Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State.

The purpose of this essay is to take stock of recent contributions in comparative politics to the study of the State to assess their utility for accounts of the state in American political development. There are two important intellectual backdrops to this undertaking. First, it is now well established that the apparent "statelessness" of the United States is an illusion. Second, not only has the view of the American state changed but the comparative template of the state against which American state-building has been measured has shifted as well. We argue in this essay that these two puzzles are closely linked and that these new directions in the very comparative literature that once found the United States to be "stateless," following J. P. Nettl's classic paper on the state as a multidimensional conceptual variable, ironically provide the basis upon which to build an alternative perspective on the American state, enriched by comparative insights. In this emerging view, American state building, strength, and institutional capacity form through links with society, not necessarily through autonomy from society. In this essay we explore these paradoxes in some greater detail, beginning with the general comparative literature on the state before turning our attention to the parallel ironies of the state in American political development. We then survey a small number of recent works drawn from comparative, international, and American politics, all of which highlight in a variety of ways an alternative, more multidimensional view of the state. This reconceptualization of the state, we then suggest, is particularly applicable to the United States and helps to resolve the paradoxes of the American state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]