Jack asked:
Once defined, "State" is then often reified so
that we speak about the "State" doing things or having things
done to it. The danger of the uncritical application of
familiar deductive theories is that we may thereby obscure
...
What I
often see in works of a macrosociological bent is the lumping
together under the rubric "State" of interaction networks
whose nature may be a crucial empirical element in the
development of world-systems theory.
*********
Jack,
Start with reading relevant sections of Chris Chase-Dunn's _Global
Formatiion_ on the modern world-system; then look at two of our papers:
1993. "Comparing World-Systems: Concepts and Working Hypotheses."
Social Forces 71:4(June):851-886.
1994. "The Historical Evolution of
World-Systems." Sociological Inquiry 64:3(Summer):257-280.
What you are asking about is precisely the issue we address at some length,
as do Frank & GIlls, especially Barry Gill's Chapter.
The issues you raise are really quite old in this end of sociology, and one
of the many useful insights of Wallerstein is precisely that the 19th (and
16th and 17th ect) form of the state is large part a product of and
reflection of the world-system.
Thus most WS writer use the term "state" as generic term for all of these.
Those of us who discuss precapitalist (a better term would have been non
capitalist but we are more or less 'stuck' with the pre term) issues have
all argued that those states are radically different from 19th or 20th
century.
tom hall