that criticism as what one would expect from an
entrenched and (until quite recently) hegemonic paradigm, the
defenders of which being either unwilling or unable to see the
changes that are taking place in the field (Adams et al. 2006). As we
have long learned from Kuhn (1962), this is likely in large measure
true. However, I suggest that it also follows from the agonistic
nature of the wave framing.
Many will easily relate to the use by Adams et al. of the words
“repression” and “exclusion” when describing second waver’s polic-
ing of what gets to be called historical sociology and what issues get
to be defined as “settled.” Those who do case studies know inti-
mately that the language of “historical comparative sociology” is
meant to exclude them in the hope of maintaining an image of the
sub-discipline that might gain acceptance with positivists. And any
social scientist will identify with the language of contestations,
battles, showdowns, challenges, and so forth that are used to
describe our “conversations.” Such agonistic framings surely do
reflect real struggles, but their constant iteration cannot easily
serve the articulation of insights from different bodies of work. And
the struggles will almost always be generational, for it is necessarily
those who have invested many decades in a paradigm that will be
most resistant to change (Kuhn 1962, Mulkay 1969). Generational
agonistics in academia are perhaps the most difficult to overcome,
as exemplified by the response of Andrew Abbott to the wave frame,
which beneath the humorous tone is caustic (Abbott 2006). Indeed,
the conflict between second and third wavers has something of the
character of an intergenerational family fight. And though Adams
et al. state that viewing the waves in terms of age-generations is too
crude, when they describe the second wave hegemony, it seems
very much generational.
This paper attempts a different approach. Rather than frame the
field in terms of successive waves or hostile quasi-generations,
state theory is framed in terms of “centers of gravity.” The aim is to
spark an interest in genuinely building upon earlier work while at
the same time showing how it needs to be modified. This is not to
say that every third waver should be doing this, but it can justifi-
ably be hoped that such an approach might find equal place with
the five current “foci” of the third wave research described by
Adams et al. (2005: 32).4 The concept of center of gravity identifies
centers that do indeed hold even as their boundaries are increas-
ingly fuzzy. Thus the center of gravity analytic heads off fallacious
arguments that point to a few “exceptions to the rule” as a way to
© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Articulating Theories of States and State Formation 555
challenge an entire framing, as has been attempted by some second

wavers in their response to the wave framing. Examples that do not
neatly fit the framing are not so much exceptions to the rule, as
cases that orbit at something of a distance from the center. Adams
et al. seem genuinely committed to not allowing the agonistics of
the debate lead to a new set of exclusions (2006: 419), yet they
seemingly find it impossible to refrain from labeling such second
wave arguments as “specious,” a word not well fitted for moving
beyond the hostility of the debate (2006: 420). That the hostile
character of the “conversation” remains despite the intentions of
the players indicates that it derives in part from the agonistics
inherent in the wave framing itself. I now turn to an alternative
approach of thinking about one of the most central objects of the
field, states and state formation, in terms of centers of gravity, or
COGs. I should perhaps note immediately that what follows is not
a literature review. No attempt is made to reference all work asso-
ciated with each COG. Rather the point is to capture key elements
of each.
Three COGs can be readily identified: the military-fiscal, the
autonomous state, and the cultural. These distinctions will not be
unfamiliar to many, but they are not the only distinctions that
could be drawn. I choose them because they identify critical dimen-
sions of the object “the state.” My suggestion is that rather than
moving beyond the military-fiscal and autonomous state COGs to
cultural analysis, we need to turn the cultural analytic back upon
the other two. The point of articulating all three is not to achieve
some kind of theoretical synthesis. On the contrary, it is to draw
together key empirical findings of each in order to generate new
theoretical questions that can guide a research agenda concerned
with articulation of findings. And while my own research lies in the
culture COG, the aim of this paper is to invite researchers from any
of the three to explore possibilities for articulation.
The Military-Fiscal Center of Gravity

The military-fiscal COG has states emerging from the dynamics of
conquest and domination. States originate in military organization
and subsequently develop through the mutually sustaining tactics
of conquest, treaty, and alliance. Thus states align with powerful
social classes in symbiotic relationships. The treasure required
to sustain military activity seeds the development of a taxation
apparatus. Domain over territory and population calls forth other
administrative functions, driven by the imperative of internal secu-
rity (e.g. police and food supply), and therefore the expansion of
state offices, and the growth of an administrative bureaucracy.

556 Patrick Carroll
Because states emerge from war and the costs of war,5 they always
exist in relation to other states (allies or enemies), and cannot be
understood apart from these relationships. It is this external rela-
tionship, and its attendant foreign policy, that partly constitutes
the state as a “sovereign” actor. The mobilization of forces and the
extraction of revenues are foundational state activities, and it is
these activities that explain the emergence of bureaucracy as a
controlling, taxing, and governing structure.
As Tilly put it over thirty years ago, the focus is on the “organi-
zation of armed forces, taxation, policing, the control of food
supply, and the formation of technical personnel,” more or less in
linear temporal order (Tilly 1975: 6; see also Mann 1986, 1993).6
The military-fiscal COG is perhaps most clearly articulated by Tilly
in Capital and Coercion (1992), where he classifies states according
to where they are located on the revenue/extraction – coercion/
violence spectrum (1992: 33). Two examples of state forms located
at the extremes of the spectrum are provided, with another in
the middle: coercion-intensive (e.g. Russia), capital-intensive (e.g.
Venice), and capitalized-coercion (e.g. Britain) (1992: 133ff). The
military-fiscal model can be thought of as a Machiavelli/Marx
inspired model. Machiavelli (2007) articulated a science of states in
terms of enemies and allies where regime craft and statecraft are
one and the same. Marx conceived of the state as a relationship
that is police/management oriented internally, and militarily/
diplomatically oriented externally. In this context it was a small
step for Lenin to define the state as a repressive apparatus. While
there are more recent sources for the military-fiscal conceptualiza-
tion of the state (such as rational choice and resource mobilization
theory), the Marxist-Leninist conception of the state as a coercive
(variously oppressive) organization with an executive head (sover-
eign) that is aligned (more or less) during particular periods with
specific classes (usually the ruling but sometimes the popular)
appears central. Alongside the view of the state as a military-fiscal
complex, however, was the somewhat contradictory idea of the
state as a unified actor, which partly results from viewing states in
relation to other states, i.e. as sovereign actors with their own
interests, objectives, etc. In this context one can trace connections
not only to Machiavelli, but to Hobbes.
Hobbes conceived of the state as an actor in the image of an
individual, embodied in the person of the sovereign. Hence the
famous engraving of Leviathan showing all the bodies of the com-
monwealth contained within the body of the king. The actions of the
sovereign are the actions of all, the actions of the entire state
understood as a commonwealth. I emphasize Hobbes’ conceptual-
ization of the actor-state to highlight the historicity of the idea. For

instance, with Machiavelli it is the Prince who acts to secure his

state, which is quite different from the idea that the Prince’s actions
are the actions of the state.7 The distinction is reflected in the titles
of their respective books, The Prince and The Leviathan, both of
which are “actors.” Today the language of the actor-state is so
deeply institutionalized and thus taken for granted that it is con-
troversial to suggest that states not only do not act, but cannot act
(Carroll 2006).8
The Autonomous State Center of Gravity

The war-taxation, actor-state, class-dynamic foci that form key
elements of the military-fiscal COG easily articulate with the notion
of an “autonomous state” actor, and thus research on or related to
the idea of state autonomy can easily be conceived as part and
parcel of a single wave of research, i.e. the second wave. Adams
et al. suggest that the broader idea of the “relative autonomy of the
political . . . best characterizes both the promise and limits of the
second wave” (2005: 17). But they do not really pursue this dis-
tinction, instead following with a list of different works they asso-
ciate with the second wave. The focus on the relative autonomy of
the state can, however, be viewed as a research COG distinct from,
if easily articulated with (because historically associated with), the
military-fiscal.9 The autonomous state COG had both Marxist and
Weberian variants. The latter has had the more enduring impact,
partly by virtue of providing Weberian answers to Marxist ques-
tions. Within the Weberian research agenda the state is conceived
as an organizational actor (variously institutionalized) that is able
to act with a degree of autonomy from the ruling class, and this
creates a research agenda distinct from that of the military-fiscal
COG, where the military power of the state is seen as “an intrinsic
part of the reproduction of class relations” (Mann 2006: 349).
Within Marxism the autonomy debate had been underway in the
early 1970s, crystallized in the exchanges between Poulantzas and
Miliband. Miliband viewed the state as a direct instrument of the
capitalist class, but Poulantzas argued that the state was better
understood as a structural expression of the logic of capital. Pou-
lantzas’ structural alternative to Miliband’s instrumentalism gave
the state (as a real-time government) a degree of autonomy from the
direct interests of particular capitalists while at the same time
granting that it secured capitalism over the long run: hence the
notion of the “relative autonomy” of the state (see also, Block 1977).
Ann Orloff, discussing the relative autonomy conceptualization,
describes it as a more “society-centered” approach, distinct from
the new “state-centered” view articulated by Skocpol and herself.

558 Patrick Carroll
Weberians thus “broke with neo-Marxist views about the relative –

that is ultimately limited – autonomy of the state” (Orloff 2005:
206). This shift from an internal Marxist debate to a direct engage-
ment by Weberians on the autonomy issue brought with it a certain
degree of confusion. The Marxist-Poulantzas notion of relative
autonomy only made sense in relation to the instrumentalist view.
The framing of the debate between “society-centered” and “state-
centered” theories recast the Marxist-Poulantzas position as
“limited autonomy.” But Poulantzas’ position was closer to that of
Skocpol than either was to Miliband. It was not so much a shift, as
the terminology might indicate, from a non-autonomy view of the
state (Miliband – class centered) to a relative autonomy view (Pou-
lantzas – society centered) to a strong autonomy view (Skocpol –
state centered). Rather at least in my view, it was a movement from
a non-autonomy view to a limited autonomy view to a relative
autonomy view. Either way, the recognition of state autonomy
by both Marxists and Weberians provided the grounds for the
articulation of the two literatures, with the strong sense of relative
autonomy (state centered) being supported by decades of empirical
research.10 Key concepts that emerged from the autonomy focus
were those of relative autonomy, embeddedness, and embedded
autonomy (Evans 1995), each of which grappled with the character
of the relationship between state and society. The focus on a state/
society relationship implied a concern with the collapse of that
relationship through revolutions (Skocpol 1979, 1994; Goldstone
1991). The research agenda on revolutions was easily expanded to
include both early modern and postcolonial periods (Goldstone
1991; Goodwin 2001).
The classical sources of this COG are Hobbes, Marx and Weber.
Hobbes, once again, because of the way he conceives of the state as
a regime with a sovereign head whose actions are taken to be the
actions of the state as a whole, that is, the actor-state idea (though
oftentimes only used as shorthand within more complex analyses).
Weber because of the focus upon the state as a continuously
operating rationalized organization with a degree of institutional-
ized autonomy from production relations. And Marx because of the
concern with class dynamics and revolutions. Just as Weber offered
new answers to questions first posed by Marx, so the state
autonomy COG developed Weberian solutions to Marxist problems.
Whereas Tilly exemplified the military-fiscal COG, Skocpol is the
scholar most centrally associated with the idea of state autonomy.
For instance, a search of Amazon for “state autonomy” yields about
1,600 hits, most of which reference Skocpol, or someone else who
references her. Though Skocpol also ascribed to the military-fiscal
model, it was her original contribution on autonomy that opened

up a whole new research agenda. The concept of state autonomy

became an engine of research, for instance, into professions, insti-
tutions, and especially the “welfare state,” which opened up a route
to cultural analyses of state formation, and critique of the positiv-
ism (Steinmetz 1993, 1999, 2005).
Ironically, the institutional and cultural analyses that have fol-
lowed have implicitly undermined the idea of a coherent actor-state.
Skocpol defined the state in a manner consistent with the military-
fiscal COG, as a “set of administrative, policing, and military orga-
nizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive
authority” (1979: 29). However, once the autonomy question is
conceived in terms of institutions understood as cultural forma-
tions,11 the notion of the politically bounded actor-state begins to
unravel. There is a way, however, to reconcile the notion of the
actor-state with institutional analysis. The actor-state can be recast
as an institutionalized discourse, a distorted representation of the
state that is nonetheless real enough in its effects (see discussion
of Timothy Mitchell’s work below). In this context state theory can
benefit from articulation with actor-network theory (ANT) in Science
and Technology Studies (STS). For instance, John Law uses the term
“punctualization” to describe the process through which a com-
plex and heterogeneous actor-network, composed of humans, non-
humans, institutions and all the rest, is simplified in the language of
singular coherent actors, whether human individuals or organiza-
tions (Law 1992). This insight is readily applicable to the notion of
the state as an actor. Though in reality a heterogeneous formation
assembled together over centuries, all the complexity of the modern
state is suppressed and made invisible through an act of punctual-
ization that renders it a single unified actor. This punctualization
is itself institutionalized such that when an executive acts those
actions are taken as the actions of the state (or indeed “country”)
as a whole. Thus we get the idiom “America decided,” “China
announced,” “Britain declared,” and so one.
By drawing on actor-network theory it is possible to reveal the
state as, on the one hand, a complex actor-network within which
agency is distributed and,12 on the other, a punctualized actor in
which agency is taken to be concentrated in a single macro-actor.
This appearance of an actor-state should not, in analyses, be
equated with an executive at the head of a more or less coordinated
apparatus, for to do so allows, ironically again, the idea of the
class-instrumental state to reenter through the back door. Reflect,
for instance, on the actions of the executive under the G.W. Bush
administration. If that executive’s actions are treated as the actions
of the state, then ipso facto the state was an instrument of the
capitalist class during that administration. We know however that

