August 20, 2023

The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

REVIEW ESSAY
The Project State and Its Rivals:
A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 2023, 528 pages

“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer seem safe and secure. In 2023, the European extreme Right is establishing itself as a force of government, populism is going global, and inter-imperial tensions have ushered in a new arms race. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland is currently polling above 20 percent, while Modi is set to win another term in India with an approval rating near 80 percent. To the desperation of liberals nostalgic for the 1990s, the “end of the end of history” has arrived.

As Maier surmises, there might be a connection between this sense of surprise and the comfortable judgments we tend to make about humanity’s last hundred years. “If the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism,” he asks, “why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?” The question provides the working hypothesis for Maier’s new monograph, a self-described “rethinking of the long twentieth century,” which aims to “explain the fraying of our own civic culture” while also “allowing hope for its recovery.” Provocatively, Maier’s focus is on “both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies,” next to “new forms of imperial domination,” “global networks of finance,” and “international associations” that both challenged and shaped the state. The ambition is nothing less than a new general theory of the twentieth century, one that would allow us to deal with an unmastered past, but also to gain proper self-understanding in a new and confusing century.

Readers would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable candidate for the task than Charles S. Maier. At eighty-four, Maier—still teaching European and international history at Harvard—remains a scholar with panoramic disciplinary reach. His 1975 debut, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I, swiftly established itself a masterpiece of comparative political history. Based on a prior Harvard dissertation complemented with a decade of additional archival research, it examined the fraught resolution of the crises of liberalism after 1918, and what factors determined the potential emergence and stymieing of authoritarian regimes. After works on Germany’s collective memory of the Holocaust and an elite-driven account of the fall of East Germany, he waded into historical political science with Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood in 2014, followed by Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 in 2016. Clearly a product of a buoyant Cold War academe, Maier has always been locked in an uneasy pas-à-deux with Marxism: attentive to the class content of political life, but never taken to monolithic views of business interests and overly abstract notions of capital. His work on political economy looked closely at the class coalitions that gave way to divergent corporatist settlements in the 1920s and ’30s, and how these national blocs interlocked with differing international arrangements—a Marxist historiography despite itself. He also took the force of ideas seriously, weaving a tapestry of conceptual, political, and economic history, which explains the unique force of his writing. Yet unlike cultural historians, Maier has retained an interest in causality through the construction of comparative counterfactuals—what Britain and Germany shared in 1918, for instance, or why English Tories did not need a Duce and why the American South was different from the Mezzogiorno—a sensibility that also informed his consistently transnational approach to the twentieth century.

The Project State and Its Rivals exudes a similarly boundless ambition. As the book’s announcements make clear, Maier is on the lookout for a unifying category to cohere our historical experience of the twentieth century—or, more specifically, the forms of statehood that emerged in the interwar period, and that still present such vexing challenges to our intellectual imagination.

Maier’s project states moved within a triad of forces: the so-called web of capital, the network of governance, and the state as an institution. On this canvas, the long arc of his twentieth century becomes visible: the birth of the project state in the wake of the military confrontations of the 1910s, its sudden maturation and ascendance after the 1929 stock market crash, a period of aggressive rivalry in the 1930s and ’40s, followed up by its domestication under American supervision after 1947, its relative globalization in the 1950s and ’60s as postcolonial nations joined the ranks of contending project managers, and finally, a period of crisis in the 1970s followed up by a haphazard dissolution in the 1980s and ’90s.

In Maier’s view, the project state was set up to subordinate the web of capital and existing networks of governance, modernize resource empires, and embed financial institutions in national communities. In the 1970s, the contradictions of its model were becoming plain to see: both citizens and capital were unwilling to tolerate the inflationary imbalances which it was imposing. Internationally, these moods of discontent compounded with the monetary limbo of previously national economies at the end of the Bretton Woods system, now responsive to bondholders rather than voters. Consequently, new actors within the web of capital and networks of governance crafted coalitions that would liberate themselves from its stranglehold. On its ruins, institutions such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were to sculpt new, more market-friendly states. These would forgo the stringent demands of their predecessors and restore capital’s hold over the investment function.

