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Paradigm Lost
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Paradigm Lost
State Theory Reconsidered
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, Editors
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paradigm lost : state theory reconsidered / Stanley Aronowitz and Peter
Bratsis, editors.
p. cm.
Based on the conference “Miliband and Poulantzas : In Retrospect and
Prospect,” held in April 1997.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3293-6 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3294-4 (PB : alk.
paper)
1. State, the. 2. Miliband, Ralph—Contributions in political
science. 3. Poulantzas, Nicos—Contributions in political science.
I. Aronowitz, Stanley. II. Bratsis, Peter.
JC11 .P37 2002
320.1—dc21 2002002333
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Murphy
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
State Power, Global Power xi

Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis
PART I
Miliband and Poulantzas in Review
ONE
The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate: An Intellectual History 3
Clyde W. Barrow
TWO
The State and Contemporary Political Theory: Lessons from Marx 53
Adriano Nervo Codato and Renato Monseff Perissinotto
THREE
Bringing Poulantzas Back In 73
Paul Thomas
PART II
The Contemporary Relevance of Miliband and Poulantzas
FOUR
The Impoverishment of State Theory 89
Leo Panitch
FIVE
The Stateless Theory: Poulantzas’s Challenge to Postmodernism 105
Andreas Kalyvas
SIX
Eras of Protest, Compact, and Exit:
On How Elites Make the World and Common People
Sometimes Humanize It 143
Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven
SEVEN
The Withering Away of the Welfare State?
Class, State, and Capitalism 170
Rhonda F. Levine
EIGHT
Globalization and the National State 185
Bob Jessop
NINE
Relative Autonomy and Its Changing Forms 221
Constantine Tsoukalas
PART III
Beyond Miliband and Poulantzas
TEN
Unthinking the State: Reification, Ideology, and the State
as a Social Fact 247
Peter Bratsis
ELEVEN
Global Shift: A New Capitalist State? 268
Stanley Aronowitz
Contributors 287
Index 291
Acknowledgments
The inspiration for and most of the contents of this collection derive
from the conference “Miliband and Poulantzas: In Retrospect and Pros-
pect,” held in April 1997. We would like to thank the Ph.D. program in
political science of the CUNY Graduate School and the Center for
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Queens College, for their spon-
sorship and support of this conference. We would like to thank and ac-
knowledge all those who were involved in the organization of this confer-
ence and without whom the conference would not have been possible:
Nicos Alexiou, Jose Eisenberg, Joao Feres Jr., Hollis France, Andreas
Karras, Andrew Lawrence, Chris Malone, Roland Marden, Irving
Leonard Markovitz, Eleni Natsiopoulou, W. Ofuatey-Kodjoe, Constan-
tine Panayiotakis, and Frances Fox Piven. We would also like to thank,
in addition to those represented in this collection, those who partici-
pated in the conference and greatly contributed to its success: Ira
Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, John Mollenkopf, Bertell Ollman, and
Robert Ross. Finally, we wish to note the importance of Joseph Murphy.
Not only was he involved in all aspects of the conference, but his friend-
ship, advice, humor, and intellect were invaluable to us and to the suc-
cess of this project.
ix
State Power, Global Power
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis
The ability to rise from the dead is unique to that which has been im-
properly buried. From Freud’s Totem and Taboo to Stephen King’s Pet
Sematary, a lack of proper burying protocol results in the return of that
which had been thought dead. Marxist state theory and, increasingly,
the state as an analytical object have been the victims of an improper
burial. They have been buried by a conservative shift inside and outside
of the academy. They have been buried by an assumed decline of the
state in the face of globalizing and localizing forces. They have been
buried by a shift of emphasis, within the left, away from the study of
“political power” to a more disaggregated vision of power as a dispersed
and undifferentiated phenomenon (from Foucault and Habermas to
Deleuze and Guattari).
The main goal of the essays collected here is to assist state theory in
its resurrection from the dead. The essays are organized around three
broad themes: to introduce readers to some foundational aspects of
Marxist state theory, to evaluate the relevance of state theory in relation
to contemporary political phenomena and theoretical tendencies, and
to identify the limits to state theory that must be overcome for its con-
tinued development. All three themes are developed while focusing on
the contributions of Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. Focusing on
Miliband and Poulantzas allows us to frame and understand state theory
as a whole because they occupy the methodological extremes within
the range of theorists particular to state theory and because their debate
is more often than not the point of departure for subsequent attempts
xi
xii Aronowitz and Bratsis
to produce a Marxist theory of the state. To understand the utility and

limits of Miliband and Poulantzas is thus to understand the utility and
limits of state theory in a broader sense.
This introduction attempts to situate the issues examined in the sub-
sequent essays to broader empirical and theoretical concerns. We will
focus on identifying those aspects of state theory that distinguish it from
competing theoretical tendencies and we will illustrate the utility of state
theory in relation to questions about the changes of the state in the face
of globalization and in relation to questions regarding the affects of state
institutions.
The Specificity of State Theory

As many of the essays in this collection attest (especially Barrow and
Panitch), state theory enjoyed a fair amount of attention in the 1970s
not only from Marxist theorists but also from more mainstream sects
within social science. State theory had in a few short years constituted
itself as an important and viable alternative to the orthodoxy of plural-
ism and structural functionalism/systems theory within political sci-
ence and political sociology. By 1985, Bringing the State Back In, the pre-
sumed benchmark for the return of the state as an object of inquiry to
social science, had relegated theorists such as Miliband, Offe, Block,
Therborn, and Poulantzas to a couple of paragraphs and footnotes.
What is paradoxical about this startling loss of currency and popularity
is its lack of justification. State theory was never the object of a rigorous
and sustained critique that would properly “bury” it and clear the way
for alternative approaches.1 Slavoj Ži žek’s comment on the peculiar de-
cline of the Althusserian school fits well in this context: “It is more as if
there were . . . a traumatic kernel which had to be quickly forgotten, ‘re-
pressed’; it is an effective case of theoretical amnesia” (Ži žek 1989, 1).
A related and equally paradoxical phenomenon is the initial attraction
to the Miliband–Poulantzas debate. Within the Marxist commentaries
on the debate we find two recurring and conflicting observations. It is
noted that the debate received much attention and constituted the point
of departure and frame of reference for most, if not all, subsequent at-
tempts for a Marxist theory of the state; and, it is also noted that the de-
bate was a caricature of Miliband’s and Poulantzas’s true positions, offer-
ing no substantive insight into a theory of the state (cf. Jessop 1985, xiv;
Barrow in this volume; and Levine in this volume). The obvious ques-
State Power, Global Power xiii
tion is, how can this be? How can what we may assume to be informed
and intelligent people spend so much time discussing and debating what
is ultimately a vulgar and substance-lacking opposition? Our answer to
this paradox is that though it may be the case that the debate was lack-
ing in its explicit focus (as a debate about what constitutes the Marxist
theory of the state), the real significance of the debate was its repetition
of the Lenin–Luxemburg debate. After all, what is Miliband’s “instru-
mentalist” claim that the state has been captured by the capitalist class
by way of its political organization other than a repetition of Lenin’s argu-
ment that the state is an instrument of the capitalist class and, necessar-
ily, his defense of organization and the role of the revolutionary party
(a result of the instrumentalist concept of power common to both)?
What is Poulantzas’s “structuralist” claim that the state is capitalist by
virtue of its functions and acts to disorganize the working class other
than a repetition of Luxemburg’s argument that the state apparatuses
are by function bourgeois and, necessarily, her defense of self-organized
and autonomous working-class movements (that is, outside the formal
and legal logic of “the state” and hierarchical organization)?
The “traumatic kernel” of state theory may well be its connection to
political strategy. That which initially was the source of attraction to
state theory may ultimately have served as the source of its rejection.
On a superficial level, this connection can be seen by the attention given
to state theory by various political movements; this is especially true of
Eurocommunism (cf. Carrillo 1978). On a more substantive level, this
connection is present in the strategic value of the questions state theory
tends to pose. Whereas systems theory/behaviorism conformed to and
supported the pluralist fiction of a fragmented society with more or
less equal shares of political power among its factions, and whereas the
state-centered/neo-institutionalist approach chooses to reject the ques-
tion of the social foundations of political power in favor of the assump-
tion that political power is autonomous from society, state theory of all
denominations begins with the very strategic focus of explaining the
social foundations and dominating effects of political power. Where polit-
ical analysis once spoke the language of “domination” and “class antag-
onism,” it now speaks in the language of “state capacities” and “conflict
resolution.”
Our contention is that although the popularity of state theory has
declined, the importance of the questions specific to it has increased. As
xiv Aronowitz and Bratsis
Leo Panitch notes in his essay, the popularity and decline of state theory
are directly related to the vicissitudes of class struggles and political
conditions.2 As radical movements from below ebbed in the past two
decades or so, state theory and its protagonists became increasingly mar-
ginal to the shifting political climate and its corresponding academic
fashions. The reflexive effect of this decline has been that alternative
understandings of the present and their respective concepts, necessary
weapons for a renewed and strategically informed class struggle, have
all but disappeared from the intellectual scene. The resultant neutering
of political analysis has accompanied an increasing technicalization of
politics and the ways it presents itself. The increased importance assumed
by the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, and the European Union has accompanied a transformation of
what used to be overtly political questions of fiscal policy and social wel-
fare into what are now technical questions associated with monetary
policy—interest rate and debt management. The actions of political in-
stitutions increasingly appear as more or less inevitable and determined
by the logic of the free market or as the outcome of legal mandates.3 In
this context of politics appearing more and more separated from social
agency, the problematic of state theory becomes more and more neces-
sary for revealing the relation of the state to social interests and actors
and for serving as a tool for the future manifestations of the political
struggle of the dominated classes.
The decline of state theory not only has political ramifications, but
also has led to a conceptual regression within social inquiry. We exam-
ine two related areas of inquiry in what follows—the study of institu-
tions and the study of globalization—that we think can greatly benefit
from a reapplication of state theory. Of course, these themes are central
to many of the essays included in this collection in that the problematic
of state theory has suffered at the hands of contemporary discussions of
globalization and the assumed decline of state autonomy as well as at
the hands of state-centered theories that assert that they have overcome
the simple-mindedness of society-centered theories by taking institu-
tions and their agency seriously. Beginning with an analysis of Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent work Empire (2000), we attempt to
show how Marxist state theory can assist contemporary efforts on the
left to come to terms with current political changes and demonstrate
that contemporary political theory, in spite of its “amnesia,” needs to re-
State Power, Global Power xv
think the potential analytical and strategic value of Miliband, Poulantzas,

and state theory as a whole.
Globalization, Institutions, and the Vicissitudes of State Power

