State Autonomy Analysis

Michael Mann distinguishes them as two independent dimensions of state power. Despotic power is the range of actions a state elite can take without routine negotiation with civil-society groups — the capacity to command arbitrarily. Infrastructural power is the institutional capacity to penetrate society and actually implement decisions throughout the territory, such as taxing incomes or registering the population. A state can be high on one and low on the other: an absolutist monarchy could be despotically strong but infrastructurally weak, while a modern democracy is infrastructurally strong but despotically constrained.

Relative autonomy refers to the state's capacity to act with some independence from the immediate dictates of dominant economic classes, without being fully detached from the social structure. The term originated in neo-Marxist debate and was developed empirically by Skocpol and others to capture the variable, conditional nature of state independence: states are neither pure instruments of capital nor wholly free agents, and the analytic task is to specify the degree and the conditions of their autonomy in particular cases.

Autonomy and capacity are distinct but complementary. Autonomy concerns whether the state can choose goals independent of dominant classes; capacity concerns whether it can actually implement them. An autonomous state with weak capacity may set goals it cannot achieve, while a high-capacity state lacking autonomy may simply execute the preferences of powerful groups very efficiently. Explaining what a state accomplishes generally requires examining both dimensions together, which is why the framework treats infrastructural power as the bridge between the two.