“Political capitalism” is a term frequently deployed in analyses of the economic systems that emerged in the former Soviet block after the implosion of communist autocracy. This crisp, evocative phrase effectively expresses the shared feeling that the transmogrifications of the formerly “planned economies” did not lead to the desired consolidation of a “normal” capitalism. Many would say that by the mid-2000s several East European countries had reached a state approximating “Western ordinariness.” But even they would agree that, at least during the first dozen years of postcommunist changes, the somewhat mysterious dynamics shaping postcommunist “economic domains” were marred by persisting “anomalies,” enduring “atavisms,” and recurring “distortions” which originated in the realm of “politics.” One cannot in good faith dispute that there was something “political” about the way the idiosyncratic postcommunist economies functioned throughout the 1990s.
Still, current usages of the notion of “political capitalism” in the burgeoning discourse on postcommunism leave much to be desired. When used to convey that postcommunist economies are constantly abused by self-serving political entrepreneurs, the phrase is confusingly broad, and bereft of both content and context. The adjective “political” does create the impression that postcommunist capitalism differs from the Western paragon, but it does not go much beyond the vague assertion that the imitation falls short of the original. In this way, “political capitalism” is reminiscent of the similarly loaded tag “unconsolidated democracy,” which, as applied to many postcommunist polities, is “both unsurprising and theoretically uninteresting.”Footnote 1 If political capitalism means that markets are manipulated by power-holders, that politically well-connected entrepreneurs enjoy serious advantages over their competitors, and that the allocation of resources is decisively affected by political decisions, then we might ask in what sense Russia differs from France.Footnote 2 How to fill the term “political capitalism” with analytical content, place it in a comprehensive conceptual setting, and use it as an analytical tool for a comparative understanding of postcommunism—this is the challenge that I will try to tackle in this paper.
My basic contention is straightforward: the notion of “political capitalism” can add heuristic value to the scholarly discourse on postcommunism, but only if it is grounded in Max Weber's economic sociology. The project thus necessitates the integration of two distinct venues of research: a conceptual inquiry into what Weber had to say about political capitalism, and an argument about the analytical potential of a Weberian notion of political capitalism for the study of postcommunism. Insofar as what follows is a Weberian interpretation, it advances one key claim: a historically specific account of modern political capitalism may be distilled from Weber's oeuvre if the indispensable textual exegesis of Economy and Society is supplemented by a survey of the ideas and insights scattered throughout his political writings. Insofar as this paper also offers an analytical interpretation of early postcommunism, my purpose is to show how the notion of political capitalism, properly “Weberianized,” can help us depict analytically the overlapping dynamics of economic change and the restructuring of the organizational basis of “stateness” in the former “second world.”
WEBER ON POLITICAL CAPITALISM
An obvious way to begin the analysis of a Weberian concept is to look at particular passages in his writings where the notion is explicitly introduced and defined. A careful look at the systematic location of the brief paragraphs on political capitalism in Economy and Society suggests that, for Weber, the construction of this concept is part of his grand effort to delineate analytically the key characteristics of Occidental capitalism. The thrust of his argument is that “rational acquisition of profits” and “political capitalism” should be cast as contrasting analytical categories encompassing profoundly different empirical phenomena.
In a section entitled “The Principal Modes of Capitalist Orientation to Profit-Making,” Weber asserts that Western capitalism is characterized by “continuous buying and selling on the market” and “speculations of various sorts.” These “orientations to profit-making” did not play a major role in pre-modern times and are associated with the rise of Europe. In the same section Weber introduces three other types of profit making: “orientation to opportunities for predatory profit from political organizations or persons connected to politics,” “continuous business activities that arise by virtue of domination by force—colonial profits and fiscal profits realized through farming of taxes and offices,” and “orientation to profit opportunities in unusual transactions with political bodies.” These capitalist orientations, he points out, “have been common all over the world for thousands of years.” He then proceeds to subsume all three under a separate category that he dubs “politically oriented capitalism.” This conceptual exposition must be the starting point for anyone interested in articulating a Weberian notion of political capitalism.Footnote 3
In his historical analyses, Weber links political capitalism to pre-modern times and places, for example tax farming in China, financing of wars in India, and the misuse of official positions in Caesar's Rome.Footnote 4 It is therefore hardly surprising that Weberian themes related to “political capitalism” are most visible in studies that deal either with antiquity (e.g., John R. Love's work on the sociological foundations of Roman civilization) or with the modus operandi of Oriental actors (e.g., Karl Wittfogel's treatise on “oriental despotism” and its “bureaucratic capitalists”).Footnote 5 Indisputably, then, Weber has a lot to say about how “capitalist orientations” were implicated in political practices in non-European and pre-rationalized settings. When Weber explored modern Europe, however, he was reluctant to talk about political capitalism, which no doubt reflected his misgivings about the concept's analytical value in such contexts. His discussion of mercantilism is quite revealing in this regard. Weber described mercantilism as “a league between the state and capitalist interest,” and depicted it as a historical episode when “the state was handled as if it consisted exclusively of capitalist entrepreneurs.”Footnote 6 Notably, however, Weber never called mercantilism “political capitalism.”
Why was Weber unwilling to subsume modern political practices such as mercantilism under the rubric “political capitalism”? I submit that this reluctance is linked to a broader truth about Weber: he embraced in principle the idea that the political leadership of a modern nation should possess the power to shape the outcome of market interactions, and throughout his life he defended and demanded what today we might call “political interventions in the workings of free markets.” An intensely politicized German patriot, Weber never wavered in his determination that politicians must manipulate market dynamics in pursuit of national political objectives, and specifically the geo-political goals of “great powers” such as Germany. In the famous Freiburg Address which marked the beginning of his career as a public intellectual, Weber emphatically claimed, “The German race should be protected in the east of the country, and the state's economic politics ought to rise to the challenge of defending it.” He also insisted that the German government should buy up land in order to facilitate “the systematic colonization by German peasants on suitable soils.”Footnote 7 Furthermore, unlike advocates of “freedom of contract,” Weber “explicitly sympathized with the efforts of labor unions to improve the workers' lot in a capitalist framework.”Footnote 8 Finally, toward the end of his life Weber was obsessed with the design and implementation of “state-supported social policies” that would help Germany recover after the war.Footnote 9
Moreover, there are numerous passages in Weber's major works that show that he did not treat the relationship between nation states and capitalist markets in light of the a priori antagonism usually associated with the Smithian tradition of social analysis and with neo-liberal economic theory. Weber never was, and cannot be plausibly portrayed as, a “free marketeer” prone to wringing his hands in self-righteous indignation every time he encountered an example of how politics interferes with economics or vice versa. For him the “free interplay of market forces” was a politically contingent phenomenon closely linked to the organizational supremacy of modern nation-states. Therefore, he believed that the tutelage of the state is a sine qua non for the success of any form of modern rule, including forms of the exercise of power that promote and sustain the hegemony of capitalist markets. The systematic political interference in the economic system is a characteristic feature of modern rule tout court—it cannot be summarily dismissed as a syndrome of political capitalism. From a Weberian point of view, then, that various individuals and groups are allowed to make profits under the stewardship of the state has a lot to do with politics and capitalism—but not necessarily with political capitalism.
