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Uncivil States and Civil Societies: How Illusion Became Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

René Lemarchand
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Extract

What Geertz refers to as the ‘pigeonhole disease’ is nowhere more evident than in the persistent tendency of political scientists to locate state and society in separate conceptual niches: one inhabited by a potentially predatory species and the other by a defenceless and fully domesticated pigeon. Only where a recognisable entity is sharing the characteristics of a state system, whose boundaries are analytically separate from those of the social system, can political science claim a disciplinary domain of its own. The ongoing debate over the relative merits or demerits of state-centred approaches has only served to add further salience to the dichotomy between state and society, but with little agreement as to where the one begins and the other leaves off.

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Articles
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The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 177 - 191
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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