Sociological Thought of the Day

Pierre Bourdieu on Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field:

Concentration of the capital of physical force requires the establishment of an efficient fiscal system, which in turn proceeds in tandem with the unification of economic space (creation of a national market). The levies raised by the dynastic state apply equally to all subjects--and not, as with feudal levies, only to dependents who may in turn tax their own men. Appearing in the last decade of the 12th century, state tax developed in tandem the growth of war expenses. The imperative of territorial defense, first invoked instance by instance, slowly become the permanent justification of the "obligatory" and "regular" character of the levies perceived "without limitation of time other than that regularly assigned by the king" and directly or indirectly applicable "to all social groups."

Thus was progressively established a specific economic logic, founded on levies without counterpart and redistribution functioning as the basis for the conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital, concentrated at first in the person of the Prince. The institution of the tax (over and against the resistance of the taxpayers) stands in relation of circular causality with the development of the armed forces necessary for the expansion and defense of the territory under control, and thus for the levying of tributes and taxes as well as for imposing via constraint the payment of that tax. The institution of the tax was the result of a veritable internal war waged by the agents of the state against the resistance of the subjects, who discover themselves as such mainly if not exclusively by discovering themselves as taxable, as tax payers. Royal ordinances imposed four degrees of repression in cases of a delay in collection: seizures, arrests for debt including imprisonment, a writ of restraint binding on all parties, and the quartering of soldiers. It follows that the question of the legitimacy of the tax cannot be raised (Norbert Elias correctly remarks that, at its inception, taxation presents itself as a kind of racket). It is only progressively that we come to conceive taxes as a necessary tribute to the needs of a recipient that transcends the king, i.e. this "fictive body" that is the state.