codato e perissinotto paradigm lost

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Paradigm LostState Theory Reconsidered

Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, Editors

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis

London


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The goal of this essay is to present a reading of the Marxist theory of thestate that is more complex than the version produced by recent neo-institutionalist critiques. With Marxs historical works ( Revolution and Counter-Revolution [ ], Class Struggles in France,1848 to 1850 [ ],and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [ ]) as our point of departure, we attempt to show that his conception of the state takes its

internal institutional dynamics into account without forfeiting the per-spective of class analysis. In this manner, when Marx introduces the in-stitutional aspects of the capitalist state apparatus into his historical analy-sis, he develops a conception of the state that is both more sophisticatedthan the instrumentalistperspective of some Marxists and some crit-ics of Marxism and less formalist than institutionalist interpretations.

The General Theory of the State in Marx and Engels

Too well known to be taken up again here is the fact that Marx, as partof his intellectual project, intended to devote himself to a more system-atic treatment of the stateas his letters to Ferdinand Lassalle (Febru-

ary , ), to Fredrick Engels (April , ), and to Joseph Weydemeyer(February , ), written even before the publication of A Contribu-tion to the Critique of Political Economy in Berlin, attest. Yet this was atask he was never able to complete. Similarly, his study of capital (and,within it, the chapter on social classes) remained incomplete. Nonethe-less, it can be argued that a generic conception of the state can be foundin Marx and Engelss work that can provide the guiding principle, as

C H A P T E R T W O

The State and Contemporary Political Theory Lessons from Marx

Adriano Nervo Codato and Renato Monse ff Perissinotto

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Marx himself claimed (Preface, ), for political analysis. This con-ception consists, in a nutshell, of the notion of the class character of thestate. Marxist political theory therefore implies the categorical rejectionof the vision in which the state is seen as an agent of society as a wholeand of national interests. 1

This is, in short, the essence of all Marxist conceptions of the state, assummarized with notable clarity in the well-known formula from The Communist Manifesto: The executive of the modern state is but a com-mittee for managing the common a ff airs of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx and Engels [ ]). 2 Engels expressed the same idea in an equally famous passage: The central link in civilized society is the state, whichin all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class,and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding downthe oppressed, exploited class (Engels [ ]).

Yet, although the assertion of the class character of the state appara-tus is a necessary condition for the analysis of the state system, whenone goes on to look at its internal con guration, its levels of decision making, and the functions ful lled by its diverse centers of power,whetheras decision makers or as political organizers of the interests of dominantclasses and class fractions, this determination is highly insu fficient. The

state apparatus, Poulantzas reminds us, is not reducible to state power.The State really does exhibit a peculiar material framework that can by no means be reduced to mere political domination(Poulantzas , ).In this sense, the mediating role that the state plays through its admin-istrative and routine bureaucratic activities acquires a decisive impor-tance with regard to its class character. In an analogous way, this latterproblem does not refer exclusively to the e ff ects of state policieswhichinvolve analytically distinct, though empirically closely related questionsof state power but to their form and intrinsic content (Therborn

, ).The most de ning characteristic in the development of contemporary

Marxist political theory has been the absence of questions referring to theprocesses of internal organization of the state apparatus. Even Poulantzas,who sought to comprehend the speci c system of organization andinternal workings of the capitalist state apparatus through the conceptof bureaucratism primarily explored the ideological e ff ects of this sys-tem on the practices carried out by the state (bureaucracy) (Poulantzas

, ).

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According to common critiques, the reasons for such systematic omis-sion should be sought precisely in the confusion that the Marxist tradi-tion has promoted through its stubborn con ation of state power andclass power,reducing the state apparatus to an instrument controlled by dominant interests. It is almost as if the identi cation of the states class character had freed Marxists from the analysis of the concrete formsthrough which it unfolds (that is, the way the state works ). At best, Marx-ists have devoted attention to the meaning (in class terms) of state poli-cies (i.e., the social sectors that bene t from particular decisions, gener-ally economic), but not the modes of internal organization of the state apparatus and their repercussions on decision-making processes.

This critique comes in two versions. The rst one emphasizes theeff ects of this restrictive notion of politics and the state on the theory of political regimes; the second draws attention to the di fficulties of a theory of the state in Marx and later Marxisms. We will take a closer look ateach one of them.

The Institutionalist Criticism to Marxs Theory of the State

Beginning in the mid- s, most notably in Italy, the literature belong-ing to the revisionist strand emphasized the incipient nature of Marx-

ist political theory.3

According to Norberto Bobbio, the fact that Marx never wrote the book he had planned to on the state (which could beconceived of as merely circumstantial) in fact con rms the biased treat-ment that the problem received at the hands of this theoretical tradition.The state was frequently conceived of as instrumental (in terms of class domination) or as a mere re ection (of the structures determinedby the economic base). This is exactly where we can nd Marxismsmain di fficulties in dealing with the two most recurring problems of traditions of political thought: the problem of forms of governmentand its correlatewhich polarized the theoretical agenda of politicalscience at the end of the twentieth centurythe problem of political

institutions.In its essence, the argument can be presented in the following man-

ner: in insisting on the class nature of state power, classical Marxists didnot theorize the di ff erent modes in which power is exercised. Becausethey were always concerned with who exercises political dominationand not with how it is exercised, in a class-divided and strati ed society,government any government under whatever form (whether demo-

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cratic or dictatorial) was always conceived of as oriented towardfullling the general interests of the ruling class, regardless of its form,as can be gleaned from the following passage:

Marx and Engels (and in their following, a revolutionary leader such asLenin), convinced as they were that the political sphere is a sphere of force (and in this sense they were perfectly right), always set up forthemselves the problem of the historical argument of this force, asparticularly expressed from time to time in the ruling class, rather thaninquiring into the various modes through which such force can beexercised (which is the problem of institutions). (Bobbio , -

emphasis added)4

This leads to a theory of the state that, according to Norberto Bobbio,is essentially partial and incomplete. This is both a theoretical and apolitical problem. The backwardness, the lacunae, and the contradic-tions of Marxist political theory, in this sense, impinged on the devel-opment of a more articulate re ection regarding the organizational formof the socialist stateand the dictatorship of the proletariatwithits specic institutions.

This critique was reinforced and built up by contemporary literaturein political science, whose main current todayneo-institutionalism

predicates a return to the state and rejects purely societal explanationsfor historical processes. Such an approach maintains that Marxs visionof the state (and of bureaucracy) was impoverished and schematic, andthat there is not, in his work, a more careful treatment of the problemthat goes beyond the mere con rmation of the class character of processesof political domination. 5 In consequence, the state, from Marxs per-spective, can never be studied as an independent actor, to use Skocpolsexpression, that is, as an autonomous variable or an explanatory factorof social and political phenomena in its own right. From this perspec-tive, there cannot really be a theory of the state. Even the most recentworks on the capitalist state, in spite of some undeniable progress with

regard to the recognition of the relative autonomy of the political,have not overcome what we could refer to as this genetic di fficulty of Marxist political theory. 6 For example, Fred Block, one of the represen-tatives of this perspective, argued that the concept of the relative au-tonomyof the state was not more than a renewal, albeit a more sophis-ticated one, of the stubborn Marxist reductionism that identi es statepower and class power (Block a, ). This makes it impossible to



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understand both state and society from a relational perspective thatwould give the proper weight to each one in a sociological explanationthat thus leads to a more complex view.

This essay does not intend to take inventory of the classic and contem-porary contributions in the Marxist camp in order to contrast them toneo-institutionalist critiques. Our goal is much more modest: to respondto such interpretations, contrasting them to a less super cial and morecareful reading from certain selected passages from Marxs historicalworks. From our point of view, the political analyses that Marx devel-ops in Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Class Struggles in France, 1848to 1850 , and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte successfully bring together two distinct levels of analysis.

At a more general and abstract level, Marxs point of departure forunderstanding the French and German states is in fact their reproduc-tive functions. In this sense, the autonomy that these institutions ac-quire in particular historical situations does not make them an auton-omous or detached social force. From the reproductive point of view, the state is the political form of bourgeois society and state poweris identi ed with class power. Its reproductive role vis--vis the socialordera fundamental criterion in de ning the states class character

becomes evident in the following passage, in which the e ff ects of the au-tonomy of the Bonapartist state for the broader reproduction of Frenchindustrial capitalism are evaluated:

It [the empire] was acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares,attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry andcommerce expanded to colossal dimensions; nancial swindling cele-brated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set o ff by ashameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. Thestate power, apparently soaring high above society, was the very hotbedof all its corruptions. (Marx )

Nonetheless, at the level of analysis of political conjuncture, whereanalyses of the struggles of groups, factions, and class fractions are car-ried out, the state can be perceived as an institution endowed with itsown institutional resources, resources that bestow on it the ability totake initiatives and make decisions. In concrete political struggle,political groups and social classes perceive the state as a powerful insti-tution that is capable of de ning the distribution of diverse resources



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within society. Because of this, struggles occur over the direct control orexercise of in uence from afar over the di ff erent branches of the stateapparatus. At this level of analysis,it is possible to think of the state, onthe one hand, and class, on the other, as distinct and autonomous realities.Therefore, we are able to think of state power as di ff erent from classpower and of a con ict-based relationship between the two. Thus we cannd in Marxs texts themselvesand this is the basis of our argumentcertain clues that enable us to think of the state as an institution, touse the term that is so much in vogue today. 7

The State as Institution in Marxs Historical WorksMarxs political analyses always preserved the decisive di ff erence be-tween the state apparatus and state power. It was precisely the attentionthat he devoted to the former that enabled him to emphasize two othercorrelated di ff erences: between the dominant economic class (or classfraction) and the class (or fraction or group) that governed politically,and between state and government. This latter problem can be betterunderstood by considering the opposition that the author establishedbetween social classes real and nominal power. In fact, a particular class(or class fraction) can hold the helm of the state in its handsthat is,

the governmentper se without being the ruling class, and vice versa.Moreover, this is a topic that has been of utmost importance to a wholetradition within Marxism, as represented, for example, by Gramsci.

In the works we analyze here, the distinction between real and nominal power fullls the role of emphasizing the importance of the institutional dimension of the state in political struggle.As we intend to demonstrate,the political predominance of a given class or class fraction at a par-ticular historical conjuncture depends to a large extent on its ability tocontrol or in uence the branch of the state apparatus that holds real power. This power has a hold over a quantity of institutional resources(budget, administration, repression) that endow the branch within which

they are concentrated with decision-making powerand hands the ad-ministrative reins over to the class that is installed therein. Marxs his-torical analyses reveal, among other quite suggestive elements, that thereis intense struggle between ruling classes and class fractions over the con-trol of these apparatuses. In this sense, the political struggles that took place in Germany in and in France in the period show,



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contrary to the neo-institutionalist argument, a relational conception of the pair state/dominant classes,a conception that could only developto the extent that Marx understood the state as a reality separate fromsocial classes.

Where in Marx can this problem be found? In a series of four articlespublished at the end of in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx ana-lyzes the reasons for the failure of the antifeudal revolution and thefounding of a speci cally bourgeois political domain in Germany (Marx

). To get back to the central question: why is it that the Germandoes not repeat the English or the French ? The events thatoccurred between March and December show that, whether underCamphausen or the Hansemann ministry, and even though the Germanbourgeoisie may have been nominally in control at the helm of thePrussian state (owing to its hesitations and the backward steps takenbefore the democratic demands of the people and to its ability to as-sume only its most narrow, immediate interests), the feudal counter-revolutionaries as represented by the old bureaucracy and the oldarmy, loyal to the Crown, ended up taking over all important positionsof the state apparatus, thus guaranteeing the restoration of the ancienregime. 8

The Prussian bourgeoisie was nominally in control and did not for amoment doubt that the powers of the old state had placed themselvesunreservedly at its disposal and had become o ff shoots of its ownomnipotence. Not only in the cabinet but throughout the monarchy the bourgeoisie was intoxicated with this delusion. (Ibid.)

How was this able to happen? Or, more precisely: what is the sourceof this illusion? It is the belief that because the Prussian bourgeoisiewas at the helm of the state (government o ffice; at the head of thegovernment cabinets), it also held real power in its hands. This strate-gic mistake was what led this class to engage in Suppression of every po-

litical move of the proletariat and of all social strata whose interests donot completely coincide with the interests of the class which believesitself to be standing at the helm of state (ibid.). Thus, this movementled to the strengthening of the old repressive institutions: the old Pruss-ian police force, the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the army, who, sincethey receive their pay from the bourgeoisie, also serve the bourgeoisie,



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as Hansemann thought (ibid.). It was precisely this institutional base that allowed the old social forces to organize the feudal counter-revolution.

