请将“PREFACE

I occasionally think back to my first year of graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, when in 1977 the Marxist theory of the state was all the rage among radical scholars. The Poulantzas-Miliband debate had just reached its dénouement with Nicos Poulantzas’ (1976) final dismissive reply to Ralph Miliband in the New Left Review. At the same time, Kapitalistate collectives were springing up on campuses all over the United States and everyone was required to take sides in the debate between Poulantzas and Miliband.

I had entered graduate school under the influence of G. William Domhoff’s, Who Rules America? (1967) and Charles A. Beard’s, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Consequently, I was immediately drawn to Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969), once I had the opportunity to actually read it, but fellow graduate students immediately dismissed my “naive instrumentalism.” I decided not to join the recently formed (and short-lived) UCLA Kapitalistate collective. Nevertheless, I eventually succumbed to the elegant temptations of Poulantzasian structuralism, while not realizing at the time that my reading of Poulantzas was not quite the same as that of my colleagues, because I came to him backward by reading his last books first and this gave me a distinctively non-Althusserian perspective on structuralist state theory.

Structuralism and instrumentalism sat comfortably side by side in my mind as I first ventured into the topic with my dissertation, which was later published as Universities and the Capitalist State (1990). In that book, I employed both a structural and an instrumental analysis, and even combined those theoretical approaches with the new institutional approach to analyze the historical origins of what we now call the corporatization of the modern university. I did not pursue this research strategy because of a preconceived philosophical commitment to theoretical synthesis, but because I found that as a practical matter none of these approaches alone was sufficient to provide an adequate understanding of a state policy that consciously linked together thousands of individual colleges and universities into an integrated “higher education system” that would be responsive to the economic demands of leading corporations and to the political and ideological goals of the state.

In fact, after taking two graduate seminars on structural Marxism, I initially made a vigorous effort to write a history without agents and to develop a structural account of the capitalist university as an ideological state apparatus (ISA). However, I found that once the structural (i.e., political economy) context of the university had been defined (empirically by the way), it was not possible to move the analysis forward except by venturing into the actual historical and institutional development of the modern university and its relationship to actually existing corporations and the U.S. imperial state. This required an account of actually existing universities, professional associations, foundations, government bureaucracies, and judicial decisions and while I used structural concepts to theorize these developments, the actual development of the modern university required that I examine elite decision-making, resource allocations, and even real class struggles (such as intellectuals were able to muster it).

The book was reviewed extensively in education, political science, sociology, and history journals. Structuralists thought I was a structuralist, because I used the term “ideological state apparatus” to conceptualize the corporatization of universities in the United States. Instrumentalists embraced me as one of the last of their kind, especially when I used the term “corporate liberalism” in the subtitle of the book, but I had also ventured into the new institutionalism and even delved into a bit of systems analysis with the caveat that the “university system” and its “systematization” were conceived as a historical project of the U.S. capitalist class and not as an abstract analytical method.

I was actually embarrassed by this apparent jumble of structural, instrumental, new institutional, and systems theory, so I set out to clarify the various approaches to state theory in Critical Theories of the State (1993), which appeared just as scholarly interest in state theory was waning in the United States and Europe. In Critical Theories of the State, I argued that Marxian state theory had splintered into a matrix of artificially constructed antinomies anchored in competing methodological commitments that fundamentally had nothing per se to do with Marxism. This process of fragmentation had begun with the Poulantzas-Miliband debate.

As I developed this thesis further through a series of articles, I suggested that Marx’s classical texts had generated Gestalt-like interpretations of the same corpus, where one person’s focus on a particular text or passage leads them to see something totally different in Marx than another person, even though both are looking at the “same” textual image. My (1993, 156) conclusion was that the conceptual apparatus available to the Marxian paradigm and the methodological approaches to which that paradigm was wedded made it “highly unlikely that there could be any further theoretical discoveries of a revolutionary nature … because the conceptual and methodological antinomies of Marxism establish a bounded matrix of plural, but finite, theoretical options.” In other words, there was no such thing as the Marxist theory of the state, but we could nevertheless develop theoretically informed analyses of actually existing states.