We are in the midst of a veritable avalanche of descriptive and theoretical
writing on globalization. From William Greider’s journalistic accounts
of the spread of transnational corporate power to all corners of the globe
to the dense theoretical work of Hardt and Negri, and almost every-
thing in between, there is general agreement that world capitalism has
entered a new era, marked by the partial or complete displacement of
the old regulatory institutions and the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Some, such as Claus Offe (1985) and Scott Lash and John Urry (1987),
call attention to the end of regulation and foresee the possibility of new
forms of interstate rivalries, but most of the significant works of the
1990s on globalization insist that the crucial characteristic of globaliza-
tion is a radical reconfiguration of economic and, especially, political
space. Since the mid-1970s, it is argued, transnational corporations based
largely in the advanced capitalist states have taken economic and polit-
ical power, undercutting the sovereignty of nation-states and subverting
the very concept of citizenship. Although the old arrangements, based
on the rivalry of capitals situated in, and supported by, sovereign na-
tion-states, which seek raw materials and markets for the export of cap-
ital, survive in vestigial form, Hardt and Negri (2000), following Gilles
Deleuze, adopt the thesis of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorializa-
tion” to describe the changes; the concept corresponds to themes enun-
ciated by the popular literature on globalization, left and right, as well
as the more scholarly work.
The thesis goes something like this: States construct social space in
the metaphor of “striated” space, an allusion to centralization of power
and the organization of the social world in the model of hierarchy and
domination. Thus, they conceive of the apparent decentralization of
material production into the far reaches of the globe as a moment fol-
lowed by reterritorialization, the return to centralization. In their rich,
complex, and immensely influential book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and his collaborator Félix Guattari elaborate these ideas in a theory of
the state and of political agency. As they put it: “We are compelled to say
there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite complete. . . . The state
dates back to the most remote ages of humanity” (Deleuze and Guattari
xvi Aronowitz and Bratsis
1987, 360). Far from tracing the development of the state form within
the evolution of human societies, between an earlier stage of so-called
primitive communism and ancient societies, most often modes of pro-
duction grounded in slave labor, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the
Urstate, property of all human associations. In their conception, the state
is not an efflux of classes and of class struggle; they conceive the state as
the repository of self-reproducing power, as a form of knowledge, espe-
cially scientific knowledge based on the same centralizing assumptions
of its unquestioned universality: “by right . . . [the state acquires] a con-
sensus raised to the absolute” (375–76). The state and its science have
always claimed the mantle of reason and, in their quest for power over
social space and social thought, systematically suppress alternative social
movements and knowledges. The characteristic form of state politics is
molar; its centralization is immanent to its power. To this transhistori-
cal power Deleuze and Guattari pose the alternative of smooth space,
the molecular politics of the nomad in which deterritorialization is not
followed by centralization; with the nomadic, the state’s power itself,
not just a particular form of it, is contested. In political terms, this is a
new anarchist manifesto.
Underlying this discourse is the view that territory, as the foundation
of social power, is identical with the state. Thus, the object of political
struggle is not, as some Marxists believe, to capture state power in order
to dismantle it sometime in the future. Just as, following Lévi-Strauss
and Pierre Clastres, they abjure the concept of the evolution of human
societies, they also renounce the concept of a transitional state between
capitalism and communism. Because the state is itself a form of tyranny,
capturing state power will only reproduce that which the revolution is
trying to overcome, tyranny.
Hardt and Negri introduce the concept of Empire as the latest form
of reterritorialization. They argue that the nation-state is now largely
displaced by a “network” of transnational corporations that lead the cap-
italist states, of which the only real superpower, the United States, holds
pride of place and aggregates to itself significantly greater power than
the others. The sinews of empire are an international legal system in
which human rights, violations of national sovereignty, the interest of
perpetual “peace,” and other traditional discourses of liberal democracy
trump sovereignty. But the attempt to establish a new rule of law in in-
ternational affairs is not merely a ruse for advancing the interests of
State Power, Global Power xvii
Empire; it is a genuine effort to reintroduce juridical regulation in order

to ensure economic and political stability. Of course, this effort is di-
rected by the combined military and police powers of the various states.
If the question of control over these forces remains a serious obstacle
because residual sovereignty claims are still in force among the major
powers, Hardt and Negri have no doubt that these impediments to global
empire are only temporary. A new international “metastate” is in the
making and the old nation-state is in its death throes.
The nation-state lives chiefly as a repressive power, but also has some
purchase on maintaining a degree of ideological hegemony over what
they call “the multitude.” Because citizenship refers to states in full pos-
session of national sovereignty, and the effectivity of old class movements
such as trade unions and political parties presupposes this situation,
under the new conditions of Empire, the labor and socialist movements,
whose targets—national capital and the capitalist state—are disappear-
ing, have lost their claim to power. Empirically, it is easy to document
the decline of the opposition within the framework of the nation-state.
Hardt and Negri repeat the familiar litany of defeats suffered by labor at
the hands of globalization: sharp membership losses, the de facto de-
fanging of the strike weapon, and, as a result, the capitulation of tradi-
tional working-class and socialist parties to neoliberal policies, if not to
free-market doctrine (although the Labour government in the United
Kingdom has gone a long way toward a full embrace). Even in power, these
parties have proved all too willing supplicants of Empire. Moreover,
perhaps the signal achievement of the labor and other social move-
ments, the welfare state, is in the process of being dismantled (United
States) or has been seriously eroded in erstwhile bastions of labor soli-
darity (Germany, France, Italy) (cf. Levine’s and Cloward and Piven’s
essays in this volume). On the one hand, labor is reduced to a fungible
commodity on the world scale; on the other hand, the new information
economy has brought into being what Negri has termed a new “social”
as opposed to “mass” worker, a type not dissimilar from Robert Reich’s
symbolic analyst in which, according to their latest version, the func-
tions of management and the coordination of intellectual labor need no
longer be a separate occupational designation. Unlike the mass worker,
whose labor has been segmented and degraded, the fully qualified worker
must know the entire labor process and is often scientifically as well as
technically trained. But, following André Gorz’s older concept, capital
xviii Aronowitz and Bratsis
deprives intellectual labor of power over its own work; whereas the mass
worker’s rebellion against her subordination takes the form of “refusal”
to work in the new economy, the socialized worker’s demands are for
autonomy in the performance of her work. The revolt is no less filled
with intensities but, like the 2000 Boeing engineers’ strike in which six-
teen thousand participated, the worker wants to be left to do his work
at his own pace, a preference that disrupts capital’s drive for increased
productivity, and its incessant demand that qualified labor be reduced
to mass labor.
According to Hardt and Negri, the Empire has completely destroyed
the traditional opposition; the old politics is dead and we are facing the
end of history, if by that term we signify the revolution to displace one
form of centralized state power by another. In A Thousand Plateaus, the
force of molecular politics—the highly decentralized efforts of small
groups to forge new social spaces at the local level—is counterposed to
molar politics, the affairs of state. They point to the long-term challenges
to state science as well. Their alternative sciences do not work in the
solid, geometric mode but in the fluid mode: nature is not portrayed in
terms of gravitas but in terms of flows. The figure of the nomad is posed
against the state apparatus. Hardt and Negri take at least one step back-
ward from these theses, which were crafted in the aftermath of the May
1968 events in France and the Italian “Hot Autumn” the following year.
Deleuze and Guattari condemn the Marxist parties for failing to antici-
pate the May events, a failure they ascribe to Marxism’s imprisonment
in the politics of centralized state power. Rather than looking above,
the Marxists should look below to the conditions not of formal state-
craft, but of rhizomic discontent. But, echoing Foucault’s notion that
power is dispersed, is everywhere, Hardt and Negri posit concrete social
groups as the new agents. According to them, the proletariat as political
subject has disappeared. They assert the disappearance of the mediations
between a severely crippled labor movement and global capital. The
new agent of opposition is the “multitude”—the great mass of humanity
who have been marginalized and otherwise repressed by the Empire.
The characteristic form of social action is a “direct confrontation” be-
tween multitude and Empire.
In State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas challenges the basic premise of
this type of analysis by arguing that the true opposite of the territorial is
State Power, Global Power xix
not the nomadic, but rather the ancient Western conception of space as
a homogeneous field that has a center but has no limits:
The space of Western Antiquity is a space with a centre: the polis (which
itself has a center: the agora). But it has no frontiers in the modern sense
of the term. It is concentric, but, having no real outside, it is also open.
This centre (the polis and agora) is inscribed in a space whose essential
characteristics are homogeneity and symmetry, not differentiation and
hierarchy. . . . In this space (which is the one represented by Euclid and
the Phythagoreans) people do not change their position, they simply
move around. They always go to the same place, because each point in
space is an exact repetition of the previous point; when they found
colonies, it is only to form replicas of Athens or Rome. (Poulantzas
1978, 101)
What is significant about this point is that modern territoriality is not