For Maier, ambivalence is a scholarly virtue when approaching the period: “there are other ways to think about the history of the last hundred years than as a contest between democracies and dictatorships, emancipation and oppression, fascists and communists, or even just between liberals and conservatives, left and right, or moderates and the ideologically obsessed.” Like the Thirty Years’ War which gave birth to Westphalian absolutism, the period from 1914 to 1945 produced a distinctly new state-form that differed from its nineteenth-century predecessors and still casts an intimidating shadow in our own era of state incapacity.

Defining the Project State

How should the period in question be typified? Here, Maier ably ventures into a crowded field. Since the 1940s, terms such as “totalitarianism,” “developmentalism,” “state capitalism,” or “managerial revolution” were devised to explain the types of collective power that arose in the twentieth century. Some of the century’s most able social scientists cut their teeth on the categorization. Yet all their solutions steadily revealed their hard limits. The “totalitarian” label always seemed overly normative and proved unable to explain internal differences in each camp; ostensibly anti-totalitarian leaders such as Roosevelt and Attlee also presided over an unprecedented suspension of civil liberties, while state control over the economy was hardly unique to the Soviets.

Yet the notion of “state capitalism” proposed by Frankfurt School theorists such as Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer also did not capture the strange hybrid of public and private which the interwar states were expressions of. In Pollock’s view, the bourgeois capitalism of the nineteenth century had died out somewhere in the 1930s: the free market was abolished by decree, prices were administered, and economic power had been replaced by political caste categories. Looking at cases such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Rooseveltian United States, Pollock claimed that state capitalism was the only viable successor to the age of laissez-faire. The cardinal question was now whether it would come in democratic or totalitarian forms—or whether the Office of Price Administration or Gosplan was in charge.

Already in the 1940s, however, critics pointed out the severe deficiencies of this frame. A mere five years after Pollock proposed his “state capitalism” thesis, the American Office of Price Administration was dissolved on the initiative of a Republican Congress, and American employers pushed through their Taft-Hartley Act. The resulting Cold War empire—driven by a coalition of capital-intensive export industries and investment banks that crystallized in the later New Deal—was to deconstruct the old European dominions, reindustrialize the continent, and replace Lenin’s imperialism with a less coercive model of global management. Borrowing a phrase from Tim Barker, Maier claims that the State Department thereby became the American equivalent to the French Commissariat général du Plan, even if it was never interested in the social housing projects and universal welfare provisions Parisian planners presided over.

Even in France, however, the predicted state takeover never happened. Rather, communists were pushed out of government under American pressure and planning remained indicative rather than direct. Similarly, the National Health Service proved an exception to the failed nationalizations introduced by the postwar Labour government; the Tennessee Valley Authority was an outlier compared to most public-private partnerships financed by the Roosevelt administration; in the meantime, the Nazis privatized large parts of the German economy.

The idea of a “managerial revolution,” in turn, underestimated the persistent power of a shareholder bloc, while the notion of a “developmental state” focused too heavily on economic policy. All missed the deeper transformation in state structures and political mobilization that marked the interbellum.

Project Leadership

Maier’s book offers a new solution to this enigma. In his view, all the classical categories used to describe the twentieth-century state miss its central feature: its orientation around the notion of a project, which could weld business interests, the general population, and state bureaucrats under a single, long-term time horizon. What united Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s Russia, Attlee’s Britain, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and Nkrumah’s Ghana, then, was not a diffuse totalitarianism or developmental ideology. Rather, it was their status as project states, which all “had a transformative agenda . . . based on authoritarian and even totalitarian as well as liberal and democratic coalitions seeking to reform sclerotic institutions or societies that seemed unacceptably unequal.” Project states thereby tended to “see society as a plasmic whole, sometimes in terms of elites and masses, knowable and controllable through statistical science, biological and legal interventions.” The specimen did not come without ancestors, of course—in Maier’s view, Napoleonic France and the wartime organization of the U.S. federal government in 1861 already exhibited embryonic signs of a later project state—yet “as a continuing and nonexceptional form of polity,” the new creature only “came into its own in the twentieth century.”

