Page 212 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

189 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

Egypt, China, and India, as well as in European feudalism). Let
me separate the internal and external aspects of this process.
Internally the modern state can be understood as the result of
the differentiation of an economic system which regulates the
production process through the market—that is, in a decentralized
and unpolitical manner. The state organizes the conditions under
which the citizens, as competing and strategically acting private
persons, carry on the production process. The state itself does not
produce, except perhaps as a subsidiary to entrepreneurs for whom
certain functionally necessary investments are not yet or no longer
profitable. In other words, the state develops and guarantees
bourgeois civil law, the monetary mechanism, and certain infra-
structures—overal] the prerequisites for the continued existence
of a depoliticized economic process set free from moral norms
and orientations to use value. Since the state does not itself engage
in capitalist enterprise, it has to siphon off the resources for its
ordering achievements from private incomes. The modern state
is a state based on taxation (Schumpeter). From these deter-
minations there results a constellation of state and civil society
which the Marxist theory of the state has been continually con-
cerned to analyze.4
In comparison to the state of feudalism or the ancient empires,
the modern state gains greater functional autonomy; the ability
of the modern administration to assert itself vis-a-vis citizens and
particular groups also grows in the framework of stronger func-
tional specification. On the other hand, however, the comple-
mentary relationship to the economy into which the state now
enters makes clear for the first time the economic limitation on
the state’s scope of disposition. ‘“Because (the state) is excluded
from capitalist production as well as simultaneously dependent
On it...it is forced to create the formal and (increasingly) also
the material conditions and presuppositions for carrying on pro-
duction and accumulation and for ensuring that their continuity
does not founder on the material, temporal, and social instabilities
inherent in the anarchic adaptation of the capital process to
society.” > The premodern state also faced the task of protecting
society from disintegration without being able freely to dispose
of the capacities for social integration; but the modern state