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contingent upon social routines as opposed to some in-built structural tripods(Jessop
1982:126).
In The Capitalist State, Jessop is first a methodological institutionalist so far as state
as the congeries of institutions does not have an ex ante coherence(since formal
coherence is not substantive coherence) and that there must be an instutionalist
explanatory model for the terms of any extant coherence. Even when there
exceptionally is a modicum of coherence in the structures of the state, the
consequences of réglementation for capital accumulation is still not altogether
contingent upon that modality of coherence. Furthermore, Jessop considers
institutionalist heuristics as cardinal even to the relational analysis of the form of state
as a social relation and for an open-ended theory of capitalist state in that ‘one should
differentiate among different types and sites of power in terms of their instutional
mediation to establish the form-determination of state power’(Bertramsen 1991:101).
The book, needless to say, had been prior to his later strategic-relational thinking on
the capitalist state(or state/economy/society relations in capitalism) and definitely
prior to the decidedly regulationist infléchissement in that format of thought.
Jessop’s strategic-relational theory is basically a methodological scheme with a
heavily in-built critical realist ontology, which however is no longer a stale ‘critical
rearrangement of elements’. Strategy is the paramount(and a considerably middle-
range) concept within that methodological scheme. Myriad modalities of strategy are
integral to myriad modalities of coherence. Since structures and social units do not
have any ex ante substantive coherence, concrete strategies are indeed integral to the
design of any such substantive coherence. This methodological injunction rebuffs any
tangibly dichotomous understanding of structure-strategy. In fact, though structural
elements are socially determinate parameters at a particular time, along a broader time
horizon, these mechanisms may always partially or wholly abate when they are part of
some structured format of institutional coherence no more but are ‘conjunctural
possibilities’ for avant-garde strategies(ibid.:109).
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