Regulation Theory and the State

Abstract

Before moving on, we need further to qualify the opening assertion that ‘l’Etat, l’économie et societé civile n’existent pas’. This assertion is concerned with the question of the validity of state, economy and civil society as objects of analysis.⁶⁰ It is shorthand for the firm rejec­tion of the transcendental conception of state, economy and civil society as unified social essences produced by the dialectical unfolding of Reason within a single consciousness with the form of an Absolute Spirit, as well as of the immanentist conception of state, economy and civil society as providing the real and self-perpetuating structures of social life in which any consciousness is reduced to a structural effect. In fact, what is implicitly asserted is that there is no real alternative between Hegel and Spinoza. Both have an objectivist ontology which needs to be questioned. Evidently, there is neither an objective move­ment dividing up the social totality nor an objective social totality to be divided, since every objectivity is limited by social antagonisms and dislocated by what it fails to represent. Hence, there is no ready-made world of unified essences or underlying structures which can be made the object of a more or less supreme knowledge by the social scientists.