“The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior”*…
Alan Jacobs quotes from Freeman Dyson‘s epic 1998 book, Imagined Worlds…
It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedom represented by Tolstoy. In the world of computers, Napoleon is the massive IBM main-frame; Tolstoy is the humble Macintosh. The computer revolution was an escape from the Napoleonic ambitions of von Neumann to the Tolstoyan anarchy of the Internet. Future revolutions will bring more such escapes.
Jacobs goes on to observe…
The big AI companies are the apotheosis — literally, in the view of many who work for them — of Napoleonic science. The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing.
See also: “Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? – Our surprisingly Napoleonic twenty-first century,” in which Erik Larson unpacks Dyson’s thinking and reconciles it to the world of 2022 (when Larson wrote the piece).
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As we contemplate culture, we might spare a thought for Jack Kilby; he died on this date in 2005. An electrical engineer, he made a– if not the— foundational advance that moved us into the age we’re now navigating: the integrated curcuit (or as we know it, the chip).
In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem.
Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.”*…
The “nation state” as we know it grew from the Treaty of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648) and the “Westphalian system” of states that it spawned. While scholars debate the emergence of the modern nation-state, most see it as a 19th-century European phenomenon facilitated by developments such as state-mandated education, mass literacy, and mass media.
From the beginning, some scholars (and speculative authors), pondered what might come after the nation-state. Some foresaw a global government; some, an evolution into communal anarchy or zero world government, in which nation states no longer exist. In the 1990’s, Samuel P. Huntington suggested the devolution of the world into clashing civilizations.
In the event, how are nation-states doing?
As we skate up toward the (date on which we choose to celebrate the) 250th “birthday” of the U.S., we might feel that the “idea,” that sense of love and fellowship in the U.S., is under strain. And as we look around the world, we see those “national virtues” fraying in country after country.
So it’s auspicious that Will Davies and Andrew Barry have collected several colleagues views on the state of The State…
Events in the 2020s have raised the question and problem of ‘the state’ anew, in ways that few could have predicted, even if there was a clear sense that neoliberalism was already faltering or dying over the previous decade. A new era of mercantilism, protectionism and economic nationalism apparently dawned, as successive US administrations increasingly sought to weaponize trade policy to resist rising Chinese power in the global economy. The Biden administration’s rhetoric, which elevated national security concerns alongside economic growth, questioned the allocative efficiency of international markets and pressured European powers to similarly foreground geopolitical considerations in their economic policies (Sullivan, 2023). The Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, both passed by the US Congress in 2022, demonstrated a more concerted effort by the Federal government to direct private and public sector investment towards strategic national security goals. The second Trump administration’s determination to press ahead with tariffs on dozens of US trading partners, despite causing financial instability and harm to US corporations and consumers, has further signalled a new era of state economic interventions and geopolitical tactics.
Significantly, one thing that distinguishes the present conjuncture from the immediate post-2008 world is that prominent liberal elites in ‘the West’ are now notably reflexive and at pains to declare a new policy paradigm (e.g. Foroohar, 2022). For example, following large investments by the Hewlett Foundation in 2018 and 2020, a research agenda developed in pursuit of ‘post-neoliberalism’, which has seen high profile attempts to draw a line under a ‘free market’ economic model. Indeed, some argue that there is a need to celebrate the state as a source of economic dynamism, security and technological strategy (Mazzucato, 2013, 2021). Ideas of ‘modern supply side’ economics, ‘new productivism’ and ‘abundance’ have also emerged in the United States to provide strategic direction for a more active and interventionist state (Klein & Thompson, 2025; Rodrik, 2022; Yellen, 2022). In a striking public manifestation of this movement, Britain’s then shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, outlined a vision of what she termed ‘securonomics’ that wedded goals of prosperity with those of national security (Reeves, 2023).
