Re-Emergence of the State in Post-WWII Political Theory

For much of the mid-twentieth century, political scientists almost stopped talking about “the state.” The concept that had once anchored the discipline was quietly set aside in favour of newer vocabulary like “the political system,” “groups,” and “behaviour.” Yet within a few decades, the state came roaring back to the centre of political theory. By the 1980s, leading scholars were openly calling for “bringing the state back in.” This intellectual journey, from neglect to revival, tells us a great deal about how we understand power, governance, and development today, especially in societies emerging from colonial rule.

Why the state faded from political theory 🔗

To understand the state’s re-emergence, we first need to understand its disappearance. In the decades after the Second World War, the study of politics, particularly in the United States, was transformed by what is called the behavioural revolution. Scholars wanted to make political science more “scientific.” They shifted their attention away from formal legal institutions, constitutions, and the abstract idea of the state, and towards observable human behaviour: how people voted, how interest groups bargained, and how decisions were actually made.

The leading figure here was David Easton. He argued that political science should study the “political system” rather than the state. In fact, Easton famously declared that neither the state nor power was a concept useful for organising political research, urging scholars instead to examine how values are “authoritatively allocated” for a society. This was a radical move. The state, once the master concept of political theory, was treated as too vague and too legalistic to be useful.

The dominance of pluralism 🔗

Alongside behaviouralism rose pluralism, associated with thinkers like Robert Dahl. Pluralist theory viewed government largely as an arena, a neutral space where competing interest groups bargained and negotiated to shape public policy. In this picture, the state had no real independent will of its own. It simply registered the balance of forces among groups in society. Policy was the outcome of competition, not of any autonomous decision by the state itself.

This society-centred view dominated for a generation. The problem was that it worked reasonably well for stable Western democracies but struggled badly elsewhere. When scholars looked at military coups, authoritarian regimes, and rapid state-led economic change in the developing world, the idea of the state as a mere “arena” looked deeply inadequate.

The 1960s and 1970s: two traditions rediscover the state 🔗

The revival of the state did not come from one source. It emerged almost simultaneously from two very different intellectual traditions, the liberal and the Marxist. Both, in their own way, concluded that you simply could not explain modern politics without taking the state seriously as a force in its own right.

The Marxist state debate 🔗

Marxist theory had long been awkward about the state. Classical Marxism tended to treat the state as a kind of by-product of the economy, an instrument of the ruling class with no real independence. In the late 1960s and 1970s, this changed dramatically through a famous exchange known as the Miliband-Poulantzas debate, conducted largely in the pages of the New Left Review.

Ralph Miliband, in The State in Capitalist Society (1969), took an “instrumentalist” position. He used careful empirical analysis to show how the people who run state institutions tend to come from, and serve, the dominant capitalist class. Nicos Poulantzas challenged this from a “structuralist” angle. He argued that the state could not be reduced to a simple tool of any single class, but instead enjoyed a “relative autonomy.” The state, in this view, functioned to hold a fractured capitalist society together and to secure the long-term reproduction of the system, even if that meant acting against the immediate wishes of particular capitalists.

The crucial idea that emerged here was relative autonomy, the notion that the state has a degree of freedom to act on its own, even within a class-divided society. This concept became a central reference point for political theory through the 1970s and 1980s. It forced even Marxists, who had once dismissed the state as an “epiphenomenon,” to study it directly and seriously.

The neo-statist or liberal revival 🔗

The other great push came from comparative and historical sociology. The defining statement was the 1985 volume Bringing the State Back In, edited by Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. The title itself was a deliberate rebuke to the society-centred approaches that had dominated for decades.

These scholars argued that dominant paradigms in the social sciences had failed to treat states as organisational structures or as potentially autonomous actors, noting that the very term “state” had become rare in scholarship. Their counter-argument was that the state is an agent which, while shaped by the surrounding society, also actively shapes social and political processes. Skocpol’s own earlier work on social revolutions in France, Russia, and China had already shown that states could act with a logic of their own, especially in matters of war, taxation, and administration.

What drove the state back to the centre? 🔗

This twin revival was not just an academic fashion. It was driven by real-world events that the older theories could not explain.

