Where there’s smoke there’s fire. This is the essence of the argument lying at the heart of Sidney Tarrow’s sweeping, bracing new manuscript. War is the fire in this analogy, and contention is the smoke—or vice versa. It is not Tarrow’s purpose to show that war generates contention or that contention generates war in any unidirectional sense. It is to call our attentions to the critical historical realities that where there is war there is usually contention; that where there is contention there is very often war; and that states are usually altered in dramatic ways amid these violent interlocking processes. Most books in comparative politics draw precise causal arrows pointing from cause to outcome. War, States, and Contention paints more of a causal swirl. Almost everything points, at one juncture or another, to almost everything else.
This might be a drawback if everything Tarrow analyzes were not so bloody interesting. As with most works in the comparative-historical canon, the power of Tarrow’s volume cannot be neatly distilled into any single causal claim, or even a particularly concise set of claims. Its glory lies in the author’s historical breadth, comparative imagination, normative mission, and steadfast commitment to addressing interesting historical questions in important historical cases. For anybody who loves political history, War, States, and Contention is above all else a good old-fashioned riveting read. Crisscrossing both the globe and the centuries, Tarrow shows how contention fed into war and back again in settings ranging from revolutionary France to the American Civil War, and from fascist Italy to America’s “War on Terror.” This review cannot do justice to all of Tarrow’s action-packed case-studies and novel analytical moves. What might be more fruitful is to try to tie a tighter thread around his many themes and cases than the fact that they are all somehow connected to wars, states, and contention.
Recall the smoke-and-fire metaphor that launched this review. In these conflagrations of contention and war, what exactly gets burned up? The main answer, Tarrow convincingly demonstrates, is rights. More than anything else, this is a book about how wars give states extraordinary latitude to restrict citizens’ rights, while also providing citizens with extraordinary incentives and opportunities to fight for their rights. In this respect, Tarrow’s book is not only a timely homage to his late compatriot Charles Tilly. It is also a resounding corrective. For Tilly, wars tend to expand rights by giving citizens new leverage over their rulers as indispensable warriors and taxpayers. Tarrow brilliantly exposes the flip side of this process, as wars give states the perfect pretext to trample on rights through states of emergency. Rights play such a leading role throughout Tarrow’s book that War, Rights , and Contention would have been a more fitting title than War, States , and Contention. As a book about war, a book about rights, and a book about contention, it succeeds mightily.
But as a book about states, the contributions are less evident. In fact Tarrow’s treatment of states represents something of a step in the wrong theoretical direction. Where Tarrow goes worrisomely astray is in his treatment of Michael Mann’s critical notion of state infrastructural power. From Mann’s initial invocation of the concept (in “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25:2 [November 1984]: 185–213) to his defense of it a quarter-century later in a special journal issue on infrastructural power coedited by Hillel Soifer and Matthias vom Hau (in “Infrastructural Power Revisited,” Studies in Comparative International Development 43:3 [Fall/Winter 2008]: 355–365), Mann has been admirably clear and consistent in his definition. Similarly, in the new comparative research agenda on infrastructural power that has blossomed over the past decade (beyond the aforementioned special issue see Daniel Ziblatt, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism, 2008; Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, 2008; Matthew Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power, 2009; Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, 2010; and Soifer, State Building in Latin America, 2015), the definition has remained remarkably stable. Despite a different word here or alternative clause there, state infrastructural power has always and everywhere been defined as the state’s capacity to implement policy throughout its realm. Considering how much difference of opinion surrounds core concepts such as democracy, revolution, and even the state itself, it might be no exaggeration to say that state infrastructural power represents the clearest major concept we have in comparative politics.
Tarrow’s take is subtly but substantially different. Suggesting that my 2010 book defines infrastructural power “in a narrower sense” than one should (p. 262), Tarrow locates some surprising ambiguity in Mann’s definition of the concept as “the power of the state to penetrate and centrally coordinate the activities of civil society through its own infrastructure” (p. 17). The key word is “its.” Tarrow interprets it to mean “society’s,” as in, the state coordinates society through society’s infrastructures. But in his landmark 1993 volume (The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914), Mann is explicit that the “its” he has in mind is not society’s but the state’s. To quote him in full: “Infrastructural power is the institutional capacity of a central state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions. This is collective power, ‘power through’ society, coordinating social life through state infrastructures” (1993, 59). This is consistent with Mann’s later usage as well as that of the scholars who have followed devotedly in his footsteps. Tarrow doesn’t get the wrong Mann; he gets his Mann wrong.
This is not merely splitting hairs. For Tarrow, state infrastructural power does not even require the state’s institutional presence. In fact it may be most evident when the state is absent, because society is doing the state’s work for it. For Tarrow, infrastructural power most fundamentally consists of a state’s “ties within society” (p. 25), and not its own institutional arms. The mix-up takes its biggest toll in Tarrow’s awkward formulation that the American Civil War allowed “financial capital….to control the state’s infrastructural power for generations to come” (p. 75). By this definition, state infrastructural power is not even power. Nor is it even state infrastructure. If a narrow segment of society is controlling the state, that is state capture. This might fairly be considered the opposite of state infrastructural power.
If Tarrow has something to offer on infrastructural power, it is a hypothesis about which kind of states can accomplish what they want: i.e. those with strong ties within society. Tarrow’s claim here is plausible but familiar. It closely dovetails with Peter Evans’ notions of embeddedness, state-society synergy, and shared projects (in his Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, 1995) as well as Philip Gorski’s concept of disciplinary power (in his The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe, 2003), which drew heavily on Michel Foucault’s “governmentality.” Evans and Gorski are very clear that they are making a claim about where infrastructural power comes from. They do not conflate infrastructural power with the social embeddedness they hypothesize as its causal source.
Happily this allows us to end on a forward-looking note. Once this definitional confusion is resolved, Tarrow’s book can be understood as an important new contribution to existing debates on how states’ social ties might enhance their power. Do dense social ties improve a state’s capacity to implement its policies and achieve its objectives? Tarrow, Evans, and Gorski are probably right that the very strongest states are those with robust social ties. But such ties sometimes leave states captured rather than making them capable. We cannot even ask why this is so if we treat social ties as the definition of infrastructural power instead of its possible fountainhead. Once this critical definitional repair is made, War, States and Contention should stand as a singular contribution to our understanding of all three concepts that constitute its lofty title.