Given that the intertwining of government and economics is one of the markers of modernity, should we conclude that the notion of political capitalism is completely irrelevant to Weberian analyses of modern contexts? I am convinced that such a conclusion would be erroneous. I will demonstrate that a theoretically engrossing and conceptually sharp depiction of political capitalism may be gleaned from the political essays Weber published during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. It is in these essays that Weber suggests how we may distinguish between political capitalism and other forms of governmental involvement in economic processes, and comprehend what it is that sets “predatory profits” apart from deliberate state sponsorship of strategic constituencies, “unusual transactions with political bodies” from carefully planned policies designed to enhance a country's might (Macht), and the “normal” striving to manage a nation's resources from the “abnormal” ascent of political capitalism. The overarching argument I will defend is that a usable Weberian interpretation of political capitalism must explain how this capitalism is embedded in patterns of governance. Such an interpretation should conjure up the main characteristics of modern rationalized rule: the functioning of bureaucracies, the behavior of administrators, and the implementation of policies—in short, the workings of a modern state.
WEBER'S POLITICAL WRITINGS
To assert that Weber's political writings have been unduly neglected would be unwarranted.Footnote 10 Still, I think that this particular facet of Weberiana is yet to be subject to vigorous analytical investigation. It is my contention that what Weber says therein about specific modes of functioning of bureaucratic apparatuses, the dynamics of institutional reconfiguration, and the metamorphoses of “the spirit” of modern capitalism might be plausibly characterized as a coherent and heuristically suggestive notion of contemporary political capitalism.
A. Political Capitalism as a Konjunktur
In a polemical passage written in December 1917 Weber attacked the German pundits who saw no difference between “the war profits of the Krupp concern and those of some little black-marketeer in malt.” Weber's main argument against those who too readily subsumed both Krupp and “the little black-marketeer in malt” under the category “war profiteers” was that, incapacitated by their “blissful ignorance,” such commentators “have not the faintest idea of the gulf of difference separating the kind of capitalism which lives from some momentary, purely political conjuncture—from government contracts, financing wars, black-market profiteering, from all the opportunities for profit and robbery, the gains and risks involved in adventurism, all of which increased enormously during the war—and the calculation of profitability that is characteristic of the bourgeois rational conduct of business in peacetime.”Footnote 11
I think that it is precisely this “other kind of capitalism” that Weber refers to which can be characterized as “political capitalism.” The distinct characteristic of this “other capitalism” is that prevalent strategies for profit making are designed in reaction to what Weber calls rein politische Konjunktur—an expression that would perhaps be better translated as “purely political circumstances” rather that “purely political conjuncture.”Footnote 12 What makes such circumstances important is that the peculiar dynamic that submerges social interactions stems from neither the logics of on-going political conflicts in German society nor the rational calculations propelling capitalist appropriations, but rather from largely unforeseen historical developments that rupture such logics and calculations. For Weber, then, political capitalism emerges from social and institutional disarray that hampers the more or less automatic reproduction of institutionalized political and economic practices. “Unusual” opportunities for profit making emerge when patterns of rational individual behavior are shattered and the established routines and enforceable norms that constitute bureaucratic apparatuses implode. War is a paradigmatic example of such an accidental and momentous development, but there is no reason to believe that it is the only one. We can envisage other scenarios featuring the disruption of the rationality embedded in governing organizations and the rise of political capitalism, for example, the sudden collapse of an all-encompassing authoritarian regime and the disintegration of established forms of control over economic resources.
B. Unitary Bureaucracy and the Staatliche Willensbilding
Among the many disturbing tendencies that Weber commented upon during the war, one that he found particularly worrisome was the rapid disappearance of any boundaries delimiting an organizationally and bureaucratically distinct “state domain.” This process was spurred by several factors, not the least of which was the appeal of “the German Ideas of 1914,” or comprehensive plans for establishing a state-controlled economy that would induce a “rebirth of the national spirit.”Footnote 13 Weber was opposed to the notion that state officials should manage industrial firms, and argued that such policies would trigger off a cascade of unwelcome developments, among which he singled out “the rise of a unitary bureaucracy.”Footnote 14 Why was Weber so vexed by this prospect?
An obvious answer is that Weber feared socialism. And, indeed, Weber was deeply concerned that his contemporaries' attempts to abolish capitalism might succeed. Surrounded by intellectuals burning with desire to “slay the dragon of capitalism, the father of everything evil and the cause of all unrest”Footnote 15—a desire that still animates intellectual debates today!—Weber argued that the nationalization of industry might lead to the “progressive elimination of private capitalism” and culminate in the creation of a qualitatively new type of a state where “state bureaucracy would rule alone [and] public and private bureaucracies will be merged into a single hierarchy.”Footnote 16 He tried to persuade German public opinion that “the socialization of the economy” will inevitably result “in the dictatorship of the official, not the worker.”Footnote 17 The blurring of the boundaries of the state thus might lead to bureaucratic domination, a Weberian theme subject to countless scholarly interpretations, usually cast against the chilling backdrop of the famous “iron cage” imagery.
But as we ponder the problems attendant to the rise of a unitary bureaucracy we should not forget that often in the Weberian analytical universe “one and the same factor may have opposite effects depending on context.”Footnote 18 Hence one might argue that as Weber reflected on the rise of “unitary bureaucracy” he also envisaged another scenario, one that I, in contradistinction to the more conventional “socialism” and “iron cage” narratives, will call “the political capitalism scenario.” The core plot may be summarized as follows: “the merger of bureaucracies” will not endow the state with additional strength, but will enable various profit-seekers and politically well-connected entrepreneurs to gain “unlimited and uncontrollable command over the state.”Footnote 19 The outcome will be an emasculated, not a domineering state—Leviathan will be reduced to an assemblage of fractured administrative apparatuses unable to exert any control over their environment. The erosion of the elastic but vitally important political membrane that separates state from non-state bodies in a modern political system triggers infusions of dysfunctionality into the infrastructure of governance.