560 Patrick Carroll
the institutional structures of the state system, buttressed by the

agency of professionalism, resisted executive directives in many
cases. For instance, “health and safety inspectors” responsible for
the mining industry refused to adopt the new title of “compliance
assistance officers,” as directed by their newly appointed boss, who
before his appointment was a big coal CEO. This shows that the
autonomous state COG, as articulated by Skocpol, contains within
it an “essential tension” (to borrow a term from Kuhn) between the
idea of the state as an actor and the idea of the state as a complex of
institutions. That tension is currently dissipating, not because it has
been reconciled theoretically, but because the “next generation” is
leaving behind talk of the actor-state as they move the institution-
alist part of the COG further in the direction of cultural analysis. For
example, the idiom of the actor-state is hardly used at all by the
“third wave” authors in Adams et al. (eds. 2005).13 Yet the idea is
nowhere explicitly questioned either, and it does pop up occasionally
in a rather ad hoc and common sense way, i.e., in its punctualized,
institutionalized, and therefore taken for granted meaning.
The Culture Center of Gravity

The range of research encompassed by the culture COG is too vast
and diverse to summarize here. Much of it is already summarized
and represented in Adams et al., and also in Steinmetz (1999), and
in any case my purpose here is not to write a literature review.
Instead I will discuss some of the research from the cultural COG
that one, relates to the state; two, is identified as third wave; and
three, explicitly or implicitly articulates, or has the potential to so
do, with the military-fiscal and autonomy COGs. This will in turn
serve to expand the discussion to other cultural approaches that do
not easily fit the wave frame but which do fit in the COG frame
(such as governmentality studies and STS). As noted, a cultural
approach to the state as an institutional formation emerged from
the autonomy COG and for this reason is easily articulated with it.
Adams et al. acknowledge this by noting that institutionalism in
historical sociology is essentially “a friendly amendment” (to their
second wave grouping). However, while this is the case with respect
to the autonomy COG, it is much less so with respect to the
military-fiscal COG, which still awaits consistent cultural analysis.
The new historical institutionalism is exemplified in the work of
Orloff and Clemens. Both straddle the autonomy and culture COGs
and have now become leaders of the third wave, particularly its
cultural aspect. Orloff, for instance, argues for an exorcism of “the
whole set of socially determinist analytic approaches that have held
us back from making a cultural turn in this field” (Orloff 2005). The

turn to culture always existed as a potentiality in the autonomy

COG in a way that it was not in the military-fiscal, and the actual
transition now underway further underlines the distinctiveness of
each COG and thus the inefficacy of viewing them as part of a single
wave of research. Orloff’s work developed out of the autonomy
COG’s adoption of the welfare state as an object of inquiry. As Orloff
recalls, their approach to the welfare state was set apart from
kindred social democratic and neo-Marxist approaches through the
concern to look “at the ways in which state elites might pursue
projects beyond any suggested” by non-state actors (Orloff 2005).
This led to a view of the “institutional constitution of actors,” which
led directly to considerations of culture. Ironically, however, much
of the institutionalist work from the state-centered perspective,
while extending to crucial questions such as gender and race, has
generally not interrogated the very idea of “the state.” It is mostly
taken for granted that we know what the state is: it is only required
to distinguish its varieties, particularly its welfare varieties, and
the historical contingencies or forces that shape those differences,
for instance, professionalization of state actors.14 More broadly, the
new institutionalism brought something of a departure from the
entire state problematic, rather that a direct critique of it.
This is surprising given the emergence, at roughly the same time,
of “governmentality studies (see Burchell et al 1991),” an approach
that may be articulated with cultural institutionalism and which
shifted the register away from states as actor-structures and
towards rationalities of governance. On the other hand, because
institutionalism emerged from a state centered view it did not
articulate well with a Foucaultian perspective (Foucault 1978,
1980, 1988, 1990, 2007) that emphasized a liberal governmentality
in which the state is decentered. A more focused discussion of
governmentality literature follows below, but for now it can be
noted that the orientation is wonderfully captured by Patrick Joyce
in the phrase “the rule of freedom,” a form of rule that signals
a liberal governmentality in which free choosing subjects are
constructed, and are compelled to act as such, that is, as self-
governing subjects free of an overarching and dictating centralized
power in the form of “the state” (Joyce 2001, 2003 see also, Rose
1990). As Orloff more recently notes, however, there are many
avenues for articulation of an institutionalized view of the state with
Foucault’s work, particularly the themes of regulation, classifica-
tion, discipline and the capillary processes of administrative power
(Orloff 2005: 223–4). Indeed it is another irony that while institu-
tionalism emerged from an effort to bring the state back in, it has
an important affinity with a research agenda that was founded
upon “taking the state back out” (Curtis 1995).

562 Patrick Carroll
A key area for articulating cultural analyses with the other two
GOGs is the tricky issue of the state/nation relationship. Lyn
Spillman’s work on nation is less directly derived from either the
autonomy or military-fiscal COGs, yet it is more explicitly articu-
lated with them. She notes that Tilly acknowledged in 1975 that he
and his colleagues at the time focused on the state rather than the
nation because it was so difficult to come to an agreement on what
nations are. The result was a bias “toward the extractive and
repressive activities of states” (Spillman and Faeges 2005: 426).
Spillman shifts away from conceiving of culture simply in terms of
beliefs, values, and interests, largely viewed within the military-
fiscal GOG through the analytic lens of ideology. The ideological
view treated culture in the classical sense, as a mere reflection/
distortion of material structures and interests at the more
determinate level of the political-economic. Culture was thus
explanandum rather than explanans. As recently as 1999 Tilly put
it thus: “culture and identity, not to mention language and con-
sciousness, [are] changing phenomena to be explained rather than
as ultimate explanations of all other social phenomena” (Tilly 1999:
411). Tilly overstates the choice, since cultural sociologists have not
generally claimed that culture is the ultimate explanation of every-
thing. On the other hand, the second wavers did, with few excep-
tions, hold that culture could explain nothing.
Brubaker and Spillman advance us beyond that view, by showing
how culture is constitutive of national identity and nationhood.
This constitutive view is also advocated by John Walton, who
strangely does not appear in the exhaustive bibliography in Adams
et al. Walton argued, in opposition to Tilly, that culture was con-
stitutive of identity, which fundamentally informs a groups sense of
their “interests,” and therefore explains collective action (Walton
1992). The absence of Walton from the third wave grouping tends to
confirm the generational character of the wave framing, as does the
absence, in Adams et al.’s detailed introduction, of Corrigan and
Sayer’s 1985 work on state formation as cultural revolution. In any
case, all cultural work of the third wave takes the constitutive view
(Adams et al., 2005). However, as far as explanatory capacity goes
it can be argued that the issue is not a theoretical one to be
answered once and for all, but an empirical question that requires
examination in every case. It is likely less a case of either/or than
one of the complex co-constitution of the political, the economic,
and the cultural.
Spillman’s work on the ways that culture is constitutive of nation
(and the open agenda for research that she lays out) could easily be
articulated with the military-fiscal and autonomous state COGs in
order to reveal the co-production of that perplexing hybrid, the

“nation-state,” and Spillman explicitly advocates building upon

earlier historical and comparative work (Spillman and Faeges 2005:
434–437).15 Indeed, such an approach could also help explain
post-colonial nation-states, where the colonizer was successful at
engineering state-systems, but failed, partly due to nationalism, to
maintain sovereignty (Carroll 2006). This should not, however, be
read to mean that cultural analysis does not explain the particular
form of states. Cultural analysis of states should not be confined to
the nation side of the nation-state coupling. On the contrary, now
that science (both natural and social) has been revealed by STS as
a form of culture, an explanation of the peculiar form of the modern
state is impossible without recourse to cultural analysis (Mukerji
1997, 2009; Carroll 2006). Furthermore, current work is revealing
how both the political and the economic are culturally constructed
in specific ways. For instance, Adams shows how the political is
shaped by gender through the patriarchal forms of patrimonialism
(Adams 2005). Gorski shows how religion shapes the social, politi-
cal, and economic order (Gorski 2003). And work on the culture of
economics, markets, and capitalism is finally dismantling through
empirical research the reification and naturalization of these
categories (e.g. Carruthers 2005; MacKenzie 2006; Knorr-Cetina,
Karin and Alex Preda, eds. 2006; Nee and Swedberg, eds. 2005).
This work is opening up opportunities for articulating STS with
the new economic sociology, as well as with historical research on
states and state formation. Carruthers, for instance, while noting
that work in the military-fiscal COG always accepted that “states”
and economies “co-evolved,” takes the role for states a step
further by showing how they are constitutive of particular eco-
nomic forms. Work in STS adds to this by emphasizing how eco-
nomic science crucially constructs the very economic reality it
claims to merely represent (MacKenzie et al., eds. 2007). Both
forces of cultural construction, science (or knowledge/expertise),
and government (or governmentality) are now being shown to
co-produce the capitalist economy as a distinct object and sphere
of activity. The linkages that develop between economics as
knowledge and government as policy become institutionalized in
law (Denis 1989), and constituted in calculative techniques and
“metrological regimes” (Barry 2002; Mitchell 2008) in such a
ubiquitous way that the notion of a mechanical “relationship”
between “state” and “economy” seems increasingly inadequate as
a theoretical assumption. Though eschewing explicitly “cultural”
analysis, Mitchell demonstrates that the idea of the economy as a
specifically material realm separate and apart from discursive
representation is unsustainable (Mitchell 1998). Work on econo-
mics (however construed) in STS and Foucaultian work has con-

