Geography and the State: An Essay in Political Geography (Critical Human Geography)

There can be no distinctive political geographical theory but only a political-geographical perspective within the wider context of political economy: there is no subdiscipline of political geography. P. J. Taylor That is the manner in which politics unfold -not by conspiracies and the exercise of personal power but by error, muddle, doubt, instinct, and the free play of human weakness. ## P. Jenkins The origins of this book lie in a concern with the substance of political geography and its contribution to human geography in recent decades. As I became more involved with the literature and research in the field, so I became more certain that political geography was in an arrested state of development, not, as some have claimed, because the quantitative revolution had passed it by, but rather because it had evolved no sensible treatment of the central element in its work -the state. As I have argued elsewhere, both in academic polemic (Johnston, 1980b(Johnston, , 1980d, 198lb) , 198lb) and in major reviews (Johnston, 198la, 1981g), political geographers have neither developed nor adopted any viable theory of the state, without which their analyses are incomplete. (All of the attempted analyses, and the many descriptions, are based on an implicit theory; almost invariably this is naive and unrealistic.) This book follows on from those pieces, by presenting the outline of a theoretical approach, both to the study of the state and to the study of state actions. It is a contribution to the political geography perspective, not a political geography. Front Matter....Pages i-xii Geography and the State: an Introduction....Pages 1-10 The State: its Nature and Functions....Pages 11-27 The Development of the State....Pages 28-65 The State and the Contemporary World-Economy....Pages 66-119 The State, its Territory and its People....Pages 120-186 The Local State....Pages 187-260 Postscript....Pages 261-262 Back Matter....Pages 263-283