States that Build Citizen Power and Joy
In her recent article for CLT, Davina Cooper calls for the urgent reimagination of the state. She calls upon critical theorists to move beyond critique of the current state form, and ask the deeper questions: what is the state
for? What does it mean to be a state? And, crucially,
what could it come to mean? Echoing her appeal for the Left to think about statecraft in terms of a proactive project of reimagination, here I offer the beginnings of a response to these questions.
For forty years, neoliberal governance practices, processes, and institutional forms have sculpted the ‘possible field of action’ of citizens, based on a notion of the forms of social interaction which should be encouraged, and those which must be limited. The notional justification for this is that people and organisations are at their best when encouraged to behave as atomised ‘utility maximising’ individual agents, in competition with one another.