Mitchell, Timothy. "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics." The American Political Science Review, Vol.85, No.1 (1991): 77-96.

Mitchell, Timothy. "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics." The American Political Science Review, Vol.85, No.1 (1991): 77-96.

• Political scientists have repeatedly had a problem studying 'the state' and distinguishing it from broader society. The two responses of American academics to this problem has been to either replace the 'state' with the similarly vague and borderless notion of the 'political system', or to try and reduce the state to an overly narrow set of formal politics, executive bodies, and an idea of objective national interest. Neither of these approaches has solved the core problem of distinguishing the state from society (77-78, 84).
• The author proposes a third approach of seeing the perception of the state as separate and distinct from society, despite social relations regularly crossing that line, as a social and political phenomenon deserving of study in its own right (78).
• Political scientists first sought to remove the term 'state' from their conceptual vocabulary in the 1950s because it was vague, poorly defined, and excluded important parts of the political process, like parties and the media (78-79).
• This movement within the discipline was motivated by a wider turn towards a more integral conception of politics that included psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. In this wider conception of politics, the idea of the 'state' was no longer useful (79).
• This turn towards a broader study of politics as embedded within society, and related to sociology and economics was a response to the failure of political science in the 1940s to explain the communist sympathies or political apathy of segments of the Western European population. Governments viewed this as imperative to stopping the spread of communism and thus demanded answers that required a broader study of political life (79-80).
• The author applies his approach to the issue of defining the boundaries of the state, using the case of Aramco, the American oil consortium that maintained exclusive rights to Saudi oil resources (89).
• After the Second World War, Saudi Arabia demanded that its share of oil revenues be increased from 12% to 50%. Aramco was unwilling to pay this and arranged with allies in the US State Department to have the additional revenues be paid to the Saudis by US taxpayers by the Treasury Department using Aramco's tax payments, allowing Aramco profits to remain the same (89).
• Stephen Krasner, one of the major advocates for a strict and narrow definition of the state, argued that the case of Aramco demonstrated that the US government used oil companies to achieve political ends, such as giving more money to the pro-American government in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Kranser rejected the idea that this example indicated private corporate interests had any impact on American policy (89-90).
• The divide between state institutions and nonstate actors is fuzzy and illusory, as the direct involvement of Aramco in American policy and international relations demonstrates. However, the claim that is outside of the state is important in its own right, because it allows the US government to clandestinely achieve political ends through Aramco (90).
• The author instead defines the state largely as an exercise in the ability of society to be disciplined and organized to certain political and social ends, as explored by Michel Foucault. The state thus exists only in social practices designed to make it exist. These include patrolling and enforcing borders or instituting uniform laws and regulations (92-94).