Maier’s category thereby demarcates and unifies. The notion of a “project state” allows us to understand what Mao, Hitler, De Gaulle, Attlee, and Nkrumah had in common. Yet it also clearly separates the twentieth-century state from its pre-1914 antecedents. Although Maier’s state never fully abolished capital, it did have a productively agonistic relationship with it: it was able to both discipline and repel those that controlled investment and to direct or claim those resources for itself. It was a state made for and by warfare, yet not exclusively so. To the disgust of neoliberals and New Leftists, it had an eternally uneasy relationship with the public-private divide, both on the social and on the economic front, encouraging higher birth rates while compiling calorific tables.

Above all, it was pitted against the nineteenth-century nightwatchman state, both as a reality and as a metaphor; public authority was to turn itself from a mere facilitator of economic commerce into an active choreographer of social movements. As Maier notes, the hustle and bustle of the traffic jam was replaced by the “ordered direction of the Riefenstahlian march”; under its baldaquin, masses would gather for coordination and instruction, in a rage for order that ran across the whole interwar period. Maier’s concept does not rule out internal differentiation, of course: “creating the fascist man who would live as a lion and not as a jackal was a different project than raising out of poverty ‘one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,’” and Stalin was surprised to see Churchill switch office with Attlee when negotiating the postwar order.

Still, all its forms took an energetic, even invasive interest in the populations that fell under their control: the project state built the National Health Service, transported prisoners to Kolyma, incinerated Dresden and Nagasaki, birthed cybernetics and nuclear power, reduced infant mortality, and cartelized the coal industries. Here was an entity “addicted to transformative agendas,” with a lifespan as short as it was eventful: born somewhere between 1914 and 1929, gone between 1973 and 1991. By the close of the 1980s, Maier admits, the project state had given up on its project and was no longer capable of controlling the forces of private capital. It slowly gave up the role of sculpting society, instead leaving the field open to self-experimentation and the emerging entrepreneurs of the self. In the historian’s view, its “audacity repelled many at the time and certainly social historians in the century since, but the ambitions constituted a major historical force and deserve empathetic understanding.”

Above all, Maier shows, project states met a crisis of leadership. Max Weber, himself an uneasy prophet for the rising project state, already discerned this feature in the late 1910s, when he called on a newly republican Germany to face a “night of icy darkness” with heroism and the “slow boring of hard boards.” He was hardly a lonely prophet. On a globe in which the oscillations of the market rather than the turning of the seasons governed an ever-larger portion of human life, “drift” inevitably gave way to “mastery,” as Walter Lippmann noted at the dawn of the new age in 1914. Internally, project leadership sought to organize and stratify the suffrage expansion which capitalism had always contained as a promise, yet which made cohabitation between labor and capital difficult. Externally, project states were to guarantee commodity frontiers or what Maier terms “resource empires” that could support increasingly market-dependent metropoles.

Project states, Maier thereby argues, were a product of the First World War, turbocharged by the Second, only faintly surviving into the age of American world-hegemony, finally to teeter in the inflationary 1970s, and fully die out in the unipolar 1990s. Already in the late 1950s, “the poet Stephen Vincent Benet was no longer around to ask us, as he had queried the dead in the 1930s, why we were marching,” Maier recollects. “We were being marched for the sake of a concept of citizenship that would largely dissolve by the 1960s. . . . [T]he project-state still imposed memories and set a cadence, but the urgency of its causes was weakening.” While Maier’s students marched against Vietnam, Milton Friedman proposed a marketization of the draft and a replacement of existing social security with a minimal cash grant. From the inside, plans for the silent execution of the project state were being composed.