Let us take a look at this same problemthe lack of overlap betweenreal power and formal power from another point of view. How is thisexpressed in the realm of the state apparatus? At the heart of the stateapparatus there are only some branches that, in detriment of others,hold eff ective poweror, more properly speaking, real decision-makingpower what Marx has called, in The Class Struggle in France, the (ca-pacity for) initiative in the government. In concrete terms, politicalpower is concentrated in speci c nuclei of the state apparatus; these, inturn, can be occupied directly (or controlled or in uenced) by di ff erentsocial classes; in this case, the relative power of each of them is deter-mined by its proximity to or distance from the most important center of decision making. This can be gleaned from the following passage:

Marche, a worker, dictated the decree by which the newly formedProvisional Government pledged itself to guarantee the workers alivelihood by means of labor, to provide work for all citizens, etc. Andwhen a few days later it forgot its promises and seemed to have lost sightof the proletariat, a mass of , workers marched on the Htel deVille with the cry: Organize labor! Form a special Ministry of labor! Reluctantly and after long debate, the Provisional Government nomi-nated a permanent special commission charged with lending means of improving the lot of the working classes! This commission consisted of delegates from the corporations [guilds] of Paris artisans and waspresided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg Palace wasassigned to it as its meeting place. In this way the representatives of theworking class were banished from the seat of the Provisional Govern-ment, the bourgeois part of which retained the real state power and the reins of administration exclusively in its hands; and side by side with theministries of nance, trade, and public works, side by side with the Bank and the Bourse, there arose a socialist synagogue whose high priests,Louis

Blanc and Albert, had the task of discovering the promised land, of preaching the new gospel, and of providing work for the Paris prole-tariat. Unlike any profane state power, they had no budget, no executive authority at their disposal. They were supposed to break the pillars of bourgeois society by dashing their heads against them. While the Luxem-bourg sought the philosophers stone, in the Htel de Ville they mintedthe current coinage. (Marx , ; boldface emphasis added) 9



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Thus, this indicates that the State (or, more precisely, the institutionalsystem of state apparatuses) is a complex compound with higher (rul-ing) levels what Marx also refers to as decisive posts, where in factthe reins of administrationare held and subordinate levels (with noexecutive authority, as we have seen). 10 The task of Marxist politicalanalysis is, precisely, to identify those apparatuses where real power isconcentrated. What could be called the center(s) of real power are, inthis context, the indispensable site where class hegemony is exercised.Therefore, it should be emphasized that real power emanates directly from a series of institutional resources administration, budget, execu-tive powerconcentrated in a speci c branch of the state apparatus,through which the social class that controls it is endowed with a superiorposition in political struggle. The contrast between the LuxembourgPalace and the Htel de Ville speaks eloquently in this regard.

In turn, the way in which the bureaucratic structure of the state andpolitical hegemony are articulated can be better understood by follow-ing Marxs analyses of French politics during the period that precedesthe December coup. The February revolution, which underminedthe nancial aristocracys exclusive dominion that had been consecratedby the July Monarchy, had the major task of consummating bourgeois

rule,by allowing . . . all the propertied classes to enter the orbit of polit-ical power (ibid., ).11 This critical compromise was to be de nitively broken at the beginning of November with Minister Barrot-Fallouxsdismissal and Minister dHautpouls ascent.What was the real meaningof this change in government? In sum, the restoration of the nancialaristocracy through its control over a decision-making center.

According to Marx himself, the new cabinets nance minister wasAchille Fould.Fould as Finance Minister signi es the official surrenderof Frances national wealth to the Bourse, the management of the states property by the Bourse and in the interests of the Bourse.With the nomi-nation of Fould, the nance aristocracy announced its restoration in

the Moniteur . . . . In place of the names of the saints [the bourgeois repub-lic] put the bourgeois proper names of the dominant class interests. . . .With Fould, the initiative in the government returned to the nance aris-tocracy (ibid.; emphasis added).

Now, as we can see, this fundamental shift in the heart of the power-holding bloc occurred through the recovery of the nance ministry and



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the maintenance of this apparatus insofar as it represented the seat of eff ective power. All the political struggles of this subperiod, which spansfrom June , , to March , , can be summarized in this episodeof (re)conquest of executive power:

The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the rst and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal forms, accordingly, adecisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost, never to re-conquer it, an indispensable position for the maintenance of theparliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of o fficials numbering more than half a millionindividuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where thestate enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its mostinsigni cant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to theprivate existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, acapacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity which nds a counter-part only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of theactual body politicit is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real in uence when it loses command of the

ministerial posts. (Marx , ; boldface emphasis added)

The nancial aristocracy travels the opposite route of the Party of Order. It struggled to regain its political in uenceundermined by the

revolution throughout the Republican period. This in uencewas recovered through the (re)conquest of the nance ministry and of the maintenance of this apparatus speci cally as the site where eff ectivepower was concentrated. When Bonaparte dismissed Minister OdilonBarrot and replaced him with Achille Fould, he was in fact allowing thenancial aristocracy to recover the privileged position it held withinthe state apparatus under Louis Philippe.