564 Patrick Carroll
verged in a powerful new analytic, and though rarely presented

as explicitly cultural in orientation, can be justifiably viewed as
part of a wider cultural approach.
A range of other work exists that can be viewed as part of the
cultural COG. This work, which I will address presently, does not
find its way into the waves framing for two reasons. First, some of
it is published prior to the chronological emergence of the third
wave. Second, most of it is published outside of the United States,
the overall limiting factor for the wave framing. The two problems
are linked together, as a quasi-generational framing between hege-
monic teachers and their rebellious students must necessarily
be rooted in a relatively self-referential space/place, in this case
a particular national context. Adams et al. have defended the
national approach as necessary to prevent their project becoming
unwieldy. Perhaps, however, it is more a case that the wave frame
itself only makes sense in a national context. Unfortunately, a
national framing has some drawbacks. First, it seems somewhat
anachronistic in a globalizing world where the integrity and dis-
creteness of nations is increasingly questionable, particularly with
respect to intellectual or scientific traditions. Second, and more
importantly, it compounds the problem of “methodological nation-
alism” (which, in terms of the analyst’s intentions, need not imply
a political nationalism). The actual nature of methodological
nationalism is subject to debate (Chernilo 2006), but it is expressed
in the equation drawn between societies and nation-states as a
function of modernity, and the methodological use of the nation-
state as the basic unit of analysis in political sociology, particularly
in “comparative historical” work, but also in case studies. Dividing
the field of historical sociology in national terms creates what might
be termed a meta methodological nationalism. I am not suggesting
that framing research traditions or research agendas in national
terms is by definition wrong. On the contrary, part of the job of
interrogating methodological nationalism is to understand the role
it plays in both explaining and supporting the equation between
societies and modern states. However, if the aim is to achieve a
cumulative understanding of states and state formation, and in
particular illuminate the contributions of cultural analysis, then
going beyond the nation framing is desirable.
An early and groundbreaking cultural analysis of state formation
is Corrigan and Sayer’s The Great Arch (1985). Importantly, and
unlike in the United States, this work brings to bear Durkheimian
themes on the question of state formation, without rejecting the
contributions of Marx and Weber. A key concept in this analysis is
the idea of “moral regulation.” Durkheim conceived of social rela-
tions as irreducibly moral relations, and while arguing that social

solidarity was spontaneous when “normal,” an unusually rapid

increase in the division of labor broke apart social ties leading
both to greater individualism and the elaboration of individualist
theories of society. The answer for Durkheim was, partly, moral
(disciplinary) education (Durkheim 2002). Importantly, however,
Durkheim sees the state not as some kind of master actor, for “the
state does not execute anything” (Durkheim, in Giddens, ed. 1986:
41).16 Rather “the State is a special organ whose responsibility it
is to work out certain representations which hold good for the
collectivity” (Durkheim, in Giddens, ed. 1986: 40). This idea,
though reformulated from a critical perspective, appears central to
Corrigan and Sayer’s concept of moral regulation. While moral
regulation is distributed across a wide range of spaces and prac-
tices (locales of execution), and always involves a “particular” mis-
construed as a “universal” (the influence of Abrams [1988] is
evident here), it is crucially informed in the English case by the very
idea, orchestrated and broadcast from London, of what it means to
be English. In other words, the state in this case is inseparable
from the central government’s collective representation of English-
ness and the English nation. English (and later British) state for-
mation is shown to be an 800-year process through which the
English subject and the English state are co-constructed.17 Sayer
further develops the analysis by explaining the unique development
of capitalism in England by reference to the institutional forms of
state and civil society.
English state formation, over the very longue duree, molded a civil society in which
capitalist economy was possible. Critical in this was the early unification of England
as a national state. But equally significant was the “peculiar” character of the
political and legal institutions through which this national unification was
accomplished and in whose continuities, real and imagined, society came to be
represented. . . . These institutions of state directly, and from a very early date,
empowered a wide spectrum of Englishmen of property against encroachments,
whether from above or below. They proved sufficiently flexible, by virtue of their
rootedness in locality and interest, to accommodate secular economic and social
changes in the connotation of property. They long subjected the populace to a social
discipline that was local, personal, and patriarchal, and the more effective for all
that. And they legitimated all these things, superbly, in the name of an English
nationality claiming to embrace everyone in a common and ancient polity and
culture. From the point of view of its contribution to the rise of capitalism, there
would appear to be every reason for regarding such a polity as paradigmatic rather
than peculiar (1992: 1410–11).
Sayer’s work on English state formation was less an effort to

elaborate a cultural analysis (though it was that also) than it was
part of a wider critique of the reification of analytic categories
(particularly in Marxism) and what he called the “violence of

566 Patrick Carroll
abstraction” (1987). But there is no question that this work can

be understood as cultural in orientation. Culture could no longer
be viewed as merely a reflection of the supposedly more real and
therefore determinate action at the level of the economy and
politics. Economy was both demarcated and developed through
practices of political culture and the institution building
implicit in such. Modernity, as an institutional and therefore
cultural formation, needed to be seen as part and parcel of
capitalism.
Quite independently of such re-readings of Marx, a similar
flight from abstraction was being inspired by Foucault in both
France and England (Corrigan and Sayer also took cues from
Foucault, particularly with respect to individualization/totaliza-
tion). Arguments were increasingly made against the use of macro
categories of analysis such as “the state,” and in favor of atten-
tion to specific rationalities, programs, practices, and technologies
of government and their associate expertise, both within the state
as conventionally understood, but also “beyond” it. This is most
clear in the field known as “governmentality studies” (Burchell
et al 1991). Despite the heterogeneity of work that shares this
label, it does appear to have as its center of gravity a concern
with the microphysics of power. This is particularly the case in
the work of two of its most ardent proponents, Nikolas Rose and
Peter Miller (Rose and Miller 1992, 2008). At first blush, and for
a number of reasons, this work does not appear to contribute to
a cultural analysis of states and state formation. First, it presents
as a more constructivist approach in opposition to the realism of
state theory. Second, it is less connected to cultural analysis per
se than to a range of Foucaultian themes. Third, and perhaps
most importantly, it was initially presented as a kind of non-state
theory in that it followed Foucault’s injunction to seek out the
ways political power was exercised beyond the state. Rose and
Miller expressed the agenda as one that “relocates ‘the state’
within an investigation of the problematics of government.” (1992:
174 [emphasis original]) This framing left open the possibility for
articulation with state theory, but the agonistics of the field were
such that this non-state theory soon became an anti-state theory,
and eventually even an approach that was not even concerned,
precisely, with power or governance (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde
2006: 85). Again, my purpose here is not a literature review. But
I do wish to dwell for a moment on how a departure from con-
ventional state theory became over time an opposition to state
theory. The point of retracing part of this process is to show how
there was nothing inevitable about it, and that it is entirely pos-
sible to incorporate governmentality studies into cultural analyses

of states and state formation, and articulate it with both the

military-fiscal and the state autonomy COGs in state theory.
Rose and Miller decenter the state by focusing instead on the
role of political rationalities in shaping modes of governance, the
constitution of the liberal subject through discourse and lan-
guage, the emergence of problems of government for which pro-
grams are created and expertise elaborated, and the construction
of an array of connections between government projects and non-
government actions that are heterogeneous and spread through-
out the social body. They explicitly reject the realism of state
theory (1992: 177), and instead of focusing on systems of coer-
cion and revenue extraction, address how the state “emerges as
an historically variable linguistic device for conceptualizing and
articulating ways of ruling” (1992: 177). And finally they focus on
the role of knowledge in projects for “acting upon action,” defined
not simply in term of ideas, but rather as a “vast assemblage of
persons, theories, projects, experiments and techniques that has
become a central component of government” (1992: 177). Each of
these points are presented as setting their agenda apart from the
concerns of state theory at the time. In America, where Marxist
and Weberian mixtures of theory had become institutionalized,
the project was largely ignored. There was little appetite for
Foucault in historical comparative sociology, and governmentality
was sometimes viewed as a mere return to liberal talk of govern-
ment in the sense that it was somehow neutral with respect to
the social structures of capitalism. The dismissal of the govern-
mentality agenda was based on a lack of understanding of it, but
it was buttressed by some blistering critiques that were very well
informed and lucidly crafted.
A case in point is the response of Bruce Curtis to Miller and
Rose’s 1992 agenda setting piece (Curtis 1995), his sharply worded
critique clearly hitting a nerve with the authors, who responded by
wondering how a single paper could “produce such a defensive
reaction, while an entire field of related literature can be ignored
without discomfort” (Miller and Rose 1995: 590). In an otherwise
smart and penetrating critique, Curtis at times expressed a degree
of contempt for the entire project, describing it at one point as
“smoke and mirrors” (1995: 585). Miller and Rose clearly took it
personally, shooting back with references to Curtis’ “outdated anti-
nomies,” his “fixations” and “confusion,” and his “comforting cal-
culus of domination and emancipation.” While claiming they did
not deny the existence of states “understood as political appara-
tuses and their associated devices and techniques of rule” (1995:
593), they responded with prickliness, saying one was under no
obligation to account for them in the “constitutional language of the

568 Patrick Carroll
nineteenth century” (1995: 594). The agonistics of polite scholarly

discourse was now in full swing, and Miller and Rose became much
more strident in their critique of state theory, stating the need to
“abandon,” “discard,” and “reject” a range of foundational ideas in
state theory, such as the “belief that regimes of power rest upon a
falsification of human subjectivity,” i.e., ideology (1995: 593). In
addition, they simply ducked Curtis’ cogent points of critique, for
instance with respect to what exactly they understood by the word
“government,” or ignored them completely, for example with respect
to their failure to complement their account of subject formation
through individualization with an account of totalization within the
state. Whatever prospect existed for Miller and Rose to engage with
state theory rapidly receded over the following decade. Whereas
they had earlier reflected on how governmentality studies could
speak to issues such as the military-diplomatic complex, interna-
tional relations between states, geopolitical issues, the idea of
sovereignty, and the prosecution of war, these possibilities were
starkly absent from Rose et al’s 2006 review of the field, which
addressed the origins of governmentality, the kinds of research that
had been conducted, and its connections with other literatures.
While reasserting (2006, 2008) their agenda as originally formu-
lated, they seemed to cut off all possibility of articulating govern-
mentality work with the concerns of the military-fiscal and
autonomous state COGs. Indeed, they stated that “governmentality
is far from a theory of power, authority, or even of governance”
(2006: 85). If these are not central to governmentality studies, that
field would seem fundamentally incompatible with state theory.
On the other hand, while they had never explicitly cast govern-
mentality studies in terms of cultural analysis, they granted, in the
context of speaking to connections with other traditions (though it
seems almost an afterthought), that “we should mention culture.”
Yet their interest was not so much about how state theory could
benefit from a cultural understanding of government and knowl-
edge, but rather how “culture, too, could be analyzed from the
perspective of government” (2006: 97). Indeed, the idea of culture
was useful to the extent that it could be reduced to their own
familiar categories of analysis: “Culture itself, then, can be analyzed
as a set of technologies for governing habits, morals, ethics – for
governing subjects” (2006: 97). Before culture was reconceived in
terms of the concerns of governmentality studies, the suspicion of
cultural analysis seemed largely to rest on what was viewed as its
inextricable connection to the analysis of ideology, as is evidenced
in Dean’s critique of Corrigan and Sayer and the role they gave to
moral regulation in the “(mis)attribution of meaning to experience”
(Dean 1994: 151). Yet despite the rather ambivalent attitude toward

cultural analysis, and the increasingly hostile stance toward

“the state” as an analytic category, I suggest that the main foci
of governmentality studies can be recast in cultural terms and
articulated with theories of states and state formation.
Where Rose, Miller, O’Malley and others largely left macro
categories like “the state” behind, others, particularly Timothy
Mitchell, set out an agenda that sought to explain such macro
categories as the effects of more micro practices and technologies.
In a classic article published in 1991 (see also, Mitchell 1999,
2002), a year before Miller and Rose proposed to “relocate the
state” in the problematics of government, Mitchell proposed to go
“beyond” both state theory and its critics. Though also inspired by
Foucault, Mitchell’s work went in a different direction than govern-
mentality studies, with different consequences for state theory.
Less concerned with the construction of subjectitivities, Mitchell
laid out his critique of state theory and his alternative research
agenda with stunning clarity. His major point was that no one had
been able to establish a clear boundary between the state (or even
the political) and society and/or economy. His conclusion was that
we should give up trying and instead acknowledge that the distinc-
tion did not stand up to empirical scrutiny. The agenda therefore
should be to show how the “apparent” distinction between state
and society was the product of webs of discourses and technologies
(both of which seem to include practices), that is, how it was a
“structural effect” (Mitchell 1991: 93). Mitchell’s analysis is cen-
trally informed by the concept of disciplinary power elaborated
by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1978), and this partly
explains his divergence from governmentality scholars, who never
paid much attention to that text.
Like governmentality analysts, however, Mitchell tended to cut
off opportunities for articulating his analysis with themes in state
theory. For instance, with respect to the autonomous state COG
he points out that Skocpol provides a definition of the state upon
which the notion of autonomy depends, but provides “no actual
means of knowing whether a given institution belongs merely to
the political system or the state proper” (Mitchell 1991: 87). He
incisively demonstrates that the “boundary of the state . . . does
not mark a real edge. It is not the border of an actual object”
(1991: 95). With respect to the military-fiscal COG he questions
whether it is appropriate to make transhistorical reference to a
repressive apparatus of police, prisons, etc., “when almost every-
thing we mean by these institutions is . . . recent in appearance”
(Mitchell in Bendix et al 1992: 1019). Finally, in his groundbreak-
ing work on the constitution of “the economy,” he cuts off oppor-
tunities for articulation with cultural analyses, by invoking the