The Century of the Project State

Taken on this timeline, Maier’s heuristic thereby acquires a sharper outline: project states were a product of a world war which was itself the expression of challenges to what John Darwin has called the “British world system.” This was a system based on free trade, the gold standard, and asymmetrical naval power. In this board game, countries that wanted to achieve military parity had to industrialize; to industrialize, they needed access to “resource empires” which would assure food and energy supplies in a world supposedly beset by existential scarcity. Naturally, challengers to this system were also under threat of being reduced to primary commodity suppliers to the British hegemon, stuck in unequal trading relationships and the ensuing comparative disadvantage. Internal British developments only created more reasons to break out. As more European nations began to acquire manufacturing sectors in the late nineteenth century, the British Empire began to tie its existing colonial territories to the home country by what was called “nontariff barriers”: “regulatory measures of one sort and another,” as Mike Macnair notes, “which pushed the colonial territories into trade with the metropolis.” As Branko Milanović has shown, the savings glut of capitalism’s nouveaux riches incentivized investment in colonial holdings rather than domestic economies. Coming up to 1914, this surplus was rushed to locations outside of Europe, where the new debt obligations were to be surveilled with navies financed through increased military spending.

The creation of these nontariff barriers led to what Germans termed Torschlusspanik (“closing door panic”): a sense that new capitalist economies with energy and food dependencies would be shut out of imperialist resource networks and face geo-economic extinction. Here was the driving force of the New Imperialism from the 1870s onwards, which accelerated the scramble for Africa and the increasing build-up of naval power. These factors also proved crucial in the German bid for continental hegemony in 1914—itself an attempt to secure a resource empire which could guarantee the population’s food and oil supply.

After 1918, this problem was only moderately resolved by the American supervisory system over Europe. The Versailles order left British and French imperial dominance intact and reduced Germany, unable to build its Eastern empire, to a state of semi-suzerainty. Coupled with the increasingly ambitious demands of domestic working classes, governmental minimalism was becoming a liability. Later, as these formal empires were rendered informal in the 1950s and ’60s, many former colonial territories began constructing their own project states to escape from their status as commodity frontiers: Mao, Castro, and Nkrumah as project leaders.

A general pattern becomes visible here. The rise of the project state can be conceptualized as a series of attempts to break the grip of dependency in an age in which the British world system was already fraying. This escape plan now presupposed a level of mobilization and coordination in a fully capitalist economy absent in the nineteenth century. Even in the case of the Soviet Union, the quest to catch up with Western competitors drew the contours of the Russian project state. For countries that had no internal frontier to recycle their settlers, like Germany and Italy, these attempts took on particularly brutal forms; all in all, however, the attempts saw an enormous expansion of state power, with catch-up projects which could take on both less democratic and more democratic forms—fascist, liberal, clerical-authoritarian, socialist, communist, or nationalist.

After the war, the project states and their resource empires were slowly decoupled, as Maier notes in the book’s middle chapters. This was followed by the construction of a new commercial empire, exemplified by the Pax Americana and Bretton Woods, which encouraged European nations to acquire new manufacturing sectors without threatening class stability. These were no longer the unruly project states that had threatened international disorder in the 1930s and 1940s; “economic growth allowed a policy of allocative neutrality,” while “the European project helped to replace the colonial tribute.” As Maier notes, “formal empire might have ended,” yet the Third World continued to serve its sorry function as a commodity frontier, even as many postcolonial leaders sought to emulate the jailbreak economics which project states had first practiced in the 1920s and ’30s.

An Unfinished Fresco

There are many virtues to this narrative. Maier’s book offers a powerful corrective to many one-sided accounts of twentieth-century history—particularly self-satisfied liberal narratives which still see the age as a confrontation between tyranny and freedom. Following in the tracks of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, and his own oeuvre, The Project State and Its Rivals kicks over idols that still stalk our historical imagination in the twenty-first century.

As the historian Clinton Rossiter already noted in the late 1940s, many Western nations had embarked on a period of “constitutional dictatorship” to stabilize their political institutions throughout the middle of the twentieth century, blurring the very lines between authoritarian or nonauthoritarian regimes. In the latter sense, Maier offers us a twenty‑first-century variant of the 1338 fresco by the Italian painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, which offered a morphology of state forms through the ages. Most importantly, by drawing attention to the common experience of the project state across continents, Maier also offers helpful tools for understanding the synchronicity of the populist revolts after 2008, from Delhi to Budapest, held hostage by the same phantom memory of a now absent project state.

