“There is nothing greater on earth than I, the regulating finger of God”—thus the monster bellows.
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The notion that modernization means repeating the Western experience of modernity, and so of converging upon Western institutions and cultural forms, is itself one of the principal illusions of the modern age, subverted by many of the most decisive developments in modern history. At the same time, this deceptive self-image of modernity passes over and leaves unremarked the one sense in which modernization has meant Westernization—namely, the adoption by other cultures of an instrumental perspective on the earth which is ultimately nihilistic.
—John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake
Kant once said that even a band of devils can found a state, “provided that they have only the necessary intelligence.”1 Despite Kant’s legitimate point about the requirement of reason, he can still be corrected on this count, to judge by the empirical evidence in both recent and historical political experience. A state of this minimalistic nature, whether or not led by a misguided or devilish band, can never be modern in the true sense of the word. It cannot be paradigmatic, nor can rationality be its sole prop. The modern, whatever meaning we assign it, is always connotative of complex structures, most notably in the case of the state. Kant’s aforementioned standards at least presuppose that one can speak of the state as the site of political engagement, if not, as Carl Schmitt vehemently insisted, as an analytical category. But even this much is not conceded by some political and sociological theorists who spurn the concept of the state as a useful analytical field.2 I shall side with Brian Nelson and others who do not subscribe to this view and who counter by ascribing ideological motives to its proponents.3 I therefore join the majority of writers who have viewed the state as both an ontologically meaningful and analytically viable entity. The question then is: What constitutes the phenomenon of the modern state?
It has often been noted that the state is different things to different people. A survey of the relevant literature immediately imparts the distinct impression that every original thinker has seen the state in a unique way, ranging from imputing to it an organic ethical impulse (Hegel, Otto Gierke) to founding it on natural law and a state of nature (Hobbes, Schmitt). Marx saw the state as a function of economic domination of one class by another, Kelsen as a primarily legal phenomenon, Schmitt as the embodiment of the political, Gramsci as a hegemonic system, and Foucault and the poststructuralists as significantly pervasive of the cultural. After Schmitt in the 1930s, the Hegelian viewpoint of the ethical has largely dropped out of the scene, but great controversy still rages over the definitional limits and analytical value of the state. Some commentators regard the state as “the central explanatory variable,” it being an actor “with interests of its own which do not necessarily reflect those of society.”4 Others take the position that the state cannot be understood on its own but rather as it stands in a relationship with the social order within “specific socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts.”5 Still others navigate a path in between, often emphasizing one over the other. It would then be no exaggeration to say that there are nearly as many ideas of what the state is as there are prominent scholars writing about it.
A careful reading of the various theories of the state—excluding those of Hegel and the Hegelians—suggests that at the heart of this vast disagreement is little more than perspectivism: each view is occasioned by the fact that it adopts a particular perspective that has been, for one reason or another, privileged over others. The cases of Marx, Weber, Kelsen, Schmitt, and even the Foucauldians—whose vantage point is, relatively speaking, the widest—are all emblematic of this. It is therefore possible to approach the matter synthetically, weaving certain perspectives into a more or less coherent narrative. The Weberian bureaucratic, the Kelsenian legal, the Schmittian political, the Marxian economic, the Gramscian hegemonic, and the Foucauldian cultural can all be brought to bear upon a conception of the state. And we are not obliged to accept the delimitations of any of them. One can, for instance, accept much of Kelsen’s theory of law and constitutional theory but reject his condition that this sphere must remain uncontaminated by ethics, politics, or sociology. From our perspective, Kelsen fits within both a Schmittian theory of the political and a Foucauldian theory of power and culture. For our purposes, perforce also perspectivist, all these and several other theories remain highly useful and will therefore be drawn upon.
Furthermore, our account of the state need be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, although it is important that we not overlook features of the state that are either inherent to it or necessary for our query about the Islamic state. For the absence from our account of any such feature could obviously be detrimental to evaluating the possibility or impossibility of this state. Accordingly, I will distinguish between the form and content of the state, regarding the content as a variable or a set of variables and the form as consisting of fundamental structures or properties that the state has in reality possessed for at least a century and without which it could never be conceived of as a state, being that essential. As noted in the previous chapter, our benchmark is the real, existing, and paradigmatic state, not one that is utopian or futuristic.