opposed to the ancient conception of space based simply on logical de-
duction, but by looking to the historicity of political space and seeking
its determinations. For Poulantzas, the mistake of Deleuze and Guattari
(and thus Hardt and Negri as well) is that they fail to recognize the im-
portance of the division of labor and everyday life to this historicity of
space.4 The space of ancient, and even feudal, societies has no territorial
boundaries because the hierarchies particular to these societies are not
segmented spatial ones, but rather are based on the immobility of social
position given the ascribed status of class. Before the capitalist division
of labor, there is no escaping to the big city to “reinvent” yourself, there
is no moving to “America” for the good life, no running away to join the
circus. In this preterritorial space, “Delimitations are constantly inter-
secting and overlapping in a series of twists and turns; and subjects, while
remaining on the spot, move around in accordance with the changes of
the lords and sovereigns to whom they are personally tied” (Poulantzas
1978, 103). Here, the dream of the nomadic faces its mirror image, move-
ment without change, smooth spaces from which there is no escape.
With the rise of capitalism, the limitation and segmentation of space
and its (re)production by the state become paramount.
The direct producer, the worker, is now totally separated from the means
of labour—a situation which is at the root of the social division of labour
in machine production and large-scale industry. The latter involves as its
precondition an entirely different spacial matrix: the serial, fractured,
parcelled, cellular, and irreversible space which is peculiar to the Taylorist
xx Aronowitz and Bratsis
division of labour on the factory assembly line. Although this space also
becomes homogenous in the end, it does so only through a second-
degree and problematic homogenization, which arises on the basis of its
essential segmentation and gaps. Already at this level, the matrix space
has a twofold dimension: it is composed of gaps, breaks, successive frac-
turings, closures and frontiers; but it has no end: capitalist labour process
tend towards world-wide application (expanded co-operation). It may be
said that the separation of the direct producer from his means of labour
and his liberation from personal bonds involve a process of deterritoriali-
zation. But the naturalist image peddled by this term is no more exact in
this context than it is elsewhere. The whole process is inscribed in a fresh
space, which precisely involves closures and successive segmentations. In
this modern space, people change ad infinitum by traversing separations
in which each place is defined by its distance from others; they spread out
in this space by assimilating and homogenizing new segments in the act
of shifting their frontiers. (Ibid., 103–4)
This means that territoriality is a property not simply of a “state,” but of

the capitalist state. It means that the dialectic of the inside and the out-
side, so basic to territoriality as we know it and as Deleuze and Guattari
define it, is fundamentally and necessarily tied to capitalist exploitation
and its organization/reproduction by the state. It also means that argu-
ments such as those given by Hardt and Negri are fundamentally flawed
because there is no space “outside” of the nation-state in which power
can reside (for additional arguments against the globalization thesis,
see the essays by Jessop, Panitch, and Tsoukalas in this volume). The
inside-outside dialectic is only proper to one of the spatial dimensions
that Poulantzas speaks of—the fractured, segmented, that is, vertical,
space of capitalist society and its division of labor. The horizontal space
of capitalism has no limits, no “beyond” the nation-state and its organs
of power. It is simply a question of what nation-state you happen to be
in and what your position is within the spatial hierarchies of that class
society. The metaphorical statements of Hardt and Negri about power
residing “above” or “over” or “beyond” the territoriality of the state are
necessarily incorrect unless some space other than that of the state and
its corresponding rhythms of everyday life can be identified as being the
generator and locus of alternative political power. This is not to say that
territoriality is here to stay; it is to say that unless there are alternative
spatial and institutional organizations of power, there can be no ques-
tion of going beyond the centrality of the state.
State Power, Global Power xxi
The nation-states remain a mainstay of global arrangements. To take

a contemporary example, the executive committees of the main institu-
tions of globalization—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank (WB)—are composed of the finance ministers of the
leading capitalist powers, who in turn retain close ties with the chief
transnational corporations. In Hardt and Negri’s analysis, there are no
mediations because they have eluded performing the necessary work of
investigating the institutional basis of the Empire’s power. Just as the
French and Italian Communist parties could not anticipate the move-
ments from below that disrupted ordinary life and state power in their
respective countries in the late 1960s because they were looking in the
wrong direction, Hardt and Negri could not anticipate the protests that
occurred in Seattle in December 1999, in April 2000 in Washington, D.C.,
and in Genoa in 2001 precisely against the institutions of the Empire. As
we write these lines, groups all over the world greet every meeting of the
IMF, WB, and World Trade Organization (WTO) with militant protests,
often using direct action to make their presence felt and to articulate
their demands. In December 1999, a march of fifty thousand demonstra-
tors, most of whom were trade unionists, successfully shut down the
WTO meetings and everyday life for several days in Seattle, sounding a
gong that has been heard around the world. The alliances that are being
forged in these struggles are, indeed, molecular: they are composed of
environmentalists, trade unionists, women’s groups, sex radicals, anar-
chists, New Leftists, and other unlikely partners. But the struggles, al-
though international in scope and the alliances, are conducted with the
political culture, as well as the borders, of the nation-states. In Seattle
and Washington, the slogans were incurably American, the pledge and
practice of “nonviolence” was a direct legacy of the 1960s civil rights
movement, and the call for democratic access to institutional decision
making was in the tradition of New Left participatory democratic dis-
course. To the extent that rhetoric always contains a strong cultural di-
mension, the internationalist protests against the Empire’s key institu-
tions were distinct national mediations.
The failure to see the possibilities is directly related to the theory: if
there are no mediations such as institutions that are repositories of power;
if there are no class agents; if the movements have been decimated be-
yond recognition, then this focused and highly organized series of demon-
strations can hardly be conceived. In the end, Hardt and Negri are left
xxii Aronowitz and Bratsis
with “nomadic” intellectuals linked, somewhat mystically, to multitudes

without definition. This practical mélange may be connected to a deeper
flaw: the sin of theoreticism. Confining itself to a highly abstract series
of concepts, the discourse borders on formalism and, because refer-
ences to practices, which inevitably entail analysis of the interventions
of specific social groups, are absent, Negri and Hardt are left in the em-
barrassing position of rendering an ultimately apolitical discourse. Em-
pire is bereft of practice largely because it posits the impossibility of
any agency other than those who have been wrenched from territory.
But, although Deleuze is right to contrast molecular to molar levels of
political practice, the state remains an arena for politics because, among
other reasons, its territories, both geographic and political, albeit seg-
mented, remain pertinent to popular need.
Of course, it is not only Hardt and Negri who tend to ignore the role
of institutions qua mediations. Strangely enough, self-proclaimed neo-
institutionalist (or, state-centered) approaches have done the most to
diminish the analysis of institutions. Neo-institutionalism tends to fol-
low two trends. One trend (the most famous example being the work of
Theda Skocpol) views state institutions as social agents. The other trend
views state institutions not as actors but as constraints that encourage
or discourage various policy outcomes (perhaps the best example of
this tendency is the collection edited by Weaver and Rockman, 1993). Both
are great retreats from the advancements in institutional analysis cham-
pioned by Poulantzas and Offe with their concept of structural selectiv-
ity, Jessop and his concept of strategic selectivity, and even Miliband
with his C. Wright Mills–like approach for understanding the interper-
sonal linkages between state and corporate institutions.5 Now, we can
either, following Skocpol, posit the autonomy of state power and, with-
out any reference to the practices and struggles that actually take place
in these settings, assume that all institutions act, whenever possible, to
further their own corporate interests (thus fetishizing institutions). Or
we can, following Weaver and Rockman, revert to typical systems-theory–
like analysis of looking to inputs and outputs in order to find some cor-
relations that will, presumably, tell us what kind of institutional arrange-
ments are best for dealing with various kinds of policy areas.6 In both
cases, the spaces and practices of institutions are never studied because
institutions are either assumed to be one social actor among many or
State Power, Global Power xxiii
they are conceived of as independent variables that are not to be explained

or examined, but only used to help understand why some law was passed.
In contrast to these approaches, neo-Marxist theory always gave great
importance to explaining capitalist institutional spaces and the practices
within them. Take the case of education. Following Antonio Gramsci’s
insistence that questions of educational reform are crucial to any proj-
ect of political intervention, Louis Althusser has argued that in soci-
eties ruled primarily by consent rather than by force, schooling is the
main ideological state apparatus. Both were very aware that, unlike pre-
vious modes of production, capitalism with its segmented spaces and
the separation of worker from means of production relies on the insti-
tutions of the state in the broad sense in order to secure the expanded
reproduction of society. No longer do the economic spaces, as had been
the case with slave and feudal societies, reproduce themselves in a sim-
ple way. Even the casual observer recognizes the mediating functions of
schooling today. Buffeted by cultural and economic pressures—mainly
the fact that women have rejected their traditional role as household man-
ager and, in any case, are being integrated into the paid labor force—
the bourgeois family (the model for all social classes in these societies)
has become an unreliable institution for the social discipline of the young.
Even though the traditional mythologies associated with nationalism
and patriotism may have suffered damage in advanced capitalist soci-
eties and, owing to globalization and labor migration, the existence of a
singular national culture is seriously in doubt, the degree to which edu-
cation represents social hope for working and middle classes would
confound anyone who is attracted to the romance of deterritorialized,
nomadic agents. Of course, at the intellectual level, Marxist critics have
been able to puncture the myth of the link between education and class
mobility. Bourdieu has shown how education, especially cultural capi-
tal, actually reproduces the class system, even if a few from the lower or-
ders are permitted to attain positions of technical authority. But these
debunking activities pale in comparison to the lived experience of the
striving classes: having been deprived of stable working-class jobs by the
application of neoliberal economic policies, many who once disdained
formal education and its curriculum have opted to spend five years or
more beyond secondary school to learn how to become a socialized
worker in computers, management, engineering, and other technical
xxiv Aronowitz and Bratsis
occupations. Moreover, most experience this decision as having been