The new fusion of geopolitical strategy and economic policymaking in the United States and Europe, evident in renewed enthusiasm for industrial policy, ‘onshoring’ and ‘friend-shoring’ of supply chains, was catalyzed in part by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is also associated with the continuing long wave of competitive innovation in digital technologies, including AI, the rise of China as an alternative economic model, and the contested political response to climate change. In these circumstances, juridical problems of borders and sovereignty have become entangled with material problems of energy, natural resources and ‘critical minerals’, leading to heightened geopolitical interest in areas of the globe (such as the Arctic, the DRC, Ukraine, Venezuela) that are now thought to be of particular geological and strategic importance in an era of ‘transition’ (Barry & Gambino, 2024). Disruption to supply chains and energy security, following the crises of 2020–2022, led to worldwide inflation, driven by supply-side factors that policymakers were ill-equipped to respond to, and for which most incumbent political parties were punished in the 60 national elections of 2024 (Weber et al., 2024). Attention turned toward the capacity of states to govern in areas of national strategic importance, where infrastructure, technoscientific innovation, energy security and critical resources are needed to sustain competitiveness and boost productivity.
The international order appears to be in a state of flux, to a greater extent than at any point since 1989, and arguably earlier. The global economy is fragmenting along with the ideology of a ‘rules-based international order’ (Amoore, 2023). The decentring of ‘the West’ in the global economy and the over-arching challenges of technological change and climate breakdown are profoundly altering what is expected of ostensibly autonomous states vis-a-vis competitors. Assumptions about neoliberal or ‘advanced liberal’ rule which achieved hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s, no longer seem adequate in a geopolitical, ecological and technological context in which the state is being asked to do far more, by capital, by publics and by emerging technologically mediated epistemological arrangements that offer novel ways of perceiving, characterizing, classifying and knowing the increasingly uncertain world.
Arguably, the question and problem of the state have been posed most forcefully by illiberal, authoritarian nationalist regimes, driven by the rising popularity of many radical and far right political parties. ‘Populist’ parties of the Right have been in the ascendence in many democracies around the world since the global financial crisis (Hopkin & Blyth, 2019; Revelli, 2019). Given electoral successes in India, Brazil, Hungary, Italy and the United States, populist leaders and parties are no longer simply critics of the status quo. They have pushed forward policies for targeting their ideological and ‘cultural’ opponents, whether these are to be found in universities, the ‘old’ print and broadcast media, independent civil service and so on. In these states in particular, ethno-nationalist, patriarchal and ‘anti-woke’ agendas have been threaded through public policies in areas of education, culture, welfare and border control, with fiscal policy also being remade to serve radical Right agendas.
Here and elsewhere, rising authoritarianism and nationalism appear able to co-exist with a new strain of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that further challenges liberal assumptions about jurisprudence and bureaucracy, as arbiters of public goods (cf. Hall, 2017). ‘Neo-reactionary’ and anti-democratic ideologies, which first achieved hegemony in relatively niche online communities, now threaten to disrupt the basic capacities of the modern bureaucratic liberal state, casting doubt on the value and durability of democracy and the rule of law (Slobodian, 2024; Smith & Burrows, 2021). As illustrated by the example of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration, the collapse of trust in government, politicians and the mainstream media in many democracies potentially offers greater freedom and political power to private wealth and rentiers, as a substitute for public institutions.
The above are somewhat disparate examples, drawn from the midst of a fast-moving situation of apparent state transformation for which we do not yet have an adequate theoretical framework or name. They may not all belong to the same tendency and may contradict each other in various ways. Despite the temptation, we should avoid the urge to bring them under a single conceptual umbrella, at least for the time being. Rather than offer a sweeping diagnosis of this conjuncture, then, in this collaborative essay, five members of the Editorial Board of Economy and Society each reflect on their own theoretical and conceptual equipment, its genealogy, possibilities and limitations for interrogating the present state of the state, especially in what we might call the ‘actually existing neoliberal states’ of the Global North.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this journal helped to forge a heterodox perspective on power in modern societies, urging scholars to look beyond the state to understand the power and politics of liberalism, to those non-state centres of calculation, knowledge, control and standardisation, which (after Foucault) were collectively understood as core to government (Burchell, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose,1993; Walters, 1995). In an era when orthodoxy held that ‘neoliberalism’ was leading to a contraction of ‘the state’ and the expansion of ‘the market’, this journal exuded scepticism towards these categories and assumptions, in favour of empirical attention to the heterogeneity, historicity and contingency of shifting technologies of power. Deconstruction of familiar sociological and political categories allowed the play of power and politics in (neo)liberal societies to be seen afresh, without the conceptual edifice of ‘the state’ getting in the way.
We suggest that now is a useful moment in which to think again, to bring ‘the state’ back into view and examine the tools that are available to make sense of the present. The problems of the 2020s are different from those of the 1980s and 1990s, or indeed the 1930s or 1900s, and so should our problematizations be too. In this essay, we do not seek to name or singularly theorize the present crisis or conjuncture of the state, but rather to address it from different perspectives, both reflecting on and updating the journal’s longstanding preoccupations with the power and politics of knowledge and economy in liberal states.
The five contributions that follow do not offer a unified response to the question of the state of the state today. William Davies begins by situating analysis in debates over ‘neoliberalism’ that have, in many respects, dominated the social sciences in recent decades. Davies excavates a host of rich insights from a diverse range of perspectives, highlighting how the challenge of theorizing state transformation is closely bound up with wider reaching power relations of shifting ideas, policy paradigms and ideologies, alongside cultural and material transformations. In this reflection on post-2008 theoretical and empirical literatures, Davies invites us to think beyond historical precedents and models of ‘crisis’, and to recognize the heterogeneity of the present, the intermingling of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘post-neoliberal’ tendencies, which have contributed to the renewal of the problem of the state.
Samantha Ashenden’s contribution stresses the centrality of the idea of crisis to the current conjuncture. On the one hand, one might say that the state is ‘in crisis’ – a legitimation crisis to use Jürgen Habermas’s term. On the other hand, the state has come to act in the context of what proponents of state action themselves conceive as a series of crises. This has given a renewed justification for state action, or interstate action, whether to address financial, environmental and security crises or, as Ashenden argues, crises of fertility and population. What does the burgeoning of crisis talk tell us about the state today?
If the question of fertility – and population and demography – has long been a preoccupation and justification for the state, so is the milieu, the natural and unnatural environment. Andrew Barry’s contribution directs us to the way in which the chemical composition of the world has provided both the object and means for state action. The state has long been engaged in both managing and sustaining a ‘chemical regime of living’. Barry’s intervention points to the conjunction of state efforts to control access to mineral resources in the name of security (so-called ‘critical minerals’) with growing concern with what some have called the ‘chemical crisis’ of pollution and public health.
Ilias Alami’s contribution proposes an explicitly Marxist account of the present-day state. His contention is that state transformations are the manifestation of the political mediation of ‘determinate mutations in planetary capital accumulation’. He outlines a range of critical mutations, including the concentration of industrial production in East Asia, the displacement of labour by machines and consequent underemployment and industrial overcapacity, environmental degradation, and the geopolitical competition for resources. These are the conditions for growing economic interventionism by the state, and tighter relations between state and capital which are taking increasingly anti-democratic forms.
Finally, in her contribution, Linsey McGoey does not deny the significance of rising state intervention today. Yet, McGoey questions accounts of its history and its novelty. In doing so, she draws inspiration from Giovanni Arrighi (2009) who argued that the idea that the nineteenth century was an era of free trade is part of the mythology of the twentieth century, and from Friedrich List who highlighted the ‘inconvenient facts’ not acknowledged by Adam Smith. McGoey directs us to consider the history and politics of substantial efforts to deny the close relation between the state and the ‘free market’ which has been present all along…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The State of the State.”
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As we contemplate countries, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”*…
Your correspondent is headed into a melange of meetings (and their attendant travel), so (Roughly) Daily will be on pause for a few days. Regular service should resume on or around June 19. I’ll leave you with a (timely?) tale from the past…
“Steve” publishes a wonderful weekly newsletter, Dates With History. In a recent post he shares the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt…
If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.
A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.
On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.
A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event 645 years ago next Monday—15 June 1381.
That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.
His name was Wat Tyler…
[Steve explains the origins and workings of the feudal system in England, the (extraordinary) impact of the Black Death, the Poll Tax, the subsequent rise of peasant resistance, the Revolt itself, Wat’s demise, and the immediate aftermath. He concludes…]
… Wat Tyler enters the historical record on 7 June 1381 and exits eight days later, 15 June 1381, when he was executed. That’s his lot.
The revolt failed.
But the idea it carried—that labour had value, that taxation required some semblance of fairness, that the common man had rights—survived.
The Peasants’ Revolt echoed what the barons had done at Runnymede in 1215—confront a king and extract written concessions from him. Tyler’s rebels knew their history. Had they succeeded, those sealed charters would have amounted to a Magna Carta for the poor.
Over the three centuries that followed, the power of English rulers to do as they pleased eroded steadily. By 1689, the Bill of Rights made explicit what three hundred years had been quietly establishing—that rulers governed within limits they did not set themselves.
Wat Tyler hadn’t written that principle. But he had fomented one of its earliest and most violent proofs of concept.
There wouldn’t be another poll tax in England for six hundred years—until Margaret Thatcher introduced one in 1990 and was promptly removed from office.
History, it turns out, has a long memory for bad ideas…
(Trying to) hold power to account: “It’s 1381 and the peasants are revolting.”
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch) in Paddy Chayefsky‘s and Sidney Lumet‘s Network
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As we ponder power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring that most proletariat of dishes, the hot dog. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”*…
… and so we shouldn’t. Ryan Weber (a professor of technical writing who, happily for us, moonlights) is here to help…
More at “‘Descartes Against Humanity’ and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers,” from @mcsweeneys.net.
Unrelated, but important: “Help save Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by signing this petition.”
* George Bernard Shaw (though often mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin)
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As we play, we might spare a thought for a philosopher whose game would likely be “The Game of Life,” Bernard Williams; he died on this date in 2003. As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks.
His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams’s mentors at Oxford University, said that Williams “understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your own sentence.”
Described by Colin McGinn as an “analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist,” he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it “come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life.”
“Science explains how things work, it doesn’t always answer why they exist”*…
Still, it’s cool to know how things work. In a continuing series of “tear-downs,” Bryan Macomber obliges in the most elegant of ways…
Are you curious why a clicky Pen… clicks? How a Zippo Lighter flips open? Or what lives inside a Pez Dispenser?
I’ve illustrated tear-downs and break-downs of everyday products that you may have taken for granted. Let’s take a look inside and understand how they work. Click around, have fun and maybe learn something new!…
An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us: “Mechanical Pencil.”
* (Paraphrase of) Isaac Newton
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As we muse on the mechanical, we might recall that it was on this date (according to most sources, though a few cite the 12th or the 19th of June) in 1902 that Philadelphia restauranteurs Frank Hardart and Joe Horn opened the first Automat in the U.S. A cavernous, waiterless establishment that was a combination of fast (but fresh) food, vending, and a cafeteria. Customers put nickels into slots beside small glass-doored compartments in the Automats and turned a knob. In the compartment next to the slot, food revolved into place for the customer to receive through the glass door.
Horn & Hardart Automats expanded into a chain reaching Manhattan in 1912. With their uniform recipes and centralized commissary system of supplying their restaurants, the Automats were America’s first major fast-food chain.
For more on how they worked, see “Meet Me at the Automat” and the charming documentary “The Automat.”
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