Theories of State

The State is central to our understanding of modern societies and politics. It is a truism to
mention that State plays a crucial role in the functioning of modern society.

Understanding the State

It was around the time of the Enlightenment that major enquiries into the basic nature and
structure of the State began to be made in a systematic manner. The new concerns focussed on
the distinctions between the new, modern State that had come into being and the traditional state
systems. It also focused on the relationship between the State and society.

State can be defined as the centralized, law making, law enforcing, politically sovereign
institution in the society. The state
- Comprises a set of institutions with ultimate control over the means of violence and
coercion within a given territory;
- Monopolizes rule-making within the territory;
- Develops the structures for the implementation of the rules;
- Regulates market within the territory; and
- Ensures the regulation and distribution of essential material goods and services.

During the last three hundred years or so, a whole new set of functions have been added to this.

If we were to divide the entire human history into three phases – preagrarian, agrarian and
industrial – then the State certainly did not exist in the preagrarian phase of human life. Not all
the agrarian societies had a State. Only the large and the more complex ones did.

It was however in the third phase of human society, i.e., under industrialism that the State ceased
to be an option and became an integral and necessary part of human society. Under industrial
condition there is no choice but to have a State. State under modern conditions is no longer an
option but a necessity.

Liberal Conception of the State

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Jean Bodin (1530-96) were amongst the earliest writers to
articulate the new concerns, although it was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1642) nearly a century later
who addresses the question sharply.

Thomas Hobbes offers a brilliant analysis of the State and related issues. He represents a point of
transition, between a commitment to the absolute State and the struggle of liberalism against
tyranny.

liberalism can be explained as that worldview which gives central importance to the idea of
choice, this choice is to be exercised across diverse fields like marriage, education, enterprise,
work and profession and of course political affairs. This ability to choose is what characterizes a
rational and free individual and politics is about the defence of these rights and any interference
whatsoever is to be limited and through the State based on a constitution.
Hobbes in his book ‘Leviathan’ acknowledges clearly the development of a new form of power,
public power characterized by permanence and sovereignty. Hobbes combines within him many
profoundly liberal and at the same time many illiberal arguments.

Thomas Hobbes considers the State to be pre-eminent in social and political life. According to
him it is the State that gives to the individuals the chance to live in a civilized society. The
miserable life in the state of nature is altered by the emergence of the State. Then follows the
creation of a civilized society. Thus it is the State that in Hobbes’ conception constructs society
and establishes its form and codifies its forces.

Moreover the self-seeking nature of individuals leads to anarchy and violence and hence State
has to be powerful and strident enough to resist this and maintain order, for order is a value that
Hobbes cherishes greatly.

Hobbes’ political conclusions emphasizing on an all powerful State does make him profoundly
illiberal, and this tension in his writings between the emphatic claims on individuality on the one
hand, and the need for an all powerful State on the other hand make his arguments very exciting.

Locke is not prepared to accept the idea of an absolute sovereign, and this is a major point of
departure from where he then establishes his theory of the State. For Locke the State exists as an
instrument to protect the life, liberty and estate of the citizens. It was his idea that the State
should be for the protection of the rights of the citizens which made the transformation of
liberalism into liberal democracy possible.

Taking off from Locke’s ideas that there must be limits upon legally sanctioned political power,
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and James Mill (1773-1836) developed a systematic account of
the liberal democratic State. In their account the State was to be like an umpire while individuals
went about their business as per the rules of the free market, and periodic elections determined
who would be in power.
This argument was clearly advocating a limited State on the grounds that the scope and power of
the State should be limited in order to ensure that the collective good be realized through
individuals freely competing and pursuing utility without State interference.

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) is perhaps one of the first and strongest advocates of democracy as an
end in itself who saw its primary purpose as the highest and harmonious development of the
individual. John Stuart Mill was deeply committed to the idea of individual liberty, moral
development and the rights of minorities. Mill proposed a representative democracy.

Standing apart from the liberal and democratic tradition is Rousseau (1712-1778) who might be
described a champion of the ‘direct’ or ‘participatory’ model of democracy. State would be thus
a result of a contract that human beings create to establish possibilities of self-regulation and self-
government.
The Marxist Perspective
Marx contends that the State has to be seen as a dynamic institution circumscribed by social
forces and always changing. Thus the key to understanding the relations between people is the
class structure.

Marx and Engels challenged the idea that the State can be neutral and represent the community
or the public interests as though classes did not exist. When the liberals claim that the State acts
neutrally it is according to Marx protecting a system of individual rights and defending the
regime of private property, thus its actions produce results that are far from neutral. Marx is of
the opinion that the dichotomy between the private and the public which characterizes the
modern State is itself dubious for it depoliticizes the most important source of power in modern
societies i.e. private property. That which creates a fundamental and crucial divide in society is
presented as an outcome of free private contracts and not a matter for the State.