coerced by the realities of the labor market, which, with the exception
of skilled trades, simply offers few well-paying industrial jobs.
No mediations? Try the steady erosion of the health care systems in
advanced capitalist countries. In the United States, where there was never
a universal health plan, tens of millions of people received adequate care
under prepaid programs negotiated under collective bargaining agree-
ments in the public and private sectors and emulated by nonunion com-
panies, often as a means to keep the union at bay. The disappearance of
well-paid factory jobs has placed many of these plans at risk. The advent
of “managed” care, a health care austerity program aimed at cutting
costs, has resulted in severe delimitation of the extent of coverage, with
millions losing their benefits and a decline in the quality of care. It would
surprise those who try to comprehend the effects of globalization with-
out an institutional analysis that this question has been thrust to the
center of electoral and labor struggle.
What is more surprising is that any political intellectual living in these
societies at the turn of the twenty-first century could miss the signifi-
cance of the mediations of education and health, especially as they affect
everyday life. To theorize that the mediating institutions constructed in
the era of regulated capitalism have undergone profound transforma-
tions in the past quarter century is simply not the same as declaring that
they have disappeared. For example, schooling remains, among other
functions, an efficient aging vat and warehouse of labor power. It is also
the site of the socialization of the costs of training a qualified, increas-
ingly flexible, and disciplined labor force for capital’s use. Education
remains a huge industry, absorbing tens of billions of dollars in every
capitalist society, especially the most technically and economically de-
veloped. Health care is a major outlet for capital investment and is be-
ing relentlessly privatized, precisely because of its profitability.
Beyond the practical and historical argument remains a theoretical
one: geographic, political, and social space has been transformed by
globalization and by the demands of empire. That the transnationals
constitute a parallel “metastate” with close interlocks with nation-states
is highly likely, and, as we have seen, they share with the states common
institutions of coordination and control over both advanced and devel-
oping countries. But, as Bob Jessop shows, Poulantzas’s discussion of
processes of internationalization is at once a strategic, that is, a political
State Power, Global Power xxv
intervention, and a theoretical advance over earlier work in Marxist state

theory. Jessop reveals the degree to which Poulantzas modifies the tra-
ditional theory of imperialism by separating out the United States, with
its unique postwar international power and role, from other “imperial-
ist powers.” According to Jessop, Poulantzas’s analysis anticipates later
work on “Atlantic Fordism,” even though in other respects he did not
anticipate its subsequent crisis or the growth of East Asian capitalism.
Yet, Poulantzas was acutely aware of the appearance of regional differences
within an otherwise regulated global imperialism and, in this sense,
continued to insist on that which the Deleuzian Empire thesis denies:
the continued importance of territory administered by the state as the
context for capital accumulation, international power relations, and po-
litical struggle. As he puts it:
capital is a relationship between capital and labour; and it is because it

moves in the international spatial matrix of the labour and exploitation
process that capital can reproduce itself only through transnationaliza-
tion—however deterritorialized and a-national its various forms appear
to be. (Poulantzas 1978, 106)
Indeed, regional power blocs—the most ubiquitous is undoubtedly

the European Union (EU)—have altered the international landscape.
Since the 1970s, they have been in conflict with their constituent nation-
states over a wide range of issues: the demand for a common currency;
the demand on the constituent states to weaken their welfare programs;
uniform reductions in subsidies for agriculture and other state-protected
sectors, even as the demand for eliminating intrastate trade barriers pro-
ceeds. As we have seen over the past couple of decades, the economic,
political, and cultural implications of trying to institute the euro as even
a partial replacement for the pound, mark, and franc has elicited enor-
mous opposition and, as for the standard of reduced state welfare budg-
ets, this proposal generated mass demonstrations in France in 1995, has
resulted in victories for social-democratic and labor parties throughout
Europe, and produced a new wave of anti-Americanism in many of its
capitals.
The essays in this volume represent more than a sign that a discred-
ited Marxist theory of the state refuses to lie in its grave. Although the
editors are acutely aware that the traditional theory of imperialism no
longer accounts for the character of international political-economic
xxvi Aronowitz and Bratsis
relations and that its privileging of the nation-state as a theoretical and

practical site needs serious modifications, many of which are discussed
by various contributors, the invocation of the work of Miliband and
Poulantzas, among others, should be read as a positive intervention in
an ongoing debate. Surely, for those who have abandoned class and class
struggle, this book is a provocation. In sync with the theoretical under-
pinnings of historical materialism, we remain convinced that social strug-
gles, equally at the international and the national planes, entail strategic
as well as analytic attention to the mediations between the relations at
the level of production, consumption, and distribution, the spheres of
civil society where social groups discuss and fight out their worldviews,
as well as contest for ideological hegemony, and the state where issues
of power, including those having to do with a wide array of institutions
and their bureaucracies, are contested. We believe the essays contained
herein make a contribution to the revitalization of the theory of the state
because, in every instance, they continue to take seriously political econ-
omy on the one side, and ideological and cultural issues on the other.
At the same time, nearly all contributors are committed to a secular-
radical view in which what has been surpassed by History is ruthlessly
criticized and abandoned. As Marx once quipped, “to be radical is to go
to the root and to make a ruthless critique of everything.” The successes
and shortcomings of this volume may be measured by that standard.
Notes
1. Notable among the few attempts to provide such a critique are Easton (1981),
Skocpol (1980), and van den Berg (1988). None of these works, however, attained a
sufficient degree of acceptance or popularity to constitute a definitive or fatal cri-
tique of state theory.
2. It is interesting to note that in Asia and Latin America, where political strug-
gles are still overt and politics has not reached the degree of fetishization present in
Europe and North America, state theory has continued to enjoy a significant follow-
ing. For example, in Brazil there still exist “Poulantzasian” departments of political
science (notably, the Federal University of Paraná).
3. As a corollary to this technicalization, we see the proliferation of the view that
politics and the legal process are mere spectacles to be consumed (from Court TV
and the Gulf War to the infatuation with the Clinton scandals). Of course, in this
“society of the spectacle,” the popular classes become increasingly marginal actors.
4. In this way, Poulantzas is much closer to Henri Lefebvre than to the Deleuze–
Guattari school.
5. For more on these concepts, see the essays in this volume by Barrow, Bratsis,
and Codato and Perissinotto.
State Power, Global Power xxvii
6. It is striking that a collection with such a direct title (Do Institutions Matter?)
spends very little time examining institutions. Rather than examine specific institu-
tions, the book is organized around differing interinstitutional relations of the broad-
est level: the four “regime types” of separation of powers (the United States), coali-
tional (Italy), party government (France and England), and single-party dominant
(Japan and Mexico) (cf. Weaver and Rockman 1993, 448). These regime types are
evaluated by their policy “capabilities,” which Weaver and Rockman define as “a
pattern of government influence on its environment that produces substantially
similar outcomes across time and policy areas” (6). Particular capabilities examined
include setting and maintaining priorities, coordinating conflicting objectives, and
managing political cleavages. “Capabilities” are stressed over policy content because
policy preferences are not the same for different societies, and thus it becomes very
misleading to compare regimes on the substance of their policies. Through a series
of statistical case studies designed to show any correlations between these “regime
types” and a series of “capabilities” (such as cleavage management and maintaining
international agreements), the authors attempt to discover the agency of these insti-
tutional forms. At the end of more than four hundred pages of analysis, the authors
conclude that institutions matter but are unable to explain exactly why they matter,
for correlations do not equal causal analysis, and they must resort to speculation
about possible explanations.
References
Carrillo, Santiago. 1978. Eurocommunism and the State. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence
Hill and Company.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Easton, David. 1981. “The Political System Besieged by the State.” Political Theory
9(3): 303–25.
Evans, Peter, Dietrich Rueshemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State
Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Jessop, Bob. 1985. Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press.
Offe, Claus. 1985. Disorganized Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso Books.
Skocpol, Theda. 1980. “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories
of the State and the Case of the New Deal.” Politics and Society 10: 155–201.
van den Berg, Axel. 1988. The Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the
State of Marxism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Weaver, R. Kent, and Bert A. Rockman, eds. 1993. Do Institutions Matter? Washing-
ton, D.C.: Brookings Institute.
Ži žek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso Books.
I
Miliband and Poulantzas in Review
CHAPTER ONE
The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate
An Intellectual History
Clyde W. Barrow
In the Marxist scheme, the “ruling class” of capitalist society is that

class which owns and controls the means of production and which is
able, by virtue of the economic power thus conferred upon it, to use
the state as its instrument for the domination of society.
—ralph miliband, 1969
The state has the particular function of constituting the factor of

cohesion between the levels of a social formation. This is precisely
the meaning of the Marxist conception of the state as a factor of
“order”. . . as the regulating factor of its global equilibrium as a
system.
—nicos poulantzas, 1978b
What Is the Miliband–Poulantzas Debate?

