Thinking of the State in the Neoliberal Age from the Case of Morocco

How can the study of the Moroccan state help us understand the state and the art of governing and systems of domination, in a global perspective? How can empirical work lead to theoretical generalizations? Béatrice Hibou and Mohamed Tozy have conducted three decades of fieldwork that inform and sustain their book entitled Tisser le temps politique au Maroc. Imaginaire de l'Etat à l'âge libéral (Weaving Political Time in Morocco. The Imaginary of the State in the Neoliberal Age) (Karthala, 2020). Interview with the authors.

Your recent book on Morocco appears as a general and universal reflection on the state and the art of governing. How is a comparative perspective important to this work?

Thank you for having identified the theoretical ambition of our empirical research. It is indeed fundamental for us. We have conducted almost 30 years of fieldwork, but for us the aim of this was really to confront theoretical questions on the state and the art of governing, and more precisely on how to approach changes in the state and in systems of domination. To respond more directly to your question, three factors appear—a posteriori—to be important in our comparative approach.

The first factor is our methodological direction: the question of reasoning through ideal types. Following Max Weber and using his expressions, thinking with ideal types means highlighting the “distinctive features” of social practices in their “most marked profile”, from the “concrete given” as it “presents itself in the historical reality”. The ideal typical method is an intellectual construction that helps us to reason and notably, for us, to make the description of governmental practices more complex, by freeing us from often implicit normative assessments. More precisely, we have attempted to depart from any perspective that sees, for example, the fact that there are no official regional state representatives as a “weakness”, the ceremonial renewal of allegiance and the mixture between private and public as “archaic”, and the fact that a non-institutionalized intermediary may intervene in public policy as “dysfunctional”. Stemming from a specific and recent conception of the state (from the modern age, according to the periodization of historians), these visions prevent a global reading of the practices and the conceptions that are present in the field.

In order to avoid these restrictive assumptions, we have created two ideal types that we have called “empire” and “nation-state” (or “imperial state” and “nation state”), intellectual elaborations capable of retracing two different ways of understanding power relations, ways of governing, and domination. We have done this by drawing from the historical trajectory of Morocco, but without wanting to identify any given historical moment as an archetype, i.e. without considering the Sharifian empire as the model for the empire ideal type or contemporary Morocco as the model for the nation-state ideal type. In fact, in pre-colonial Morocco, different modes of government coexisted, integrating direct and legal-rational interventions that are distinctive of the nation-state ideal type. Similarly, in contemporary Morocco, governments make use of sophisticated mises-en-scène, such as in ceremonies of allegiance, or in the persistence of dahir (a king’s decision close to a decree) as a way of legislating, which are distinctive of the empire ideal type.

Le Petit Journal. Supplément illustré. Les chefs de Tribu. Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France

We have therefore constructed the empire ideal type as a combination of a whole series of features: the absence of an ambition to control the entire society and a propensity to favour compromise and adaptation; the refusal to systematically associate legitimacy with possession of a monopoly on power, including a monopoly on the use of violence, which itself seems more spectacular than systematic; a will to govern at a minimal cost by multiplying the modalities of intervention and intermediation; an accommodation of a pluralism of legal regimes, ethnic groups, nations, and religious groups, and a capacity to manage both territorial and temporal discontinuities; a massive investment in the production and control of information on territories both near and far away, and a tendency to bet on people rather than institutions and structures. To say it in a simple formula, this type of state seeks to govern while sometimes renouncing the administration of affairs. As for the nation-state, it is based on the principles of uniqueness and continuity, voluntarism and domestication, standardisation and abstract equality, investment in systematic and homogenizing information, privileging averages and the law of large numbers and highlighting transformative action.

Very concretely, this theoretical construction has allowed us to go beyond evolutionary analyses that see the imperial state as a form of endangered species, and the nation-state as the only modern form of state, which in a country like Morocco, would nevertheless be difficult to realise. It has also allowed us to identify the simultaneous diversity of power relations, conceptions of authority, sovereignty, responsibility, or representation, modes of action, and roles of the state, as well as how the state’s legitimacy might be understood. Clearly, our approach is not specific to the Sharifian kingdom. It has a dimension that is unmistakably general (and thus comparative), and this is also one of the ambitions of our book. Recourse to the ideal typical analysis of the state and to conceptualisation in terms of the entanglement of temporalities makes it possible to think of invisibilities. This can be seen in France, for example, with territorial discontinuity (in the existence of overseas territories) and legal pluralism (in Alsace-Loraine with canon law and in Mayotte with state Islam), which in the Jacobin ideology of the French nation-state can only be perceived in terms of abnormality and exceptionalism but which express other modes of power as soon as alternative state registers or references are introduced.

The second factor is our conceptual approach: the will to appropriate powerful ideas, not through a work of pure theoretical elaboration and speculation but through a “thick” empirical work, as Clifford Geertz would put it, to imbue these ideas with rich content. The dialogue and permanent entanglement between theoretical reflection and empirical research is distinctive of our approach—it is also very Weberian in character, like most of the concepts that structure our research.

This is certainly the case for our conceptualisation of the state. Against the commonly accepted readings of Weber and political science textbooks, we do not consider the state solely as an institution or a group of institutions. We do not limit it to an entity that would claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. With Weber, we understand the state in a relational manner—as very diverse modes of action, including in the forms of non-action and laisser-faire—and as the idea of and belief in norms that allow the exercise of domination through permanent adjustments of a different nature. We were made aware of this conceptualisation thanks to our collaboration with Jean-Pierre Grossein, a specialist on Weber’s work. And we have been able to give substance to this conceptualisation of the state because our field, understood as a place to define our questions and concerns, had already made us attentive to the plurality of types of public action, to the multiplying places and forms of the exercise of the political that are situated most often outside of the places that are institutionally devoted to them, to the importance of representations, ideas, values, and norms in the exercise of domination, and to the importance of tensions, conflicts, and struggles for the construction of cultural hegemony.

The to and fro between empirical experience and theoretical elaboration in our work has not only occurred around or in articulation with concepts coming from the Western intellectual tradition, of which Weber would be the emblematic figure. The Islamic tradition has also played a large role, maybe more implicitly (although political thinker Ibn Khaldoun is present from start to finish in our exposition), but clearly evident in the way we have approached issues of representation and norms, such that they may appear through the question of the perception of the mandate of elected representatives and their relation to electors and of the independence of magistrates.