Pos 100 State and State-Society

Why the state? The state is a faceless entity that is sovereign, which consists of institutions that govern the general population of a certain territory. This jurisdiction on a particular territory is practiced through different uses of power. First and foremost the state uses its power to legitimize its actions towards the population under it. It legitimizes all that is what the state think is good for the nation. Pierre Bourdieu discusses these modern tendencies of the state, which was described in the elements before. Bourdieu (1994), stated that the State is “the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital...”(4). The culmination in this statement means that the state is the apex or highest form of a systematic institution. This concentration of the use of power by the state is seen in its legitimizing tendencies. The state has this aptness to make something we do as something permissible or not. This high tendency of the state to have this institutionalization to the highest form makes way for the different species of capital to emerge. These species of capital are Physical Force, Economic, Informational and Symbolic. These species are what makes the state inescapable for the population in a certain nation. For the first species, the state is the only entity that can use force in a specialized, particularized kind of action because they sanction them. In short, the state formalizes the use of force through military and police to maintain peace and order. If the state can’t do this, then the state is weak. The next species, the Economic, talks about how the state uses its power to levy tax for the State to use armed forces to perpetuate the peace on the nation. Tax also imposes that the state has legitimate rule to the populous. The next species is Informational, which is always related to the Symbolic species of capital. Informational talks of the Theoretical Unification where everyone has the same perception of what is

Bibliography: Bourdieu, P. (1994). Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. Sociological Theory, 12(1), 1-18. Barkey, K. and Parikh, S. (1991) Comparative Perspectives on The State. Annual Review of Sociology, 17, 523-549.