The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’s Pouvoir politique et classes sociales
(1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initi-
ated a return to the state in political science and sociology (Easton 1981;
Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Comninel 1987; Therborn 1987;
Almond 1988), but it simultaneously fractured Marxist political theory
into pieces that may never be reassembled (Barrow 1993; Alford and
Friedland 1985; Carnoy 1984; Jessop 1982). Miliband observes that prior
to the publication of his book, Marxists had “made little notable attempt
to confront the question of the state” since Lenin. The one exception to
this claim was Poulantzas’s Pouvoir politique et classes sociales, which
3
4 Barrow
Miliband (1969, 6, 7 n. 1) describes favorably as “a major attempt at a

theoretical elaboration of the Marxist ‘model’ of the state.” Similarly,
after the publication of Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society,
Poulantzas (1969, 67) praised the book as “extremely substantial” and
indicated that “he cannot recommend its reading too highly.” However,
Poulantzas’s praise was qualified by “a few critical comments” that set
off a series of exchanges in the New Left Review that became known as
the Miliband–Poulantzas debate (Miliband 1970a, 1973; Poulantzas 1969,
1976).
The debate was never confined exclusively to Miliband and Poulantzas;
political theorists and political sociologists quickly lined up on either
side of the debate, and particularly over whether Miliband’s “instru-
mentalist” theory of the state or Poulantzas’s “structuralist” theory
of the state was the Marxist theory of the state (Gold, Lo, and Wright
1975a, 1975b; Jessop 1977). Moreover, the debate itself remains sympto-
matic of unresolved epistemological issues within Marxism that have
far-reaching methodological repercussions beyond state theory. There-
fore, the Miliband–Poulantzas debate was never just a conceptual or
empirical disagreement about the nature of the capitalist state; it was
from the beginning an epistemological dispute over whether there is
any such thing as a specifically Marxist methodology.1
Thus, on the one hand, the Miliband–Poulantzas debate is a watershed
in the development of Marxist political theory. On the other hand, it
brought into sharp relief a methodological impasse that has persisted
since Eduard Bernstein (1961) first argued that there is no such thing as
a Marxist methodology and Georg Lukács (1971, 1) replied that Marxist
theory refers exclusively to a method. Consequently, the debate captured
the attention of radical scholars for almost ten years, but by the end of
the 1970s, the debate became sterile as Marxist theorists again found it
impossible to move beyond these methodological antinomies.2
In reconstructing the Miliband–Poulantzas debate, I do not claim to
answer the original epistemological question posed by Bernstein and
Lukács as to whether there is a Marxist methodology in some abstract
sense of the term. However, as a particular historical observation, I do
argue that there is nothing peculiarly “Marxist” about the methodolo-
gies employed by Miliband or Poulantzas. In my book Critical Theories
of the State, I advanced this thesis as a mere assertion and it is my inten-
tion to document that claim with more specificity in this essay.3 At the
The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate 5
same time, it is my contention that the conceptual aspects derived strictly

from “the Marxian classics” by Miliband and Poulantzas are embedded
in problems of textual interpretation that cannot be resolved by further
appeals to the Marxian corpus.
Background to the Debate

The Miliband–Poulantzas debate erupted within a paradoxical historical
context defined by the political rebellions of 1968 and the dominance of
a social science preoccupied with “pluralism” and “system equilibrium.”
The two sides of this contradiction were mediated by a student, intellec-
tual, and cultural revolt that revived Marxism inside the universities of
the advanced capitalist societies (Ollman 1982). Not coincidentally,
Miliband and Poulantzas were public intellectuals already engaged in
this ideological struggle, and, surprising as it may sound, they both
shared similar conceptions of “the Marxist tradition” and considered it
the main alternative to the dominant “bourgeois social science.” In fact,
the two books that precipitated their initial debate appeared within a
year of each other at the global apogee (1968–69) of the domestic and
colonial insurrections in and against advanced capitalism.
Biographical Background: The 1960s

In a sense, Miliband and Poulantzas were both expatriates and refugees
who fled repressive regimes early in their lives. Miliband was born in Brus-
sels in 1924 to Polish-Jewish immigrants.4 He joined his first socialist
youth organization at age fifteen and fled to England with his father in
1940 literally on the last boat to leave Belgium before Nazi troops cap-
tured Ostend. Two years later, at age seventeen, Miliband entered the
London School of Economics (LSE) specifically to study with Harold
Laski (Miliband 1993). Miliband began teaching at LSE in the early 1950s.
He remained at LSE until the late 1970s, when he left for North America
to take up a series of teaching posts at Brandeis University, York Univer-
sity, and, finally, the City University of New York Graduate Center. He
had just retired from CUNY shortly before his death in 1994 at age seventy.
Miliband was an independent socialist intellectual who never joined
an established political party, but instead promoted the building of a
new socialist movement that would steer a path between Leninist van-
guardism and Labourist revisionism. Miliband’s first book, Parliamen-
tary Socialism (1961) was a critique of the British Labour Party and of
6 Barrow
the electoral and bureaucratic mechanisms that diverted the party from
pursuing more radical objectives (Saville 1995). During this time, Miliband
was a founding editor of the New Left Review and a cofounder of the
Socialist Register (which he coedited with John Saville for thirty years).5
He was also active in the British peace movement, the anti-Vietnam
War movement, and numerous other campaigns against social and po-
litical oppression. In the 1980s, Miliband was a founder of the Socialist
Society, which helped convene several conferences to provide a new
voice for socialists outside the British Labour Party. In the final decade
of his life, he was calling for a new socialist party capable of forging an
alliance between labor and the new social movements (Allender 1996).
Miliband’s intellectual reputation derives primarily from his book The
State in Capitalist Society, which, as George Ross (1994, 572) points out,
was responsible more than any other single work for “bringing the state
back into political science and sociology.” Indeed, by the mid-1970s,
Miliband was near the top of the American Political Science Associ-
ation’s list of most-cited political scientists and, at the height of his
popularity, was probably “the leading Marxist political scientist in the
English-speaking world” (Blackburn 1994, 15).
Nicos Poulantzas was born in Athens in 1936, where he lived through
the Nazi occupation and the Greek civil war. Poulantzas received his
baccalaureate from the Institut Français in 1953 and then entered the
University of Athens School of Law. Although active in various political
movements as a youth, it was not until the early 1960s, after Poulantzas
had moved to Paris, that he became a card-carrying member of the Greek
Communist Party (Jessop 1985, chap. 1). Poulantzas was a professor of
legal philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1961 to 1964 and he continued
teaching at French universities until his death in 1979. By the time he
published Pouvoir politique et classes sociales in 1968, he was already well
known in French intellectual circles, primarily through his association
with the “existential Marxists” at Les Temps modernes. However, shortly
after joining the editorial board of Les Temps modernes in 1964, Poulantzas
was increasingly influenced by the British Marxists gathering around
the New Left Review, by the works of Antonio Gramsci, but most especially
by the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser (Hirsch 1981; Poster 1975).
Poulantzas’s reputation as a state theorist was secured by the publica-
tion of Pouvoir politique et classes sociales, which appeared only a few
days before the May days of 1968 (Jessop 1985, 9–25; see Singer 1970 and
Touraine 1971 for background). However, Poulantzas was catapulted to

prominence within the English-speaking left with his review of Miliband’s
book in the New Left Review and, shortly thereafter, increasing interest
in Poulantzas’s work led to its translation in 1973. Goran Therborn ob-
serves that “in the first half of the 1970s, Nicos Poulantzas was arguably
the most influential living political theorist in the world,” whose works
influenced left-wing academics and political activists throughout Eu-
rope, North America, and Latin America (Therborn 1987, 1230). Simi-
larly, Bob Jessop (1985, 5–6), who has written the most extensive intel-
lectual biography of Poulantzas, suggests that “it is no exaggeration to
claim that Poulantzas remains the single most important and influential
Marxist theorist of the state and politics in the post-war period”; for
even where Poulantzas’s contributions have been superseded by more
recent work, he has often “set the terms of debate.”6
Intellectual Background: Bourgeois Social Science

In the late 1960s, however, the terms of debate in social science and po-
litical theory were being defined by theories that could not account for
the existence, much less the magnitude, of rebellion within the advanced
capitalist societies (Young 1977). The concept of the state and state power
had been replaced in academic sociology and political science by a con-
cept of “political system” that Miliband identifies with the works of
David Easton and Robert A. Dahl. David Easton (1953, 106) had played a
major role in initiating the behavioral revolution more than a decade
earlier with his declaration that “neither the state nor power is a con-
cept that serves to bring together political research.” In urging political
scientists to abandon the analysis of state and power, Easton proposed
that scholars examine instead “those interactions through which values
are authoritatively allocated for a society.” Furthermore, Easton (1965,
21–23) emphasized that to account for the persistence of political sys-
tems, one had to assume that they successfully generate two “system
outputs”: (1) the political system must be able to allocate values for a
society, and (2) the political system must induce most members to ac-
cept these allocations as binding, at least most of the time. The bulk of
Easton’s theoretical and empirical work during the 1950s and 1960s was
on the “support inputs” that stabilize and equilibrate political systems.
As Miliband (1969, 3) observes, systems analysis was tied closely to “a
democratic-pluralist view” of society that came “to dominate political
8 Barrow
science and political sociology.” Robert A. Dahl was certainly the single
most important proponent of pluralist theory among the icons of the
behavioral revolution. The significance of pluralist theory is that it
seemed to explain how the political system induces most citizens to ac-
cept decisions as binding most of the time. As Dahl (1959, 36) pointed
out, pluralist theory assumes
that there are a number of loci for arriving at political decisions . . .

