(Roughly) Daily

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.”

* Giuseppe Mazzini

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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.

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