Reimagining Ontology of State Causality

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Political Community: Legitimacy, Boundaries, and the State Across Time

Abstract

This book chapter examines how classical sociological theory adopted a flawed, commonsense notion of causality—rooted in Hume’s constant conjunction and Hempel’s covering law model—into state theory, shaping debates over the causal relationship between state and society. Foundational approaches—Holism, Methodological Individualism, and Interactionism—assumed unidirectional, reductionist causal structures that treat social objects as external and distinct. Applied to the state, these assumptions produced two models: output theories depicting the state as shaping society, and input theories viewing social forces as acting on a unified state. Both reify the state as a coherent actor, obscuring fragmentation, institutional layers, and complex state–society entanglements.
Contemporary research on fragmented states highlights diverse agencies, institutional differentiation, and unstable boundaries, challenging classical state ontology yet struggling to explain how fragmented states produce coherent governance. Relational and state-effect models add insights but reproduce earlier limits by either neglecting intrastate interactions or reverting to methodological individualism.
To address these issues, the chapter advances an Emergent model of causality grounded in critical realism. Rejecting reductionism, it conceptualizes political outcomes as products of multiple interacting causal powers whose effects cannot be captured by single-mechanism accounts. This emergent framework integrates retroduction (identifying causal mechanisms) with retrodiction (explaining how mechanisms interact to generate events), offering a stronger foundation for analyzing state causality. Reframing the state as a historically contingent configuration of interacting agencies and social forces, the chapter provides a more adequate explanation of when and why states appear coherent, fragmented, effective, or ineffective in relation to society.

Author

• Sourabh Singh, Florida State University