Exceptional state arises when a liberal democratic society adopts government policies that rely on the coercive power of the state, rather than trying to maintain compromises that balance conflicting interests. Exceptional state is a departure from the usual role of democratic states and therefore exceptional. Stuart Hall used the term 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; 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 own 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’.
How Exceptional is the Exceptional
State? Lessons form the American Case
Phil Wood, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University
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’ prison1 and the re-engineering of social and geographical space in
the Middle East2, as well as the general question of the balance between liberty and
security in the context of the war-without-end on terror.
Social Control and the Rise of the Exceptional State in
Britain, the United States, and Canada - Journal: Crime and Social
Justice Issue:19 Dated:(Summer 1983) -
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.