In our account, it is content that is changeable or potentially changeable. For example, the state may be dominantly controlled by liberals, socialists, communists, oligarchs, or any such brand, but these, despite their varied influence on the state and its society, cannot (and, more abstractly, do not) change its forms. The form is not only essential to the existence of the state but is also what shapes it into a state.
This distinction requires some justification. The content/form typology must not be allowed to impute to the state an ahistorical character, as if the modern state emerged out of a vacuum—as is often projected in political science. In fact, the contrary is true. The state is as much a historical product as any institution or concept we know, including—as we will see in due course—modern versions of metaphysics. Even more, I shall argue in the next section that this very historical provenance is an integral part of the state’s quiddity and that without it we will never understand it completely or even adequately. A state’s history is the process by which the state, as both an abstract concept and a set of practices, unfolds. And for a body politic to adopt the paradigmatic features of the modern state, it must come to possess the means to penetrate society and culture, to shape them in ways conducive to the formation of the state’s subjects. In other words, for an entity to form itself in the image of a fully realized state, it must presuppose a particular subject/subjectivity, viz., the citizen. The state and its fully realized citizen are possible only by virtue of a historical process, one that is not always integral to many states that we would nowadays call “weak,” “rogue,” or “underdeveloped.”
But that which made the state what it has now become does not necessarily remain integral to its form. It is now well understood and acknowledged by the vast majority of historians that the state has always been, even in its premodern forms, heavily engaged in economic policy planning, economic ventures, capital, and industry (however these last two may be defined).6 Countless historians have argued that the connection between the state and capitalism was at one time organic.7 Yet this particular connection is mutative, as evidenced in the many decades of rule in so-called communist countries, as well as in the various and at times very different economic policies that characterize the economically developed countries (the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Italy are cases in point). Thus, different economic or state-class arrangements can arise within the bounds of the modern state. The point remains that if such a state as the former Soviet Union could diverge so drastically from Euro-American economic organization and its philosophies (on which Euro-American countries in turn differed among themselves), then it would be difficult to argue that a particular economic policy or ideology is a fixed attribute of the state. As David Held has argued, the theory that essentializes the state as the sum of class relations sits in tension with the necessity of seeing the state as a “set of collectivities concerned with the institutionalized organization of political power,” thus failing to separate out these sui generis institutional elements of the modern state and its politics from the variables of class relations.8
What, then, are those features without which a modern state could not and cannot exist and, in the foreseeable run, without which will not likely be able to exist? Before addressing the question in both of its variants, I wish to emphasize, yet again, that the question does not presuppose a fixed concept of the state or a concept of a fixed notion of state, one that is ahistorical and therefore unchangeable. The question—again posed from the perspective of concern about the Islamic state—rather posits a particular trajectory in which the paradigm of state requires certain constitutive features that happened to remain essential for the regular operation and existence of the modern state. This is not to say that a form-property in the present day cannot or will not become a content attribute, a mutative quality, at some point in the future. This is clearly possible, just as the issue of capitalism, essential to the rise of the state, proved to be after the Bolshevik Revolution. The future obviously can admit a wide range of possibilities, all responsive to the progressively rapid changes of and in the modern project. But if we are to speak of what an Islamic state would look like in the present or foreseeable future, we must consider the facts on the ground as they have actually existed for a century or longer. If and when one or more of our form-properties is reduced to a content attribute or eliminated altogether, then someone might reconsider the issue and might want to write another book asking questions of the sort the present book poses.
As things stand today and have stood for a long while—and, importantly, as far as our question about the possibility of an Islamic state is concerned—there are five form-properties possessed by the modern state without which it cannot, at this point in history, be properly conceived. These are: (1) its constitution as a historical experience that is fairly specific and local; (2) its sovereignty and the metaphysics to which it has given rise; (3) its legislative monopoly and the related feature of monopoly over so-called legitimate violence; (4) its bureaucratic machinery; and (5) its cultural-hegemonic engagement in the social order, including its production of the national subject. As we will see, the nation as a political community and political concept, as well as the nation’s education and educational institutions, are integral to this cultural hegemony.