Thus, according to this view, the State appears to have a certain degree of power independent of
class forces, thus it is described as being relatively autonomous. The other view that we find
often represented in Marx’s writings is that the State’s role is to coordinate a divided society in
the interests of the ruling class, thus it sees the State as merely a ‘superstructure’ serving the
interests of the dominant class.

Welfare State

The emergence of the case for the welfare State began with the argument that instead of public
welfare being the cause of dependence, loss of autonomy and capacity for individual
responsibility for action and the market the source of independence and freedom, the opposite
was the case.
People were seen as being held together by social bonds that were not merely contractual and
hence they could make claims on one another as citizens engaged in a common enterprise. This
made the welfare State appear less like a charity and more like a form of entitlement.

T. H. Green (1836-82) was one of the first and strongest advocates of the kind of the welfare
State that Europe became familiar with. The theory of modern welfare State stems out of an
enquiry into the alleged inadequacies of the individualistic market order rather than from a
socialist or Marxist theory.

The latter theories would not argue for a welfare State without the backdrop of socialism. In fact
Marxists are deeply critical of the welfare State institutions since they are merely set upon
existing capitalist structures.

Libertarian- Minimal State

Robert Nozick has in his work ‘Anarchy, State and Utopia’ (1974) expressed his deep
reservations regarding a State that is allowed to intervene and in fact to the whole quest for
equality. Nozick is of the view that it is only the minimal State that can be morally justified,
being limited by rights bearing individuals. Nozick challenged.
He argues that a State that does anything more than provide services will necessarily violate
people’s rights and so cannot be morally legitimate. He argues primarily against the view that a
major function of the State is to achieve distributive justice on the basis of some conception of
the right pattern of distribution. Nozick therefore argues that a State which is more extensive
than the minimal State is bound to be non-neutral by increasing the scope for manipulations. The
position that Nozick took led him to become one of most invoked philosophers of the New
Right, who were arguing through the 1980s for the rolling out of the State from the society.

DEMOGRAPHY

From the middle of the eighteenth century Western Europe witnessed a historically
unprecedented decrease in mortality, followed by a period of rising fertility and then a secular
decline in fertility. It was roughly while the western world was in the process of this momentous
transformation that population became a subject of intense debate.

Population has frequently been invoked to explain a variety of social processes population
growth as a check on economic growth, as a stimulant of economic growth, as a cause for
poverty, as an outcome of poverty and so on.

Theories of Demographic Change

Malthusian Theory of Demographic Change

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) is popularly considered to be the founding
father of modern demography. His 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population still
provides the main theoretical frame for modern demographic research.

Malthus’ main contribution was to enunciate a homeostatic, cyclical view of population

movements. The high level of human fecundity made it possible for fertility to outstrip food
production bringing about starvation and enhanced mortality in its wake. This crisis ensured the
return of equilibrium and the beginning of a new cycle. This vicious cycle was usually prevented
by the operation of preventive and positive checks.

The “preventive” check in the form of postponed or averted marriages in the “civilized”
European part of the world usually allowed these regions to escape crisis. The other route to
equilibrium, usually found outside Christian Europe was the so-called “positive” check that took
the form of war, disease, sterility from sexually transmitted diseases, polygamy and vices
including infanticide, abortion and contraception.

Though this was the main demographic content of the original Malthusian model, it also
contained a very significant element of ruling class anxiety about the debilitating influence that
the rapidly proliferating poor would have on society. The general Malthusian model of
homeostatic population-economy equilibrium through the operation of preventive and positive
was to have universal applicability. But it was the class component of the model that made it
politically significant.

Malthus was the first to clearly and comprehensively enunciate the fears and anxieties of English
intelligentsia of social revolution and assert a civilizational gap between the peoples of the
metropolis and the colonies in clearly demographic terms. Further, in the middle of the
nineteenth century it carefully saw contraception as vile and clearly accepted a divine design.

Being written in the most general terms, Malthusian concepts could be used to understand
demographic phenomena in widely different contexts- from Poor Laws in England, to population
growth in the New World and to famines in India.

Demographic Transition Theory

In the post War period, demography was taken very seriously by government policy makers. In
France the INED was created to collect data and analyse population trends. In Germany,
however, after the terrible excesses of the Nazis, the state decided to remain neutral in matters of
population and family. Early American demographic anxieties concerned immigration and
immigrants.

The so-called transition theory that has had such an enduring hold over generations of
demographers was first presented in 1929 by Warren S.Thompson, one of America’s leading
demographers. However, this prototype failed to recruit many followers. Towards the end of the
Second World War in 1944, the “demographic transition theory” was published separately by
Frank W. Notestein and Kingsley Davis to become the guiding “theory” of demographic change.

