Table of Contents

1. The Problem of the State in the Social and Political Sciences 2. The Matter Thereof and the Artificer – Hobbes, Weber and the Constitutionalist Approach 3. The Government of Men and Things – Foucault’s Radical Critique of Constitutionalism 4. Problematising the State – Historical and Ethnographic Studies of State Practices 5. The Limits of Problematisation – Historical Studies and the Divorce of Discourse from Practice 6. Fictions of Practice – Anthropological Accounts and the Fabrication of the Real 7. The Problem of the State Beyond Constitution and Construction 8. What We Talk About When We Talk About the State

About the Author

Michael Mair is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK.