Abstract

I supplement Mitchell’s insights about state effects with Bernardo Zacka’s focused theory of the modern administrative state as a “collective fiction,” inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. The state’s fiction is constituted by bureaucrats’ ordinary actions and the state’s material artifacts, including architecture, which, Zacka writes, “reassemble the world around them into novel configurations” and “[play] a part modulating relationships between citizens and bureaucrats and in constituting the publics assembled there.” Zacka’s theory of the administrative state’s collective fiction seems especially appropriate for studying postwar American government centers, because their ample public plazas and interior public service areas are sites where citizens of an expanded postwar American social democracy identify themselves as such, in explicit relation to the state.