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Contemporary usage presents an opposition between states and terrorism, as if to suggest that terrorism is not an instrument of the state but something that is used against it. Yet the two most influential foundational myths of the modern states system suggest that the state's capacity for terror is the source of peace and order within the territorial community. It also makes other states think twice about attacking its territory. The author examines the ramifications of these myths and shows how they underlie conventional accounts of what is at stake in the war on terror.

There is little of value to be said about the concept of power as such. The term itself is best seen as invoking the ‘total structure of actions brought to bear’ by some on the actions of others. What is of interest, then, is not power as such but rather the special cases in which relatively stable configurations of power can be identified. Lukes' focus on domination obscures the significance of other configurations. One is the political power of the state, which Lukes simply takes for granted, focusing instead on the question of who has control over its use. Another, which overlaps with political power but is not reducible to it, is government of the state. The system of states is the site of a third major limitation in PRV‘s discussion, which is the point of the plural, states, in my title. Neither the American debate to which PRV made an influential late contribution nor Lukes' expanded discussion have much to say about the role of these configurations of power in the world today. A view of power that simply ignores them may be radical in certain respects but it is blinkered in others.

On 13 January 2004 Associated Press reported ‘Bush signs proclamation against corruption’. It barred entry into the USA of public officials from Latin America who had been accused of corruption and...

This article considers Michel Foucault's work on the rationality of government and the practices in which it has been implemented. Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucault's analysis of political reason in relation to the governmental significance of electoral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of individual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the neglect of the international system and the problem of sovereignty.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Michel Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as a distinctive form of political reason. Liberalism is commonly regarded as a normative political doctrine or theory that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle both to the legitimate objectives of government and to the manner in which those objectives may be pursued. Foucault's account of liberalism as a rationality of government also accords central place to individual liberty, which is seen as giving rise to a prudential concern that one might be governing too much. The suggestion is that, rather than pursue its objectives through the detailed regulation of conduct in the manner of police, it might be more effective for the government of a state to work through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty. According to this account, underlying the liberal fear of governing too much are two distinct but related perceptions of the population to be governed. It is seen first as containing a number of self-regulating domains of social interaction, and secondly as consisting of individuals endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. In liberal political thought, Foucault observes, the market epitomizes both perceptions, serving, in effect, as "a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality."1 Liberal political reason, then, sees individual liberty as a limit, not simply to the legitimate reach of government, but also to its effectiveness. More recent scholars have adapted this account of liberalism to the analysis of neoliberal attempts to govern through the decisions of autonomous individuals.

This article analyses the relationship between political theory and social theory. The separation of political and social theory (and of political theory from other areas in the study of politics) is a relatively recent development. The most significant difference between conventional political theory and conventional social theory concerns the relationship between normative and descriptive/explanatory issues in the analysis of social/political life. In spite of their differences, however, political and social theory share the one set of historical roots and, partly in consequence, a core set of assumptions. They specifically share intellectual and cultural history.

Critical examination of the concept of actor shows, first, that actors' choices are an important part of the explanation of their actions (but those choices are not reducible to the rationality of the actors concerned or to effects of their structural location) and, second, that there are actors whose concerns and objectives are not reducible to those of human individuals (but classes are not among them). These arguments undermine analyses of politics in terms of the actions or interests of classes and the attempts of rational choice theory to analyze politics in terms of a methodological individualism.

Said, E. (1977) Orientalism . New York: Random House.Spivak, G.C. (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York:Methuen.Weber, M. (1968[1922]) Economy and Society: Volume I . New York: Bedminster.Yu, H. (2001) Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in ModernAmerica . Oxford: Oxford.

In his discussion of the forms of legitimate domination Weber notes that rational, legal domination is frequently combined with an important element of plebiscitarian democracy. He also suggests that the fact that the chief may be represented as the servant or agent of the people "naturally does nothing whatever to disprove the quality of dominance" (Weber 1978, p. 215). The element of democracy, then, does not mean here that the people rule. Rather it serves in the legitimation of a distinctively modern form of rule that combines a bureaucratic state and significant elements of charismatic domination. Ideas of popular sovereignty and the considerably weaker idea of the mandate are certainly invoked in these societies, and not only when elections are in the air. They play a significant part in political life, but they do not describe it properly. Weber's argument on this point exemplifies an important cautionary thesis concerning the role of ideas in social life. There is a clear sense in which ideas about the workings of particular social institutions may be embedded in the social institutions themselves and may function as essential lubricants in their day-to-day activities, but it does not follow that those ideas properly describe the institutions in which they operate. The ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty are well-known examples. Another example is the idea of politics as class struggle, which has played an important part in socialist and labor movement politics for much of the modern period. This paper makes a similar point about the idea of the person as rational actor. It is a ubiquitous component of Western social thought, figuring prominently both in the life of modern societies and in our attempts to make sense of it. The first part of this paper identifies what is involved in that idea. Next I go on to use a more general model of the actor, considered simply as a locus of decision and action, to undermine the idea of the person as rational actor. It is necessary to distinguish 1) a capacity to employ conceptual tools and devices to construct a connected chain of reasoning or argumentation, and 2) the rationality (or otherwise) of the tools employed. What matters is to investigate what those tools and other devices are, rather than to make any prior assumptions about their rationality. The final section considers the implications of this argument for our understanding of what Weber calls the "specific and peculiar rationalism of modern culture" (1978, p. 26).

This paper criticizes the ways in which `power', `interests', and related notions are used in the analysis of social relations. Two broad approaches to power analysis are considered. The first involves `capacity-outcome' conceptions in which power is defined in terms of the capacity of an agent to secure particular outcomes. The second involves more general usages in which power is supposed to be effective not only as regards the outcomes of particular struggles, but also in the determination of the conditions of struggle themselves by the systematic exclusion or suppression of certain interests. I argue that both approaches operate to foreclose serious analysis of the constitution of arenas of struggle and the forces active in them by means of gross oversimplification of the conditions in which struggles take place.

It is sometimes possible, using census data and overall voting figures, to estimate the voting behaviour of various socio-economic groups. In particular this involves, under certain assumptions, the use of least square regression analysis. The results themselves provide a partial check on the validity of these assumptions. This study shows, taking the city of Liverpool as a whole, that there is no consistent relationship between socio-economic group and voting behaviour. But more consistent patterns are revealed if the city is divided into a number of areas according to their social composition.