business men, trade unions, politicians, consumers, farmers, voters and
many other aggregates all have an impact on policy outcomes; that none
of these aggregates is homogeneous for all purposes; that each of them is
highly influential over some scopes but weak over many others; and that
the power to reject undesired alternatives is more common than the
power to dominate over outcomes directly.
Thus, as Miliband (1969, 2, 3) concludes, the state seemed unimpor-

tant to mainstream social science only because it implicitly assumed, or
more often explicitly asserted, a pluralist theory of the state. Importantly,
Miliband notes that because “a theory of the state is also a theory of so-
ciety and of the distribution of power in that society,” pluralist assump-
tions tended “to exclude, by definition, the notion that the state might
be a rather special institution, whose main purpose is to defend the pre-
dominance in society of a particular class.”
Although Miliband has often been chastised by structuralists for al-
lowing bourgeois social science to set the methodological terms of his
analysis, Poulantzas was responding to a parallel intellectual context.
Poulantzas (1978b, 19) explicitly derides French political science as “un-
derdeveloped” and, consequently, he calls explicit attention to the fact that
he made “frequent recourse” to works by British and American authors.
These authors include Talcott Parsons, David Easton, Gabriel Almond,
David Apter, and Karl Deutsch—a virtual pantheon of the systems analy-
sis and structural-functionalist movements in American social science.
As Poulantzas was aware, in Parsonian systems analysis,
the political component of the social system is a center of integration

for all the aspects of this system which analysis can separate, not the
sociological scene of a particular class of social phenomena. (Parsons
1951, 126)7
Similarly, although relying more on the structural functionalism of

Robert K. Merton, David Apter (1958) defined the “political” as a struc-
ture with “defined responsibilities for the maintenance of the system of

which it is a part.” Likewise, Gabriel Almond and James Coleman (1960,
12) identified the function of the political system within the overall so-
cial system as the crucial “boundary maintenance function.” Impor-
tantly, Poulantzas (1978b, 47 n. 17) cites these works favorably, even if
critically, in a section titled “The General Function of the State” as ex-
amples of how contemporary political science was “beginning to empha-
size the role of the political as the factor of maintenance of a formation’s
unity.”8 Thus, if Miliband was preoccupied with challenging bourgeois
social science within the methodological parameters defined by behav-
ioralist methodology and pluralist theory, Poulantzas was also working
through a methodological position that is directly traceable to the sys-
tems analysis and structural functionalism of Parsons, Almond, and
Apter. It is ironic that so much of the Miliband–Poulantzas debate came to
revolve around the question of Marxist methodology when there was
nothing peculiarly Marxist about either author’s methodological approach.
Intellectual Background: The Marxist Tradition

Nevertheless, Miliband and Poulantzas both challenged the dominance
of bourgeois social science by drawing on a Marxist tradition that each
of them identified with the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci.
Miliband (1969, 5) argues quite explicitly that “the most important al-
ternative to the pluralist-democratic view of power remains the Marxist
one.” Miliband (1977, 1) identifies “classical Marxism” with “the writings
of Marx, Engels, and Lenin and, at a different level, [with] those of
some other figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Trotsky.”
Miliband’s (1969, 5) interpretation of classical Marxism was based on
his observation that Marx “never attempted a systematic study of the
state.” Miliband was well aware of the fact that “this was one of the tasks
which he [Marx] hoped to undertake as part of a vast scheme of work
which he had projected in the 1850s but of which volume I of Capital
was the only fully finished part.” Hence, most of Marx’s political writ-
ings “are for the most part the product of particular historical episodes
and specific circumstances; and what there is of theoretical exploration
of politics . . . is mostly unsystematic and fragmentary, and often part of
other work” (Miliband 1977, 1–2). Miliband identifies the political writ-
ings of classical Marxism primarily with Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France and with Lenin’s What Is to
10 Barrow
Be Done? and State and Revolution. Significantly, although references to

the state in different types of society constantly recur in almost all of
Marx’s writings, Miliband concludes in the final analysis that
as far as capitalist societies are concerned, his [Marx’s] main view of

the state throughout is summarised in the famous formulation of the
Communist Manifesto: “The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (Ibid., 5)9
Miliband claims that this thesis “reappears again and again in the work
of both Marx and Engels; and despite the refinements and qualifications
they occasionally introduce in their discussion of the state . . . they never
departed from the view that in capitalist society the state was above all the
coercive instrument of a ruling class, itself defined in terms of its owner-
ship and control of the means of production” (ibid.).10 Miliband (1969,
6) considered Lenin’s State and Revolution to be merely “a restatement
and an elaboration of the main view of the state” found in The Commu-
nist Manifesto, and that after Lenin “the only major Marxist contribu-
tion to the theory of the state has been that of Antonio Gramsci.”11
Miliband identifies the chief deficiency of contemporary Marxist po-
litical theory as the fact that nearly all Marxists have been content to as-
sert the thesis articulated in The Communist Manifesto as more or less
self-evident. Thus, for Miliband, the primary objective in renewing state
theory was “to confront the question of the state in the light of the con-
crete socio-economic and political and cultural reality of actual capital-
ist societies.” Miliband suggests that Marx provided a conceptual founda-
tion for the socio-economic analysis of capitalist societies, Lenin provided
guidance for a political analysis, and Gramsci supplied the conceptual
apparatus for a cultural and ideological analysis of capitalist societies.
Hence, Miliband was convinced that the central thesis and conceptual
structure of Marxist political theory was effectively in place and that
what Marxism needed was empirical and historical analysis to give con-
crete content to this thesis and its theoretical concepts. The intended
purpose of The State in Capitalist Society was “to make a contribution
to remedying that deficiency” (Miliband 1969, 7).
Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1978b, 1, 42) also claims
to draw on the classical texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci and
“to provide a systematic political theory by elucidating implicit ideas
and axioms in their practical writings.” However, it will come as no sur-
prise that Poulantzas’s epistemological attitude toward these texts was

far more complex and problematic than Miliband’s position. In Political
Power and Social Classes, Poulantzas cites Louis Althusser’s (1969) work
as the basis for his claim that Marxism consists of two united but dis-
tinct disciplines called dialectical materialism and historical material-
ism. According to Poulantzas (1978b, 11), dialectical materialism (i.e.,
Marxist philosophy) “has as its particular object the production of
knowledge; that is the structure and functioning of thought.” Marxist
philosophy is essentially a process of reading the classic texts rigorously
to produce the concepts necessary to an understanding of history and soci-
ety.12 Althusserian structuralists viewed the historical development of
Marx’s own thought as exemplary of this process and to that extent
they emphasized a distinction between the young Marx and the mature
Marx. For Althusserians, including Poulantzas, Marx did not become a
“Marxist” until he wrote The German Ideology, which constituted his
“epistemological break” with bourgeois categories of thought, although
Marx’s thought does not reach full maturity until the publication of Cap-
ital (Therborn 1976).
Thus, whereas Miliband places Marx and Engels’s Communist Mani-
festo at the center of Marxist political theory, Poulantzas (1978b, 20)
identifies Capital as “the major theoretical work of Marxism.”13 Never-
theless, Poulantzas’s (1978b, 21) reading of Capital leads to the parallel
conclusion that while providing “a systematic theoretical treatment of
the economic region” of the capitalist mode of production (CMP), there
is “no systematic theory of ideology . . . to be found in Capital. . . nor is
there a theory of politics in it.” Hence, with respect to political theory,
Poulantzas understood that an Althusserian epistemology had to deal
with two problems from the outset: (1) problems related to the “raw
material” of theoretical production, and (2) problems concerning the
status of what texts among the Marxist classics count as “political.”
The chief difficulty in designating Capital as the central theoretical
work of Marxism is that it is an unfinished work. It contains no theory
of social class, no theory of the state, no theory of transition from one
mode of production to another and yet it explicitly intends to address
those issues. The known gap between what Marx intended in Capital
and what he accomplished before his death leaves a text that is rife with
lacunae, omissions, and stated intentions that are never fulfilled in fact.
Hence, Marxist philosophers, particularly Althusserian structuralists,
12 Barrow
are faced with the task of not only clarifying the existing text, but of
completing the existing text. For Althusserians, Engels’s role as editor of
the final volumes of Capital, and his role in explicating various ideas in
Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State provides an exemplary model of the type of intellectual produc-
tion involved in completing the central text. Therefore, Poulantzas con-
cludes that to produce a theory of the capitalist state, it is not only nec-
essary to “Read Capital,” but to “Write Capital” (or at least its political
equivalent). Interestingly, Poulantzas concurs with Miliband that, after
Engels, it was Lenin and Gramsci who did most to advance this task.
Unfortunately, as Poulantzas observes, these Marxist classics do not
specifically discuss politics and the state at the same level of theoretical
systematicity as one finds in Marx’s Capital. Thus, Poulantzas (1978b, 19)
emphasizes that,
in order to use the texts of the Marxist classics as a source of informa-

tion, particularly on the capitalist state, it has been necessary to com-
plete them and to subject them to a particular critical treatment.
Because of the non-systematic character of these texts, the information
contained in them sometimes appears incomplete or even inexact.
Consequently, for Poulantzas (ibid., 21), the concepts required for a