Reiterating his premonitions about the rise of “unitary bureaucracy,” Weber asserts that this trend will fatally impede “the formation of the state's own will.”Footnote 20 In my view, this reference to “the formation of the state's will”—die staatliche Willensbildung—is worthy of special consideration. Weberian scholars have neglected this concept. To the best of my knowledge, no one has paid particular attention to it, though it recurs with impressive persistence in his political writings.Footnote 21 The term undoubtedly has Nietzschean overtones—the notion that the destiny of nations is ultimately determined by a “will to power” or a “will to govern” would be quite acceptable to Weber.Footnote 22 From a Nietzschean perspective, a state without a will is bound to be victimized and subdued by its Übermenschen-led rivals. But the process of Willensbildung also has institutional implications, and it is these implications that might be of interest for those who seek to reconstruct a Weberian view of political capitalism. Politics, Weber never tired of reminding his readers, is all about “the leadership (Die Leitung), or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political association (Verband) which today means a state.”Footnote 23 In every modern state, opportunities for profit will be crucially determined by political decisions affecting flows of resources to the benefit of constituencies favored by state agents. But in a state without a will, the allocation of such opportunities will be disconnected from the pursuit of coherent public policies. In the absence of meaningful Willensbildung the institutional environment fractures and formally empowered legislative and executive office-holders, be they democratically elected or not, will invariably find that the day-to-day management of administrative agencies is beyond their control. The rise of unitary bureaucracy thus undermines the organizational integrity of the state and creates an environment where capitalist profits are related to politics not by means of policy decisions, but instead through the unmonitorable exercise of discretion by a discombobulated officialdom.
In sum, a symbiosis of state and non-state agencies may result in the absorption of the latter by the former, in which case there will be a socialist regime with too-powerful state actors and too-weak private capitalist agents. But it may also lead to the absorption of the former by the latter, in which case there will be a political capitalism with too-powerful private agents and too-weak public institutions.
C. De-Bureaucratization and the Spirit of Political Capitalism
Weber witnessed during the war a shocking transformation of “the spirit of the times” and deterioration of prevalent ethical standards. One change in particular that deeply disturbed him was the eclipse of traditional economic ethics by unrestrained greed. “Behind the curtain of our communal wartime economy,” Weber asserted, the following spectacle is unfolding: “A wild dance around the Golden Calf, gamblers grabbing at every chance opportunity escaping through the pores of the bureaucratic system, the loss of every standard for any kind of business-ethical distinctions and inhibitions, and an iron compulsion forcing everybody, including even the most conscientious businessman, either to join in and howl with the hyenas on this unique Golgotha of all economic ethics—or else be punished with economic destruction.”Footnote 24
What is particularly important in this vivid description of “political profit-making” in the declining German Reich is the reference to “the pores of the bureaucratic system.” That “chance opportunities” escape from “the pores of the state” indicates that the decline of “economic ethics” has an elective affinity with particular modes of functioning of the state, and specifically with the mundane fact that corruption becomes rampant. Simply put, an important trait of political capitalism is that the civil service behaves as an uncoordinated multitude of self-interested agents pursuing immediate financial gratification. It should be made clear that, far from being sensationalist hyperbole, Max Weber's remarks were provoked by widely known facts about German realities circa 1917. Originally introduced to depict the fact that German civil servants are underpaid and increasingly restless, by late 1917 the term “crisis of the civil service” simply meant that various forms of illicit behavior among German bureaucrats were widespread. This development prompted the Bavarian minister of cultural affairs to complain that the German Beamtenstand was “getting close to being corrupted in all its parts.”Footnote 25 It was the spirit of corruption, then, that rapidly reshaped the inner workings of bureaucracies in Weber's native country.
The passages on “the other capitalism”—on what I think we might call “political capitalism”—are replete with diatribes that make Weber sound like a modern-day Cicero bemoaning the loss of ethical grounds during times of ugly public mores. However, I think that such passages contain something more than exhortations and lamentations. Specifically, Weber's attempt to depict “the wild dance around the Golden Calf” can be construed as a diagnosis of a phenomenon that might be called “de-bureaucratization of the state.” Weber's insight is that changing circumstances and evolving opportunity structures may create strong incentives for bureaucrats to behave in ways that deviate from the model of rational administration. Compelled to facilitate “unusual transactions with political bodies,” civil servants will quickly unlearn how to “behave according to calculable rules without regard to persons.” Subjected to arbitrary pressure from “persons connected to politics,” they will have a limited personal interest in “the objective discharge of administrative tasks.” And, being daily witnesses to various schemes whereby “political organizations” are used “to generate predatory profits,” they may be easily motivated to forfeit their “duty of obedience.”Footnote 26 A modern state may continue to employ hordes of bureaucrats, enact countless regulations, and maintain a highly visible and obtrusive presence in the daily lives of its citizens, and yet be fundamentally de-bureaucratized if the spiritual intangibles that cement modern officialdom evaporate. Weber himself pointed out, “An organization exists so far as there is a probability that certain persons will act in such a way as to carry out the order governing the organization.”Footnote 27 Keeping this definition in mind, an alternative way to depict the metastasizing of the spirit of political capitalism is to say that more and more officials behave in ways that de facto negate the validity (die Geltung) of “the order governing the state.”Footnote 28 In the absence of such order the institutional basis of effective and legitimate authority will erode.
A careful scrutiny of Weber's political writings thus reveals that alongside the possible “futures” that he intensely feared (“iron cage”) or hoped for (the “taming” of bureaucracy by means of determined political leadership and the creation of what today we call horizontal and vertical accountabilityFootnote 29), a third potentiality became conceivable: the corruption of the civil service and the ensuing “de-bureaucratization of the state.” This state of affairs would not be radically oppressive, but neither would it bring about the revitalization of a society that has had bureaucracy “taken off its back”: its main characteristic would be the malfunctioning of rule-enforcement mechanisms and decision-making processes that constitute the institutional backbone of the public domain.
To conclude, Weber clearly envisaged the possibility that accidental, uncontrolled events might create a milieu in which politically oriented modes of profit making could flourish. He sought to understand how such events might trigger institutional changes affecting the organizational basis of the state, such as the obliteration of the boundaries between public and private domains, the privatization of decision-making mechanisms, and the corruption of the civil service. As already mentioned, Weber defined political capitalism in terms of “predatory profits from persons connected with politics” and “unusual transactions with political bodies,” but he did not give any examples or explain what “unusual” might mean. The “unusualness,” I would claim, stems not from any inherent characteristics of the transactions, but rather from the single invariant component of such structured relationships, namely that one of the parties involved is a fragment of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. It is this feature that brings into relief the idiosyncrasies of the intertwining of capitalism and governance in political capitalism. Such transactions presuppose the existence of both a state and self-interested entrepreneurship, and yet they undermine the organizational capacity of the former and the rational underpinnings of the latter. What emerges under political capitalism is not a hegemonic and repressive regime, but a mosaic of exemptions, immunities, and privileges. Political capitalism does involve redistribution of resources, but, unlike “normal” redistributions, such patterns of political action follow no politically articulated blueprint and are accompanied by a massive hemorrhage of institutional capacity. The “other” capitalism is therefore a modern phenomenon energized by, and contributing to, crises of stateness. As Randal Collins reminded us some time ago, “The state is the factor most often overlooked in Weber's theory of capitalism.”Footnote 30 I would argue that the state is also the factor most overlooked in Weber's views on modern political capitalism. What Collins had in mind was that well-functioning states are essential for the emergence and endurance of rational capitalism; I have in mind that state dysfunctionalities are essential for the emergence and endurance of political capitalism.
POLITICAL CAPITALISM IN POSTCOMMUNISM
In his political writings Weber disentangled the institutional and organizational potentialities inherent in the tight embrace of modern capitalism and the nation-state. But he did not attempt to distill the ahistorical essence of “political capitalism,” nor did he provide a ready-made matrix that can be employed by scholars exploring other times and places. All we can hope for is to unearth clues and guidelines that may help us accomplish what Weber described as the ultimate purpose of social analysis: understanding “the unique character of cultural phenomena.”Footnote 31 It is to the interpretation of one such cultural phenomenon, early postcommunism, that I now turn. Admittedly, the most appropriate way to describe the thrust of my Weberian construal of postcommunist political capitalism is analytical re-description rather than an alternative explanation of what transpired in the former “second world.” As I will show, however, this enterprise does yield heuristic added value: it sheds light on the historically specific intertwining of political, economic, and organizational change in postcommunism; it clarifies how exactly the elites who benefited during the 1990s were positioned advantageously; and it suggests new ways of thinking about the organizational dimension of state weakness. In the conclusion I will demonstrate how the analytical themes that revolve around the Weberian concept of political capitalism may help us sharpen and recalibrate current research agendas focusing on the former Soviet bloc.
As already noted, the phrase “political capitalism” enjoyed brisk circulation in the literature on postcommunism. To take one representative example, Jadwiga Staniszkis argued that political capitalism emerged with the forging of “new linkages between power and capital.” Her analysis also demonstrates that the “power” in question is possessed by former party cadres, and that “the capital” is captured in the process of “making owners of the nomenklatura.”Footnote 32 Along the same lines, numerous observers have construed the concept of political capitalism to epitomize the power of neo-communist elites to exercise control over the domains previously policed by the party-state.Footnote 33 It is usually scholars who belabor the fact that the selection of “economic winners” in early postcommunism was a politically driven process that refer to Weber and his views on political capitalism. For example, Helmuth Berking, in his analysis of how the workings of democratic institutions are implicated in the creation of “a class in possession of the means of production,” mentions Weber and insists that what transpired in postcommunism is “a configuration of political capitalism” under which “market and democracy appear fated to obstruct each other.”Footnote 34 Lawrence P. King argues that what was absent in Russia in the 1990s was “the relative separation of the economy from politics,” which according to Weber “distinguished modern rational capitalism,” and that as a result there emerged “political capitalism” characterized by “political distribution of property” and modes of “accumulation” driven by “political rather than economic logic.”Footnote 35 Iván Szelényi and his collaborators also refer explicitly to Weber and political capitalism in their fine study of class formation in Central Europe. Having asserted, “Central European capitalism … might look like the political capitalism Weber wrote about,” they then summarize Weber's views as follows: “Political capitalism is capitalism in the sense that it is oriented towards the rational acquisition of profits, but it is political because this happens under the tutelage of the state and/or under the conditions of systematic political interference in the economic system.”Footnote 36 Thus the consensus among those who acknowledge their debt to Weber is that postcommunist political capitalism is a transformative episode unfolding in accordance with an overarching statist logic and is propelled by systematically applied policies subservient to a Weberian Zwekrationalität, or rational calculus intended to ensure the accomplishment of certain economic ends through political means.
As my previous analysis suggests, such interpretations of Weber's position are demonstrably erroneous: for him phenomena like “tutelage of the state,” “systematic political interference in the economic system,” and politically guided “rational acquisition of profits” could transpire under modern capitalism but would never materialize under political capitalism. Seemingly commonsensical narratives about how politics influence economic processes thus fail to identify the specific ways in which economic and political processes in early postcommunism intermesh. In what follows, therefore, I will offer an alternative Weberian interpretation of postcommunist political capitalism, one attached to the analytical armature erected in the previous section. Specifically, I will argue: (1) the end of one-party regimes generated considerable organizational shocks which blunted existing tools for exerting political command; (2) in early postcommunism the “unitary bureaucracy” blocked the process of Willensbilding by redistributing what Weber called “power of control and disposition” (Verfüngungsgewalt) and facilitating the emergence of a privilege-centered polity distinguished by highly selective and arbitrary modes of law-enforcement; and (3) endemic corruption in early postcommunism “embedded” the postcommunist state in its organizational milieu in a way that rendered impossible the implementation of blueprints for economic reform that relied on state “tutelage.” The message at the core of my interpretive enterprise is that inquiries into how politics and economics blend in postcommunism should be grounded in an analytical account of the symptoms and consequences of a dysfunctional infrastructure of governance.
Early Postcommunism as a Weberian Konjunktur
The events of 1989–1991 unleashed radical political and institutional changes that transformed the former Soviet Empire. To be sure, scholars who wish, a la Tocqueville, to demonstrate continuities between what transpired “before” and “after” the spectacular revolutionary moment would usually find this an easy task. Still, it cannot be denied that the implosion of communist systems was accompanied by political upheavals, institutional dislocations, and unexpected reconfigurations of networks of power. To use Yoshiko Herrera's felicitous term, the end of Marxist dictatorships was marked by “ras-stroika,” or “de-structuring” which led to “haphazard shifting and muddling of the boundaries of political and economic organization” and “a clash of alternative political and economic organizational structures.”Footnote 37 There is little doubt, then, that the immediate aftermath of 1989 fits the description of a Weberian Konjunktur, where unforeseen tectonic shifts affecting institutional and organizational landscapes were as significant as social conflicts, class antagonisms, or collisions of incompatible rationalities underpinning different modes of economic agency.
What is important to grasp is that among the most salient traits of this Konjunktur one should count diminished levels of state capacity and heightened dysfunctionality of the organizational framework of governance. Under the political circumstances of “ras-stroika” the general directionality of institutional change was toward a weakening of the state. By the mid-1990s astute explorers of the postcommunist political condition could assert with confidence that “the universal problem in postcommunism, which cuts across the enormous variety of countries involved, is the crisis of governability.”Footnote 38 To be sure, the experiences of various countries in the former Soviet world differed in many respects—the magnitude of the economic downturn, the consolidation of democratic institutions, the consequential manifestations of nationalism. However, a survey of context-sensitive studies of specific postcommunist places easily corroborates the contention that the crisis of governability was a cross-regional phenomenon.