Looking at these elements, we are able to establish two fundamentalcriteria that, when combined with others, enable us to describe and ex-plain the concrete con guration taken on by the state system: in therst place, it reects the variation in the correlation of forces betweenthe executive branches that make up the state apparatus in accordancewith their real participation in the decision-making process (as exem-plied by Marxs contrast between the Luxembourg Palace and the



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Htel de Ville); in the second place, the relationship of competitionand predominance between the executive and the legislative (the Na-tional Assembly) in the tortuous process of de ning governmentalpolicies must be considered. Taken together, these factors should be ableto indicate, with a reasonable margin of certainty, the site where e ff ectivepower is located within the state apparatus.

In short, at the political juncture Marx analyzed, the political su-premacy of a particular class fraction results from the control or in u-ence that this class (or its representatives) are able to exercise over theapparatus in which real power is concentrated. Thus, it seems di fficultto maintain that Marx underestimates the importance of the state asan institutionthat contributes to the precise con guration taken on by the relations of force in a political scenario within a given historical sit-uation. To maintain such a position, one must ignore all of the passagescited earlier. What we can perceive are the various groups and socialclasses in conict over the control of institutional resources monopolizedby the state apparatus or, more speci cally, by some of its branches. If the state were an institution of lesser importance, how could Marx characterize it as the major object of desire of social classes in strug-gle? The state, in Marxs historical works, constitutes the principal tar-

get of political struggle precisely because it concentrates an enormousamount of decision-making power and a signi cant ability to allocateresources. 12

Conclusion: The Limits of Neo-institutionalism

Neo-institutionalists have accused the Marxist theory of the state of committing the serious mistake of underestimating the state as an insti-tution. This mistake is seen as the inevitable consequence of the Marxistemphasis on the class character of the state apparatus, which, in turn,would make it impossible, from this theoretical perspective, to elabo-rate a theory of the state per se.

We have tried to demonstrate that the analyses in Marxs historicalworks place value on the state as an institution separate from the rul-ing classes and class fractions, endowed with resources of its own and,especially in the French case, possessing considerable ability to take ini-tiative and make decisions. It is this institutional dimension of the statethat motivates social groups and classes, to conquer a privileged positionwithin it. The French political scenario, from to , was the stage



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of a struggle between antagonistic social classes, on the one hand, andruling classes and class fractions, on the other, over the conquest, in-crease, or consolidation of their respective political in uence on stateinstitutions. This is, without doubt, a vision in which state and classconstitute autonomous poles of a single relationship. At the same time,because we do not want to turn Marx into an institutionalist avant la lettre, it is necessary to emphasize that his analyses, and studies doneby Marxist theorists in general, go beyond the immediate dimensionof specic political struggles and the institutional aspect of the stateapparatus.

To recognize the autonomy of the state, its institutional reality, itslogic, and the speci c interests of its state agents should not, accord-ing to Marx and the Marxists, stop us from asking what kind of socialrelations the actions of the autonomous state reproduce. It has beenprecisely through this concept of state power that Marxists have triedto respond to this question. As Nicos Poulantzas emphasized:

The various social institutions, in particular the institution of the state,do not, strictly speaking, have any power. Institutions, considered fromthe point of view of power, can be related only to social classes which hold power. As it is exercised, this power of the social classes is organizedin specic institutions which are power centres: in this context the state isthe centre of the exercise of political power.(Poulantzas , )13

The problem ofstate power is theoretically distinct from the problemof the state apparatus. Insofar as the latter refers to the institutionaldimension, the former seeks to identify which social relations are guar-anteed through the public policies that the state promotes. Thus, the so-cial class whose privileged position in the productive structure of a givensociety is maintained through state actions can be considered the classthat holds power.