Transition theory was invested with applicability independent of place and time. Unlike its
subsequent reincarnation in the 1950s, the transition theory of 1944 vintage clearly saw
demographic change as a dependent variable with social, economic and cultural developments as
the main explanatory factors. The context was clearly held to be significant. Demographic
change was seen to be a cumulative result of social and cultural and institutional change.

The dissemination of contraceptive techniques was recognised as important in controlling

fertility. However, its effectiveness was always dependant on “the social setting; hence new
patterns of behaviour are to be established principally by the alteration of that setting.”

Marx’s Understanding of Demographic Change( check text)

Ecology
- The Industrial Revolution changed the lives of people in Europe in a most dramatic way.
It brought them from the countryside to the city in search of jobs; it changed their life
patterns, created new tastes and recreations. Most significantly, it saw the organization of
production of goods on a scale never known before. Factories required fuel and raw
material.
 - As new industrial townships came up there was a huge demand for construction material
like bricks, in the manufacture of which large quantities of wood were required. There
was also a growing need for food grain to feed the growing urban population.
- How it impacted on nature? The most noticeable change was the conversion of wooded
or forest lands to cultivable tracts. Millions of hectares of land were brought under
cultivation.
- New industrial cities brought unhealthy living and pollution in its wake.
- When the settlers came to the New World, (North and South America), Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa and other lesser-known parts of the world, they brought with them
the plants and animals they were familiar with. These plants and animals formed an
important part of their diet.
- But soon the species multiplied so rapidly that it became a menace, competing with
human beings for the land and its resources. The new animals also needed certain kinds
of fodders and grasses for their sustenance. These grasses were often imported from the
home countries and would spread like wild fire. Existing grasses and weeds were wiped
out as a result.
- It wiped out the other indigenous plants in the region.
- So there were two types of ecological changes: the intended and the unintended. Both had
very far-reaching consequences and usually upset the ecological balance of the regions
where they appeared.
- Diseases like smallpox, measles, typhus and influenza were of common occurrence in
Europe in any case and they only found a more congenial environment in the new areas
that the Europeans travelled to.
- The European conquerors also weakened the native population by appropriating their
food reserves. Since most of these areas had a subsistence economy, i.e. the people
produced just enough to meet their own immediate food requirements, their precarious
nutritional balance broke down. They now became more susceptible to illnesses and
subsequent death.
- There is no doubt that major ecological changes were being triggered off in the areas
occupied by the imperialists. Even if they were unintended, they suited imperial interests.
The wiping out of indigenous plant and animal species and the killing off of native
populations all fitted into a pattern and rendered easier the tasks of accommodating the
surplus population of Europe and of creating a subsistence base for them.

Since most of the colonies had been acquired to fulfil the needs of industrialization, especially
the growing demand for raw materials, the ecosystems of these areas were bound to be affected.

Coal Mining

- During the period of the industrial revolution coal was the major source of energy. As the
industrial revolution gathered momentum, the demand for coal went up dramatically.
- There were parts of Europe, which were rich in coal like Poland and southern Russia, and
mining was carried out here. But another major source of coal was the Appalachian
mountains of the United States.
- The method of strip mining was used to extract coal. Vegetation was obviously removed
to enable the mining to take place and once that happened, there were major landslides.
 - These landslides destroyed neighbouring farmlands and even roads. River systems were
also affected as sedimentation increased and the flowing capacity of streams and rivers
was reduced.
- Sulphuric wastes were generated and these entered the water system.
- The burning of coal releases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which seriously affects
the ozone layer.
- Most colonial states derived a large amount of their revenue from agriculture. Hence it
was in the State’s interests to expand the area of cultivation. For this it was necessary to
clear forestlands.

Thus we can say that though the importance of the forest was realized it was still regarded as an
exploitable resource, to be modified and distorted to serve the interests of the “nation”.

Modern Warfare
Intro

Karl Von Clausewitz was a Prussian military officer who proved to be a philosopher in his own
right. His philosophical treatise titled Vom Kriege (On War) was published in 1832 by his widow
Maria Von Clausewitz. Clausewitz’s analysis of warfare turned out to be one of the best if not
the best ever produced in history.

- For Clausewitz, war is organized violence unleashed by the state.

