Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic

Abstract

How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.

Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation, state structures, and stratification

“…Cultural sociology provides another lens into the contested meanings of punishment. Work at the intersection of cultural sociology and political sociology has examined how cultural codes and values (Alexander, 2006;Connor & Doan, 2019;Dromi, 2020), narratives (Connor, 2012;Polletta, 2009), performances and rituals (Berezin, 1997;Reed, 2019;Xu & Gorski, 2019), and other symbols (Karakaya, 2020;Olick et al, 2003) inform the meanings attributed to political issues. Several works highlight the role of culture in shaping how and when the state may legitimately impose its will on citizens when carrying out punishments (Smith, 2008;Willis, 2008).…”

Charismatic authority and fractured polities: A cross‐national analysis

“…Restricting the analysis to charismatic authority, there are two primary strands in the literature. The first concerns charisma authority as arising through social interaction (Joosse, 2012(Joosse, , 2018Katz, 1975;Reed, 2019; for a review see Joosse, 2018). Second is the scholarship that focuses on the routinization of charismatic authority-which has been a hallmark of the Weberian perspective (Joosse, 2017;Ritzer, 1975).…”

“…Since Max Weber's seminal work Economy and Society (1978 [1922]), sociological research has focused on charismatic authority as either arising through social interaction (Joosse, 2012, 2018; Katz, 1975; Reed, 2019) or on its routinization in bureaucracy (Joosse, 2017; Ritzer, 1975; Schoon & Joseph West, 2017). Little work, however, has addressed the associations between charismatic authority and various political outcomes of interest to political sociologists—especially in cross‐national comparative perspective.…”

“…Building on the charisma as performative literature (Joosse, 2012, 2018; Katz, 1975; Reed, 2013), as well as literature that establishes the intensification of political polarization through personal interaction (Liu & Srivastava, 2015), we theorize that a dichotomy emerges for followers of the charismatic leader in terms of loyalty. For charismatic leaders, there is no room for grey areas regarding competitors.…”

Democracy and Collective Identity in the EU and the USA

“…Some of the new American regime‐directed methods of participation echoed today's banality of European political practices and identification, as in the regime's emphasis on publicizing its performance of state functions (Reed, ). Yet as new divisions emerged, elites and popular actors used other symbolic political technologies to put forward competing visions of belonging, legitimacy and agendas (Aldrich, ).…”