Throughout the 1990s Russia was repeatedly singled out as the paradigmatic example of a dysfunctional postcommunist state. Allen C. Lynch expressed the views of many (e.g., M. Steven Fish, David Woodruff, Katherine Stoner-Weiss, Michael McFaul, Stephen Holmes) when he pointed out, “A weak state structure facing a fragmented and exhausted society … fatefully constrained Russia's prospects for political and economic development. … Too little structure existed in post-socialist Russia … to give shape effectively to the country's political and economic course on behalf of public purposes.”Footnote 39 Ukraine too had to face what Lucan A. Way calls “the dilemmas of reforms in weak states.” According to Way, central to understanding both countries is that “the weakness of formal rules makes it very difficult to characterize how in fact the systems operate.” For this reason, analyses of postcommunism that conjure up formal policies or a-contextual imperatives such as accumulation of capital will misrepresent transformative dynamics in postcommunism, a set of circumstances where the parameters of change are set by the modifications and rearrangements of informal practices within the bureaucratic domain.Footnote 40
The theme of how the dislocations attendant to the demise of one-party regimes produced a fractured state that subverts orderliness also runs through analyses of countries that were not part of the Soviet Union. Summarizing her research on how Romanian peasants experienced their encounters with postcommunist state institutions, anthropologist Katherine Verdery emphasizes that for them “government” is the major factor that accounts for “maintaining an environment of uncertainty,” reliance on “law” is “an occasion to experience inefficiency,” and “local self-government” means “struggle to assert oneself against powerful local authorities who [fail] to resolve problems.” In a memorable passage, she suggests that what transpired after 1989 should be construed as “a transition to feudalism,” because in her view the array of associations that the term “feudalism” mobilizes sharpens our thinking about “the disintegration of socialism's centralized, paternalistic state” and provides a better vantage point for comprehending the parcelization and incoherence of postcommunist statehood.Footnote 41 Along the same lines, the political dynamics that engulfed Romania's neighbor Bulgaria had been depicted as “preying on the state”: strategically located elites, adjusting to the unexpected reconfiguration of power positions, reasserted their influence, and in the process sapped administrative agencies of their logistical capacity and blocked mechanisms that could enable democratically elected “principals” to monitor lower-ranking civil servants. The fluctuation of stateness is therefore singled out as the analytical cornerstone of accounts of political and social change after 1989.Footnote 42
Conventional wisdom teaches us that “Central Europe” followed a trajectory quite different from that of the former Soviet republics and “backward” Balkan states. Nevertheless, incisive commentators confirm that the valedictorians and the laggards of the transition shared something: in the aftermath of the sudden imposition of communist regimes the infrastructure of governance fragmented. Having looked at governmental institutions in Hungary, Valery Bunce and Maria Csanadi reported, “Roles are poorly defined, component parts lack integration … and formal institutions, along with norms, conventions and informal as well as formal rules are in the process of withering away and yet being generated. The structure of the situation, in short, is that there is not much.”Footnote 43 Evidence from Poland lends itself to similar interpretations. Among the various consequences generated by the “accidental factors and spontaneous developments” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly noteworthy was “the state of disorder” characterized by “weak institutions.” The most important behavioral characteristic of state agents was that they acted as “institutional nomads” who “take over or create institutions for the sake of expediency, use them, and abandon them… . Unlike skilled craftsmen who clean the tools having completed their work, Polish post-communist elites have not cared for the instruments of power.”Footnote 44
It appears, then, that state weakness is a background motive in empirical accounts of postcommunist political Konjunktur. Irrespectively of all the continuities that undeniably marked the “transition” from communist regimes to postcommunist polities, the events of 1989 created unforeseen matrixes of threats and opportunities. And just as Weber predicted, under such circumstances regularized patterns of policy-making and settled routines of policy implementation were abandoned. It might be empirically misleading and conceptually unjustifiable, then, to relate the notion of political capitalism to an overarching “political logic” that lends coherence to the discretionary acts of public officials, somehow strings such acts together into comprehensible interconnected modalities of “systematic interference,” and ultimately remakes economic realities in accordance with the ideology of a specific class. From a Weberian point of view, what matters most about postcommunism is that the entire edifice of the state, capacious though it remained, lost to a fairly large degree the normative and empirical dimensions of the “taken-for-grantedness” that characterizes the workings of functional institutional ensembles. The hallmark of political capitalism as a Konjunktur is the non-reproducibility of the administrative structures and the institutional patterns in which the actual capacity to rule is grounded.
Unitary Bureaucracy as a Distributor of de facto Control and Enforcer of Privileges
Among the many idiosyncratic features of the transformative processes in Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century one might justifiably count the fact that in the course of less than two decades two distinct scenarios which Weber conjured up in his writings on the unitary bureaucracy came to pass. At the beginning of the 1980s, the unitary bureaucracy constructed by communist state-builders—a centralized, logistically well endowed set of administrative agencies that did not have to reckon with independent individuals or autonomous groups—was vigorously deployed by state-entrenched elites against societal opponents.Footnote 45 Ten years later it became the main source of the state's dysfunctionality and organizational weakness. Here is the central claim I would like to defend in that regard: the most important manifestation of the influence of the unitary bureaucracy was the conversions of power. Such conversions aggravated the governability problem because they redistributed what Weber called “power of control and disposition” in a way that led to the creation of a privilege-centered polity characterized by dysfunctional mechanisms for policy implementation and rights enforcement. In other words, Weber's worry that a unitary bureaucracy might become the medium through which various predators penetrate and pillage the state was vindicated. For a variety of reasons, in the aftermath of 1989 a redistribution of state-held assets subservient to a coherent Willensbildung might have been desirable; in practice, the spontaneous and chaotic reassertion of the unitary bureaucracy precluded any kind of governmental tutelage.
In the discourse on postcommunism the term “conversions of power” designates the repertoire of practices (ranging from single “hits” to more or less institutionalized interactions) that allowed communist elites to re-deploy various assets which they controlled during the communist era into a new institutional context and thus preserve their dominant position. That such practices had a formative impact on postcommunism societies cannot be seriously questioned. Summarizing empirical analyses of cross-regional trends, Iván Szelényi and his collaborators pointed out that it is elites embedded in the structures of the ancient regime—elites who possessed “political capital [defined as] that type of social capital which is institutionalized through the practices of the Communist Party”—who almost instantly occupied positions of economic power and social prestige.Footnote 46 Undeniably, the magnitude of “cadre power” varied across the region. As Eric A. Hanley demonstrated, for example, such power was more extensive in Hungary than in Poland.Footnote 47 But that the phenomenon transpired everywhere and produced the first “winners” of postcommunist reforms is beyond dispute. The dynamic that propelled socioeconomic restructuring during the 1990s stemmed from “the process of unsupervised and uncontrolled conversion of state property into private ownership by the members of the communist elite.”Footnote 48
I contend that a key contextual factor that made such conversions possible was the emergence of power positions and modes of agency which Weber depicted as “unitary bureaucracy”—and that this development undermined Willensbildung in postcommunist states. The term “unitary” should not be construed to mean that the multitude of state agents possessed attributes such as unity, cohesiveness, or adherence to a shared set of values. Rather, it refers to the scope of their decision-making power. Under any modern circumstances, bureaucratic power is formidable; and yet, as Weber made clear, normally this power is constrained by political leaders whose authority is recognized by civil servants, and, perhaps even more importantly, by private bureaucracies and other social constituencies whose collaboration is necessary for the accomplishment of state-bureaucratic objectives.Footnote 49 As we have seen, under the postcommunist Konjunktur routinized hierarchies linking bureaucrats to politicians dissipated, and powerful private actors were nonexistent. Thus the same networks of cadres that operated as guardians of the public domain also acted as self-interested managers of locales designated as “private.” Hence one of the salient characteristics of postcommunist political capitalism was that the unitary bureaucracy—which, Weber pointed out, enjoys “unlimited and uncontrollable power”—conceived and carried out the countless decisions that ultimately determined who got what when and how.
Another important feature of postcommunist political capitalism might be described in the following way: this was a political environment where the state's Willenslbildung was markedly less important than what Weber called Verfüngungsgewalt, or “the power of control and disposition.” Let me explain.
An important and yet strangely overlooked question about early postcommunism is the following: what kinds of advantages can state officials allot to favored interlocutors? The dominant view on this subject is well captured by Iván Szelényi who, as already noted, invokes the notion of “rational acquisition of profits.” Though seemingly uncontroversial, this observation is wrong. Under communism markets were either suppressed or thoroughly marginalized; barring some minor exceptions, all forms of profit making were criminalized, and the rationality of capitalist entrepreneurship was almost completely eclipsed by the rationality of the plan. Unless we endorse the rather naïve and discredited view that full-fledged “rational” markets emerge as soon as state control is relaxed or dissipates, we must conclude that in early postcommunism “opportunities for rational acquisition of profits,” market-based advantages, and chances for capital accumulation were not simply a scarce, but non-existing commodity. Their absence was a major fact with which economic and political actors had to reckon, and which analysts should recognize as well.
If the overlapping dynamics of political and economic transformations did not lead to the distribution of opportunities for profit making through political means, what is it that the unitary bureaucracy was in the business of distributing? I think that we may use another term introduced by Weber, Verfüngungsgewalt, or “the power of control and disposition,” to designate the object of bureaucratic discretion and entrepreneurial appropriations. Just as is the case with political capitalism, the German scholar invokes this term in the context of his multi-layered discussion of how Western modernity is different from other sociopolitical configurations. More specifically, he asserts that in what he calls “a modern market economy,” characterized by “legal protection” extended to “autonomous agents,” questions such as who owns what and how they are positioned in the economic and political fields are answered with reference to laws, legal titles, formal contracts, and legislative provisions. Outside of the Occidental framework, however, what really matters, both empirically and analytically, is “the de facto distribution of powers of control and disposal.” For those who study non-Western contexts (Weber mentions “socialism” as an example of such a context!), such de facto power is much more important than legal entitlements or market-oriented modes of profit making. Who has such power, how it is displayed, and what dynamics it imparts on political and economic processes are all questions to be answered through analyses of localized, informal, sub rosa, ad hoc arrangements.Footnote 50
My earlier juxtaposition of Willensbildung and Verfüngungsgewalt will hopefully make more sense now. Social change propelled by policies that embody the democratic will of the state is grounded in legislatively agreed upon blueprints for reform or is carried out in accordance with policies designed to advance a negotiated—if not necessarily laudable or unequivocally embraced—conception of the common good. In contrast, socioeconomic transformations triggered by redistribution of the de facto power to exploit productive assets are rooted in a myriad of quid pro quos involving agents that operate across—and strategically shift—the boundary demarcating an amorphous public domain. Postcommunist political capitalism should be construed as a set of power configurations that rest on Verfüngungsgewalt rather than on deliberate political manipulations of markets engineered by a willful state.
To substantiate my argument empirically I will refer to the centrality in accounts of socioeconomic change in early postcommunism of the notion of “siphoning off” of resources and assets hitherto stockpiled in the public domain. The theme of “siphoning off” was an essential component of both descriptive factual narratives and explanatory analytical frameworks that focused on the reconfiguration of advantageous positioning and power relations in early postcommunism. It resurfaces, unadorned by any empirical or conceptual modifications, in analyses of different postcommunist contexts. Andrew Schwartz's description of tunelovani (tunneling) in the Czech Republic is almost identical to Roumen Avramov and Kamen Guenov's depiction of “spider schemes” in Bulgaria.Footnote 51 David Stark's analysis of “nomenklatura buyouts” devised by “clan-like networks of enterprise directors” parallels Jadwiga Staniszkis' explorations of the “dual [public/private] ownership status of assets in the state domain” and the way in which this “dual status” was exploited by “the political class.”Footnote 52 And Alina Pippidi's examination of “local captures” in Romania bears close resemblance to the “state captures” documented and explored by Joel Hellman.Footnote 53 What the general term “siphoning off”—as well as cognate terms like “asset-stripping”—seeks to convey is precisely the analytical point that what really mattered in postcommunism was not so much market-rooted advantages but the de facto exploitation of state-owned resources for private purposes. From a Weberian perspective, postcommunist political capitalism is a form of domination by a unitary bureaucracy that enables cadre networks to raid resource-rich public locales.
Among the characteristics of postcommunist political capitalism, then, one should count the fact that decisions about who gets what and how are made by a unitary bureaucracy, and that such decisions create an environment where de facto control over resources is more important than de jure orderliness designed and sustained through the organizational instruments of the state. In the same vein, I would ague that postcommunist political capitalism has a third trait: it is a privilege-centered, not a rights-centered polity. The reference is to a distinction that Weber introduced in Economy and Society, which in my view is a useful analytical tool for dissecting the intertwining of economic and organizational change in early postcommunism: the distinction between rights and privileges. From a sociological perspective, Weber maintained, “The statement that someone has a right by virtue of the legal order of the state … means that he has a chance … of invoking in favor of his ideal of material interests the aid of a ‘coercive apparatus’ which is in special readiness for this purpose. … Such guaranty … does not depend upon questions of expediency, discretion, grace, or arbitrary pleasure.”Footnote 54 Privilege, on the other hand, is a rather different arrangement for the protection of interests—it rests on the particular expectation that “one may himself engage, or fail to engage, in certain conduct without interference from a third party,” and this “third party” is usually the ruler who can deploy violence in order to enforce deals.Footnote 55 In other words, privileges rest on ad hoc arrangements involving identifiable personalities (some acting as economic entrepreneurs and some acting as rule-enforcers) rather than on general legal rules and impersonal enforcement mechanisms that guarantee property rights under the conditions of modern statehood. In an organizational environment where the state's will had been blocked by a unitary bureaucracy it was expectations related to privileges, not to rights, that were sociologically meaningful in a Weberian sense, namely in the sense that “the aid of a coercive apparatus” could be summoned for their defense.
