Political Power and Social Theory (review)

This year's annual review of political power and social theory highlights three concerns. The first section focuses on postauthoritarian Latin America, calling for the disaggregation of the concept of the state. The second addresses colonialism and postcolonialism, arguing for attention to culture and discourse, and the third concerns race and class in the U.S. While the essays as a whole are strong, a long essay by George Steinmetz stands out as meriting wider attention.

In part 1, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Jeffrey Rubin argue that one must break down the concept of the state as a unitary actor to understand the impact of cultural systems upon states and the difference between the center and its local and regional components. Baiocchi compares local governments in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where one regime elected during the transition to democracy by the forces of civil society (trade unions and social movements) led to its subsequent demobilization, but a successive regime encouraged greater civic activity. He highlights the latter local government's sponsorship of greater involvement in the municipal "participatory budget" and a subsequent increase in neighborhood associations in poorer areas.

Rubin seeks to apply "post-structuralist insights to analysis of states by conceptualizing the state as a culturally and historically situated 'subject.'" He develops these arguments by attention to the breakdown of the authoritarian state in Mexico in the 1980s, calling for a shift to sub-national analysis to highlight how states are produced and how they change. The last essay in this section by Patrick Barrett analyzes the continuity of harmonious relations between the Chilean economic elite and the Augusto Pinochet regime as well as the post-authoriarian ruling center-left party. While I agreed with the authors in this section that there are significant differences between different levels of the state, the essays did not seem to consider the impact of the political transformations in the states they were analyzing and the limitations of comparisons of single countries at different times. Subsequent regimes are influenced by their predecessors, and as post-authoritarian regimes consolidate and take root over time, state-society relations are frequently influenced by the policy learning that informs successive governments.

George Steinmetz, who has also edited a volume on the state and culture, offers the sharpest contribution in part 2. He analyzes German native policy towards five colonized peoples in three countries and observes the limits of theories based on political and economic interests, as well as on features of the colonized. Steinmetz calls for attention to the representations of cultures by German officials and the struggles among those officials to implement a particular preferred approach to native policy. In this way, Steinmetz offers a multifaceted analysis of power with the multivocal nature of culture. He is further interested in what he calls the psychic side of native policy that explains the apparently irrational nature of much colonial policy, all of which makes for a complex analysis. But he balances clear case summaries with extended analysis, grounded by focusing on variation in policy. His approach is strengthened by his framing the article by addressing the limits of previous approaches in explaining variation, rather than simply rejecting them or calling for a general integration of culture and the state. The range of scholarship marshaled across a wide range of cases is impressive, demonstrating both the potential and the demands of this approach.

Karin Rosemblatt concludes part 2 with an analysis of the construction of the Chilean nation that highlights the influence of Spanish colonial discourses of family and sexuality. She analyzes political discourse arguing that Chileans should maintain patriarchal families, with women demonstrating sexual propriety and domestic virtue.

Part 3 contains a debate on the work of Adolph Reed Jr., who argues that race and class have been misunderstood in the U.S. because they have been analyzed as distinct phenomena. Instead he argues they should be seen as "equivalent and overlapping elements within a singular system of social power and stratification rooted in capitalist labor relations." He...