Crisis and the Structural Transformation of the State: Interrogating the Process of Change

‘Crisis' is one of the most underdeveloped concepts in state theory and, indeed, in social and political theory more generally. In this article I suggest one way in which this persistent oversight might be rectified, making a distinctive case for rethinking the process of social and political change in terms of the transformation of the state, and for rethinking state crisis in this ‘restating of social and political change’ (see also Hay 1996a). I return to the etymology of the term and (re-)conceptualise ‘crisis' as a moment of decisive intervention and not merely a moment of fragmentation, dislocation or destruction. This reformulation suggests the need to give far greater emphasis to the essential narrativity of crisis, and the relationship between discourses of crisis and the contradictions that they narrate. The result is an analysis of crisis as a moment of transformation—a moment in which it is recognised that a decisive intervention can, and indeed must, be made. It is argued that during such moments of crisis a new trajectory is imposed upon the state. The intense and condensed temporality of crisis thus emerges as a strategic moment in the structural transformation of the state. Within this theoretical account crises are thus revealed as ‘epoch-making’ moments marking the transition between phases of historical–political time. They are thus suggestive of a periodisation of the development of the state.