theory of the capitalist state are merely implicit in the texts of the Marx-
ist classics. Importantly, in sorting out the issue of which classic texts
count as political, he distinguishes between those theoretical texts that
“deal with political science in its abstract-formal form, i.e., the state
in general, class struggle in general, the capitalist state in general,” and
“the political texts in the strict sense of the term.” Among the former,
Poulantzas includes Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and The
Civil War in France; Engels’s Anti-Dühring; Lenin’s State and Revolu-
tion; and Gramsci’s Notes on Machiavelli. It is interesting that Poulantzas
never clearly defines “the political texts in the strict sense of the term,”
although his subsequent citations indicate that they include Marx’s The
Poverty of Philosophy; Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State; Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?; Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; and
numerous pamphlets by Lenin and personal letters by Marx. It is re-
markable that the one prominent classic not included on this list is The
Communist Manifesto—the one work that Miliband considered key to a
Marxist theory of the state.14
Yet, not only did Miliband and Poulantzas see two different Marxes,
their different epistemological conceptions of how one engages in a Marx-
ian social science is further clarified by contrasting Miliband’s preoccu-
pation with fact gathering to Poulantzas’s insistence on concept produc-
tion. According to Poulantzas, historical materialism is the actual “science
of history” constructed through the use and application of Marxist cat-
egories of knowledge derived through dialectical materialism. More
specifically, Poulantzas (1978b, 11) suggests that historical materialism
“has as its object the concept of history, through the study of the various
modes of production and social formations, their structure, constitu-
tion and functioning, and the forms of transition from one social for-
mation to another.” In other words, if dialectical materialism (i.e., phi-
losophy) is responsible for producing these concepts through a reading
of the Marxian canon, historical materialism (i.e., general theory) is re-
sponsible for defining these concepts so they become the basis of so-
called regional and particular theories.
For Poulantzas, regional theory is the study of the elemental struc-
tures and practices whose specific combinations constitute a mode of
production and a social formation.15 Particular theories consist of theo-
ries of particular combinations, for example, a theory of the slave mode
of production, the feudal mode of production, or the capitalist mode of
production. For Poulantzas, it is particular theories that allow one to
understand and explain “real, concrete, singular objects” such as France
at a given moment in its political development. Thus, Poulantzas was
concerned with producing a particular theory of the capitalist state;
namely, the production of the concept of the political superstructure in
the capitalist mode of production.
Significantly, therefore, Poulantzas (ibid., 24) claims that dialectical
and historical materialism do not involve the study of facts (i.e., real
concrete singulars), but the study of “abstract-formal objects” (i.e., con-
cepts). He acknowledges that abstract-formal objects (e.g., the capitalist
mode of production or the capitalist state) “do not exist in the strong
sense of the word, but they are the condition of knowledge of real-
concrete objects.” In other words, there is no such thing ontologically as
“the capitalist state,” but it is this category of knowledge that makes it
possible for us to know and understand an actually existing capitalist state
(i.e., a real concrete singular). Consequently, the methodological role of
the “real concrete” in Poulantzasian theory is merely (1) to illustrate and
14 Barrow
exemplify the regional or particular theory, or (2) to provide raw mate-

rial for producing the specific concepts that make concrete knowledge
possible.
It is no doubt a controversial claim, but this epistemological position
places structuralism squarely within the 1950s and 1960s tradition of tran-
scendental and analytic political philosophy. The method of textual analy-
sis and its epistemological underpinnings are again not uniquely Marx-
ian, because one can find the same types of arguments being made in
mainstream political philosophy by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey,
among others.16 Viewed within the larger postwar context of academic
political theory, the only thing uniquely Marxian about the Althusserian
epistemology was its choice of a sacred canon: the Marxist tradition,
rather the classical tradition (e.g., Plato or Aristotle), or the liberal tra-
dition (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), but the epistemology of textual
analysis is identical. In this respect, the Miliband–Poulantzas debate
merely reproduced within Marxism the very same empiricist-textualist
dichotomy that had divided mainstream political science since the early
1950s (Ashcraft 1980; Lukács 1971, 110–49).17 Of course, the epistemolog-
ical dichotomy at the center of the Miliband–Poulantzas debate, includ-
ing the radical divergence in their definition of Marx’s “political writ-
ings,” is essential to understanding their different concepts of the state,
state power, and the state’s role in a capitalist social formation.
Miliband’s Theory of the State

The most succinct summary of Miliband’s (1969, 23) theory of the state
is the following:
In the Marxist scheme, the “ruling class” of capitalist society is that class
which owns and controls the means of production and which is able, by
virtue of the economic power thus conferred upon it, to use the state as
its instrument for the domination of society.18
In empirical terms, Miliband identifies the corporation as the initial

reference point for defining the capitalist class. In the United States, for
example, the bulk of capitalist economic activity, whether measured in
terms of assets, profits, employment, investment, market shares, or re-
search and development expenditures, is concentrated in the fifty largest
financial institutions and the five hundred largest nonfinancial corpo-
rations (Means 1939; Mason 1964; Baran and Sweezy 1966; Edwards, Reich,
and Weisskopf 1978). Thus, members of the capitalist class are identified
as those persons who occupy the managerial and ownership functions
of corporations (Mintz 1989, 208; Zeitlin 1974; Useem 1984). The capi-
talist class is an overlapping economic network of authority based on
institutional position (i.e., management) and property relations (i.e.,
ownership). The wealthy families who own large blocks of corporate
stock and the high-ranking managers of those same corporations are
usually estimated to compose no more than 0.5 percent to 1 percent of
the total U.S. population (Domhoff 1978, 4).
Social Class and Political Practice

In making this claim, Miliband was directly challenging the pluralist
theory of liberal democrats who were arguing that references to “a cap-
italist class” are empirically meaningless, because corporate power is
diffuse and competitive, and the representation of business interests is
fragmented among divergent interest groups and/or checked by counter-
vailing centers of social, economic, and political power. Thus, Miliband’s
empirical documentation captured the attention of behavioral social
scientists, because it questioned the assertions of political theories that
claimed to be empirical (e.g., Truman 1951; Dahl 1959; Galbraith 1952).
Moreover, in challenging these theories, Miliband was also debunking a
widely held ideological belief, especially in the United States, that capi-
talist societies were more or less classless, pluralistic, egalitarian, and
democratic. Thus, as bizarre as it may seem in retrospect, it was theo-
retically important within the Anglo-American intellectual context to
reestablish the simple empirical fact that a capitalist class does exist and
that numerous mechanisms can be identified that facilitate the eco-
nomic cohesion of capitalists as a class.
However, assuming that one can document the existence of an eco-
nomically dominant capitalist class, Miliband (1969, 24) contends that
in conceptualizing the state, most Marxists had failed “to note the obvious
but fundamental fact that this [capitalist] class is involved in a relation-
ship with the state, which cannot be assumed in the political conditions
which are typical of advanced capitalism” (i.e., political democracy).
Instead, if Marxist theory is to effectively challenge the claims of bour-
geois social science, then the relationship between the state and the cap-
italist class “has to be determined” with historical and empirical preci-
sion (ibid., 1969, 55).19 Miliband emphasizes that in documenting this
16 Barrow
relationship the claim put forward by a Marxist theory of the state en-
tails a heavy empirical burden for the political theorist. This burden de-
rives from the fact that Marxists do not merely assert that the capitalist
class exercises substantial power, or even that it exercises more power
than other classes, but insists that the capitalist class “exercises a decisive
degree of political power” and that “its ownership and control of cru-
cially important areas of economic life also insures its control of the
means of political decision-making in the particular environment of ad-
vanced capitalism” (ibid., 48).20
What Is the State?

However, determining the magnitude of the relationship between a cap-
italist class and the state requires not only a clear definition of the capi-
talist class, but an equally clear designation of “the means of political
decision-making” that constitute the state. Yet, Miliband observes para-
doxically that the state “is a nebulous entity,” because the state “is not a
thing, that it does not, as such, exist.” Instead, the state, as Miliband
(ibid., 48–50) conceives it, is merely an analytic reference point that
“stands for . . . a number of particular institutions which, together, con-
stitute its reality, and which interact as parts of what may be called the
state system.” For Miliband, the state system is actually composed of
five “elements” that are each identified with a cluster of particular insti-
tutions (ibid., 49–53):
1. the governmental apparatus, which consists of elected legislative and
executive authorities at the national level that make state policy
2. the administrative apparatus, consisting of the civil-service
bureaucracy, public corporations, central banks, and regulatory
commissions, which regulates economic, social, cultural, and other
activities
3. the coercive apparatus, consisting of the military, paramilitary, police,
and intelligence agencies, which together are concerned with the
deployment and management of violence
4. the judicial apparatus, which includes courts, the legal profession, jails
and prisons, and other components of the criminal justice system
5. the subcentral governments, such as states, provinces, or departments;
counties, municipal governments, and special districts
According to Miliband (ibid., 54): “These are the institutions—the
government [executive], the administration, the military and the police,
the judicial branch, sub-central government, and parliamentary assem-
blies—which make up the ‘the state,’ and whose interrelationship shapes

the form of the state system.” Miliband’s emphasis on the state system
as a set of interrelationships between particular institutions warrants
special attention, because he has often been accused of reducing the
state to a mere “tool in the hands of the ruling class.” Yet, contrary to
these assertions, Miliband offers an important qualification that belies
this metaphorical straw man.
Miliband chastises liberal pluralists and left-wing activists for the
mistaken belief that “the assumption of governmental power is equiva-
lent to the acquisition of state power.” Although it is a simple distinc-
tion, Miliband’s conflicts with the British Labour Party made him acutely
aware that drawing a conceptual distinction between government and
the state can have significant consequences for political strategy and
tactics. Miliband understood that the accession to governmental power
at various points in the twentieth century by liberal, labor, and social-
democratic governments was accompanied generally by a simultaneous
failure to conquer state power in its diverse forms and places within the
state system. The fact that a socialist government might control the par-
liamentary and executive branches of government, whether by election
or revolution, does not automatically entail its control of the military,
the police, the intelligence agencies, the civil service, the legal system,
the subnational governments, the schools and universities, regulatory
agencies, public corporations, and so on. As Miliband (ibid., 49–50) notes:
“the fact that the government does speak in the name of the state and is
formally invested with state power, does not mean that it effectively con-
trols that power.”
What Is State Power?