570 Patrick Carroll
now familiar rejection of macro categories like polity, economy,

and culture: “To rethink economy, we will not get far by posing
questions about the relationship between economy and culture –
as if these were two big objects or spaces or dimensions, found
everywhere, and as if our task were to identify their changing
relationship, the diverging degrees of embeddedness, and so on”
(Mitchell 2008: 1120). Thus he rejects the “relational” analysis of
macro categories/worlds in the context of economy and culture
just as he did in the context of state and society. His unique
contribution to governmentality studies is thus to direct attention
not to the processes of individualization, but to the mechanisms
of totalization, and their correlate in sociological analysis, what
might be called “macro-ization.” Connections could be drawn here
to the work of Sayer, but that is for another day. The point is that
Mitchell, if from a different direction than Rose and Miller,
eschewed macro categories of analysis. This seemed to preclude
articulation of his work with cultural analyses of the state and
the new economic sociology, not to mention conventional theories
of state and state formation more generally. But this need not be
the case.
First, while such macro categories cannot be found delineated
and pure in the world of practice, they can be identified discursively
in terms of ideas, beliefs, and meanings. They have epistemic
qualities that cannot be reduced to misattributions any more than
subjectivities can be reduced to false consciousness. As such they
are central categories through which distinct policies and practices
are carried out. Organizations of government form around them,
specific bodies of knowledge and expertise become associated with
them. We need to understand how macro distinctions are formed in
micro practices in which such distinctions can seem arbitrary, but
also how those macro distinctions then create means for under-
standing and acting upon the world. From a sociological point of
view they can be elaborated as analytic categories derived from the
categories of actors. If they shape how actors act then we must
account for the genuine work they do. For instance, actors con-
struct rights and define and limit powers in the overarching order
designated by the macro categories of politics and “the state.”
Government builds infrastructure, stimulates demand, trains
and educates in the context of purposeful development of “the
economy.” National meanings and “national cultures” are con-
structed in quite deliberate ways through exhibitions, rituals,
symbols, representations, knowledges, monuments, maps, narra-
tives and so on (Anderson 1991). “Social” workers and mental
health professionals of every stripe intervene to reorder and correct
relationships (i.e. “the social”). And from the other side, just as

particular agents and agencies of government “see like a state”

(Scott 1998), so subjects of such government “see [and thereby
experience] the state” (Corbridge et al. 2005).
But we do not have to follow the actors’ meanings slavishly, in
the sense of crass empiricism. We can define them analytically
and consistently, but always with reference to actors’ categories.
And we need not think of them as bounded, but rather in terms
of their key centers of gravity. For instance, we can analytically
conceive the center of gravity of politics as power, that of the
economy as production, that of “the social” as relationships, and
that of culture as meaning. By seeing them as centers of gravity
that overlap in complex ways we can avoid the extremes of both
micro and macro stances. For instance, while we can say that the
center of gravity of culture is meaning, we can also point out that
all meaning requires production, involves relationships, implies
power, and is inseparable from material forms, and that all of
these aspects are crucial to an adequate understanding of
culture. How they are all connected in any one case is, again, an
empirical question. That is, the material dimensions of culture
will not be of equal significance in every case and at every time.
The main point, however, is that macro categories do not refer to
less real realities than micro categories, meaning is not less real
than practice or materiality, and the macro effects of microphys-
ics are no less real than microphysics itself. Indeed, Foucault’s
argument that categories like “the state” are derivative does not at
all imply that they are without causal consequences (Hannah
2000: 42). The very idea of the state is a powerful force in his-
torical events and outcomes. In any event, the essentialist oppo-
sition of governmentality (micro) to state theory (macro) has
recently been brought into question by returning directly to Fou-
cault’s own writings (Jessop 2007; see also MacKinnon 2000;
Hannah 2000).
There is no essential reason why Foucaultian research cannot
be articulated with state theory more generally. Those locked in
an agonistic frame with powerful paradigmatic commitments will
view every difficulty of articulation as proof that such is impos-
sible. But for those who wish to break out of the existing para-
digmatic fragmentation and opposition, such difficulties are
merely a challenge demanding a commitment to work hard to
overcome them.18 For instance we can explore how it need not be
the case that the disciplined military only “appears” greater than
the sum of its parts, as Mitchell once suggested (1991: 93). It can
be argued that the modern disciplined military is greater than the
sum of its parts, that it is an emergent macro power that while
emerging from micro disciplinary practices cannot be reduced to

572 Patrick Carroll
them. The same can be said of the macro phenomena of the state.
Or in the context of Mitchell’s critique we can agree that deploy-
ing the category “repressive state apparatuses” transhistorically
produces a generalization that does not stand up to empirical
scrutiny. But we can deploy the ideas of coercion and extraction
at the heart of the military-fiscal conceptualization of the state in
order to grasp a key characteristic of states in general. That is,
while we should not generalize what are better seen as particu-
lars, nor should we take such errors of generalization as proof
that generalization itself is essentially flawed. Also, we do not
need to think of cultural analysis simply in terms of the “inter-
action,” “embeddedness,” etc., of culture and economy or culture
and polity or culture and state. Rather we can develop a distinc-
tively cultural analysis of state formation while revealing em-
pirically the complex networks of discourses, practices, and
materialities through which and out of which states are built and
sustained. In this context there need not be any essential barrier
to articulating the findings of governmentality studies with the
concerns of state theory. And it is worth noting that despite
efforts to eschew talk of the state it has generally not been pos-
sible to do so entirely. For instance, Miller speaks of the “inter-
relations between accounting and the state,” going so far as to
“define” the state, even if only “as a loosely assembled complex
of rationales and practices of government” (Miller 1990: 315; for
different conceptualizations of the state in governmentality
studies see Asch 2007; Christie 2005; Bailey 2006; Hannah 2000;
Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Goldman 2001; Hindess 2005;
Kivinen and Rinne 1998; Leibler 2004; Li 2005; Sharma 2006).
While I suggest below that the materiality of states as countries/
populations/technologies can and should be distinguished from
the ideas/discourses of state that constitute rationalities, and the
organizational practices of government that constitute the state
system, the point here is that the degree of tightness or looseness
in how the various elements are assembled is entirely an empiri-
cal question.
Finally, it is clear that some working under the governmentality
umbrella have more explicitly adopted a cultural analysis, particu-
larly those from the perspective of anthropology. Ferguson and
Gupta, for instance, point to a growing anthropological literature
which recognizes that “states are not simply functional bureau-
cratic apparatuses, but powerful sites of symbolic and cultural
production that are themselves always culturally represented and
understood in particular ways” (2002: 981). On the other hand, in
other governmentality studies the status of culture in the analysis
is sometimes vague (for instance Asch 2007; Silverman and

Gulliver 2006; Christie 2005; Hindess 2005; McFall and Dodsworth

2009). The variety of views on “the state,” and the array of positions
on culture points to the variability of the governmentality literature,
a literature that spans disciplines and appears more akin to a
heterogeneous group of fellow travelers than a well defined para-
digm. Indeed this is sometimes not only acknowledged by its major
spokespeople, but welcomed. In terms of the goals of articulation
it is a plus. Since there is no powerful disciplinary matrix associ-
ated with the paradigm its agenda is more plastic than other
approaches.
Conceptualizing the Analytic Architecture of Culture

Because the status and meaning of “culture” is often only implicit
in governmentality studies, the category as employed in such work
is sometimes understated. On the other hand, work that explicitly
adopts a cultural analysis of states and state formation reveals a
wide range of ways in which culture is conceptualized. Rather than
viewing this as a problem it can be seen as an opportunity for
greater articulation. Instead of pitching one view of culture against
another, it is possible to attempt to sketch a broad architecture
of culture. This will demand moving beyond a modernist view of
culture that sees it in ideational terms set in opposition to the
material. Weber is not of great service here, since his concept of
culture is inescapably modern in that it contrasts culture as the
ideal with economy as the material (and also politics as material in
the sense that it is the organization of “rational” individuals pur-
suing their material interests, which are themselves ultimately
economic). Adams et al. emphasize the ideational and emotional
aspects of culture, and associate it closely with agency and contin-
gency. This sustains the dualism of the material/structural and
cultural/immaterial and ironically both hinders articulation of
culture with the themes they describe for the second wave, and
results in a too conservative view of culture that leaves those
second wave elements intact. Let me be clear that I am not sug-
gesting that the focus on meaning in cultural analysis be replaced
by something else. However, culture also needs to be understood as
internal to practice, and much greater attention needs to be paid to
material culture. STS can be a resource here, as it has emphasized
the analysis of practice as a strategy for understanding the culture
of science (Pickering 1995).
The focus on practice in turn directs analysis to the material
technologies immanent in the research process, and to the inter-
vention in, and transformation of, material forms, i.e., the pro-
duction and use of material culture, which extends to the built

574 Patrick Carroll
environment and land that has been transformed by practice. It

is important with respect to material culture that it be acknow-
ledged that material environments that embody designs and
meaningful purposes can structure action without individuals
even being aware of it, without it being consciously meaningful to
them. Whether or not this is the case becomes an empirical ques-
tion. The various ways that culture is conceptualized, however,
implies that in order to pursue a research agenda aimed at
articulating the three main COGs of research on states, it is first
necessary to attempt to graph the various conceptualizations in a
coherent theoretical way. It seems useful to begin parsimoniously,
and from that point fill in the detail. One approach is to trian-
gulate the concept of culture in terms of meaning, practice, and
materiality, and then map the variety of ways culture can be
understood. The result is the following graph, which may appear
complicated at first, but is quite easy to read once its symmetry
is understood.
Triangulating Culture

The point of this exercise is partly to show that different views

of culture in terms of, for instance, values/beliefs, symbolic
resources/systems, a toolkit, ideology, cognitive structures, insti-
tutions, discursive formations etc., need not be taken as compe-
ting conceptualizations, but rather as elements in the overarching
architecture of culture. When one scratches the surface of discus-
sions that set these different elements of culture in competition
with each other, one often finds not so much a debate over how to
conceive of culture, but rather debates over agency/contingency
and structure/determinism, micro vs. macro analysis, or about
culture as explanans rather than explanandum. The agency/
structure argument is exemplified in discussions sparked by Ann
Swidler’s concept of culture as a toolkit (2001).19 By emphasizing
the toolkit aspects of culture Swidler aimed to keep the agent front
and center. Some critics took a more structural view, arguing that
culture existed prior to the agent and therefore was a limit on
agency and/or its condition of possibility. But both these positions
must be true in varying degrees, and the question might be better
cast as when and how action is structured by culture and when
and how culture is a resource for agency.
Most sociologists likely agree that culture is composed of
symbolic, cognitive, discursive and institutionalized elements. The
common denominator of this understanding of culture is meaning.
Meaning may be consciously known and acted upon by social
actors (Swidler 2001), or it may be an institutional structure that
constitutes subjects (Meyer and Rowan 1977). It may be a set of
understandings to be explained by interest-based action (Tilly
1999), or an active process of construction that constitutes inter-
ests and thus explains action (Walton 1992). Either way, the center
of gravity is still meaning, however expressed in institutions,
beliefs, values, norms, cognitive structures, discursive formations
and so on.
Sociologists are less likely to place practice on equal terms with
meaning in definitions of culture, but there is justification for doing
so. Marx, for instance, conceived praxis to designate that human
activity always involves both the ideal and the material. Ideology
came to be understood as a set of ideas that distorted and masked
the actual character of human activity which is both material and
meaningful. Followers of Marx subsequently viewed ideology as
cultural in the sense of a structure of meaning, confining materi-
ality to economic practice, and thus erasing the materiality of
cultural production. Members of the Frankfurt school partly
reversed this by elaborating on the production of culture and the
culture industry, but they did not precisely theorize the materiality
of cultural practice, focusing more on the ideological role of the

