The Origins of the Service State: On the Ironies of Intervention

Authors

Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

This essay discusses the growth of the interventionist "service state" in the United States since the 1890s. It indicates how the exhaustion of the national entrepreneurial capitalist model necessitated state management of the economy, society and culture in order to consolidate the emergence of a transnational monopoly capitalist mode of economic growth. These bureaucratic interventions, however, from the 1930s through the 1970s dangerously eroded the continuing reproduction of civil society. Hence, the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s are discussed as popular efforts to countervail the bureaucratic logic of monopoly capital and the service state. The new social movements' focus on popular participation, community-building and political empowerment, in turn, might provide the organizational basis for creating new democratic economic, political and social alternatives to the over-administered consumer society constructed by the service state and transnational capital during the 20th century.

Recommended Citation

Luke, Timothy W. (1984) "The Origins of the Service State: On the Ironies of Intervention," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 11: Iss. 2, Article 8.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.1656
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol11/iss2/8