If we disregard the risk of an exacerbated functionalism that can springfrom this theoretical positionthat is, from assuming that the state is

functional for the ruling classes long-term interestsit is undeniablethat it represents progress in relation to the neo-institutionalist con-ception. The identi cation of the speci cities of the state apparatusand the bureaucratic origin of particular measures is just a rst step inthe analysis of the relationship between state and society. Evidenceof disputes between the state and ruling classes is not enough to war-rant any conclusions before inquiring into the results that such con icts



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have in terms of the social relations that structure a given social forma-tion. It is true that Marxist insistence on the question of state powermay very often lead to underestimating the political con icts betweenthe state and social classes that are of a more situational nature, whichtend to be quali ed as super cial, short-term, or referring to mereimmediate interests. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that theMarxist position is a guarantee against the opposite sin, which wouldbe to interpret these con icts as irrefutable evidence that the state isnot a class state.

Another problem that the neo-institutionalists point out, just as im-portant as the rst, is the highly general and abstract character of neo-Marxist theories of the capitalist state. From this point of view, the the-oretical discussions initiated by Nicos Poulantzas have only producedahistorical, and therefore nonoperational, formulations. Thus, accord-ing to the neo-institutionalists, if, on the one hand, the state must beunderstood theoretically as a fully autonomous institution, theoreticalexplanations must at the same time avoid excessive generalization. It isonly through historical research that the real degree of autonomy of any concrete state can be revealed, and it is only through this type of re-search that such autonomy can be measured(cf. Barrow , ;

Skocpol, ). The state can be autonomous to a greater or lesser de-gree, totally autonomous or totally subordinate to the ruling classes,depending on concrete historical situations.As Skocpol argues ( , ):

state autonomy is not a xed structural feature of any governmentalsystem. It can come and go. . . . Thus, although cross-national researchcan indicate in general terms whether a governmental system hasstronger or weaker tendencies toward autonomous state action,the full potential of this concept can be realized only in truly historicalstudies that are sensitive to structural variations and conjuncturalchanges within polities.

In our opinion, such a position leads to two problems. The rst, and

perhaps least compromising, resides in the lack of originality in theaffirmation that the states degree of autonomy vis--vis the rulingclasses is a historical matter and that for this reason it cannot be derivedfrom a general theory of the capitalist state.We believe that the Marxiananalyses we have cited reveal exactly the historical variation in the rela-tionship between the state and the economically dominant classes. Bothin Germany and in France, the relationship between the two uctuates



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according to the dynamics of political struggle, in which diverse classfractions, social groups, and the state bureaucracy participate. In theFrench case, as we have seen, before Bonapartes coup there was also afraction of the bourgeoisie that held real power directly. The coup, inany event, was the fruit of a political process that led to a new situationin which the states degree of autonomy grew considerably. Poulantzashimself, accused of excessive general theoretical abstraction, always em-phasized the historical dimension of the states degree of relative auton-omy with regard to the political struggles of ruling classes and classfractions. The same can be said of Max Webers work on the modernstate, which in fact can be considered the matrix of the premises of neo-institutionalist theory, as Skocpol herself recognizes (ibid., ).14

A more serious problem can be found in the fact that the concept of autonomy that is used by the neo-institutionalists, and Theda Skocpolin particular, leads to an excessively formalist conception of the state, inspite of all of the historicizing theoretical discourse that these authorsput forth. As Clyde Barrow has noted, the emphasis on the states insti-tutional capacity and on the historical dimension of this capacity hasled to a strong state/weak state antinomy, that is, a scale of meas-urement in which the states autonomy varies according to speci c his-

torical situations. Only the concrete relationship between state agentsand social forces in any given society can determine whether the state inthat society is strongor weak. In this manner, we would not arrive ata theory of the state, as the neo-institutionalists argue, but at a mere triv-iality according to which strong statesthat is, those that are endowedwith signicant institutional resourcesare more capable of acting au-tonomously against the interests of the ruling class, given their institu-tional capacity to do so. Conversely, weak states have lesser chances to actagainst the interests of the ruling class, even when this is the will of thestate elite, given their lesser institutional capacity (Barrow , ).15

This purely quantitativeview of the question of state autonomy is a

tributary of J. P. Nettls seminal article (Nettl ), cited several timesin the book by Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, which in the endamounts to a purely functional account of the state, as the author him-self admits. Nettl rst presents a schema of essential traits that charac-terize a state (internal and external sovereignty, autonomy, socioculturalroots) and then goes on to assert that his concept provides a measure-ment of stateness (or, in another formulation of his, the saliency of the



