This condition is back. Or perhaps the condition never left. The 2008 financial crisis “casts decisive doubt on the theory that states are ignored by markets,” the editors write. phronesis (Sweden). Subsequent crises, from pandemics to geopolitical conflicts to industrial policy, have only accelerated its recurrence.
However, this problem is phronesis Rather, we are interested in what conditions emerge. As the editors observe, “Today’s political debates seem less and less concerned with choosing between public and private solutions.” Instead, fault lines appear to run through the states themselves. ”
The contrasting epigraph in this issue encapsulates this tension. While Hannah Arendt presents authority as a form of obedience compatible with freedom, Friedrich Nietzsche traces the origins of the state to domination and conquest.
Rather than resolving this conflict, the contributors explore it from different angles. Issues move from issues of readability, population control, and reproductive governance to broader debates about capitalism, neoliberalism, and state power. Throughout, the state emerges “not as a solution in itself, but as a concentration of contradictions and possibilities in the present.”
rupture
During the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, many countries intervened to stabilize financial systems, stimulate demand, and secure business financing. Vanja Karlsson asks whether this resurgence of state intervention signals the beginning of the end of neoliberalism, or simply its latest mutation.
To answer this question, Carlson compares two schools of thought. The first argues that neoliberalism remains alive and well, adapting to changing political and economic realities. The state may be back, but it continues to serve neoliberal objectives centered on competitiveness and profitability.
Regulatory theory offers a different diagnosis. According to this view, neoliberalism is in a structural crisis. Rather than adapting to new circumstances, neoliberal modes of regulation may be giving way to something fundamentally different. This is not a mutation, but a genuine historical rupture.
Carlson questions, in the absence of a clear definition of neoliberalism, what counts as evidence that state capitalism will actually replace neoliberalism. This ultimately leads to broader conceptual issues. “The question is not only how to classify state intervention, but also how to determine when a historical form of capitalism is in crisis, transformed, or replaced by a new one.”
counted
Sweden, which has the world’s oldest population registration system, provides a paradigmatic example for Andreas Aspren Rundstedt’s article on the history of censuses and population registration.
These systems reveal the highly political nature of headcounting, seen as technologies of governance that enable welfare and exclusion, recognition and control. From the earliest known censuses, dating to around 3800 BC in the Sumerian Empire, “counting the population was closely associated with the centralization of power.”
Lundstedt focuses particularly on the emergence of personal identification numbers in Sweden and the tensions they have caused. Considered unduly intrusive in some countries, such unique identifiers accompany individuals “from cradle to grave” and allow information from multiple administrative registries to be integrated.
In an era of facial recognition technology and expanded digital surveillance, the Swedish case raises broader questions about how much privacy should be sacrificed for government legibility and efficiency.
The census does more than just record reality. It helps shape it. “Readability is not simply the ability to describe a population; it also widens the horizons of the bureaucratic and political imagination.” The Swedish population estimate of 1747 is a case in point. This number shocked policy makers as it was much lower than expected and directly contributed to the creation of new administrative institutions and demographic interventions.
childbirth
As birth rates decline, many states are reverting to old patterns in which childbearing is seen as a collective responsibility, even obligation, rather than an individual choice. Terms such as “population balance,” “dependency,” and “future workforce” increasingly frame reproduction as a solution to social and economic problems rather than as a deeply personal decision.
Evelina Johansson Willen examines all aspects of how parenthood is being repoliticized. Natalists advocate procreation as a social necessity, while antinatalists increasingly frame non-procreation as a moral obligation. Both risk degrading reproduction into a means to achieving broader political goals. Johansson Willen argues that raising children remains an “existential leap,” an irrevocable commitment to an uncertain future that cannot be justified by demographic, economic, or ecological reasons alone.
That leap is now even more difficult as families, once supported by collective welfare institutions, are increasingly expected to assume responsibility. At the same time, concerns related to the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” are driving policies that restrict the reproductive rights of some groups while promoting reproduction for others in the name of preserving the “white demographic majority.”
anarchism
From early research on peasant societies in Southeast Asia, weapon of the weak and look like a nationJames C. Scott developed a unique anarchist perspective on state power. His attention to “small weapons of class struggle” such as rumors, foot-dragging, desertion, petty theft, and sabotage, writes Michael Ohmstedt, reveals the everyday resistance hidden beneath apparent obedience.
This “anarchist squint,” as Scott calls it, usefully “denaturalizes the state-centered present.” However, Omstedt argues that the lens ultimately reproduces an open-ended conflict between state and society, abandoning the state as a terrain of struggle and consistently projecting social conflicts and aspirations for liberation onto an “unsullied realm beyond the state.”
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
