“The post-colonial state was thought of an entity that stood outside and above society as an autonomous agency.” Explain. (2021, 20 Marks)
The statement summarises the neo-Marxist view of the 1970s, given classic form by Hamza Alavi in “The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh” (New Left Review, 1972). It reworks Karl Marx’s idea of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), where a state balancing between classes appears to rise above all of them. The words “was thought of” matter: the view was influential, and later scholarship qualified it.
Why the state appeared to stand above society
- The overdeveloped state. In Europe the bourgeoisie built its own state. In the colonies a metropolitan bourgeoisie imposed a military-bureaucratic apparatus powerful enough to subordinate all indigenous classes. At independence this apparatus was inherited intact, overdeveloped relative to the weak social classes around it.
- No single ruling class. Power was shared among three propertied classes: the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the weak indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes. None could rule alone, so the bureaucratic-military oligarchy mediated between them, gaining relative autonomy of the kind Nicos Poulantzas theorised for capitalist states.
- An independent economic base. The state appropriated a large share of the surplus and spent it through planning, public enterprise and licensing, so it was not merely the instrument of any one class but an economic actor in its own right.
- The nation-building function. As John S. Saul stressed for Tanzania, the post-colonial state had to manufacture territorial unity and legitimacy where no nation pre-existed; it shaped society’s categories rather than reflecting them.
- The developmental mandate. Amid instability and underdevelopment, modernisation theory and planning alike cast the state as the agent of change acting upon a “traditional” society; India’s Planning Commission (1950) and the Mahalanobis strategy of the Second Plan embodied this self-image.
Pakistan fits most closely. After repeated military rule, the 27th Amendment (13 November 2025) made the army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, Chief of Defence Forces, gave the field-marshal rank lifelong status and privileges, and moved constitutional cases to a new Federal Constitutional Court: the army-bureaucracy core still towers over elected institutions.
Why the view was revised
- Autonomy was overstated. Colin Leys (1976) argued that “overdevelopment” described colonial coercion, not post-colonial class relations; the state remained tied to dominant classes and foreign capital, as dependency writers also held.
- India does not fit Pakistan’s mould. Pranab Bardhan (The Political Economy of Development in India, 1984) found the state bargaining with three dominant proprietary classes (industrial capitalists, rich farmers and professionals), so its autonomy produced subsidy-driven stalemate, not command. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) described a “weak-strong” state facing a demand polity.
- Society penetrates the state. Joel S. Migdal (Strong Societies and Weak States, 1988) showed social organisations fragmenting state control; Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) described a political society in which the poor negotiate with the state through informal claims; Sudipta Kaviraj argued that the Nehruvian elite’s modernist discourse never became common sense below, so democratic politics steadily pulled vernacular demands into the state.
- Embeddedness, not separation, works. Peter Evans’s embedded autonomy (1995) showed that successful developmental states in East Asia were autonomous and connected to capital through dense networks.
- Diversity. Comparativists object that one model flattens very different colonial and anti-colonial histories.
Conclusion
Alavi correctly located the post-colonial state’s power in its colonial inheritance and its mediating role among classes, and Pakistan still bears him out. Yet the state never truly stood “outside” society: in India and much of Africa it is embedded, contested and bargained with. Its autonomy is relative and variable, which is precisely why the statement is put in the past tense.