This limitless ambition also comes with potential risks, however. Throughout the book, Maier does an impressive job tracking continuities and discontinuities between a wide variety of case studies. Yet readers receive relatively little on the exact etiology of the project state. Where did it come from? Maier’s intuition seems to be that the project state came about through inter-imperialist catch up. Internally, capitalist economies generated a power vacuum in which capital and labor were pitted against each other, unprofitable assets were left unused, and populations were condemned to mass unemployment. Externally, an increasingly market-dependent society necessitated the creation of imperial reservoirs which could supply primary resources while being force-fed with the center’s industrial produce.

At the same time, however, Maier also posits interstate competition as a consequence without a cause. Project states are called into existence to modernize resource empires and battle geopolitical rivals—but why were these imperatives in the first place?

As mentioned, Maier seems to indicate that increasing market integration at the start of the twentieth century created a set of dependencies which exposed humanity to a new vulnerability. Capital’s invasion into the social fabric, so it seems, called forth a Polanyian counter-reaction. At the same time, Maier also claims that the “term capital is an abstraction, a shorthand for business leaders who represented finance and industry in the public eye and asset-owners and managers who directed privately owned firms”—a more sociological notion which gives us a matrix of choices for different social groups. Yet it tells us very little about the overall environment and structures in which project states were born, nurtured, and died—and why they have proven so difficult to resuscitate and maintain in the new century.

After the Project State

These ambiguities are on awkward display in the book’s closing chapters. By the early 1970s, Maier argues, the project state’s energy was spent: it “had mobilized public energy to wage war, overcome the interwar depression, attempt to retain empire, and construct social insurance schemes for old age, unemployment, and varying degrees of medical coverage.” Yet “governmental activism seemed to run into pervasive difficulties by the 1970s,” felled by overheating economies mired in stagnation and energy insecurity. The web of capital now sought to liberate itself from the strictures which the project state had once imposed upon it, including the large share of public property it had gained. The result was a momentous transition: the largest privatization of collective property since the secularizations of Catholic Church lands throughout western Europe and Latin America from the sixteenth century to the 1860s—“neoliberalism’s greatest wager.” The resulting transnational employer offensive saw capital hollow out the project state from the inside and rearrange it for its convenience. The result was a debilitating victory for capital in the social question—indeed, the effacing of the social question—and a dramatic crisis of interest-based politics. As Maier notes, “night was falling in the gardens of the global north.”

The resultant creature is never given a name in the book. Yet it is clear how frail the successors of the project state look in comparison to their centauric predecessors. The new state forms are “lamentably feeble when it comes to collecting taxes, winning wars or forging a really ‘hegemonic’ power bloc or an ideology that can carry the state beyond the coercive and ‘corporative’ level and into the moral and intellectual sphere.” As the Covid and Ukraine crises have shown, post-project states find it amazingly difficult to vaccinate and produce weapons—two of the “plasmic” interventions which were once celebrated as the key attributes of twentieth-century statecraft—and are ever-more helpless when buying consent from their populations.

Maier tells us much about the “how” of this story. Yet we receive comparatively little about the “why.” These problems compound in the book’s concluding chapter on the 2010s. Closing his arc, Maier zooms in on the explanandum of his overall project: a proper understanding of the populist decade after 2008. In his view, existing interpretations of the populist moment are too lopsided, choosing a cut-off point that hampers our understanding of them. Populists “may have believed” they were reviving the project state, he argues, “but the project was reduced to protection of the ethnic community,” with the more plausible result a mere “mafia state.” Maier’s overview of the current literature on populism is cursory, only faintly fleshed out by the references to political economy which run throughout the rest of the book, and replete with liberal pieties. He offers some hazy references to populism as an illiberal ideology with leadership at its center, linked to the charismatic authority endemic to the interwar period, yet never clearly settles on a definition. He rarely relates populism to structural factors that give plausibility to these new movements.