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state) for a given society. Because this is a quantitative variable, thebest way to measure would be through functional analysis. Thereby, so-cieties characterized by centralized administration directed by the state,state sovereignty that has been institutionalized in detriment of other non-state organizations, in which the state has autonomy (in other words,capacity to take initiatives), and consequently, the ability to implementits objectives, can be seen as societies with high levels of stateness; onthe contrary, societies in which these attributes are weak or absent canbe seen as possessing a low level of stateness. Ultimately, the main con-cern of the approach suggested by neo-institutionalists is the (concep-tual) de nition and (empirical) measurement of the stateness of a givensociety. For this purpose, certain functional attributes have been positedas dening the state, and their empirical presence, as more or less in-tense, serves as a yardstick for qualifying a state as weak or strong. 16

The preference for the functional analysis of this quantitative variableis justied, according to Nettl, because in this way a generic de nitionof the state can be produced, without including certain structural char-acteristics that, as historical and therefore variable, can be identi edthrough empirical research. 17 In our opinion, this quantitative vision of the autonomy of the state, which aims to leave the structural speci cities

of the state to historical analysis, becomes highly abstract and formalistto the extent that it ignores the existing correspondence between partic-ular political structures and particular types of relations of production.

As a result, this theoretical perspective is not able to structurally di ff-erentiate di ff erent states, that is, to perceive that strong or weak states,in spite of this quantitative similarity, can be structurally distinct to theextent that they correspond to di ff erent social relations. The institu-tionalist approach would lead us to identify the French society of theabsolutist monarchy as a society with a high degree of stateness, and tosay the same regarding French society of the postrevolutionary period,because both states were capable of exercising all of the prototypical func-

tions. 18 Yet this position disregards the fact that these are two di ff erenttypes of state, with di ff erent organizational structures and that ful lltheir functions in qualitatively di ff erent ways, with their own ideologiesand mechanisms for establishing legitimacy, corresponding to two his-torically distinct types of society. For this reason, the materialist thesisof the correspondence between the relations of production and the formstaken on by the state, as Marx synthesized in his Preface to A Contribu-



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tion to the Critique of Political Economy, seems extremely important tous. Without this possibility, we would be left at a very generic and for-mal level in which we would only be able to determine if society x or y entertains greater or lesser stateness, but would be unable to explainwhy the states under consideration take on the form that they do oroperate in one way rather than another.

Marxism, in taking into account the inescapable links between polit-ical structure and relations of production in a particular society, thussupplies us with a theory of the state that is at once general and histor-ical. This is in fact Nicos Poulantzass project in Political Power and So-cial Classes.As is known, this author has a clearly functional perspectiveinsofar as he de nes any and every state as a factor of cohesion in agiven social formation. At the same time, and following Marxs indica-tion, he sees this function as exercised di ff erently by qualitatively di ff erentstates, that is, states that are di ff erentially structured. Thus, in a func-tional sense we could say that capitalist states and the states of slave so-cieties are equivalent. Nonetheless, they are extremely di ff erent fromthe structural point of view and in the way in which they carry out theirfunction, because they belong to qualitatively di ff erent societies. In thissense, the generality of the theory of the capitalist state in Poulantzas

is much less abstract than the vision of the state elaborated by the insti-tutionalists, for it includes only one historical type of state structure.Thus, when we speak of a capitalist state, we are speaking of some-thing very specic, of a historically particular type of state; on the otherhand, when we speak of a strong state, we are referring to any statethat incorporates the attributes that Nettl and Skocpol have identi ed.Thus, neo-institutionalism, in rejecting the connection between the stateand relations of production, produces a purely quantitative and highly abstract theory that, in spite of its historical discourse, can be indis-criminately applied to all types of state, without giving due value to theirstructural di ff erences.

Notes

This is a modi ed version of the paper presented at the seminar The Concept of State in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, organized by the Department of Philosophy of the Federal University of Paran (Brazil),April and , . It hasbeen translated from Portuguese by Miriam Adelman.



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1. One of the most fundamental theoretical conquests of modern political theory was the assertion of the class character of processes of political domination by clas-sical Marxists. See, in this regard, Macpherson , chapter .

2. This is also Ralph Milibands ( a) interpretation with regard to the core of Marxian (and Marxist) conception of the state.

3. On the underdevelopment of Marxist intellectual production within thedomain of political and economic theory from the s on, and the prevalence of aesthetic and cultural studies, see Anderson .