- He divided war into Limited War and Real or Absolute War.
- For him, eighteenth century European warfare as practiced by Louis XIV and Frederick
the Great represented Limited War.
- Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he admiringly called the ‘God of War’, tried to break out of
the paradigm of Limited Warfare. For Clausewitz, Napoleonic Warfare exhibited seeds of
Absolute War that would reach fruition in near future (absolute wars of 1914-18 and
1939-45).
- Modern War is the stage between Limited War of the eighteenth century and Total War
of the twentieth century.
- Limited War is also referred to as Dynastic War because the various monarchies fought
against each other for making limited gains along the frontiers at the expense of other
dynasties.
- Absolute War in Clausewitz’s paradigm means war untrammeled by any obstruction. The
objective is to unleash organized violence wholeheartedly for absolute destruction of the
enemy. This in turn required mobilization of all available resources of the state for total
defeat of the enemy. The aim in such conflict is to annihilate the enemy’s schwerpunkt
(centre of gravity).
- The French Revolution ushered in the idea of destruction of the enemy’s government.
Hence, the beginning of French Revolution i.e. 1789 could be taken as the beginning of
Modern War.
- This process reached its logical culmination under Adolf Hitler’s der totale krieg (Total
War) when the objective was complete destruction of enemy’s society by wholesale
mobilization of the volk (common people).
Mobilizing Military Manpower

- Increasing size of the armies was a characteristic of Modern War.

- Since the objectives of Dynastic Warfare were limited, small armies were adequate. the
core of the armies was composed of nobility who constituted the officer corps and their
armed retainers functioning as soldiers. During emergencies extra men were hired as
mercenaries.
- However, the French Revolution changed the ‘face of war’.
- Modernization of organized violence resulted in the rise in scope, intensity and lethality
of warfare. Dynastic conflicts occurred within a confined geographical space. But, under
Napoleon, thanks to greater number of soldiers available, war acquired a continental
character.
- The theatre of Napoleonic warfare embraced whole Europe. Thus, in terms of
geographical spread, Napoleonic Warfare was the prelude to Total War of 1939-45 which
occurred on a truly global scale.
- Increasing sizes of the armies and their deployment on a continental scale also resulted in
the battles becoming more bloody and lengthier.
- Battles in the age of Limited War lasted for a maximum of about twelve hours.
- Combat in case of Dynastic War stopped during night and campaigning ceased during
winter. But, under Napoleon, fighting continued throughout the year.
- The point to be noted is that the strength of the army deployed for a single battle during
the age of Modern War was bigger than the total size of the army maintained by a
country during the age of Limited War. One consequence of the rising size of the armies
was increasing casualties.
- Ironically, militarization of the society also accelerated democratization. Frederick the
Great of Prussia even conscripted enemy prisoners for meeting manpower shortage in the
army.
- National identities, however, became rigid in the nineteenth century, during the course of
the Modern Wars.
- Mass mobilization also opened the gates to talents. Modern War witnessed the
replacement of the landed gentry with the educated middle class in the officer cadre.
- Waging Modern War required increasing technical knowledge.

Technology and War

- One aspect of modernization of war was also industrialization of war.

- A dialectical relationship existed between the growth of modern war and industrialization
of West Europe.
- Modern warfare in a way meant more killing in a shorter time.
- The 19th century witnessed continuous improvement in weapons of mass murder.
- The rifle first emerged among the huntsmen of Rhineland.
- Steel cannons became common with the advent of Bessemer process.
- Mass production of steel weapons required a huge industrial infrastructure. Military
prowess became dependent on economic muscle.
 - The state took up the responsibility of clothing, feeding and arming the citizens. This was
the beginning of Hobbes’ Leviathan.
- Generalfeldmarschal Helmuth Von Moltke of Prussia, the winner of Austro-Prussian and
Franco-Prussian Wars introduced the General Staff system.
- It was a step in the emergence of the centralizing polities.
- Railways were especially required for deployment of mass armies quickly and cheaply.

Modern warfare in the colonies

Some techniques of Modern Warfare were imported in the non-European World by the
colonizing powers. The indigenous polities when faced with modern military techniques of the
colonial powers were forced to transform their own states and societies.

Besides the maintenance of a permanent army, another characteristic of Modern Warfare was
rising cost of warfare. Thus, the Sepoy Army constituted the biggest government employer in
colonial India. In independent India, railways have overtaken the army as the biggest
government employer.

TOTAL WAR

The thirty-one years of conflict that began on 28 July 1914 and ended on 14 August 1945 is
increasingly being seen by historians as the marker of a new phase in the history of conflict. The
noted Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm calls this phase the age of total war.
- There were indeed, two distinct conflagrations, the first ending in November 1918 and
known to Europeans of that generation as the Great War, the second starting in
September 1939 and ending in 1945, known as the Second World War.
- The interregnum, however, was marked by tremendous domestic conflicts in the
European nations, the Great Depression, the emergence of Fascism and Nazism, and
regional wars.
- These latter included the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931),
the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935),
the Spanish Civil War (1936-39),
and the German invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938-39.

The close linkages between domestic and international conflict during this 31-year period make
it appear as one seamless global crisis, with characteristics deriving from the impact of
competition between the great powers, capitalist industrialization and the thwarted growth of
popular democratic aspirations.

Concept of Total War

Warfare till the end of the 19th century was still conducted between professional armies, and was
relatively brief.