576 Patrick Carroll
culture industry. Althusser, however, developed the more profound

idea of praxis found in the early Marx, by arguing that ideology was
not simply a set of beliefs that failed to correspond with material
reality, but that it was a meaning structure itself dependent upon
material practices for its reproduction (Althusser 1994 [1969]). The
practices that sustain the “ideological state apparatus” are there-
fore just as material as economic practices, or the practices of the
“repressive state apparatus.”20 Weber’s conceptualization of action
also unites meaning and doing, at least to some extent. Indeed, it is
precisely the combination of meaning and behavior that distin-
guishes action from mere behavior. Intersubjectivity is thus never
simply about meaning, since it implies social interaction. And while
meaning can traverse time and space, interaction is always rooted
in real-time material spaces. However, the focus on action and
agency in terms of meaning has tended to lead sociologists away
from the analysis of culture as practice. An exception is the work of
Bourdieu, where, Calhoun and Sennett note, the concept of prac-
tice “knit together structure and action, meaning and material
conditions” (2007: 7).
Anthropologists have been more inclined to view culture in terms
of practice. Sewell, who Adams et al. classify as second wave but
here fits the culture COG, proceeds on the basis of an anthropo-
logical sense of culture, noting that “the presumption that a
concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings is at odds
with a concept of culture as practice seems to me perverse” (Sewell
2005: 163–164). As Sewell points out, to engage in practice is
necessarily to engage with a system of symbols and meanings.
Perhaps the best proof that practice is cultural is the example of
tacit knowledge (Kuhn 1962). As Harry Collins, working within the
STS sub-field of sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has most
forcefully shown, there are some forms of knowledge that can only
be communicated through practice (Collins 1985). Though Collins
first addressed the issue in relation to the role of skill in natural
scientific experimental replication, the implications are much wider
since there are all kinds of skills that can only be acquired in
practice, from carpentry to drawing blood to playing basketball.
Practice must be more than a vector for the transmission of cultural
meanings. It must be internal to bodily cultural production, main-
tenance, and transformation. This is shown in an important new
volume entitled Practicing Culture, edited by Craig Calhoun and
Richard Sennett (2007), in which the argument is made that
culture “is practice: embodied, engaged, interactive, creative, and
contested” (2007: 5).
If practice has had a doubtful place in sociological understand-
ings of culture, “material culture” has largely been viewed as a

contradiction in terms. The material, from both a Marxist and

Weberian perspective, was seen to belong more properly to the
realm of production, or more broadly to the realm of the economic
and the politics that flowed from it (hence the notion of “material
interests”). Adams et al. somewhat sustain this idea, contrasting
material determinism with a view of culture that stresses signifi-
cation (2005: 48–51), and framing the cultural turn in terms of
“religion, emotion, violence, habit, and all the nonrational elements
of social life” (2005: 64). However, John Hall has recently noted that
of the three dimensions (meaning, practice, and materiality) of
culture, the material is the most in need of theoretical elaboration
(Hall, Neitz and Battani 2003). Practice should be central to how
we think about material culture, for as well as participating in
meaning (as Sewell notes), studying practice leads necessarily to its
material forms. The focus on cultural practices draws attention to
the tools, instruments, technologies and other materials of human
activity, as well as the material environments in which and through
which action unfolds. Such materials must be understood as
both embodying earlier discourses and practices, and as shaping,
driving, and constituting unfolding cultural practices. For instance,
Chandra Mukerji has illustrated how the analysis of material
culture helps explain how the modern state was forged and
secured, made in an agential sense and concretized in a structural
sense. Mukerji focuses on the Gardens of Versailles, demonstrating
their centrality in the construction of Louis XIV as the Sun King
and France as a new Rome (Mukerji 1997; for a different context see
Lofland 1998). The gardens were not simply a symbol of royal power
and French taste. Elaborate parties brought the nobles to the court
where interactions were carefully choreographed as enactments of
royal power. The material culture of the gardens acted to structure
symbolic articulation and concretize hierarchical relations. This
was a case of material agency since the gardens embodied specific
intentions and designs. The gardens extended out into the coun-
tryside serving to illustrate the unbroken connection between the
court and the country. And the techniques of land management,
forestry, cartography, engineering, and geometry employed in the
material construction of Versailles were the same as those used
throughout the country to incorporate the land into the state
(Mukerji 1994, 1997).
It should be clear then that practice can be conceived as the
linchpin between the world of meaning and the world of mate-
riality. It partakes of both. With respect to my graph of culture,
the important orienting point to note is that as the perimeters of
the meaning and materiality circles recede from the point where
they intersect with practice, descending from top to bottom, they

578 Patrick Carroll
represent a greater degree of structure. Thus the term “discursive

formation” signifies highly structured meanings that endure
across time and place, while the term “intersubjectivities,” at the
intersection of practice and meaning, signifies less structured
meanings that are used by agents, like a toolkit, and that serve
the active construction of meaning in interaction. On the mate-
riality side the transition is from material designs, which involve
a culture of working with materials, to material formations that
again are structural in form and therefore shape human life
and interaction in a manner that is largely beyond the ability of
most individuals to change or resist. Material formations can also
structure at the macro level of economics, politics, and social
order, for instance, in the case of the water conveyance and flood
control infrastructure in California. None of this requires eschew-
ing more traditional cultural analysis that focuses on beliefs,
values or ideas. Such beliefs and values are in some respects
born of the consequences of material engagements with nature
and the transformations wrought by material cultural infrastruc-
tures. It is a question of understanding the power of culture in
the specificities of its manifestation, and the dynamic relations of
its ideational/discursive, practiced/organizational, and material
forms.
The graph presents “institutions” as somewhat less structural
than discursive formations in that they are closer to practice and
thus to particular organizational forms. Marriage, for instance, is
an institution tied to various organizational forms of familial life.
But a discursive formation, for instance that centered on “reclama-
tion,” is both more free-floating with respect to specific organiza-
tional form, and more diffusively structural. The details here are,
however, very much open to debate and articulation in various
ways. Some might argue that the differences between institutions
and discursive formations are too insignificant to constitute a
useful analytic distinction. Yet at a minimum the distinction maps
onto particular approaches in cultural analysis (broadly conceived),
so it does no harm to maintain them, even if the purpose is only
to show through articulation that the distinction is more one of
paradigmatic idiom than of substance. Similarly, the category of
cognitive structure can be articulated with conventional cultural
accounts of ideology. On the one hand ideology can be granted
a certain structural salience in that it is a symbolic system for
knowing the world structured by political-economic or other situ-
ated positionalities (“identities” and “interests”). On the other hand
it can be viewed in the agential sense as a political toolkit actively
and consciously deployed by actors, sometimes in an overtly decep-
tive way. Mannheim was more interested in the former sense of

ideology, the sense in which it shaped the “the mental structure in

its totality” (Mannheim 1936: 238), but given the contemporary
media landscape of political punditry it would seem rash to view
the latter sense as less important for cultural analysis. Consider,
for instance, the flap over “death panels” in the health insurance
reform debate in the United States.
The location of agency and structure in the graph at the points
of overlap between meaning/practice and meaning/materiality on
the one hand, and between meaning and materiality on the other,
signifies how the agency/structure issue can be conceived within
a triangulated cultural analysis. The double reference to agency
is not to privilege it over structure once and for all, but to signify
within the analytical architecture that agency is present across the
spectrum of meaning, practice, and material culture. This does not
require stripping choice from our understanding of agency, but it
does require recognition that choice need not always be expressly
articulated in real time. For instance, the concept of practice does
not imply that individuals so engaged with the world are con-
sciously making choices concerning everything they do, but those
practices can be traced to choices made in the past and subse-
quently institutionalized. Thus when a scientist uses a particular
technology in practice she may well do so as a matter of routine
that does not involve choice in the normal sense of the term, but
the use of that particular technology can in principle be traced to
conscious choices (in the context of struggle) between alternatives
at an earlier point in time. In this sense practice, no matter how
routine or unconscious, must encompass some degree of agency.
The same is true of the concept of material culture. It implies that
the materiality in question embodies past designs and purposes
and in this sense it can be said to have agency. This way of
conceiving material agency has the advantages of an actor-network
approach but without the disadvantages. That is, the agency of the
material world can be brought into the analysis without completely
redefining the meaning of agency as generally understood within
sociology. Intentionality is built into the material world and
because of this it can act in the manner that human actors can.
However, the material world does not act without human actors
any more than human actors do without non-human: the core idea
of actor-network theory is maintained. Thus we easily see the
fallacious character of the notion that “guns don’t kill people,
people do.” Such a claim is similar to saying “airplanes don’t fly,
people do.” An actor-network approach, encompassing meaning,
practice, materiality, agency, and structure, would say that people
and guns act together to kill, just as people and planes act together
to fly.

580 Patrick Carroll
An important consequence of this conceptualization is that

agency is a micro rather than macro capacity. Roger Sibeon argues
that there are macro (social or organizational) as well as micro
agents (Sibeon 1999). However, this seems inconsistent with a
view of agency that involves choice, and it goes to the heart of the
actor-state problematic. For instance, it does not make sense to
say that Russia chose to invade Georgia. In the first place, a state
is far too complex an entity to able to make choices. Second, all the
people of Russia did not participate in the decision. And from an
actor-network perspective such a view seems to reduce the mul-
titude of agents in a network down to a few, such that the actions
of the few are made to appear the actions of all. Thus it would seem
more appropriate to say that Putin and his inner circle chose to
invade, doing so in the name of Russia. Through strategies of
translation and punctualization the actions of particulars appear
to be the actions of a generality. But this is only an appearance. At
the same time, specifying agency with respect to particular indi-
viduals does not deny the larger body of actors that make up the
state of Russia, a network including tanks and missiles as well as
humans, a network that makes the appearance of macro agency
possible. Macro agency is a network effect, it is the outcome rather
than the source of agency. This is not to say we should never speak
of organizational agency. For instance, when a collective acts
through consensus decision making it would seem appropriate to
say that the organization acted as one, that the organization is an
agent or has agency. But most organizations are hierarchical
command structures in which particular segments mobilize others,
and in which particular persons make decisions on behalf of
others. Nor is this to say that there is no such thing as social
agency, for apart from the example of a consensus based organi-
zation, all individuals are social entities, or to use John Law’s
terms, all persons are network effects (Law 1992). Thus individual
agency is, inescapably, social agency. Agency is a necessary
element of the architecture of culture because cultural forms are
designed and built by actors and they in turn sustain and struc-
ture action. It follows, consistent with Giddens’ theory of structu-
ration (1986), that practice is the bridge between agency and
structure, just as it is between meaning and materiality. Finally,
this analysis of culture breaks it into its constitutive parts only
to put them back together again. The strategy avoids what Sayer
describes “the violence of abstraction,” whereby conceptual and
analytic distinctions become reified to the point that social reality
is broken into distinct parts that are seen as having their own
unique qualities independently of the other parts (Sayer 1987).
Discourse, practice, and materiality are not well bounded and

interacting realities, but are fully embedded in each other and are
co-productive of each other. They are analytical distinctions, not
ontological separations.
Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation

With this conceptualization of culture in mind, I now turn to
the relationship between science and modern state formation.
Research on states and state formation has paid surprisingly little
attention to the role of science (particularly natural science), largely
because there has been very little traffic of ideas with the various
sub-fields that make up STS (on state policies and “social knowl-
edge,” see Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996). This lack of attention
to science is also due in part to the intellectualization of science and
the failure to see it as a form of culture. However, even with the
cultural turn in historical analysis the issue has been obscured by
ideational accounts of culture, or by analyses that focus entirely on
discourse. Paying attention, in addition to discourse, to the cultural
practices and material culture of science, reveals a more profound
relationship between science and state formation than is generally
recognized. It is now largely agreed that the adoption of experiment
and thus the introduction of craft knowledge (Oster 1992) into
natural philosophy was central to the scientific revolution, particu-
larly in England. Those unfamiliar with the history of science may
be surprised to hear that this is only a relatively recent recognition
(despite Zilsel’s classic demonstration, in 1942, of the role of craft
and engineering in the genesis of the new science [2000]). As
history of science sought, in the 1930s and 1940s, an epistemo-
logical basis for defining its object of study, it adopted an histori-
ography that took rationality and the potential genius of such as
the basis of the scientific revolution, explicitly rejecting the impor-
tance of empiricism and thereby experimentalism. The case was
most famously stated by Alexandre Koyré, in his article “Galileo and
the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century” (1943). In one
of the most influential statements of the new historiography of
science, Koyré argued that the single most important basis of the
scientific revolution was the conceptualization, by Galileo, of iner-
tial motion: the idea that something at rest will remain at rest
unless moved by another force, and something moving at a par-
ticular velocity will continue moving at that velocity unless its
movement is countered by another force. Galileo, according to
Koyré, had thus rejected the empirically based philosophy of
motion derived from Aristotle, and he did so not through the new
form of empiricism called experiment, but by the sheer genius of his
rational mind. Thus Koyré quoted a famous exchange between

582 Patrick Carroll
Galileo and one of his imaginary Aristotelian opponents. Having

explained the principle of inertial motion the empirically minded
Aristotelian asked if he had confirmed it by experiment. Galileo
replies: “ ‘No, and I do not need to, as without any experience I can
affirm that it is so, because it cannot be otherwise’ ” (Quoted in
Koyré, 1943: 13). Koyré thus concludes that “it is thought, pure
unadulterated thought, and not experience or sense-perception, as
until then, that gives the basis for the ‘new science’ of Galileo”
(1943: 13).
Ironically, while Koyré’s neo-Platonism was a major influence on
Kuhn, informing his conceptualization of paradigms and his adop-
tion of Gestalt psychology (Kuhn 1962), Kuhn’s impact was to
cause a focus on the “research activity itself,” a focus that led away
from intellectualist accounts and a move toward laboratory prac-
tices and the machineries of knowledge production (Latour and
Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Knorr-Cetina
1999), in addition to a full blown critique of the abstractions of
analytic philosophy and the functionalism of Mertonian sociology of
science. A focus on the actuality of science led early to its treatment
as a form of culture, for instance, Michael Mulkay’s Kuhnian-based
critique of Merton, “Some Aspects of Cultural Growth in Natural
Science” (1969). Mulkay argued that scientists were governed not
by Merton’s social norms, but by technical norms that formed a
cognitive structure similar to a paradigm.
Over the past thirty years the focus on experiment and labo-
ratories has increasingly moved cultural analysis of science
beyond cognitive structures and discursive formations and
towards an interest in technologies and materialities (Knorr-
Cetina 1999; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour 1988; Pickering
1995; Law 1992). It has now become clear that experiment
involved the integration of a new material culture of inquiry into
the cultural practice of science, and that this insight has pro-
found consequences for cultural analyses of state formation. Four
key material technologies can be discerned in modern science:
scopes (telescopes, microscopes, gyroscopes, etc.), meters (baro-
meters, thermometers, inclinometers, etc.), graphs (cartographs,
photographs, seismographs and all technologies of graphic re-
presentation), and chambers (pumps and other devices which
capture and isolate entities so they can be materially mani-
pulated). The internality of such technologies to experimental
research bound natural philosophy to engineering and gave birth
to modern techno-science, or what I call “engine science” (Carroll
2006). Modern engineering culture and its associated technolo-
gies increasingly served to link both science and government, and
science and production.

Jack Goldstone is one of the few historical sociologists to

emphasize the role of the scientific revolution, particularly the
significance of the steam engine, in the rise of the west (2000,
2002). It has long been believed that the development of the
steam engine had little to do with science (understood ideationally
as theory). However, the connections can be drawn by tracing the
emergence of the new engineering culture that was central to
engine science, and which articulated with invention in industry
(Jacob and Stewart 2004). Second, the connection can be drawn
by following the traffic of material cultural technologies between
science and invention. For instance, Boyle badgered London’s
artisans to contrive brass valves for him so that he could contain
and control the pressures in his pneumatic pump as he sought to
“weigh the air” (atmospheric pressure). After much resistance on
the possibility of such from the artisans, he finally got what he
wanted (on Boyle as an artisan and craftsman in his own right,
see Oster 1992). The steam engine, with its high pressures, would
have been impossible without this little recognized revolution in
valve technology. Similar connections could be traced through the
meters used to monitor pressures, though it is important to rec-
ognize that traffic in the material culture of engine science went
both ways. For instance, James Watt invented the first automatic
graphing/metering device in the form of his “indicator-diagram.”
The indicator metered the pressure at each stage of the stroke of
his steam engine while at the same time graphing the work being
done during each stroke based upon the volume of steam in the
chamber. The steam engine, in turn, became central to the for-
mulation of the theory of thermodynamics. And now automatic
graphing and metering technologies are almost ubiquitous in the
practice of scientific research. They are part and parcel of the
practice.
The steam engine was, of course, the technological powerhouse
of the industrial revolution. As such it powered an economy that
could finance a massive growth in the state system and the expan-
sion of standing armies. In addition, the steam engine set the stage
for the further growth of engine science and the eventual mecha-
nization of warfare. And here again we find unexpected linkages
when we follow the material culture. The first “caterpillar tractor,”
powered by a steam engine, was developed to move earth in the
extreme muddy conditions of the California Delta, but it was only
a small step to fit it with a gun in order to get what we call a “tank,”
a technology that further revolutionized warfare. Thus here are
examples of how an expanded understanding of culture that
includes practice and materiality can articulate with the military-
fiscal COG. It is not so much to deny the extent of what has been

584 Patrick Carroll
said about the military-fiscal dimensions of state formation, but to

greatly expand upon it by articulating its central concerns with
those of cultural analysis.
We might also ask how modern engineering shapes military orga-
nizations. The first highly organized groups called “engineers” were
the ordnance builders and handlers in the early modern military.21
And by understanding the engineering culture at the heart of the
new experimental science of the seventeenth century we can better
explain how scientific research and military power become insepa-
rable, obviously with respect to nuclear science and the bomb, but
more profoundly and ubiquitously in the traffic of scopes, meters,
chambers, and graphing technologies and their associated skills,
techniques and knowledge. For instance, a submarine is an exem-
plary case of chambers, scopes, meters, and graphing technologies
engineered together, all forming part of an actor-network of which
the crew is also a part. Michael Mann speaks of Europeans’ “love of
war,” and he agrees with Patrick O’Brien’s claim that British
success as a powerful state is based primarily on its fiscal-military
(and naval) “core” (Mann 2006: 348, 344). But the very success of
its military-fiscal apparatus can perhaps be attributed to some-
thing even more defining of Britain’s modern “core,” that is, its
modern engineering culture.
Considering the role of science as culture can also help us
recognize that conceiving of the modern military, and indeed police,
entirely in terms of war, violence, coercion and repression fails to
grasp much of what is distinct about these modern organizations.
Consider, for instance, the military’s constructive role in cartogra-
phy, medicine, earthworks, and land reclamation, or the police
in toxicology, forensics, and public health and safety. The con-
temporary notion of biosecurity might seem novel, but it goes all
the way back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the
construction of a people as a population of a state, and to the
idea that the power of a state was proportionate to the number and
character of its population. Science studies is beginning to show
that the development of political arithmetic and political economy
in the context of statecraft and reason of state in the seventeenth
century is central to the development of modern capitalist states.
With this in mind I turn to the case of science and state formation
in Ireland, which illustrates the centrality of science in the devel-
opment of the modern state generally.
Science and State Formation in Ireland

By focusing on materiality the significance of the new relations
between science and government that emerged in the seventeenth

century is revealed. Land, the built environment, and bodies/

people became boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989)
between science and government. This is made possible, on the
one hand, by the rise of a new engineering culture and it asso-
ciated engine science with the adoption of experimental tech-
niques. On the other hand, it is made possible by government
accepting the ontology of nature elaborated in the new mechani-
cal philosophy. Also important is that major figures in the new
techno-science worked closely with or for government. Thus with
respect to land we see cartography, geology, hydraulics, fisheries
and forestry management, arterial drainage, and experimental
agriculture (with its related sciences such as chemistry and
natural history, and later biology and biochemistry). With respect
to the built environment we find model building designs, sani-
tary engineering, ventilation systems, structural mechanics, road
construction, and drainage systems. And in the case of bodies/
people we find public health and safety, toxicology, sanitation,
pedagogy, and training. Of course, some sciences and technolo-
gies are found in one or more of these centers of gravity, for
instance, political arithmetic and censuses. But it is through this
networking of science and government that nature and culture
come to be hybridized in a new specifically modern state forma-
tion. It is important to note immediately that this is not the rise
of “scientific government,” an idea which has been exploded, for
the boundaries between science and government, however dif-
ficult to discern at times, remained due to the distinct center of
gravity of each. However, a process of networking science and
government together in the context of a new engineering culture
begins in the seventeenth century, and it continues to expand to
this day.
William Petty, writing in the second half of the seven-
teenth century, is one of the most famous harbingers of this
process. Like other experimentalists at the time, Petty separated
and purified natural and political philosophy. But he immedi-
ately sought to reunite them in a simultaneously natural and
political analysis that he called political anatomy. Political
anatomy involved, in Petty’s words, “both natural and political
observations.” As an analysis of the state, his approach stands
in contrast with the regime-oriented political science found in
either Machiavelli or Hobbes. Machiavelli famously gave us the
dark craft of policy, and Hobbes the wonderfully simplistic image
of all persons and their actions united in the singular person and
actions of the sovereign. Petty’s legacy, however, is the concep-
tualization of the state as something composed of both natural
and political objects; indeed, that natural objects were or at least

586 Patrick Carroll
should be recognized as political objects too. On this point

alone it might be argued that Petty was even a harbinger of
STS!
Petty explicitly viewed Ireland as an experimental ground, and
while in Ireland he developed all of the schemes for which he
is famous. His political arithmetic and political medicine were
the precursors to demography, statistics, and public health and
medicine. Marx credits him as one of the founders of political
economy.22 He drew up plans for technical colleges, teaching hos-
pitals, and “workhouses” (in the sense of apprenticeship shops).
As Surveyor-General of Ireland he conducted the first census of
the country and the first accurate cartography. The map became
the basis for land valuation and for the distribution of land to
the conquering soldiers and “adventurers,” the latter being early
venture capitalists taking great risk for great profit. The map
remained an important reference in political and economic affairs
well into the nineteenth century. He turned his Irish estate into a
local experiment in statecraft, mapping it, developing a port and
industrial center, drawing up plans for fisheries and forestry
management, and exploring land drainage techniques. He applied
his political arithmetic to engineer a plantation population based
on the economical division of labor, and also in terms of security
by balancing the numbers of natives and planters (Carroll 2006).
As time went by it was not only the discourses and practices
of experimental science that translated into the political and
economic realms, since specific material technologies of natural
scientific inquiry were also integrated into political projects. For
instance, microscopes and telescopes became crucial for accurate
map-making, pumping engines were necessary elements of land
reclamation and sanitary engineering, and thermometers and
barometers became instruments of political medicine and public
health.
Petty’s actual accomplishments at the level of the state were not
as great as he had wished as they were often scuttled by political
jealousies, and more generally by deep suspicion about his pro-
posals for political anatomy, medicine, arithmetic and economy
in terms of “reason of state.” For instance, in relation to the Royal
Society’s schemes for agriculture, one yeoman refused to answer
their “inquiries on the grounds that ‘there is more reason of state
in this Royall societie then at first I was aware of’ ” (Quoted in
Hunter 1995: 109). Yet Petty became the exemplar for scien-
tifically informed government in Ireland, his name constantly
cited by others conducting similar schemes in more favorable
contexts. A century and a half after Petty, through the mecha-
nism of iteration, the formation of historical memory, the process