There are undeniable similarities with twentieth-century authoritarians, of course. Like twentieth-century fascists, today’s populists glorify leaders and seek to restrict universal citizenship to national borders; like ultra-nationalists, their primary locus for political decision-making lies in the executive. At the same time, the new populists hardly have ambitions to break the American world system, to rebuild a racial welfare state, or to discipline capital into the productive investment required to meet the century’s new challenges. With comparatively weak and top-heavy parties at their disposal, populists also find it hard to colonize and wield the state, often acting as rent-seeking coalitions that simply adapt to stagnation. Compared to the dynamic states headed by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mao, today’s populists are cursed by a “cruelly absent grandeur,” in the words of Pierre Rosanvallon.

Maier notes these differences, yet his state-centric apparatus seems particularly ill-equipped to explain them. Both for Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Mussolini, the relationship between leader and people that crystallized in the project state had its roots in history: a sense of directionality and dynamism, a telos to which humanity was to move. A “people” was to be mobilized for a project, itself indicating a close link between past, present, and future.

Few traces of such a philosophy of history can be found in contemporary populism. In that sense, it is indeed properly post-historical: unable to relate itself to historical dynamics that would determine where the Italian, Dutch, French, or British people are headed. Rather, populism instead relies on a constant short-circuiting between people and leader.

If we see Hitler, Attlee, and Eisenhower as products of the nsdap, the Labour Party, or the GOP, what different history emerges? And what if we were to query the very idea of the mid-century era as that of the “project state”? As the German émigré Franz Neumann famously claimed, the Nazi state could easily count as a non-state, since “under national socialism . . . there is no need for a state standing above all groups; the state may even be a hindrance to the compromise and to domination over the ruled classes.” Partly motivated by his defense of the Sozialstaat which he saw dormant in the Weimar Rechtsstaat, Neumann saw Nazi Germany as little more than a temporary cartel between social groups.

The project state, in the latter sense, was mainly a project society, in which a specific mode of human action made possible durable forms of political engagement. Focusing so closely on the web of capital and the networks of governance, the mass parties and organizations which assured access to the state throughout the century only appear en passant in Maier’s analysis—a choir serenading in the dark.

One need not accept Neumann’s anti-statist readings of the Nazi project state. Yet real questions remain for Maier: if the project states which once forced a jailbreak out of the British world system were above all project societies, what are we to make of the possibility of their return? And if the project state’s revival requires a restarting of the fraught dialectic between society and state which ran across the twentieth century, how does it change our evaluation of populism as a failed attempt to do so?

A Society of Rackets

The mid-century moment which Maier so skillfully dissects offers potential clues here. Before Horkheimer borrowed Pollock’s notion of state capitalism, he offered a far more plausible analogy for the social formation which united all capitalist societies across the Atlantic in the 1920s and ’30s: “the society of rackets.” Horkheimer agreed with Schumpeter that the era of the heroic entrepreneur had come to an end, just as the authority of the bourgeois father had broken down. Yet what replaced it was not necessarily an all-powerful caste of planners. Rather, the bourgeois capitalism of the nineteenth century, overtaken by both employee and employer cartels, was increasingly sorting itself into “rackets”—the less idyllic iteration of the Burkean platoons which conservatives celebrated.

Horkheimer’s theory was tainted by an overall disdain for labor unions and their tendency toward corporatism. This was itself a relic of the left-communism he had adhered to in the early 1920s. As he noted in the late 1930s, “procurers, condottieri, manorial lords and guilds have always protected and at the same time exploited their clients. Protection is the archetype of domination.” In the twentieth century, this tendency to rackets now took on a specific form. “The racket pattern,” he claimed, “is now representative of all human relationships, even those within the working class. The difference between rackets within capital and the racket within labor lies in the fact that in the capitalist racket the whole class profits, whereas the racket of labor functions as a monopoly only for its leaders and for the worker-aristocracy.”

Around these rackets, so it seems, several projects could then coagulate, tying together the coalitions which captured the state machines of the mid-twentieth century. With the decline of familial authority, one part was transferred to the state—the “society without fathers,” which sociologists still analyzed in the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, however, Horkheimer’s racket society relied on the transfer of parental authority to the level of the brotherhood—the substitute association. As men left the families that had nurtured them, they found their first refuge in the trenches, the Freikorps, and the party or the association—first in arms, then in street battles fought in the 1920s and ’30s. Financed by an aristocracy hostile to modernization, their ranks swelled further and were able to invade the state. It was their project, overall, that turned the interwar state into a project state; as Horkheimer noted, “the gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a symptom of the vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive groups.”

