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    The Evolution of Modern States

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    Tharindu Dissanayake
    Sven Steinmo's book The Evolution of Modern States compares the welfare state structures of Sweden, Japan, and the United States and how they have evolved in response to globalization pressures. It analyzes each country as an adaptive system, with institutions playing a key role in generating variations to react to challenges. Steinmo argues that different societies organize taxation and welfare in different ways aligned with their internal evolution. He concludes that the US excels at innovation, Sweden at selecting variations, and Japan at reproduction but less at generating variation. Overall, the book provides useful insights into how states have remained robust centers of societal direction despite globalization.

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    The Evolution of Modern States

    Uploaded by

    Tharindu Dissanayake
    52 views3 pages
    Sven Steinmo's book The Evolution of Modern States compares the welfare state structures of Sweden, Japan, and the United States and how they have evolved in response to globalization pressures. It analyzes each country as an adaptive system, with institutions playing a key role in generating variations to react to challenges. Steinmo argues that different societies organize taxation and welfare in different ways aligned with their internal evolution. He concludes that the US excels at innovation, Sweden at selecting variations, and Japan at reproduction but less at generating variation. Overall, the book provides useful insights into how states have remained robust centers of societal direction despite globalization.

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    Sven Steinmo's book The Evolution of Modern States compares the welfare state structures of Sweden, Japan, and the United States and how they have evolved in response to globalization pressures. It analyzes each country as an adaptive system, with institutions playing a key role in generating variations to react to challenges. Steinmo argues that different societies organize taxation and welfare in different ways aligned with their internal evolution. He concludes that the US excels at innovation, Sweden at selecting variations, and Japan at reproduction but less at generating variation. Overall, the book provides useful insights into how states have remained robust centers of societal direction despite globalization.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    52 views3 pages

    The Evolution of Modern States

    Uploaded by

    Tharindu Dissanayake
    Sven Steinmo's book The Evolution of Modern States compares the welfare state structures of Sweden, Japan, and the United States and how they have evolved in response to globalization pressures. It analyzes each country as an adaptive system, with institutions playing a key role in generating variations to react to challenges. Steinmo argues that different societies organize taxation and welfare in different ways aligned with their internal evolution. He concludes that the US excels at innovation, Sweden at selecting variations, and Japan at reproduction but less at generating variation. Overall, the book provides useful insights into how states have remained robust centers of societal direction despite globalization.

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    of 3

    International Studies Review (2012) 14, 463–465

    The Evolution of Modern States

    Review by Chris Thornhill


    Politics Department, University of Glasgow

    The Evolution of Modern States. Sweden, Japan, and the United States. By Sven Steinmo.

    Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/14/3/463/1793439 by guest on 28 October 2021


    Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264 pp., $28.30 (ISBN 978-0-521-
    19670-3 (hb); 978-0-521-14546-6).

    Evolutionary theory currently occupies a somewhat marginal yet also discretely


    influential methodological position in the social sciences, and it often crosses
    the divides between sociology, political science, and even law. The book under
    review here, The Evolution of Modern States. Sweden, Japan, and the United States,
    utilizes evolutionary theory to assess the implications of the bundle of processes
    classified together as globalization for the welfare-state structures of advanced
    democracies, and it compares ways in which different institutional systems gener-
    ate different (variably successfully) reactions to these processes. Globalization is
    construed as an aggregate of objective circumstances posing risks both for the
    domestic cohesion and the international competitiveness of particular societies
    (or particular political economies), exemplified here by Sweden, Japan, and the
    USA.
    The specific evolutionary dimension of this inquiry resides, first, in the fact
    that the book analyzes institutions in different societies as expressions of selective
    variation, which facilitate societal reactions to broader problematic constellations.
    Indeed, the book perceives ‘‘human agency’’ itself, defined as the volitional sub-
    strate of different institutions, as a complex aggregate of ‘‘intentional variation’’
    (220), which makes it possible for a society incrementally to adapt to systemic
    pressures. Underlying this approach is a systemic-evolutionary sociology of politi-
    cal institutions. This approach accords a ‘‘structuring’’ role to institutions (xvii),
    which are defined as mechanisms for reproducing and consolidating variations
    that have obtained demonstrable adaptive success. Institutions are ‘‘systems of
    rules,’’ akin to biological rules governing cell behavior, and human agency gen-
    erates mutations within these rules (220). The image of societal order emerging
    from this analysis is based in an interplay between institutional structure and var-
    iational agency: These elements of society act together to stimulate the adaptive
    and co-evolutionary interaction between different parts of the societal whole. Sec-
    ond, the evolutionary focus of the book resides in the claim that each human
    society as a whole forms a system, integrating the parallel evolutionary trajecto-
    ries of a number of (sub-)systems. Indeed, Steinmo argues that all territorially
    delineated societies or countries represent ‘‘quite different systems,’’ in which
    problems of institutional balance, cohesion, and adaptivity are posed and
    resolved from different preconditions (206). This is an interesting and rather dis-
    tinctive argument, and it contains a rather unusual use of evolutionary theory.
    The equation of a national society with a sui generis system has been increasingly
    abandoned in more contemporary evolutionary theory in favor of a conception
    of transnational or world society in its entirety as a social system. In this respect,
    Steinmo’s analysis appears to look back to earlier models of systemic functional-
    ism—that is, to those of a Parsonian orientation—which were widespread in the