of institutionalization, the organization of practices, the expansion

of the material culture of engine science, and so on, his vision
is largely realized. That vision is particularly exemplified in the
Ordnance Survey of Ireland, conducted between 1824 and 1846,
and it provides just one example of how science as culture net-
worked with government, and shaped the course of modern state
formation.
Considering the history of cartography in Ireland from the mid-
seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century reveals the need for a
broad conceptualization of culture that both accounts for agency,
spectacular in the case of Petty, and the processes of institution-
alization through which the discourse of reason of state came to
embrace map-making as a foundational government activity. The
Ordnance Survey was carried out by Royal Engineers of the British
Army. Recognized at the time as the most accurate national map
ever produced anywhere in the world, the achievement of the
survey marks a significant watershed in the history of military
capabilities not captured by work in the military-fiscal COG, but
which obviously can be articulated with the latter. The baseline was
measured near the shore of Lough Foyle in Ulster. Here again we
must have recourse to an analysis of agency, since the baseline
measurement involved considerable innovation by a particular
individual. The material culture of the measuring technology
involved a series of bars of different kinds of metal that expanded
and contracted at different rates, the comparison of which allowed
compensation to be made for atmospheric conditions. A series of six
microscopes was used to observe the variations, another example of
how a scope could migrate into new areas making new more pow-
erful actor-networks possible. A contemporary image of the mea-
surement shows the colonized and known land of Derry to the east,
and the relatively uncharted lands of Donegal to the west. Good
cartographic reasons for choosing the location were articulated by
the scientists, but the wider symbolism the site furnished was
equally significant, visualizing as it did the link between modern
scientific England on the one hand, and traditional Ireland on
the other. To the west a blank page or great unknown, to the
east a great engineering culture plotting its ingenious scheme. In
this sense the image of the baseline measurement tapped into
centuries-old ideas of civilization and improvement. These ideas
can be understood as classically ideological in that they masked
the practices of conquest and expropriation at the center of
colonialism and empire building. But they were also part of the
cognitive structure informing cartography and surveying, practices
genuinely aimed at gaining knowledge in order to materially
improve the country.

588 Patrick Carroll
The triangulation operations at the heart of the cartography

illustrate the role of the most abstract forms of knowledge – math-
ematics and geometry – in the formation of the modern state. The
accuracy is reflected in the detailed knowledge it produced of the
lay of the land, showing not only the natural and civil boundaries
– the provinces, counties, towns, rivers, mountains, bogs and so on

– but the size and shape of individual fields, and the precise
meandering of ditches and streams. An army of engineers moved
methodically (for two decades) across the country, equipped with
the mundane baggage of tents, chains and provisions, and the more
esoteric technologies of the time, at the heart of which were tele-
scopes, microscopes, compasses and so on. The use of scopes and
meters in the production of graphs, in this context as in others,
indicates the logic of cultural practice at the core of engine science.
Spirit leveling rendered the rise and fall of the land, producing a
map that facilitated the more effective prosecution of roads and
railways into the interior, and in this sense the map was never only
about representation. The map served the practices of material
intervention, roads and railways permitting deeper penetration into
the country by the agents of government. To paraphrase an old
saying about Roman conquest, English colonial governmentality
traveled down English roads. An early nineteenth century engineer
captured the idea succinctly in his book, Strictures of Road Police,
in which he argued that roads were themselves agents of govern-
ment policy, and hence part of the internal police of a country
(Greig 1819).
The survey included geological, zoological, and botanical inquir-
ies that helped value the land as a commodity and establish its
potential for economic development. Of particular importance was
the search for coal deposits. All manner of samples were collected
and analyzed in government museums and laboratories. Antiquar-
ian and archaeological research reconstructed the ancient face of
the island, complicating and making intellectual the question of
who could legitimately lay claim to it. Historical, statistical,
political-economic, and social-economic studies rounded out the
map as a statement not simply of place, but of the people, their
economy, society and culture. Ethnographic and orthographic
inquiries documented every possible place-name and spelling of
that name, clearing the way for the wholesale translation of the
country into the English language. Data was inscribed in reports
and maps, delivered to government, integrated with other repre-
sentational forms like the census and the land valuation, and made
to stand for the real Ireland, that which was demonstrated by
science and enshrined in law. Integration with the land valuation
was particularly important as the latter served to legitimate and
regularize revenue extraction through property taxes. O’Brien
points out that during the early modern period “all attempts by
ambitious Chancellors and fiscal advisor[s] to construct realistic
valuation of the King’s base for taxation provoked serious resis-
tance and turned out to be impossible to use on a routine basis”
(2006: 353–54). Here again we can broaden the analysis of the

590 Patrick Carroll
military-fiscal COG by seeing how the new scientific culture

reshaped both military capabilities and revenue extraction
mechanisms.
The “success” of the British state, of which O’Brien, Mann and
other like researchers are so concerned, cannot be explained
without reference to the new science, and cannot therefore be
explained without recourse to cultural analysis. Again it is not a
question of pitting cultural analysis against bilicist – or political
economic approaches more broadly, but of conceiving of the entire
field of research on states and state formation in a manner that
facilitates articulation of different conceptualizations of that object.
Similarly, efforts at articulation with respect to the autonomy COG
has the potential to widen the scope on the state and state forma-
tion. The protracted design and implementation of the survey
reveals competing institutionalized forces that resisted its more
innovative elements. For instance, the plan to publish extensive
survey “memoirs” (akin to ethnographies) for each county was
subsequently killed, with only one memoir (for Templemore in
Derry) being actually published (though extensive data was col-
lected for the entire country).23 Despite the praise from influential
agents such as Charles Babbage, publication of the memoirs was
construed as being beyond the domain of government, and was said
to be more appropriately left to private business. Thus structured
institutionalized discourses around public and private frustrated
the designs and choices of particular actors. Here again the ques-
tion of the relative significance of agency and structure is an
empirical one.
The case of the Irish Ordnance Survey shows that states are not
simply regulatory structures that govern a reality apart from them.
What we see is the constitution of new forms of reality. Through the
technology of the survey Ireland was translated into English,
erasing in many respects the names of places indigenous to the
native people. A new taxation system was built from the survey and
the land valuation, one that cross-referenced value estimates for
properties with coordinates on maps. The maps also cross-
referenced with the census, of which by this time the count of
population was only a minor part of the total technology. The
census now contained information, in various subdivisions from
province, to county, to barony etc., on English language profi-
ciency, on educational levels, on births, deaths, and marriages, and
on agricultural production among other things. As Bruce Curtis
has shown, the census does not simply describe a country, it
remakes social relationships (2001). The country is made increas-
ingly legible, to use James Scott’s term (1998), for the purpose of
further government intervention and transformation. “Population”

becomes a reality partly produced by political arithmetic: it is

shorthand for “population of a state” or of an internal administra-
tive division. And this population is secured as a basis for state
power through political medicine, or public health and safety,
which itself is secured by a growing system of police (Carroll 2002).
Foucault paid considerable attention to the growth of the police
in the eighteenth century, but by viewing the culture of “liberal
governmentality” in purely discursive terms he mistakenly implies
that the rise of liberal economics brought the end of the “police
state.” As he put it in his lectures on security, population, and
territory, “a whole new form of governmentality is sketched out [in
the late eighteenth century] that is opposed almost term for term to
the governmentality outlined in the idea of the police state” (Fou-
cault 2007: 347). As a consequence of Foucault opposing liberalism
(and its concept of “economy”) to police, the continued growth of the
police state has not been appreciated by governmentality studies.24
Despite claims to the contrary, governmentality studies have been
driven primarily by a focus on mentalities, systems of thought, and
discourses. But discursive shifts from police, to liberalism, to wel-
farism, to neo-liberalism have not been accompanied by equivalent
shifts at the level of practice, though new practices have emerged in
addition to the old (for an illustration of the disjunctions between
governmental discourse and practice see Kipnis 2008).25 So while
the discourse of police regulation became relatively muted with the
rise of a discourse of liberal self-government, the practices of polic-
ing grew exponentially in the nineteenth century, particularly in
terms of what was called “medical police.” Medical police corre-
sponds with what today we call public health and safety, the latter
secured through an apparatus of policing practices that regulate
practically everything consumed by individuals in the state, and
every aspect of the built environment, from the sewer trap under
every kitchen sink to the roofs over our heads. And while this police
can be understood as “regulatory” at any particular moment in
time, when viewed across centuries of state formation it can be seen
more profoundly to constitute the reality of the state, particularly
the material culture of sanitary engineering, which becomes both a
governed and governing form that is ubiquitous. Cleanliness may
or may not be next to godliness, but it is certainly next to modern
stateliness.
The histories of medical police and sanitary engineering provide
opportunities to articulate cultural analysis with the autonomy
COG, rather than simply moving beyond it to institutional analysis
and other cultural forms. We can recognize how these sciences,
as culture, drove the development of a state system that became
autonomous from the interests of particular classes because of the

592 Patrick Carroll
cultural logics of those sciences. And we can further articulate these

cases with governmentality studies by pointing out that liberal
governmentality, which emphasized self-government over state
government, was always countered, from within the state system,
by what can justifiably be called a police governmentality and an
engineering governmentality. We can thus see that the autonomy
question is far from exhausted and need not be dismissed as stale or
overdone. It is important to discover that the modern state, partly by
virtue of the cultural logics of reason of state, always had a logic
of autonomy built into it. Thus there is no need to view the issue of
autonomy as inextricably bound to Marxist/Weberian debates, such
that because those debates have since dissipated the autonomy
COG should be superceded. Indeed, the autonomy COG can be
fruitfully articulated with the culture analytic through governmen-
tality studies, not only in terms of police and engineering, but from
the other side through the traditional concern of that field with the
formation of a liberal subjectivity.
Concluding Remarks
The state can be understood simultaneously as an idea, a system,
and a country as a complex of meanings, practices, and materiali-
ties. The state idea has become a powerful discursive formation,
a cognitive structure, and assemblage of institutions; the state
system has become a vast organizational apparatus that is prac-
ticed with varying degrees of coherence (and indeed incoherence)
from the heads of executive agencies to the most mundane aspects
of everyday life (e.g. the building police who insure the plumbing
is up to code); and the state country is constituted through the
materialities of land, built environment, and bodies/people, trans-
formed by the co-productive agencies of science and government,
and rendered in the new forms of techno-territory, infrastructural
jurisdiction, and bio-population (Carroll 2006). The concept of
infrastructural jurisdiction articulates with Mann’s concept of
infrastructural power. Both concepts point to a “power to routinely
implement decisions across a realm” (Mann 2006: 344). Infrastruc-
tural jurisdiction, however, points not so much to relations between
state officials and “dominant classes,” as to the extension of gov-
ernment regulation of the built environment, from health and
building inspectors, to surveys and control of development. The
growth of infrastructural jurisdiction through the state system
undermines the unitary image of the actor state found in the
autonomy COG. Yet the institutional analysis within the latter
articulates with analysis of meaning and practice within the culture
COG. Institutional analysis points to a more complex image of

many state actors, variously coherent or at odds with one another.

This very complexity stands in contrast with the coherency of the
state as an actor, and illustrates a tension that has existed in the
autonomy COG ever since Skocpol paired the two – state as actor
and state as institutional structure – in her foundational piece,
“Bringing the State Back In” (1985). However, both can be articu-
lated once the very idea of an actor state is seen as a discursive
formation partly born of strategic attempts at the level of early
political philosophy to justify the sovereignty of emerging “nation-
states.” The question becomes less one of “how states formulate
and pursue their own goals,” as Skocpol put it (1985: 9), and more
one of how the goals of particular state actors come to be taken
as the goals of states themselves. How, in short, is that equation
constructed and secured. In this context an important analytic
distinction needs to be maintained between the here and now of
state actors and the trans-historical quality of state formations,
between individual agents of state and the state as a structure with
emergent qualities that cannot be reduced to the actions of indi-
viduals. A reflexive moment is also desirable, since the construction
and institutionalization of the actor-state idea is partly secured by
its constant iteration within social science discourses.
In this context there is a need for greater clarity in our use of
terminology to describe the object. We need to better delineate,
relative to each other, terms like the state, government, regime, and
state actor. Though scholars make these distinctions in precise
analytical ways in their own work, there seems to be little broad
consensus on what these terms mean, nor theoretical consistency
in how they are used. There are many interesting questions to be
addressed, such as the status of local governance as elements of
state formations. For instance, when considering the capillary
power of infrastructural jurisdiction, it seems appropriate to speak
of local government health and safety police as “state actors.” And
how are we to grasp the complex jurisdictional articulation of city,
county (or equivalent), and regional governments, and that won-
derfully reconfigured feudal domain, the “district.” It has often been
assumed that the growth of “state power” is to be measured by
centralization at the expense of local governments, but this idea
does not seem consistent with important empirical cases, for
instance the United Kingdom and the United States. The latter is a
particularly interesting case of how national, state (the very nomen-
clature is jarring as national is here distinguished from state),
regional, county, city, and district (which can even be quasi
“private,” as in levee districts) agencies of government are stitched
together over time to form what, from one angle, appears like a
seamless web of governance, while from another appears com-

594 Patrick Carroll
pletely incoherent and discombobulated. What is clear is that all

these levels of government contribute to what Mitchell calls the
“state effect” (1999), they all contribute to the microphysics of
power that constitutes state formations. Finally, more clarity is
particularly needed between “state” and “regime,” and consequently
between statecraft and regime craft. Historically, as the military-
fiscal model indicates, state and regime have sometimes been
coterminous. But with the rise of the modern democratic and
techno scientific state, a gap opens up between the two, a gap that
can be gauged. For instance, in a state like Myanmar statecraft and
regime craft are practically one and the same, but by comparison
this is far from the case in democratic states. Indeed, there may be
cases where democratic state craft undermines the regime.
It seems to me that we can accept the view that states, at least
partly, originated as military-fiscal structures, and that these
structures remain common to all states. However, one can rightly
ask if culture, in the form of religion, might not also be an original
source of states, and whether the temple was as important as the
fortress in their emergence. The point here is that it is not at all
clear that religion is merely superstructural with respect to the
military-fiscal apparatus. And it would seem necessary to investi-
gate a range of other beliefs having to do with warrior culture, such
as honor, in order to fully understand the variability of military-
fiscal structures and the consequences of such for historical
outcomes. In addition, while modern states are military-fiscal for-
mations, one cannot explain what is specifically modern about
them by pointing to structures that are shared with the pre-
modern. The success of western states in terms of warfare would
seem less a matter of money per se, as a matter of the rise of what
can justifiably be called cyborg armies, ones in which communica-
tions capacities, from radio to satellite, as well as engines of all
kinds, are as central as guns and bombs. We would have to con-
sider scoping capacities, from telescopes to periscopes, and the
whole range of graphing and metering technologies, not to mention
chambers like submarines and jet aircraft (and the test chambers
used to design them and test the limits of human stresses). All of
this technology this material culture, needs to be understood in the
context of the rise of modern engineering, which is inseparable from
what is perhaps the greatest cultural revolution of all time, i.e., the
scientific revolution. We would want to consider not only how the
soldier and his weapon were integrated through new disciplinary
technologies (Foucault 1978), but how entire “socio technical”
(Bijker and Law 1992) collectives were constituted out of networks
of people and technologies. These are some of the questions that
flow from a framing of the field motivated by articulating past and

current research. The point is that by adopting a triangulated

conceptualization of culture in terms of meaning, practice, and
materiality, we can see how even the military-fiscal dimension of
the state is an object of cultural analysis. The culture COG can
contribute as much in this context as in the more familiar cultural
territory of gender, race, nation, institutions, and so on.
The aim of this paper has not been to reconcile different theories,
which would be impossible. Rather it has been to identify key
findings of different bodies of work and explore avenues for articu-
lating them in the service of a genuine cumulative advance in our
understanding of states and state formation. The centers of gravity
framing, and the triangulated conceptualization of culture, have
been offered as a means to that end. As such this paper is not an
answer so much as an invitation. It is an invitation to generate a new
center of gravity of research on states and state formation, the goal
of which is articulation. The result, I suggest, will be quite different
from, and at least as productive as, a framing that contrasts whole
theoretical traditions and highlights breaks and contestations.
Notes
1
I use the acronym for brevity, but also because the word “cog”
indicates that each center of gravity captures only a piece of the complete
object – i.e. the state – and also because it implies that in principle each
piece can be articulated with the other in a more or less workable fashion.
2
Orloff (and implicitly Adams) reiterated her commitment to the wave
framing at the 2009 American Sociological Association meetings.
3
If I situated my own work in the wave framing it would fit solidly in the
third wave. So it is the framing, not third wave research, which I am
critiquing.
4
They list the following: “(1) institutionalism, (2) rational choice, (3) the
cultural turn, (4) feminist challenges, and (5) the scholarship on colonial-
ism and the racial formations of empire.” Of course, a focus on articulating
key findings could engage any or all of these foci.
5
The notion that states emerge from war, as a universal
proposition, has been effectively critiqued (See, for instance, Centeno,
1997).
6
Randall Collins states the matter in almost mirror fashion exactly
three decades later: “To reiterate the main points, which have been well
documented by Tilly, Mann, Skocpol, Goldstone and others: the state
originates as a military organization, and expands by military conquests
(e.g. Prussia) or alliances (e.g. Dutch); military costs are the biggest item in
the state budget; the ‘military revolution’ in size and expense of troops,
weapons and logistics leads to creation of administrative apparatus
(bureaucracy) to extract revenues. From here on several historical path-
ways can be followed: resistance by aristocrats and populace to revenue
burdens and administrative encroachment can lead to state breakdown
and revolution, or alternatively to authoritarian restoration, or to state
disintegration; what happens to states which take the latter pathways is
usually a fatal geopolitical weakness that ends the independent history of

596 Patrick Carroll
that state. In the long run, the states which survive are those which
successfully expand their tax extraction and administrative organization;
and this penetrates into society, breaking down patrimonial households,
inscribing individuals as citizen-subjects of the state, and thereby creating
mobilizing conditions for modern mass politics, and for state welfare
administration” (Collins 2004: 5).
7
“A COMMONWEALTH is said to be instituted when a multitude of
men do agree, and covenant, every one with every one, that to whatsoever
man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part the right to
present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative;
every one, as well he that voted for it as he that voted against it, shall
authorize all the actions and judgements of that man, or assembly of men,
in the same manner as if they were his own . . . [for] . . . the right of bearing
the person of them all is given to him they make sovereign . . . ” (Hobbes
2008 [1651]: 114 [Ch. xviii]). Emphasis added.
8
John Meyer notes that states “are by no means really actors” (Meyer
1999: 137), and his followers are apt to put the word actor in quotation
marks when speaking about the state.
9
While Skocpol ascribed to the military-fiscal model as well, it was not
her innovation. Where she ascribes to the model – “Any state first and
fundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys these to create
and support coercive and administrative organizations” (1979: 29), she
cites as follows: “My views on the state have been most directly influenced
by such classical and contemporary writings as: Max Weber, Economy and
Society, 3 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedmin-
ister Press, 1968), vol. 2, chap. 9 and vol. 3, chaps. 10–13; Otto Hintze,
essays in Historical Essays, ed., Felix Gilbert, chaps, 4–6, 11; Tilly, ed.,
Formation of National States; Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (New York:
Academic Press, 1975), chap. 7; Bendix, et al., eds., State and Society; and
Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power (New York: Pantheon Books,
1974), page 301, note 77.”
10
Block’s classic “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” (1977), became a key
text for articulating the two. The piece is reprinted in Block 1987.
11
Institutionalists sometimes speak of the “relationship” between insti-
tutions and culture, but it is difficult to conceive institutions as anything
other than cultural.
12
A micro-physics, to use Foucaultian terminology, of agency.
13
An exception is Meyer Kestnbaum’s piece, “Mars Revealed: The Entry
of Ordinary People into War between States.”
14
Orloff’s idiomatic/analytical shift from talking about the welfare state
to talking about “regulation and provision” is a critical advance in theory.
The language of “welfare state,” like that of “regulatory state,” is thoroughly
problematic.
15
“The more general point here is that a rich array of interesting
questions for comparative-historical investigation emerge when the nation
is conceptualized as – and not simply assumed to be – one among a
number of common forms of mobilizable collective identities, with fluid and
contested relationships.” 436–457.
16
There has been something of a rediscovery of Durkheim in the context
of state theory, but exploring such in detail is beyond the already wide scope
of this paper. See for instance Giddens ed., 1986; Stedman Jones 2001).
17
A range of work has adopted the notion of “moral regulation” in
various ways, but one of the most compelling examples is Alan Hunt’s

work. Significantly, Hunt resists the inclination in governmentality studies

to reject moral regulation as a useful concept, illustrating how articulation
is possible if one wishes it (Hunt 1999: 14–18).
18
As Kuhn noted, to move beyond an existing paradigm one must
believe in the new agenda not only before one has better evidence, but in
order to create the condition of possibility to get such evidence (Kuhn
1962).
19
See the critiques and Swidler’s reply in Newsletter of the Sociology of
Culture Section of the American Sociological Society, (Winter 2004).
20
Though Althusser maintained what has been called “deferred reduc-
tionism,” in that the economic is invoked as the primary cause “in the last
analysis” (Sibeon 1999).
21
Some may ask how that squares with what we know about ancient
engineers, to which I reply that the words “engine” and “engineer” have very
specific meanings that do not have ancient roots like the words “machine”
and “mechanics.” A historicist historical sociology must take this seriously.
22
Arguing against cameralist and merchantilism doctrine, which held
that labor was the only source of wealth, Marx cited and paraphrased
Petty, stating that “nature” was itself a source of wealth: “Labour is the
Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother.” (Marx,
Capital Vol. I: 50). Marx described Benjamin Franklin as “one of the first
economists, after Wm. Petty.” Ibid., 47, note 1. See also, Lansdowne in
Petty 1927, Vol. 2, 47.
23
For an excellent detailed and recent study of the survey, see Doherty
2004.
24
The work of Mark Neocleous is critical on this point (1996, 2000). See
also, Raeff 1983.
25
For a broader critique of the loose coupling between discursive ratio-
nalities and organizational practices, see Meyer and Rowan 1977.
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Article in Journal of Historical Sociology · December 2009

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Issues and Agenda

Articulating Theories of States and

A growing number of historical sociologists are following the lead of

symposium on the book in which this framing was presented

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

challenge an entire framing, as has been attempted by some second

The Military-Fiscal Center of Gravity

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

instance, with Machiavelli it is the Prince who acts to secure his

The Autonomous State Center of Gravity

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Weberians thus “broke with neo-Marxist views about the relative –

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

up a whole new research agenda. The concept of state autonomy

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

the institutional structures of the state system, buttressed by the

The Culture Center of Gravity

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

turn to culture always existed as a potentiality in the autonomy

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

“nation-state,” and Spillman explicitly advocates building upon

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

verged in a powerful new analytic, and though rarely presented

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

solidarity was spontaneous when “normal,” an unusually rapid

Sayer’s work on English state formation was less an effort to

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

abstraction” (1987). But there is no question that this work can

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

of states and state formation, and articulate it with both the

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

nineteenth century” (1995: 594). The agonistics of polite scholarly

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

cultural analysis, and the increasingly hostile stance toward

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

now familiar rejection of macro categories like polity, economy,

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

particular agents and agencies of government “see like a state”

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Gulliver 2006; Christie 2005; Hindess 2005; McFall and Dodsworth

Conceptualizing the Analytic Architecture of Culture

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

environment and land that has been transformed by practice. It

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The point of this exercise is partly to show that different views

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

culture industry. Althusser, however, developed the more profound

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

contradiction in terms. The material, from both a Marxist and

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

represent a greater degree of structure. Thus the term “discursive

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

ideology, the sense in which it shaped the “the mental structure in

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

An important consequence of this conceptualization is that

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd