State-Society Relations Beyond the Weberian State

作为一个探索领域，国家一社会关系研究的涵盖范围，从国家在中世纪和近代早期欧洲作为一种治理形式的出现（Ert-man1997），直到当代发展中国家选择的不同经济发展轨迹（Evans1995；Kohli2004）。有两个基本概念对这个领域作出了界定。首先，国家一社会关系研究某种程度上研究的就是国家本身。

From its political relations Regardle origins in the Weberian tradition of sociology, work on state-society has inherited several propensities. ss of its specific focus, it shares a predilection for large-scale generalizations about the state and its relation to society. Conceptions of the state itself, bearing the imprint of traditional European state forms, continue to portray it as a hierarchical, Weberian bureaucratic apparatus. Consistent with this view of the state, analysts in the field have characteristically presumed that a sharp analytical distinction, if not always an actual separation, between the state and society. This essay demonstrates how these traditional approaches have proven increasingly inadequate to capture the realities of state-society relations. Not only in developed countries but increasingly beyond them, a variety of trends have progressively altered the Weberian state and the overall patterns of state-society relations that accompanied it. Societal influences on the state have also grown, diversified and assumed new forms. Thesocial imaginaries that have linked states with national societies may gradually be changing as well. Work in numerous fields, from public policy and public administration to local governance, political culture and economic sociology, reveals important dimensions of state-society relations that can rarely be fully grasped by means of the traditional state-society dichotomy.