Although these five attributes will be discussed under separate headings, they are substantively, methodologically, and theoretically inseparable from one another; one may issue from, impinge upon, or be the consequent of the other. Frequently, as we will soon see, they all stand in dialectical relationship with the others.
1. The State Is a Specific Historical Product. All things in the world are historical, including, in one important sense, God himself. But this is not quite the sense in which the state is historical, for its historicity is far more concrete than metaphysics requires. The modern state represents a process of becoming, the unfolding of a novel and particular political and politicocultural arrangement that is distinctly European in origin.9 This is to say that no other part of the world produced, on its own, this particular political arrangement. Europe, defined in geographical and human terms, was the near exclusive laboratory in which the state was first created and later developed,10 and Euro-America remains until today the location of the paradigmatic state.11 The mild qualification “near exclusive” is intended to make allowance for a second-order dialectic between the paradigmatic socioeconomic and sociopolitical developments in Europe and those in its colonies, especially during the nineteenth century. For there is no doubt that the colonial powers learned some lessons from their political and legal experiments in colonized lands, particularly the British in their conquest of India.12 But this, as noted, was subsidiary to the paradigmatic transformations that Europe was undergoing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transformations that were occasioned by rapid shifts in its own economies, technologies, societies (in city, town and countryside), political structures, and, indeed, epistemologies.13 Within this last category there must be included not only new forms of governmentality (where the political intermeshed with the sociocultural, producing new forms of subjectivity) but also the massive intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, which has had tremendous influence, within an extensive dialectic, on the state. The Enlightenment, also of European provenance despite its early massive indebtedness to the Islamic sciences,14 not only conduced to the making of the modern state but also, and just as importantly, provided the requisite ideological justification for this new form of political and politicocultural system. To say, therefore, that “the modern Western state is above all the product of historical contingency”15 is not only to offer a sound historiographical description but also to define an essential characteristic of this modern institution.
Partly as a result of ideological legitimation, the state in much of political science discourse appears as an abstraction, as a universal and timeless subject. The trend promoting this timelessness and universality began early in the eighteenth century, when the concept of the state was connected with the theories of progress, rationalism, and civilization.16 It was widely believed throughout Europe that fully civilized human beings lived within the bounds of state systems and that those who did not (and they happened to live outside Europe) belonged to inferior “tribal” societies who “were scarcely human.”17 This belief took various forms, one of which, the Hegelian, went so far as nearly to mythologize the state and attribute to it a pervasive moral fiber,18 an attribution that was rejected as spurious by successive generations of European philosophers and political scientists. Its positivist nature and “purely matter-of-fact realities”19 fully accepted, the state instead came to be associated with a “value-free” scientific method that was presumably based on universally valid laws. The product of this sort of conceptual association was the distorted view that, because the state lends itself to empirical examination and thus to the “scientific” method, it is subject to universal scientific principles that must by definition be as timeless as reason itself.
While this ideological construction of the modern state may readily qualify as a form-property20 and therefore as utterly indispensable for the existence of any enduring state, it remains, like all other form-properties, a byproduct of historical evolution and historical context. And it is precisely here that the apex and backbone of this property comes to the fore. The history of the state is the state, for there is nothing in the state that can escape temporality. It is therefore a historical product of a particular, culture-specific location: Europe, central and Atlantic—not Latin America, not Africa, not Asia. As Carl Schmitt averred, the “state has been possible only in the West.”21 In one important sense, this book is a continuous attempt to tease out the implications of this form-property.
2. Sovereignty and Its Metaphysics. Inasmuch as it is inescapable for the modern state to be a historical contingency and thus of a context-specific provenance, it is also—if we speak of it as we must—a constructed entity; that is, it must consist of something or things, whether these are real or fictional, material or conceptual, mythical or symbolic.22 The concept of sovereignty is one such form-property that remains, despite the changes the state has undergone over the last two centuries or so, one of its hallmarks.23 While all premodern rule was sustained by certain political and ideological structures, the modern state is unique in its impersonal character,24 an abstract concept that lies at the heart of its legitimacy.25 The abstractness of sovereignty therefore requires the evaluation of the state not only as an empirical set of differentiated institutions but also as an ideological structure that both pervades and orders the state’s social matrix.26
Politically and ideologically, sovereignty is constructed around the fictitious concept of will to representation. European in origin (which is to say, specifically European conditions had produced it), the concept of sovereignty is constituted by the idea that the nation embodying the state is the sole author of its own will and destiny.27 For it to come into existence, for it to become ontologically conceivable, the will must presuppose a break from an enslaving agency, a tyranny, or some such dominating evil. The break from tyranny—historically, paradigmatically, and narratively exemplified by the American and French Revolutions28—represents a quintessential requirement without which sovereignty would then have no meaning. To speak of the modern state is thus by necessity to subsume—as if it were a minor premise in a syllogism—the form-property of sovereignty and in turn to include perforce the popular will as the master of one’s own collective destiny. The will, popular and collective, does not presuppose actual and active individual participation29 but claims its collective force precisely because it is a fiction. The concept loses none of its force even when nondemocratic powers come to rule, for even in the absence of traditional democratic practices, any state (read: nation-state) comes to expect its sovereign will to be embodied in the acts and speech of its rulers, even when they happen to be a band of devils. That the elision from democratic will to tyranny and vice versa remains protected by sovereignty is an accurate expression of the historical transitions from absolute monarchies to democratic rule under the trenchant concept of the sovereign state.
Sovereignty has domestic and international dimensions. Internationally, sovereignty means that other states recognize one another’s authority within their respective borders and that each state legitimately represents its nation in its dealings with other states, individually or aggregately. The fiction has proven so successful and powerful that even when everyone knows that a regime is unrepresentative and even oppressive, it is still deemed to speak legitimately on behalf of its citizen/nation. Only a revolution or a fundamental constitutional change in a country can presume to replace an earlier tyranny with a government accepted internationally as the bearer of sovereignty. But although violence makes and breaks the representation of sovereignty, it is insufficient to constitute a state as a legitimate member of the international community. For sovereignty must be literally constituted, legally speaking, through a politicojuridical constitution.30 Otherwise, it will remain nothing more than an act of arbitrary violence.31 Violence, therefore, is the direct route to sovereignty when it is an expression of a juridically constituted popular will.32
This international arrangement, mapped out in principle in the aftermath of the so-called Peace of Westphalia (1648), is structurally connected with the internal, domestic dimension. Within a nation’s borders there is no order higher than that of the state. Its law is the law of the land, so to speak. It cannot be countermanded and cannot, as a law, be appealed to any higher order,33 for it is, after all, the expression of sovereign will. Any such challenge would lack a claim for moral support. As Geoffrey Marshall has argued, in today’s world, “it is held that there is no moral right, generally speaking, to disobey the law.”34 To challenge the law is to challenge that very will, which is to say that for a citizen or a group of citizens to challenge the law of their own state is either a contradiction in logical terms (for that would amount to challenging their own will) or an act of extreme and radical violence representing an alternative popular will, an alternative sovereignty. What is profoundly characteristic of this challenge and its reception in a positivist world of states is that the legitimacy of this challenge depends entirely on the success of violence to displace the previous order,35 for without this step no alternate constitution can ever be possible. Violence and the threat of its use are not only essential to the constitution of sovereignty internationally but also, and more importantly for us, internally. As a pure logic of might, violence is indispensable, and it constitutes a necessary condition for the internal sovereignty of the state as representing and represented by its legal will.
To come into existence, sovereignty needs not only a state but also the general prerequisite of an imagined construct, the nation.36 Being sovereign, the nation-state is thus “the product of no subject’s actions apart from its own self-creation,”37 for it is by virtue of the constructed notion of constitutional violence that it both comes into existence and continues to implement its regular law-based practices. Paul Kahn has aptly argued that the sovereign state is “conceived as the efficient agency of its own construction . . . comparable to the divine Creation ex nihilo” and “capable of having or expressing such an act of will.” In its full implications, sovereignty has in common with monotheism a host of attributes:
First, it is omnipotent: all political forms are open to its choice. Second, it wholly fills time and space: it is equally present at every moment of the nation’s life and in every location within the nation’s borders. Third, we know it only by its product. We do not first become aware of the popular sovereign and then ask what it has accomplished. We know that it must exist, because we perceive the state as an expression of its will. We deduce the fact of the subject from the experience of its created product. Finally, we cannot be aware of this sovereign without experiencing it as a normative claim that presents itself as an assertion of identity. We understand ourselves as a part, and as a product, of this sovereign. In it, we see ourselves.38
Thus, the identification of the self with the sovereign amounts to conceiving and fashioning the subject through the sovereign will, in turn conceived as the source of both the law and the nation, which, as a collectivity, is in turn fashioned in the mirror of the law. The law as reflecting sovereign will, and thus the will that creates the subject and fashions him in its own image, is little more than a replacement and substitution for the Christian conception of will. Like a great many modern concepts, pre-Enlightenment, Christian forms of authority are largely retained with a substituted set of sources that are of equal authoritative force.39 Carl Schmitt cast the matter incisively when he wrote:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systemic structure.40
In due course, we shall address the impossibility of a nation-state as an Islamic order of divine sovereignty, but for now we must briefly note a single characteristic that has been inseparable from the practices and ideology of the nation-state as a representation of sovereignty, namely, the sacrifice of the citizen.41 If the nation-state is conceived as an expression of sovereign will, then the Aristotelian final cause of its existence is nothing more than its perpetual existence. The nation-state exists for its own sake. It is a means to no other end. It is “not an end among others; it is that end for which all others can be sacrificed.”42 Carl Schmitt argued that, as a sovereign being, the state’s “decision has the quality of being something like a religious miracle: it has no reference except the fact that it is.”43 The supremacy of the state as the highest value, which the citizen must always privilege, is not a value outside of, or external to, the citizen. There is nothing in the will of the paradigmatic citizen that is outside the will of the sovereign, since the latter will—as we have seen—subsumes not only individual will but also all other wills. But that is not all: the citizen himself is not above being sacrificed for the highest end. Indeed, the citizen is the archetype and fullest manifestation of sacrifice, because there is nothing more precious than life except the nation-state, the sui generis cause that can legitimately demand and receive that ultimate sacrifice.
To be a citizen therefore means to live under a sovereign will that has its own metaphysics. It is to live with and under yet another god,44 one who can claim the believers’ lives.45 (To anticipate our arguments below, this attribute alone, with its grave implications, would suffice to render the modern state an anathema to any form of Islamic governance.)
3. Legislation, Law, and Violence. It is, then, a truism that sovereign will gives birth to the law. The law constitutes the very expression of that will, it being sovereignty’s most paradigmatic manifestation in the practice of governance. If sovereignty constitutes one of the essences of the state, then the capacity to produce law is another cognate essence, an attribute without which no state can continue to be conceived of as a state. In the next chapter, I will detail the location of law within the modern state system, a location that is of significance to our enquiry into the Islamic state. But the fact that the modern state, as an integrated and integrating system (i.e., integrating branches of government, departments, agencies, administrative and military functions, etc.), by necessity produces law is an attribute that we, in this context, cannot and must not take for granted. As an expression of sovereign will, the state is the godlike Law-giver par excellence. The demonstrative entailment between sovereignty and legal production explains why a state must claim ownership of its law in the sense that what it adopts becomes its own. Sovereign will ceases to be operative should a state formally declare that its law is to be found provided by another country, another state, or another entity. This does not mean that legal transplantation cannot occur (for indeed it does, and extensively at that), but transplantation amounts to appropriation of the law from another country or legal culture through the deliberative choice of sovereign will. By virtue of sovereignty, appropriation becomes an act of naturalization.
Kelsen argued that the state consists of three elements: territory, people, and power.46 If we are to accept his definition, we must interpret power as at least encompassing (1) law as political will and (2) the violence necessary to implement that law both internally and internationally. Seen from a juristic point of view, the state is a particular form of community created by a national legal order, where the community is defined as the regulation under a normative order of mutual behavior of a group of individuals. The state is the juristic person that represents that community both as a sociological and legal entity. To speak of a distinction between the state and its law amounts to isolating an essential attribute of a thing and then speaking of it as being able to stand apart autonomously from that thing. Of strictly logical necessity, the essentialness of the property, being relational, would cease to exist, just as no bodily organ can exist in the world independent of a body of which it is a natural part. Kelsen is right to insist that we have no reason to assume the existence of two different normative orders, one of the state and the other of “its” legal order. We “must admit,” he argued, “that the community we call ‘State’ is ‘its’ legal order”47 and nothing less.48
If the modern state is constituted by sovereign will, and if sovereign will manifests itself through law, then the enforcement of law becomes the realization of that will.49 Will without the coercive instrument to back it up is no power at all: it is, in political terms, nothing. We have seen that the state (now also read: law) is its own end, that it knows, by virtue of its very constitution, only itself and its own metaphysics. The boundaries of violence therefore are set only by the state, and it is its own measure that determines the type and level of violence to be applied against transgressors of its will.50 Put more clearly, the state is the supreme agent in the sanctioning of violence, for even if it were supposed that some divinely ordained punishment should be implemented or adopted, it would be so adopted as a choice of the state, as an expression of its will. Here, it is the state that ratifies divine will, not the other way round. Here, put more explicitly, the state stands as the God of gods. If, as we saw, sovereign will is the new god, then there is no god but the state. Therefore, the exclusive right to exercise violence and to use its threat to implement sovereign legal will is one of the most essential features of the modern state. The emphasis here is not so much on the millennia-old technique of the ruler’s capacity to mete out violence but rather on the unique relationship between violence and the metaphysics of sovereign will.
4. The Rational Bureaucratic Machine. There is perhaps to date no language used by any commentator on the state that has been less controversial, and indeed the locus of general consensus, than the following statement of Weber:
The primary formal characteristics of the modern state are as follows: it possesses an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation, to which the organized activities of the administrative staff, which are also controlled by regulations, are oriented. This system of order claims binding authority, not only over the members of the state, the citizens . . . but also to a very large extent over all action taking place in the area of its jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory organization with territorial basis. Furthermore, today, the use of force is regarded as legitimate only insofar as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by it. . . . The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous operation.51
In Weber’s political sociology, the administrative order, both an integral part and an extension of the legal order, exhibits a characteristically rational type of domination. The central features of this domination are the principles of voluntarism and systematization. Voluntarism is said to be a rationally based and thus deliberately created political organization that precludes it from being determined by tradition or religious decree. This rationality justifies not only reform and alteration of any existing order but even, at least theoretically, its total removal from existence by and through political will. Within the political, therefore, rationalism amounts to the creation and reproduction of contingency and its concomitant attribute: arbitrariness.52
On the other hand, systematization entails not only the calculability of the administrative order as an empirically measurable and measuring entity53 but also—and more important for our purposes—its standardization. In the impersonal structure of bureaucratic rule, all is treated equally, and rationality here is seen in the image of the blind lady of justice. Weber is right to emphasize this aspect and to hold what I think to be a largely correct view that this standardization implies equal treatment not only of the general populace but the members of the state apparatus themselves. But unlike Marx and several others, Weber does not equally nor adequately emphasize the complex relationship between the ruling and dominant elites on the one hand and legal and bureaucratic structures on the other. To state the case minimally, no reasonable/rational argument can be made that this (structural) relationship creates equality between this rational bureaucratic order and the disadvantaged multitudes in the social order. This is why Marx believed that bureaucracy should disappear from the future communist world, since it is, like the state, an “irresponsible” and exploitative institution that subjugates one class by another.54 A premodern Muslim jurist would, though for somewhat different reasons, endorse Marx’s view with enthusiasm.55
The more important point here is that, even for Marx, there shall always exist a dominating bureaucratic structure as long as the state exists, for this structure constitutes its essence.56 On this essentiality of the bureaucratic, Weber and nearly every other theorist agree. The history of the last two centuries has fairly consistently shown that revolutions and regime changes have managed to alter significant features of rule and even social structures, but bureaucracy was never one of these. Indeed, if anything, bureaucracy and administration have not only become consistently paradigmatic components of the state but continue to experience progressive growth in both complexity and pervasiveness, raising, as we will see in the next chapter, profound constitutional questions in any modern state. On the exponential growth of state bureaucracy there is an equally vast agreement among scholars and theorists. To say that it has been and will continue to be—at least in the foreseeable future—“indestructible”57 is merely to state the obvious.
It need not be overemphasized that bureaucratic structures are diverse and multifaceted even within a single state or province. By the nature of their jurisdictions, they even tend to compete. State bureaucracies for immigration and labor are, for obvious reasons, a case in point; so are the educational and military bureaucratic fields. Their competitiveness also manifests itself along the lines of so-called separation of powers, where legislative, judicial, and executive bureaucracies tend, by their very raison d’être, to protect their respective domains. Yet, although they are differentiated, they are simultaneously bound up within a controlling paradigmatic structure, what is often euphemistically called centralization. All bureaucratic divisions, even at the lowest levels, are supervised and controlled by higher unifying administrative units, which in turn tend to accumulate under their jurisdiction various bureaucratic divisions that exhibit the feature of competition, if not turf protection. Put differently, the more bureaucracy expands, the more it falls under unified organizational rules,58 thereby creating a hierarchical structure of administration. If centralization means anything (and certainly it does not mean the center of a periphery of equidistant points) it is a top-down, pyramidal structure. It is the top of the pyramid that rules and administers, and it does so through the bureaucratic technique. Thus, bureaucracy is the tool and instrument of administration, and administration, in the modern state, is the organization of control, governing, governmentality, and violence.
State bureaucracy therefore has a wide range of influence exceeding that of any other political organization (corporations, political parties, NGOs, etc.). State bureaucracy in fact regulates such sub-bureaucratic structures, orders them, and renders them subordinate to its rational imperatives. It also goes further to regulate civil society, from registration of birth to the certification of death—and almost everything in between: schooling, higher education, health, environment, welfare, travel, labor, safety at work, taxes, public hygiene, parks and entertainment, etc. In other words, bureaucracy not only intrudes on the private sphere and civil society, but it also—and importantly for us—orders and sets the standards for the community. We will later see how, as an extension and integral part of the law, bureaucracy fashions and continually refashions the community and the individual subjectivities of which it consists. Bureaucracy therefore breeds its own community, the community of the state.
5. Cultural Hegemony, or the Politicization of the Cultural. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, differences and even opposition between and among theories of state are mostly a function of perspective, which is to say that seemingly different theories are often reconcilable. Accordingly, from our perspective, there is no contradiction, for example, between the Kelsenian and Foucauldian approaches to the state, despite Foucault’s desire to “cut off the king’s head” in political science.59 Cutting off the king’s head did not mean for Foucault abandoning the prerequisite of looking first at the “king’s law” and the changes it induces at the level of state operation, be these empirically verifiable or not. He takes this as self-evident and as a point of departure. Nor did it mean to dismiss the immediate actions of the state insofar as law, bureaucracy, and violence are concerned. I read Foucault, despite the claimed contradictions in his position,60 as saying that it is high time to look beyond, that is, to uncover the implications of not only how the state or each of its organs operates but also (1) how we must demythologize the discursive structure conducing to the ideological justification of the state itself (i.e., deconstructing the object as subject and vice versa) and (2) how the limits of analysis must be stretched to the realm of culture, where state and culture/society dialectically produce each other (“governmentalization”) and where the state’s progressively expanding influence on the cultural order has produced and reproduced particular kinds of subjectivity.61
In one important and here relevant respect, even Kelsen is Foucauldian. But the Kelsenian perspective, being juristic and political in the conventional positivist sense, did not require cutting off the king’s head, for the “king” and his law remained most central to his analysis. Nonetheless, Kelsen would not have disagreed with Foucault on one essential phenomenon, namely, that society is not to be seen as separate or distinct from the state. Any claim that they are so separate, he argued, “can be substantiated only by showing that the individuals belonging to the same state form a unity and this unity is not constituted by the legal order but by an element which has nothing to do with law. However such an element . . . cannot be found.”62
Kelsen, here, would be in even greater agreement with Foucault if he were to bestow on the term “constituted” a performative value.63 If law as a set of discourses is seen as performative in the full sense of the term and not only in the limited sense that court decisions, for instance, are performative, then Foucault’s analysis would necessarily follow from, and upon, Kelsen’s above-stated view. It would and should be seen as integrating Kelsen’s analysis and expanding its range to the subsuming and subsumed realm of the cultural.