Empirical analyses of economic activities in countries as diverse as Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria confirm that in order to assert their “power of control and disposition,” entrepreneurs in early postcommunism would be compelled to forsake legal procedures involving civil servants acting in their official capacity, and collaborate informally with the same civil servants acting as private enforcers. In addition, the literature on postcommunism yields ample evidence that the enforcement of proprietary claims—particularly over productive assets—was driven precisely by the kinds of considerations that Weber described as inimical to any rights-oriented system: “expediency, discretion, grace, or arbitrary pleasure.”Footnote 56 One of the key organizational characteristics of postcommunist political capitalism, therefore, was the dis-embedding of claims over assets from existing public institutions. Since the enforcement of general rules and principles was entrusted to the same networks that stood to benefit if such rules and principles are selectively and erratically enforced, “unusual transactions” that involved the activation of cadre capital were much more important that reliance on impersonal rules articulated by the state. The construal of political capitalism as a set of policies favoring certain groups through the creation of market advantages is therefore deceptive—it posits “the state's Will” as a formative force and occludes empirical realities which unambiguously suggest that the Verfüngungsgewalt, micro-managed by a unitary bureaucracy, was much more important.
To conclude, I would argue that postcommunist political capitalism lends itself to an amplified Weberian interpretation, one, that is, that encompasses the interrelated concepts of Verfüngungsgewalt, Willensbildung, and privilege-centered political organization. This interpretation amalgamates an empirical account of a historically specific organizational medium—the unitary bureaucracy bequeathed by communist state-builders—into a general Weberian proposition about state weakness, weakness construed as the likelihood that the multitude of state agents will act in compliance with “the order governing the state as an organization.” Undoubtedly, in postcommunism this likelihood diminished dramatically, while the probability that the unitary bureaucracy would act in ways obstructing the state's will increased exponentially. Such a bureaucracy is still “strong” in the sense that it may inflict considerable pain on various actors and groups; it is also weak because it cannot engage in any form of “tutelage,” rational policy-making or coherent policy implementation. The “political” component of postcommunist political capitalism is thus emphatically not that the workings of domains allegedly beyond the reach of state bureaucracies—like markets—in fact function in accordance with the wishes of bureaucratic elites. To the contrary, the key political fact about this form of capitalism is that even bureaucratic domains that are supposedly run in accordance with principles other than self-interest de facto operate as “the neo-utilitarian nightmare of a state in which all incumbents are out for themselves.”Footnote 57 Interactions between state agents and their non-state cronies do indeed lie at the intersection of political-institutional and socioeconomic change. But to the extent that “politics” determined the parameters of postcommunist political capitalism, it manifested itself as a validation of de facto privileges and not legal rights. And to the extent that the functioning of the state as an organization was related to socioeconomic change, it revolved around the private exploitation of nominally communal assets through discretionary shifts that occurred within the domain that had already been demarcated as “public.” A state that amounts to much less than the sum of its parts: this is the key institutional characteristic of postcommunist political capitalism.
DE-BUREAUCRATIZATION AND THE EMBEDDEDNESS OF THE POSTCOMMUNIST STATE
No informed observer of postcommunist politics will deny that throughout the 1990s corruption was endemic, thorough, and persistent. To be sure, various aspects of postcommunist corruption are hotly debated. The literature on the subject is enlivened by theoretical controversies (what is the best way to define corruption?), cultural explorations (how is the framing of corruption as an issue grounded in cultural regional peculiarities and specific historical legacies?), conceptual disputes (what is the most useful typology of corrupt practices?), methodological debates (what are the pitfalls of extrapolating actual levels of corruption from data about perceptions of corruption?), and disagreements about policy recommendations (what is the best way to contain and combat corruption?).Footnote 58 Still, no serious objections can be raised against the general contention that postcommunist societies were afflicted by the syndrome of the de-bureaucratized state, in the Weberian sense specified above.
That levels of corruption were high was readily recognized, but the full ramifications of this situation for the type of emerging capitalism in the former second world have sometimes been overlooked. In this section, I would like to advance a specific claim about the relationship between corrupt practices and postcommunist political capitalism: such practices did not simply demoralize social constituencies and make policy implementation more costly; they effectively shrank the domain of governance and rendered various forms of benevolent state interventions impossible. In light of my analysis of the redistribution of de facto power of control, we should think about postcommunist de-bureaucratization not simply in terms of corruption but also as a dynamic “embedding” of the postcommunist state. According to Peter Evans' well-known definition, “embeddedness” is “the concrete set of connections that link the state intimately and aggressively to particular social groups with whom the state shares a joint project of transformation.”Footnote 59 The “particular social groups” that Evans himself studied were involved in various kinds of entrepreneurial activities, and “the joint projects” he refers to were designed to spur economic and technological development. In postcommunism, these groups are comprised of officials whose “project” is the looting of the public domain.Footnote 60 Corrupt practices are not a style of governing—they are an assault on the infrastructure of governance. This is the core analytical insight behind Steven Solnick's brilliant remark that once communist and neo-communist state agents began to cash in on their privileged position, “these officials were not merely stealing from the state, they were stealing the state itself.” Footnote 61 Given how dominant elites were positioned advantageously within the unitary bureaucracy, their illicit behavior depleted the state's ability to shape in a consistent and sustainable manner its institutional environment.Footnote 62 Arguably the most important empirical finding about postcommunist political capitalism was reported by M. Steven Fish, who concludes his study of various trajectories of change with the observation that not a single example exists of an East European country where “agents of the state straightened out institutions—organized civil service, got the property-right laws right, rebuilt the agencies of law-enforcement—and then proceeded with prudent, incremental economic reform.”Footnote 63
In order to amplify the point that corruption might be inimical not just to good governance but to governance tout court, I would suggest that in postcommunism sleaze can take the form of a double exclusion. On one hand, it excludes individuals who are not connected to well-positioned networks. This exclusion affects those who find themselves “below” the level of de facto management of state-owned assets. But such predatory operations also exclude policy-makers who might contemplate an alternative use of the assets stored in the fuzzily delineated state domain. This second mode of exclusion affects those who are located “above” the level of managers and, most importantly, the newly elected policy makers in the fledgling East European democracies. Conflicts over the allocation of “power of control and distribution” thus infuse economic life with essential uncertainties about the boundaries of the state, and political life with essential uncertainties about what the reservoir of “mobilizable resources” available to democratic politicians actually is.
