Exceptional State arises when a liberal democratic society adopts government policies that rely on the coercive power of the state. Exceptional State is a departure from the usual role of democratic states and therefore called Exceptional State. Stuart Hall used the term Exceptional State to describe what happened in Britain in the 1980's as economic failure led to mass unemployment, a government fiscal crisis and a loss of support among important groups, and there was a legitimation crisis. The British government fostered a sense of an enemy within the society and claimed that social instability was caused by rampant crime and militant unionists. This ‘threat’ Exceptional State and then justified giving the state coercive powers which it used to control the crisis.
The Nazi State: An
Exceptional State? - Ian Kershaw.
Any discussion of the character of an ‘exceptional’ state must presumably begin
with a notion of what categorizes a state as ‘normal’. My starting assumption is to
accept Max Weber's concept of the state. A state based upon despotic power, under modern
capitalism, can therefore be
regarded as an ‘exceptional state’. But, useful as Mann’s two-dimensional
model is, it does not distinguish between types of ‘exceptional state’.
Social Control and the Rise of the Exceptional State in
Britain, the United States, and Canada -
R S Ratner, J L McMullan.
This paper examines the rise of the Right in Britain, the United States, and Canada,
especially the ways in which crime, law and order, and punishment have been mobilized for
ideological use in dealing with social crisis, and future alternatives are
considered. Abstract: In Britain, the United States, and Canada, there has
been a hegemonic response to deepening capitalist recession through the
enactment of monetarist doctrine accompanied by an expansion of state powers
through the elaboration of new social control
ideology.
How Exceptional is the Exceptional
State? Lessons form the American Case -
Phil Wood.
Introduction: The events of September 11, 2001 may not have changed everything, as the
cliche would have it, but the way the American state responded to those events did serve
to revive interest in the politics of the exceptional state. One of the intellectual
by-products of this conjuncture was increased interest in Giorgio Agamben's work on
'bare life', the camp and the state of exception. This has since been used to
shed light on a variety of questions, including the exceptional state logic of the American
‘supermax’ prison and the re-engineering of social and geographical space in
the Middle East, as well as the general question of the balance between liberty and
security in the context of the war-without-end on terror.
Exceptional
State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (New Americanists)
by Ashley Dawson (Editor), Malini Johar Schueller (Editor).
Exceptional State
analyzes the nexus of culture and contemporary manifestations of U.S.
imperialism. The contributors, established and emerging cultural studies
scholars, define culture broadly to include a range of media, literature, and
political discourse.
Between the Normal State and an Exceptional State Form: Authoritarian Competitive Statism and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe. Lukas Oberndorfer.
Abstract: This article unfolds the theoretical concept of authoritarian competitive statism as an analytical tool to understand the current conjuncture of the European mode of integration.
I will examine the tensions between democracy and capitalism and the metamorphoses of the capitalist state implied therein. In an empirical illustration of European crisis management I show that the economic dispositifs of preventing a break with neoliberalism where erected at the supranational scale, while the rearrangement of directly repressive instruments took place at the national scale because this remains the key terrain for social movements.
The transnationalisation of the state is therefore key for examining and understanding its metamorphoses into a progressively authoritarian European ensemble of state apparatuses, understood as a deep entanglement and dependence of national and supranational state apparatuses.
SOCIAL
CONTROL AND THE RISE OF THE "EXCEPTIONAL STATE" IN BRITAIN, THE UNITED STATES,
AND CANADA.
R.S. Ratner and John L. McMullan.