We shall address the state/culture dialectic in more detail in the fourth and fifth chapters, but for now the argument must be limited to this dialectic as an essential form-property of the state. For there cannot be a full-fledged and stable state without the presence of this dialectic. One may even say that the internal coherence and strength of any state significantly depends on its ability not only to organize society, which it does by its very constitution, but also to penetrate it culturally.64 If the Islamic state is to be treated as a state, properly so defined, then it must come to acquire the dynamics of this dialectic, for there is no stable and paradigmatic state (e.g., Euro-American states) that can be deemed sustainable without it. If it is true that sovereign will is constitutive of the state,65 then no autonomous authority can be imputed to any unit or entity within the state. This is why the European state destroyed all such internal entities and why many of the “‘third-world’ states today are states in name only. Created as legal fictions by colonizing powers in the last century, they are states attempting to rule essentially segmental societies based on tribal or other local units that are the locus of political loyalty and that strive to function independently of the state.”66 Of course, the destruction of such internal entities is the first concrete step in the state’s “cultural” penetration, as classically exemplified in the rise of the English and French states since the early eighteenth century. Cultural penetration presupposes the destruction (and reconstitution) of traditional prestate sociocultural units, and both are thus successive stages through which sovereign will comes to manifest itself.
Some analysts have rightly capitalized on the distinction between two types of power, one of which involves the capacity of an agent to force another to do or not do something, thereby reducing the relationship to a unilateral form of coercion. The other generates the reception of, and cooperation with, power on the part of the very subject that is subordinated to that power. Thus, under this second type of power, the state’s ability to work through the various units of civil society increases state autonomy by virtue of its success in generating the greatest sum of social and cultural consent. Those analysts who see in this “sharing of power” a negation of the position (expressed by Michael Mann, for one)67 that state power is held over society are themselves subject to the very paradox they create, for they also argue that this sharing of power “increases state autonomy.”68 This sort of analysis “never doubts enough,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase,69 for it thinks the state through the state. As much political science does, it conduces to the legitimization of the state and its ideological apparatus while studying—or claiming to study—the state. This legitimizing scholarly project exemplifies the very issue at hand: that through state schools and an education regulated by state law (which destroys earlier forms), a paradigmatic scholarly elite is created and re-created as a cultural domain responsive to the state’s overall penetration of the social order.70 Arrogating to the social order an agency that stands autonomous from the state denies, indeed contradicts, both the essence and ramifications of sovereign will, i.e., a state political order that knows only itself, its law, its bureaucracy, and its violence. If we accept the historical contingency of the state, as we must,71 then we must also accept its contingent yet ever-present foundation as the locus of sovereign will. To impute an autonomous agency to the cultural domain is not only to deny the material and conceptual effects of this will as destructive of earlier forms but also to sanction its arbitrariness as natural. As Bourdieu has persuasively argued, the cultural domains are “constituted as such by the actions of the state which, by instituting them both in things and in minds, confers upon the cultural arbitrary all the appearances of the natural.”72
The deconstruction of these appearances must also interrogate the fundamental paradox that the autonomy of the cultural entails the fact that the cultural possesses the capacity to sanction its own destruction. If we accept that the state knows only itself, that it is its own end, that it knows no other end,73 and that therefore it is inherently incapable of sanctioning its own destruction, then the implication that the cultural domain sanctions its own destruction would make total nonsense of any claim for the autonomy of the cultural.
Later chapters of this book will further explore the foregoing themes as well as their implications within the structures of the modern state and its society. In conclusion to this chapter, however, I stress two points: the first is that the five form-properties we have discussed are indubitably ones possessed by the state; that is, no paradigmatic state can exist or be sustained without any single one of them. As earlier noted, these attributes have been form-properties, and thus any change in them as form-properties will, by necessity, require not only a reevaluation of the assumptions of our thesis (and therefore the thesis itself) but also nearly all the discourse on the state that has been engaged in from the eighteenth century until the present. This is because the disappearance or deletion of any of these form-properties from the present picture will necessarily change the archaeology, architecture, structure, organization, and overall makeup of the state as we have come to know it. This includes the first attribute, which, by definition, implies and effectively entails all the others. Second, and following from the previous point, is the compelling fact that these form-properties are structurally and organically interrelated, that a change in one will entail a change in the others. That they stand in a mutually dialectical relationship is not only obvious but also essential for the continuing existence of the modern state and its regular operation. One particular dialectic of wide-ranging importance will constitute the focus of the next chapter, this time considered in the light of a comparative Islamic component.