Answer to Question #181648 in Economics for Carina Bgasol

Question

Explain the meaning of dualism and dual societies.

Do you think that the concept of dualism ade-

quately portrays the development picture in most 

developing countries? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

The state and society are viewed by thinkers not as some opposing entity, but as different principles of organization. The state is understood as the sphere of the social system organized according to the principles of supreme power and domination, which makes decisions that are binding on its other spheres and has the privilege of legalized coercion.

Society does not mean the synthesis of all normative systems, as Kelsen believes, but all spheres of the social system that are not subject to organization according to the principle of supreme power and domination, in short, all areas of the social system, excluding the political one. Society should not be identified with the economy as its subsystem; it also includes cultural, religious, and social systems, therefore, the dualism of the state and society cannot be reduced to the dualism of the state and the economy. Dominance is a functional characteristic of the state in relation to all other subsystems of society allows not only to single out the state from all components of the social system but also to correlate its dominant position with the hierarchy of relationships and interactions of other subsystems.

This definition allows us to understand the similarities and differences in the historical evolution of the dualism of the state and society. Unity is revealed in the irreducibility of dualism, differences are manifested in the forms of exercising the monopoly of domination and state sovereignty. For European history up to the French Revolution of 1789, the penetration of elements of domination into all spheres of society is important. Domination, as the practice of the Middle Ages or the Aristotelian theory of Oikos, has shown, is not only state power. The German scientist O. Brunner, based on these postulates, concludes that the differences between the state and society can be recognized as existing only with the emergence of a modern type of state and a modern, essentially industrial-bureaucratic, society.

The division of society and the state (but not the difference between them) belongs to the era of development of bourgeois relations, since only during this period the economy is freed from politics, acquires a kind of autonomy. The degree of the antagonism (again, not differences) between the state and society distinguishes modern European history from all previous periods. Only a bourgeois trading society, a society depoliticized, governed only by the laws of exchange of the market, focused on "formal calculation" (Max Weber), and not on the material, socially obligatory goals, generates a contradiction between the state and (economic) society. At the same time, dualism acquires a normative force, is embodied in the principle of separation: in fact, not society, but the economy must be separated from the state.