Postcommunist political capitalism is an environment where the state is radically weakened vis-à-vis its organizational competitors. Thus it is markedly different from the type of capitalism where markets drive socioeconomic change. As Neil Fligstein persuasively maintained, the market is “a field that depends not just on the power of incumbents, but also on more general rules in society in order to stabilize the power of incumbents.”Footnote 64 In a de-bureaucratized, privilege-centered polity where corrupt transactions with public officials ensure de facto control over assets, the “power of incumbents” is crucially stabilized through the non-enforcement of “more general rules in society,” while actual enforcement is routinely carried out by organizations other than the state. From a Weberian standpoint, the saga of postcommunist redistributions and the mediating role of the unitary bureaucracy cannot be rehearsed as a tale of how the state-led allocation of economic benefits allowed some groups to become “capitalists.” Rather, it should be cast as a story of how non-market chances rooted in a non-Western environment somehow metamorphosed into opportunities for Western-type rational acquisition of profits.Footnote 65
CONCLUSION: GETTING THE STORY RIGHT
I have argued that the notion of political capitalism makes eminent sense when applied to postcommunism. Mainstream usages of this concept emphasize the tutelage of the state and the coherence of a political logic in accordance with which property rights are conferred to the privileged few. By contrast, I have emphasized the rupturing of administrative routines, the fracturing of the organizational context in which the state is embedded, and the emergence of ad hoc arrangements that do not coalesce into an overall stable property-rights regime. Here is, then, my analytical re-description of postcommunist political capitalism: What surfaced in the aftermath of 1989 is a privilege-centered polity where de facto control over assets is asserted by means of fragmented and personalized enforcement mechanisms. The boundaries of the state are porous and liable to be transgressed by social predators, and the de-bureaucratization of the public domain resulted in diminished levels of stateness.
As I have said, my attempt to introduce Weberian themes into the field of postcommunist studies was not guided by the ambition to offer an original explanation of what transpired after 1989. Rather, my objective is to present an alternative analytical description, a novel way of capturing the interrelatedness of political, economic, and organizational change. What is the heuristic value of this operation? What issues are at stake in the debate about the nature of postcommunist political capitalism?
I would argue that two sets of important analytical benefits can accrue if a Weberian perspective on postcommunist political capitalism is endorsed. The first is a clearer comprehension of the fact that the study of state reconfiguration is prolegomenon to the study of democratization and, particularly, economic reform. The second is a better grasp of what it would mean to cast postcommunist “transitions” as “success stories.”
The term “prolegomenon” is usually defined as a critical discussion serving to introduce and interpret an extended work. The genre becomes necessary when there is a need to engage in a debate on preliminary, a priori issues, a debate that prepares us to understand better the significance of major empirical, analytical, and theoretical findings. (For example, Kant famously argued that before considering the way humans analyze phenomena like causality, we need to comprehend the nature of thinking itself.) The ambition of those who write prolegomena is not to negate the ideas presented in the main work, but to initiate a preliminary discussion of analytical premises and background conditions that will help us better comprehend that work.
The core insight informing the Weberian perspective on political capitalism can be formulated as follows: the study of state restructuring in postcommunism should serve as prolegomenon to the study of democratization and market reforms. Democracies and market-based economies presuppose a functional infrastructure of governance, but a key contextual feature of the former Soviet world was that such an infrastructure was not available. Hence we should accord a high analytical priority to the question of how it was created, how administrative apparatuses and bureaucratic agencies were rebuilt. The analysis of political capitalism is “preliminary,” and therefore should be construed as a set of prolegomena to the study of market and democratic consolidations in a very distinct sense: it suggests that inquiries into the formative impact of specific policies and reforms should be preceded by a close look at the institutional means available to policy makers and reformers. The discussion of institutional means is to the discussion to democratization and marketization what the discussion of means of transportation is to debates about routes and destinations. If it is reasonable to assume that the means of transportation are present and sufficiently reliable, than it makes sense to focus on issues related to destinations. If, however, this assumption cannot be made, then it is not only logical but commonsensical to look at the available machinery first.
A sharper understanding of the essential way in which conventional accounts of democratization and economic recovery might be incomplete and therefore defective is the first benefit that the adoption of a Weberian view of political capitalism might bring. The second is that it pushes to the foreground an analytical theme that must figure prominently in any plausible account of postcommunist “success.” To bring the significance of this point into a sharper relief, let me venture the following proposition: in the near future Eastern European “transitions” will be recognized as an appealing success story and as a source of policy prescriptions for other nations contemplating multiple reforms. Of course, for a whole generation of scholars trained in the 1990s the suggestion that these “transitions” have been successful will be shocking, perhaps even scandalous. After all, exposing the “teleological assumptions,” “failures,” “illusions,” “unintended consequences,” “simplistic premises,” and “utopian expectations” that clouded the restructuring of the former Soviet world was de rigueur during the first dozen years of postcommunist studies. In discussions of postcommunist reforms, every mention of a “success” was followed by a “yes, but…” and a long list of claims bringing home the point that Eastern Europe had fallen short of Western models. In the future a different pattern may transpire; every mention of reform failures will be followed by a “yes, but…” and a list of countries where transformative processes generated results demonstrably worse than those in Eastern Europe. It is very important therefore to not bury postcommunist political capitalism into a grand narrative of how societies naturally progress and attain higher stages of development, but rather to explain why and how it was overcome.
As the foregoing analysis suggests, I am convinced that this story should revolve around themes pertinent to political capitalism construed as the intersection of political change, economic transformation, and state reconfiguration. Simply put, some postcommunist societies built stable democracies and regained their economic viability because they could repair their states. If this is not a sufficient condition—and admittedly states may be rebuilt by would-be dictators and used to suppress democracy and markets—it is certainly a necessary one. The following questions might guide our thinking about this issue: How are logistical resources, once hijacked from the state, re-channeled into the state domain? What are the sources of cohesion of bureaucratic apparatuses in developed societies? What are the political and organizational preconditions for the stabilization of rules demarcating the state domain? What factors determine the supply and demand of administrative efficiency? What are the social and institutional dynamics that might transform a privilege-centered polity into a rights-centered one? Answering these questions in a theoretically informed and empirically grounded manner will go a long way toward dissecting the bewildering trajectories of postcommunist development, and demonstrate how students of postcommunism can contribute to on-going conversations about governance in the contemporary world.
Citizens of postcommunist societies have very good reasons for “moving on” and facing the challenges of new eras. But it is incumbent upon scholars who study postcommunism to keep the memory of it as a distinct “moment” alive. Despite the fact that this “moment” began with a brief paroxysm of triumphant joy, individuals and communities of the former second world soon began to feel—like the Florentine humanists who enliven the pages of J.G.A. Pocock's masterpiece—engulfed by “a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of security and stability.”Footnote 66 This stream may have run its course, but it marked one of the most interesting and consequential turning points in modern history. That is why efforts should continue to ground its analytical interpretation in a coherent and theoretically engrossing framework such as Weberian economic sociology.