I thought I was done with state theory after Critical Theories of the State, and indeed it seemed as if state theory itself was done by the early 1990s, when most scholars among the original generation of critical state theorists moved on to other topics and even shifted toward other emerging paradigms, such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and globalization theory. Nevertheless, I was encouraged over the years by the large number of graduate students who approached me at conferences to tell me that Critical Theories of the State had been their first introduction to state theory and they appreciated the fact that one could read the book and understand it. Consequently, I have long contemplated a follow-up to Critical Theories of the State that would reassess state theory in the context of globalization, while incorporating the most salient insights of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. However, as I began to work on that book, I could not escape the idea that some final housework on the last generation of state theory was still warranted so that I might learn from the mistakes that could now be avoided and because the basic conceptual apparatus of state theory has not been superseded in the era of globalization.

The chapters in this book are a collection of essays and articles that have been published in earlier versions as journal articles and edited book chapters. They orignally appeared in print in a more or less random order in many different outlets, but as I reviewed the articles, I realized there was a continuity of argument about the past, current, and future condition of state theory that would only became apparent if they were presented in the sequential logic of a single book as opposed to their original chronological (dis)order in a diversity of unrelated outlets. My experience was that potential readers may have seen one or two of the pieces, but missed others and, consequently, the overall trajectory of the argument presented in this book would not be readily evident to readers who had seen only one or two of the chapters in a previous format.

Nevertheless, there are some scholars who may gasp at the idea of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate again?! Yet, the truth of the matter is that it is already being widely revisited by both senior and junior scholars who find that they cannot move forward with state theory in the age of globalization except by moving through and past the Poulantzas-Miliband debate in a constructive and synthetic way that eluded the previous generation of state theorists. Moreover, by merely “moving past” the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, as some have recommended, we leave behind much that is valuable in understanding the state, particularly the need to understand the contemporary transformation of the state form and the state apparatuses as part of the new conditions of globalization and transnational capital accumulation (Panitch, 2009, xxiii; Sorensen, 2006). Unfortunately, after the Poulantzas-Miliband debate seemed to break state theory into irreconcilable warring camps, many scholars eventually abandoned the debate as a “sterile and misleading” diversion (Jessop, 1982, xiv) and many of these scholars abandoned state theory for other fields of study.

However, a key turning point in reassessing this view of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate was a special conference on “Poulantzas-Miliband: In Retrospect and Prospect,” sponsored by the Graduate School and University Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) on April 24–25, 1997. Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, who organized the conference twenty years after the conclusion of the New Left Review debate, rekindled interest in Poulantzas and Miliband at a time when both mainstream and radical scholars were asserting the end of the state, or at least, the retreat of the state in the wake of the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus,” global trade liberalization under the World Trade Organization, and the burgeoning power of transnational corporations. The CUNY conference brought together more than a hundred scholars and graduate students from throughout North America, South America, and Europe. The anticipation surrounding that conference was palpable, since everyone expected to replay the bitter clash between Poulantzas and Miliband with old warriors and new disciples coming to the battlefield to join arms. A surprising outcome of the conference was that no one came to reenact the old debate, but to talk and learn from each other, and to discuss ways to reestablish state theory in the new era of globalization, while carrying forward the most salient components of the theoretical work bequeathed to us by Poulantzas and Miliband. It was agreed that state theory was in need of new work, but that task was to begin with a reassessment of Poulantzas and Miliband, because few of the remaining state theorists at the conference were prepared to entirely discard either of them (see Chapters 1 and 2). Although there were some in attendance who later complained that the conference had a “Poulantzasian bias,” it nevertheless began the process of thawing out frozen positions.1 Many commentators on the Poulantzas-Miliband debate had previously described it as a polemical “caricature” of both authors’ works—or as “a dialogue of the deaf”—but revisiting that debate began the process of aiding many state theorists in understanding what went wrong in the debate and to recognize just how far off track state theory went because of it in the ensuing decades (Jessop, 2008a).”翻译为中文