When the state returns, the fault lines run through it

fault lines – A new issue of Fronesis argues that today’s debate is shifting away from public versus private and toward fractures inside the state itself—across finance, surveillance, reproduction, and power. What’s returning isn’t just “the state,” but a contested form of

The state is back—or perhaps it never really left. The 2008 financial crisis “decisively called into question the thesis that the state is being sidelined by the market. ” Fronesis editors write (Sweden). Since then, crisis after crisis has only accelerated the comeback: the pandemic, geopolitical conflict, and industrial policy.

Yet the issue that has just appeared is less interested in whether the state has returned than in what kind of state is emerging. The editors argue that “the political debate today seems increasingly less concerned with the choice between public and private solutions; instead. the fault lines appear to run through the state itself.”.

Those fault lines are carried, almost like a warning, in the issue’s contrasting epigraphs. Hannah Arendt treats authority as a form of obedience compatible with freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche traces the state’s origins to domination and conquest. The contributors don’t resolve that opposition; they circle it from different directions.

Across the issue. the state is presented “not as a solution in itself. but as a concentration of the contradictions and possibilities of the present.” The chapters move from questions of legibility. population management. and reproductive governance to wider debates about capitalism. neoliberalism. and state power.

In the wake of 2008, the question that hangs over everything is what state intervention actually means. Vanja Carlsson. writing during the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. asks whether the resurgence of state intervention signals the beginning of neoliberalism’s end—or just a new version of it. She describes how many states intervened during that period to stabilize financial systems, stimulate demand, and secure corporate financing.

Carlsson compares two schools of thought. One holds that neoliberalism remains alive by adapting to shifting political and economic realities. On this view, the state may be “back,” but it keeps serving neoliberal objectives centered on competitiveness and profitability.

The other diagnosis comes from regulation theory: neoliberalism is said to be in a structural crisis. Rather than adapting, the neoliberal mode of regulation may be giving way to something fundamentally different. In this account, the change isn’t a “mutation” but a historical rupture.

Carlsson also highlights the difficulty at the heart of the debate: what counts as proof that state capitalism has replaced neoliberalism when there is no clear definition of neoliberalism. That pressure becomes a broader conceptual problem—“The question is not only how state interventions should be classified. but also how we are to determine when a historical form of capitalism is in crisis. being transformed. or being replaced by something new.”.

That same tension—between authority as order and authority as domination—runs through the issue’s attention to how populations are counted and governed. Andreas Asplén Lundstedt, using Sweden as a paradigmatic case, writes about the history of censuses and population registration.

Sweden is home to the world’s oldest population registration system. Lundstedt treats such systems as technologies of governance that enable welfare and exclusion, recognition and control. In that frame, counting people is never neutral. From the earliest known census. dating back to around 3800 BCE in the Sumerian Empire. “the counting of people has been intimately linked to the centralization of power.”.

Lundstedt devotes particular attention to the personal identity number in Sweden and the tensions it has produced. In some countries, such unique identifiers are seen as overly intrusive. In Sweden, they “accompany individuals ‘from cradle to grave’” and make it possible to integrate information from multiple administrative registers.

In an age of facial recognition technology and expanding digital surveillance, the Swedish case pushes the question into the present: how much privacy should be sacrificed “on the altar of administrative legibility and efficiency?”

And the issue reminds readers that census-taking doesn’t merely document reality; it can shape it. “Legibility is not simply a capacity to describe the population; it also expands the horizons of bureaucratic and political imagination.” Lundstedt points to the 1747 estimate of Sweden’s population: the figure shocked policymakers by coming in far below expectations and contributed directly to the creation of new administrative institutions and demographic interventions.

The fault lines inside the state grow sharper in the issue’s treatment of reproduction. As birth rates decline. Evelina Johansson Wilén writes about how many states have fallen back into an old pattern: childbearing framed less as a personal choice and more as a collective responsibility. even a duty.

In that language—“demographic balance,” “dependency ratios,” and “the future labour force”—reproduction is increasingly cast as a solution to social and economic problems. Johansson Wilén examines how parenthood is being re-politicized from all sides.

Natalists, she notes, present childbearing as a social necessity. Anti-natalists increasingly frame non-childbearing as an ethical imperative. Both camps, Johansson Wilén argues, risk reducing reproduction to an instrument for achieving broader political goals.

Her central claim is that parenthood is not something that can be justified solely through demographic, economic, or ecological reasoning. Parenthood remains an “existential leap”: an irreversible commitment to an uncertain future.

That leap becomes harder when families are increasingly expected to shoulder responsibilities once supported by collective welfare institutions. At the same time. fears associated with the so-called Great Replacement Theory are said to boost policies that restrict reproductive rights for some groups while encouraging reproduction among others—explicitly in the name of preserving a “white demographic majority.”.

If finance, counting, and reproduction show the state managing lives through different levers, James C. Scott’s anarchist perspective shows how that management can conceal everyday resistance. Mikael Omstedt writes about Scott’s intellectual journey. from early studies of peasant societies in Southeast Asia to seminal works such as Weapons of the Weak and Seeing Like a State.

Scott’s “anarchist squint,” Omstedt says, focuses on “the small arms of class struggle”—rumour, foot-dragging, desertion, petty theft, and sabotage. Those are forms of resistance that can be hidden beneath apparent compliance.

Omstedt describes how this lens—Scott’s “anarchist squint”—usefully “denaturalizes our state-centred present.” But he also argues that the lens can reproduce a liberal opposition between state and society. In that reading. abandoning the state as a terrain of struggle means projecting social antagonisms and emancipatory aspirations onto “an untainted realm beyond the state.”.

Taken together. the issue’s many strands land on a single unsettling image: authority isn’t simply returning; it’s being re-assembled through crises. paperwork. surveillance. and policy dilemmas. The question the contributors keep circling isn’t whether power exists. It’s where it concentrates. how it justifies itself. and who gets to decide what “legibility. ” “stability. ” or “the future labour force” is supposed to mean.

Fronesis Sweden personal identity number census population registration neoliberalism state capitalism regulation theory reproductive rights natalism anti-natalism Great Replacement Theory James C. Scott seeing like a state weapons of the weak surveillance digital legibility