4. See also Bobbio ( ) and ( ). Actually, this problem was rstemphasized by Aron ( ).

5. As Robert Goodin ( , ) has observed, neo-institutionalism includes avariety of theoretical currents in a wide variety of elds of knowledge (economics,

sociology, history, political science). However, all of them share the more generalthesis according to which political institutions should be seen as autonomous explanatory variables, endowed with a logic of their own, and not as the result of so-cial forces in con ict. Evidently, this article does not intend to dialogue with all of these theoretical currents, but only with those that choose Marxism as their maininterlocutor. Here we have speci cally in mind Theda Skocpols well-known article(Skocpol , ). See also Block a and b; Miliband b; and Marchand Olsen , .

6. The concept of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state was theoreti-cally elaborated by Nicos Poulantzas in his book Pouvoir politique et classes sociales.This was a seminal work that propelled Marxist and Marxist-inspired authors totake up the study of the state again. This was the concern of authors such as JoaquimHirsch, Claus O ff e, Elmar Altvater, and Ralph Miliband, among others, who in theirworks theoretically conjoined the notions of the class nature of the state appara-tus and the relative autonomy of this apparatus vis--vis the ruling classes. Theneo-institutionalist perspective is an attempt to go beyond the limits of the societaryanalysis of the state carried out by neo-Marxists. In this regard, the title of FredBlocks ( a) article is signi cant: Beyond Relative Autonomy: State Leaders asHistorical Subjects. For a summary of neo-institutionalist critiques of Marxism,see Barrow ( , ).

7. The distinction between the two levels of analysis that are present in Marxspolitical theory is obviously not original. Nicos Poulantzas was the rst to system-atize this as he perceived it in Marx (see Poulantzas ). His argument emphasizesthe general or systemic function of the state as a factor of social cohesion (or re-producer of class relations) and the main or historic characteristic of the capitaliststate in class struggle: its relative autonomywith regard to ruling classes and frac-tions. However, Poulantzas was primarily concerned with the rst level of analysis,

in other words, with theorizing on the class character of the state starting from itsreproductive function within capitalist relations of production. We would like to in-sist, based on Marxs own work, on the importance of the institutional aspects of the state for understanding its con ict-based relationship with ruling classes andfractions and its political consequences. See also Draper ( , ).

8. All the expressions within quotation marks belong to Marx ( ).9. The sentences in italics were highlighted by Marx; the sentences in bold ital-

ics are our emphasis.



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10. Thus in the approaching mle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, all theadvantages, all the decisive posts,all the middle strata of society were in the hands of the bourgeoisie, at the same time as the waves of the February Revolution rose highover the whole Continent, and each new post brought a new bulletin of revolution,now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the remotest parts of southeasternEurope, and maintained the general ecstasy of the people, giving it constant testi-mony of a victory that it had already forfeited (Marx , ).

11. It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and ironmines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with themthe so-called nancial aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, itdistributed public o ffices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts (ibid.,

).12. The following can also be deduced: The fact that the French ruling classesand class fractions were successful (or unsuccessful) in exercising direct or indirectcontrol over the center of real power in the state apparatuswhich could consti-tute a certain instrumentalismis a historical fact and not the result of a theo-retical vice; it is the result of historical research and not a theoretical conjecture.

13. See also Therborn .14. On Nicos Poulantzas, see , , .15. On Skocpols position, see also .16. According to Skocpol, these attributes are complete integrity and stable ad-

ministrative and military control over a territory, the existence of a body of loyaland quali ed staff , and economic resources that are abundant enough to guaranteethe efficacy of state action. See Skocpol .

17. The overall conceptual identi cation of the state with law, with bureau-cracy, or with government merely reimposes an arti cial . . . notion of state by group-ing structures that are better particularized and that are part of the state in someempirical situations but not in many others where some or all of these structuresexist and function without any valid notion or phenomenon of state at all (Nettl

, ).18. This is just the type of formalism that Marx did not allow himself. In his

view, just as the absolutist monarchy served the interests of the emerging bourgeoissociety but had to be swept away by the gigantic broom of the French Revolutionto make way for a new political structure more adequate to that society, the work-ing class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it forits own purposes (Marx ). From this perspective, we can certainly assert thatthe absolutist monarchy, the postrevolutionary French state, and a possible socialiststate are strong states. However, to limit ourselves to this evaluation would be to

belittle the speci cities of these state structures and their relationship to the di ff er-ent societies in which they operate.

References

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