Seminar State Theory

Michel Foucault famously called the attempt to provide a theory of the state an ‘indisgestible meal’. In this seminar, we will discuss what to make of this statement, and where the merits and limitations of state theory lie. Our entry point is the assumption that political economy, in contrast to economics, does not look at economic processes in isolation, but in conjunction with political processes. Building on this line of reasoning, we will examine a key claim of state theory, namely that it is impossible to understand how politics works without knowing what the state is. We will focus on materialist state theory because of its focus on the relationship between politics and the economy in capitalism, and we will discuss how the capitalist state is invested in relations of domination such as class and gender relations. Accordingly, we will look at some of the classics of materialist state theory such as Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci; scholars that have contributed to its revival in the 1970s, for example Joachim Hirsch and Nicos Poulantzas; and post-structuralist and feminist authors like Foucault and Michèle Barrett who have challenged its key assumptions. In the final part of the class, we will assess the contemporary relevance of materialist and materialist-feminist state theory: there will be student-led sessions on recent economic-political analyses and theoretical interventions that use state theoretical concepts. FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WiSe 2014/15 Global Political Economy Dr. Gallas Alexander