Today, Horkheimer’s rackets are no longer with us. The demise of Maier’s project state has, above all, seen a world-historic decline in associational life. This includes the “labor rackets” and parties which Horkheimer exhibited such ambiguity toward. Membership in these civil society associations—and not only on the left, the ostensible targets of the controlled deconstruction of the project state which Maier discusses—has declined dramatically in the last forty years. This controlled demolition of the public sphere has greatly reduced the administrative capacity of many states. Moreover, the Volcker shock and the ensuing era of central bank activism also emptied out the remaining associations not premised on consumption. The resulting void between citizens and states has also made it more difficult for states to construe projects per se. Instead, the repertoires of contestation and protest in the new century are distinctly fleeting and short-term, crippled by the neoliberal offensive on society, only faintly similar to the fraternities that the previous century built.

The neoliberal turn required a deep reordering of civil society. Reagan’s attack on the airliner unions and Volcker’s hawkish monetary policy could join hands. What followed was a slow squeezing of the organizations that supposedly drove the state to spend and increase inflation, to restore capitalist stability. The sovereign consumer was to replace the social citizen of yesteryear, assured by central bank action. This was a “politics to negate politics,” as Marcel Gauchet put it. Refiguring global institutions to suit the requirements of capital mobility internationally thus required national exercises of discipline which sidelined unions and decreased wage pressures, but which also pulverized established civil society institutions on both left and right.

Thus, the last thirty years have not only seen the demise and failed resurrection of the project state. At the same time, they have also witnessed the transition from what can be termed a “fraternal” to a “neo‑patrimonial” racket society. The new populist rackets are not the outgrowth of strong civic institutions. Rather, they are emanations of families and informal groupings—evidenced by the Trumps and the Berlusconis, or the cronies which the Polish PiS politicians have gathered around them, in a country where fewer than 3 percent of the population has a party membership card.

These are far removed from the fraternal rackets which Horkheimer discerned in the middle of the century. Their main set-up is not meritocratic or egalitarian, like the SS or the SPD, but rather based on reputation and spin. Their members’ value is not measured in medallions or other social capital, but rather in networks and followers. Unexpectedly for Horkheimer, the family has made a comeback in the age of neoliberalism, yet not in its traditional form, but as a refurbished insurance firm, with the Trumps, Berlusconis, and Kaczyńskis as the clearest examples.

As Maier admits, the viability of the project state’s successors is inherently limited. To make real incursions into capital’s prerogative over investment, a social threat that could alter the balance of class power is required. Few of the kind have been forthcoming in the age of populism. Rather, left-populism is best conceived as an attempt to construct a project state without a muscular civil society or labor movement, thereby greatly complicating the tasks of institutionalization which seemed so pressing in the twentieth century. So far, the only real threat has come from the life-threatening externality of climate change and the last project state in existence, Xi Jinping’s China. Yet these problems cannot solely be conceptualized on a governmental level. Today’s states are uniquely weak in the face of capital, which renders any transformative project difficult to implement. To restore the project state’s discipline over capital, however, would require disciplining the state into acquiring a project per se. Given that today’s populism has no durable project coalitions at its disposal, it can hardly restore this discipline; consequently, populists usually opt for easy rentier coalitions which trickle down wealth from specific sectors but hardly challenge the overall patterns of investment.

Maier ends his book on a conciliatory note. “Today,” he says, “many political groups are implying ‘Dare less democracy,’” which is also “a project and one that requires denying access to the polls and distorting public information.” Yet “after the totalitarian experiences of the mid-century and the personalized authoritarian ones popular today, dare one write, ‘Dare more state?’” On this point, Maier is at risk of putting the cart before the horse: a revival of the project state would require a due reckoning with the project coalitions which grouped around it in the twentieth century. Precisely this piece of the puzzle is missing from the dazzling fresco which Maier has offered us.