The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey and Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

Extract

The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey. By Sam Kaplan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 254p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. By Gyanendra Pandey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 228p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

There were relatively few states when the modern discipline of political science came into being, and the most thoroughly institutionalized among them became intellectual as well as normative templates for what states should be. Our initial expectations for the political development of the vast number of new states—an increase from fewer than 60 to more than 200 since the end of World War II—had been conditioned by ahistorical takes on the roles of the social and the cultural in state formation and nation building (see Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas, 1960; and not excepting the contributions of Charles Tilly and associates in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 1975). Two such expectations were that, over time, states' populations would exhibit more coherent political cultures and increasing social order (with diminishing violence) within frameworks of state-delineated laws and state-centered institutions. The authors of these two books suggest that those expectations are more likely to be met in form and illusion than in substance. For Thomas Hobbes, stateness is hardly sufficient for social cohesion or nonviolent civil existence. They also give reason to ask how well they have been met in the model states of the historic West.