This is a history of political science that is also a history of the role of history in its development. It was the attempt by nineteenth-century historians like Sir John Seeley to assert the scientific character of their discipline that gave the state its early prominence in the academic study of political institutions. In a book full of ironies, many of them start here: History asserted its academic independence by redescribing itself as a branch of political science, and insisting on the universal significance of the state concept for an Englishspeaking world that had not previously noticed the lack of one. Political scientists who wished to distance themselves from history were then drawn to criticizing an idea that had now become central to the academic understanding of politics. The dilemmas that resulted were intractable: “How could one explain that the discipline had been wrestling with a ghost without declaring a fair share of its past null and void, thereby undoing much of the continuity crucial to its present identity?” (p. 99). Moreover, the ghost kept reappearing, which is why so much energy was expended on trying to see through it. Its reappearance was in part due to the symbolic authority that it exerted over the whole field of enquiry, but also in part due to the nature of the idea itself: The state is not just the ordering concept of political science but also the concept of order, and political scientists have been understandably uncertain of how their subject could continue to exist in its absence.

Bartelson unpicks the ways that various schools of thought tried to get round these problems, always reestablishing the essential circularity of the endeavor. Certain themes keep reappearing: the semantic replacement of “the state” with an alternative term (“government,” “structure,” “system”), serving an equivalent purpose; the objectification of the state, which results in the state's renewed subjectivity (in the Marxist version, the state can only be a tool of the ruling class if it has “the relative autonomy” to serve that class's interests); and the repeated proclamation of the death of the state, which gives the state a life of its own. But running through them all is the simple problem that we cannot free ourselves from the concept of the state by declaring it both a vapid and a narrow idea, because if it were truly empty, it would not constrain what we can do with it. If the concept of the state is both vapid and narrow, it must be because its very vapidity is what gives it its force.

Stylistically, this is a rather repetitive book, but repetition is part of its point, and the style helps convey something of the futility of the enterprise it describes. But it is also a morality tale, and Bartelson is at pains to point out that we should not blame or even seek to explain away the motives of the critics of the state: “We have to judge them by Christian standards, not Freudian or Lacanian ones” (p. 185). Seeking to emancipate ourselves from the hegemony of the state concept is the human way to respond to the limits it places on our understanding, and it is simply emblematic of our human predicament that doing the right thing leads us back into the arms of the state.

However, Bartelson also argues that the critique of the state is not just a natural response to the demands of the state but also a necessary response, demanded of us by the state in order to maintain its own identity. In a series of concluding remarks, he claims that “systematic disbelief in the material reality of the state is the main condition of its symbolic reality, and its symbolic presence within discourse is the main condition of its functioning as real” (p. 186). But it is not clear that either of these provocative claims have been fully substantiated by what precedes them. The history Bartelson tells certainly suggests that the state concept is tied to persistent efforts to undermine it, but this does not itself demonstrate that the state's authority is dependent on those efforts. Indeed, Bartelson never does more than allude to the relation between the history of the academic claims made in the name of the state concept and the history of the political claims made in the name of the state. In reading the former history, it is hard not to be struck by possible parallels with the latter, and there are undoubtedly analogies to be drawn between the cycles of affirmation and denial that bedevil both, as well as in the ambiguous nature of the democratic state's political power. But parallel ambiguities do not constitute the causal connection that Bartelson seeks to affirm, and only a strong Hegelian reading of the history of the state can make sense of the assumption that the state's “real function” is constituted by its ability to contain its own negation at the level of discourse.

On the whole, The Critique of the State, serves to diminish, rather than enhance, the claims of academic discourse to master political reality. That Bartelson should conclude it as he does is evidence of the persistence of the temptations the book so expertly describes.