    Thornhill, Chris. (2012) The Evolution of Modern States. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2012.01138.x
     2012 International Studies Association
    464 The Evolution of Modern States

    era of late nationalism. Nonetheless, this approach has clear merits, and it allows
    the author to articulate the diverse and cultural-specific constitutional conjunc-
    tures of the societies examined.
    The substance of the book can be divided into two parts. On the one hand,
    the book contains the methodological claim that we need to see societies as
    more or less successful adaptive systems, in which institutions play a leading role.
    It adds to this point the claim that market-based systems ‘‘have come to domi-
    nate the modern world precisely because they have more mechanisms for gener-
    ating variation’’ and for ‘‘reproducing successful variations than any other
    systems of economic organization’’ (227). An element of latitude is always apparent
    here in the definition of a system: If a country is a system, how can this also be

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    the case for an economy?
    On the other hand, the book contains the more substantive claim that we
    need to perceive the correlation between fiscal strategies, welfare arrangements,
    and the social values supporting policies of redistribution as a key element in
    the adaptive structure of a society. This correlation is vital, internally, for demo-
    graphic stability and for the structurally sensitive consolidation of societies (sys-
    tems). It is also vital, externally, for cementing the position or niche of one
    society (system) within an international political economy, marked by an implicit
    transnational division of labor. These starting positions lead Steinmo to the con-
    clusions that (i) contemporary society is not driven by a unilinear rush to the
    bottom with respect to revenue extraction and welfare provision (206), and
    (ii) the pressures of globalization have not uniformly acted to ‘‘undermine the
    welfare state’’ (3). On the contrary, he claims that different societies organize
    taxation and welfare in different ways, as articulations of their wider adaptive
    national and internal evolution, and the functions of states in channeling fiscal
    resources play a vital role in creating variations to sustain a societal system in its
    internal and in its external dimensions.
    From this position, then, Steinmo concludes that some societies are marked by
    a higher level of adaptive success than others. The USA is good at generating
    ‘‘innovation and variation.’’ Sweden is ‘‘accomplished at selecting successful vari-
    ations.’’ Japan is ‘‘proficient in reproduction’’ but less effective in ‘‘generating
    variation’’ (228). Overall, the observation that taxation is a central institutional
    fulcrum in the adaptive structure of a society is of great importance, and, despite
    taxonomic inconsistencies alluded to above, it is adequately substantiated by the
    evolutionary frame of reference. The ability to extract and allocate taxation in
    relatively consensual and efficient fashion is presented as a highly probable fea-
    ture of an effectively adaptive political ⁄ economic system and so of an effectively
    adaptive society. Likewise, the claim for the continuing robustness of state insti-
    tutions as centers of macro-sociological direction is of great importance. The
    association between strong state institutions, flexibly adaptive economies, and
    effective fiscal extraction makes an important implicit claim about the functional
    continuity between states in their current form and states in their original
    consolidation in early modern Europe.
    Alongside these overlying propositions, the book generates a series of insights
    that are somewhat incidental to the broad analytical thread, but also deserve
    affirmative mention. Central to Sweden’s success, Steinmo suggests in illuminat-
    ing fashion, is the formation, dated to the 1930s, of a relatively ‘‘symbiotic rela-
    tionship’’ between capital and labor (87). This, in the setting of a small and
    traditionally homogenous society, has tended to produce legitimacy and selective
    authority for a ‘‘powerful and confident state’’ (87). The comparison of Japanese
    and US-American welfare systems is also useful, and the author, repeating an
    increasingly common theme, queries the perception that American political
    economy is based in weak provision for social welfare (152). The extent of public
    programs for materially disadvantaged social sectors in the USA is shown as
    Chris Thornhill 465

    substantially exceeding that in Japan (104), which since 1945 has had the ‘‘small-
    est tax burden of any rich country’’ and generates support structures through
    private regulatory facilities (106). All this is very helpful and gives weight to the
    more general arguments.
    Overall, the book is recommendable. It is not always clear whether the evolu-
    tionary method is necessary to make the arguments. The legal dimension of state
    institutions is also played down, and it only comes into focus in the case of Swe-
    den (221). Moreover, strict proponents of systems analysis will query the breadth
    of meaning ascribed to the word ‘‘system.’’ However, the book contains impor-
    tant explicit claims about fiscal extraction and welfare policies and important
    implicit claims about the persistence of state structures (and the adaptive

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    grounds for their persistence) in globalized societies.

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