Authoritarian regimes and the limits of pluralism 🔗

One of the strongest pushes came from scholars studying Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile experienced military coups that produced what the political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell called “bureaucratic-authoritarian” regimes. Here, the state was clearly not a passive arena reflecting group competition. It was a powerful, coercive actor that could suspend democracy, repress civil society, and reorganise the economy from above. Any theory that ignored the independent power of the state simply could not account for these realities.

The post-colonial context 🔗

The need to take the state seriously was even sharper in the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa. After decolonisation, the state was not just one player among many; it was often the single most important engine of social and economic change. Newly independent governments took on the enormous tasks of nation-building, planning the economy, redistributing land, and forging a national identity out of diverse populations.

For a country emerging from colonial rule, the state was expected to lead development directly. This is visible in the early decades after 1947, when planning commissions, public-sector industries, and state-led modernisation defined the entire political agenda. Society-centred theories from the West, built on the assumption of strong civil societies and weak states, had little to say about contexts where the state was attempting to build society itself. As scholars like Joel Migdal pointed out in his study of state-society relations in the Third World, the real puzzle was often the relationship between strong societies and relatively weak states.

The developmental state 🔗

Perhaps the most powerful evidence for the state’s importance came from the economic miracles of East Asia. Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore achieved astonishing growth, and scholars traced this success to the role of a strong, capable state guiding the economy. This gave rise to the concept of the developmental state.

Peter Evans captured the key insight with his idea of embedded autonomy, the argument that effective developmental states combined a professional, meritocratic bureaucracy insulated from short-term pressures with close, productive ties to business. The state needed enough autonomy to set a national direction, but enough embeddedness in society to implement it. This delicate balance, neither a fully detached state nor a captured one, became a central theme of comparative politics. It showed that the quality and capacity of state institutions could make the difference between stagnation and transformation.

Dimensions of state power 🔗

As the state returned to theory, scholars developed more precise tools to analyse it. Rather than treating the state as a single block, they began to distinguish between different kinds of state power. The sociologist Michael Mann offered an influential distinction in his work on the autonomous power of the state.

Despotic power refers to the range of actions a state elite can take without routine negotiation with civil society groups. An authoritarian regime that can simply override unions, businesses, or regional interests displays high despotic power.

Infrastructural power refers to the state’s capacity to actually penetrate society and implement its decisions across its territory. This depends on effective bureaucracies, communication networks, tax systems, and administrative reach. A state can issue grand laws on paper, but without infrastructural power, those decisions never reach the village or the marketplace.

This distinction is especially useful for understanding post-colonial states, which often combined considerable despotic ambition with limited infrastructural reach. Many states could announce sweeping reforms but lacked the administrative machinery to deliver them evenly across vast and diverse territories.

Why this shift still matters 🔗

The re-emergence of the state was not just a return to old ideas. It transformed how political theory approached a huge range of questions. Once the state was understood as an active player in political, social, cultural, and economic life, it became central to fields far beyond traditional political science.

Scholars of development used state theory to explain why some countries industrialised and others did not. Feminist theorists examined how the state shapes gender relations through law, welfare, and family policy, sometimes reinforcing inequality and sometimes challenging it. Students of welfare and public policy analysed how state structures determine which social programmes succeed. In every case, the move was the same: stop treating the state as a neutral container, and start treating it as an actor whose structure and capacity shape outcomes.

For anyone studying comparative politics today, this insight is foundational. Whether you are trying to understand why a development scheme succeeds in one region but fails in another, why some democracies survive crises while others collapse into authoritarianism, or how welfare reaches the poor, you are asking a question about state power and state capacity. The vocabulary developed during this revival, autonomy, capacity, embeddedness, infrastructural power, remains the basic toolkit of the field.

What do you think? If the state is genuinely an autonomous actor and not just a reflection of society’s strongest groups, how should we judge whether a state is using that autonomy for the public good or against it? And in a post-colonial context, is a strong, capable state a precondition for democracy and development, or can too much state power become a threat to both?

References

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393148.2017.1378297
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miliband%E2%80%93Poulantzas_debate
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc15/chapter/miliband-poulantzas-and-laclauon-the-advanced-capitalist-state/
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bringing-the-state-back-in/629F1D194C7E4FC19CF5208F345D6AD8
5. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/world-politics/article/abs/state-social-elites-and-government-capacity-in-southeast-asia/7837830B980FC32DC2003BE53F3052F5
6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1455143
7. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/developmental-states/1C537B3DBDDA2F1674C4C6F34E90B600