Consequently, it is theoretically important to Miliband to know who
actually controls state power at any given time. One of the most direct
indicators of ruling-class domination is the degree to which members
of the capitalist class control the state apparatus through interlocking
positions in the governmental, administrative, coercive, and other appa-
ratuses. Miliband (ibid., 54) emphasizes that
It is these institutions in which “state power” lies, and it is through them

that this power is wielded in its different manifestations by the people
who occupy the leading positions in each of these institutions.
18 Barrow
For this reason, Miliband (ibid., 55) attaches considerable importance to

the social composition of the state elite. The class composition of a state
elite creates “a strong presumption . . . as to its general outlook, ideolog-
ical dispositions and political bias,” and thus one way to measure the
degree of potential class domination is to quantify the extent to which
members of a particular class have disproportionately colonized com-
mand posts within the state apparatuses. In the eyes of critics, Miliband’s
theory of the state is considered synonymous with the concept of insti-
tutional colonization. This misrepresentation of Miliband’s analysis has
wildly exaggerated his empirical claims about the direct domination of
the state apparatuses by members of the capitalist class.
Despite the importance of colonization to Miliband’s analysis, his
empirical claims about the degree to which capitalists colonize the state
apparatus were always circumscribed by his recognition that capitalists
have not “assumed the major share of government” (ibid.) in most ad-
vanced capitalist democracies. For that reason, he argues (ibid., 59) that
capitalists “are not, properly speaking, a ‘governing’ class, comparable to
pre-industrial, aristocratic and landowning classes.”21 Indeed, a fact
completely ignored by Miliband’s critics is that he quotes Karl Kautsky
to the effect that “the capitalist class reigns but does not govern” (ibid.,
55).22 The colonization of key command posts in selected state appara-
tuses is merely one weapon, albeit an important one, in the larger arse-
nal of ruling-class domination. What Miliband (ibid., 56, 48) actually
claims is that capitalists are “well represented in the political executive
and in other parts of the state system” and that their occupation of these
key command posts enables them to exercise decisive influence over pub-
lic policy.23
The fact that finance capitalists usually control the executive branch
of government and the administrative-regulatory apparatuses is con-
sidered particularly important, under normal circumstances, for both
historical and theoretical reasons. In historical terms, political develop-
ment of the modern state system has been marked mainly by the growth
of its regulatory, administrative, and coercive institutions over the course
of the last century. As these institutions have grown in size, numbers,
and technical complexity, the state’s various subsystems have achieved
greater autonomy from government in their operations. The growth of
independent administrative and regulatory subsystems within the state
has occurred as governments, especially legislatures, have found it in-
creasingly difficult to maintain any central direction over the many com-
ponents of the state system. The historical result is that the preponderance
of state power has shifted from the legislative to the executive branch of
government and to independent administrative or regulatory agencies.
This development is theoretically important partly because the very
basis of state power is concentrated in those institutions (i.e., adminis-
tration, coercion, knowledge) and because it is those institutions that
the capitalist class has colonized most successfully. Thus, the actual ex-
tent of power that capitalists achieve by colonizing executive, administra-
tive, and regulatory command posts has been magnified by the asym-
metrical power structure within the contemporary state system (e.g., in
the United States by the imperial presidency and the emergence of in-
dependent regulatory agencies). This magnification of their state power
provides capitalists with strategic locations inside the state system from
which to initiate, modify, and veto a broad range of policy proposals.24
Miliband recognizes that a potential weakness of this more limited claim
is the fact that capitalists usually colonize only the top command posts
of government and administration. The colonization process is clearly
unable to explain the operational unity of the entire state system and,
therefore, one must be able to identify the mechanism that leads a num-
ber of relatively autonomous and divergent state subsystems to operate
as if they were a single entity called the state.
Indeed, the loose connection of lower-level career administrators
to the state elite is indicated by Miliband’s description of them as ser-
vants of the state. In fact, these servants are frequently conceptualized
as a separate professional-managerial class composed of lower- and
middle-level career state managers (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1977).25
Miliband (1969, 119) observes that
The general pattern must be taken to be one in which these men [i.e.,
state managers] do play an important part in the process of governmen-
tal decision-making, and therefore constitute a considerable force in the
configuration of political power in their societies.
Likewise, a problem of systemic unity derives from the disparate or-

ganization of the contemporary state apparatus. To the extent that the
state system is viewed as a web of decentered institutions, one must ac-
count for how the state elite and state managers are able to maintain
some overarching interinstitutional cohesion that is “capitalist” in its
20 Barrow
content. Miliband has attempted to explain the coherence of the state

system by suggesting that its operational unity is primarily ideological.
He argues (ibid., 72, 75) that most state elites, including those who are
not members of the capitalist class, “accept as beyond question the cap-
italist context in which they operate.” Consequently, their views on public
policy “are conditioned by, and pass through the prism of, their acceptance
of and commitment to the existing economic system.” In Miliband’s ac-
count, the ideological commitments of state elites and state managers
are of “absolutely fundamental importance in shaping their attitudes,
policies and actions in regard to specific issues and problems with which
they are confronted.” The result of their underlying ideological unity is
that “the politics of advanced capitalism have been about different con-
ceptions of how to run the same economic and social system.”
Miliband certainly recognizes that state elites and state managers in
the various apparatuses, whether members of the capitalist class or not,
“wish, without a doubt, to pursue many ends, personal as well as pub-
lic.” However, the underlying ideological unity of state elites and state
managers means that “all other ends are conditioned by, and pass through
the prism of, their acceptance of and commitment to the existing eco-
nomic system” (ibid., 75). Thus, in an observation that seems to antici-
pate Claus Offe’s (1975 and 1984, 126) “dependency principle,” Miliband
(1969, 75) observes that
it is easy to understand why governments should wish to help business
in every possible way . . . For if the national interest is in fact inextricably
bound up with the fortunes of capitalist enterprise, apparent partiality
towards it is not really partiality at all. On the contrary, in serving the
interests of business and in helping capitalist enterprise to thrive,
governments are really fulfilling their exalted role as guardians of the
good of all.
Otherwise, as Miliband describes it, the modern state system in capi-

talist societies is a vast and sprawling network of political institutions
loosely coordinated, if at all, through mechanisms providing a tenuous
cohesion at best. Importantly, for Miliband, the diffuseness of the state
system in capitalist societies also means that the conquest of state power
is never an all or nothing proposition, because it is—in the Gramscian
phrase—a war of fixed position, waged on many fronts, in many trenches,
with shifting lines of battle, where victories and defeats occur side by
side on the same day. The conquest of state power is never absolute; it is
never uncontested; and it is never complete, because it is an ongoing
and contingent political struggle.26 Hence, Miliband’s concept of the
state requires an analysis and understanding of state power that always
refers to particular historical circumstances and to institutional con-
figurations that may vary widely from one capitalist society to another,
and where over time class hegemony may shift in one direction or an-
other within the same society. Indeed, Miliband (ibid., 77) is quite ex-
plicit in pointing out that state elites “have in fact been compelled over
the years to act against some property rights, to erode some managerial
prerogatives, to help redress somewhat the balance between capital and
labour, between property and those who are subject to it.”
Poulantzas’s Theory of the State

Nicos Poulantzas was relatively unknown to Anglo-American scholars
until he initiated the Miliband–Poulantzas debate with his review of
The State in Capitalist Society in late 1969. When Poulantzas (1969, 67)
informed readers that his critique of Miliband derived from epistemo-
logical positions presented more fully in his Pouvoir politique et classes
sociales (1968), the debate itself stimulated a demand for Poulantzas’s
book, which was finally published in English in 1973.27 In his outstanding
intellectual biography of Poulantzas, Bob Jessop argues persuasively that
this book was written during a phase of development when Poulantzas
was “at his most structuralist” and consequently Jessop (1985, 14, 317)
contends that “the resulting debate actually misrepresents the basic thrust
of his [Poulantzas’s] work” over time. However, at the time of the de-
bate, Poulantzas’s book was being read correctly as a hybrid Althusser-
ian and Gramscian approach and, importantly, as Frances Fox Piven
(1994, 24) observes, an objective historical consequence of the debate is
that this type of structuralism tended to prevail after the Miliband–
Poulantzas debate and thereafter “to dominate the intellectual fashion
contest” that emerged from the debate. Thus, even if Jessop is correct in
his claim that Poulantzas later moved significantly beyond this approach
to the state, it is the Poulantzas of Political Power and Social Classes that
introduced structuralism into Anglo-American Marxist theory and who
defined the terms of the subsequent structuralist-instrumentalist de-
bate (Clarke 1991, 35).
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
place.
Richard Whitmore returned without having seen either Colonel Pease or his
daughter, so was unable to answer the volley of questions by which he was
assailed.
"Miss Pease was comfortably established at the hotel selected by her brother,
and had received a telegram announcing his arrival. She hoped to see him
almost immediately. I thought it better not to intrude upon such a meeting by
staying until he came," he replied.
Miss Pease wrote letters which showed that she was brimming over with
gladness; but as the days went on a difficulty arose as to her return to Mere
Side.
"My brother has much business to attend to, and will have a great deal of
travelling before he can settle down. There is no one but myself to look after
Norah. What can I do but stay with the child?"
"Bring her here, I should say," suggested Mina. "By all accounts she knows
very little of her native country, for she went to India a tiny child, came back,
lost her mother, and since then has wandered to and fro on the earth under
her aunt's wing. May she come here, Dick, and enjoy a summer holiday in
England?"
"I can have no objection, dear. In fact, it is the best possible solution to the
difficulty. Then we shall get our dear little house-mother back again, and as
soon as Colonel Pease can spare time for a rest he shall come too, if he will.
Mere Side will be a real home for him amongst you girls, until he can fix on
one for himself. He means to buy a handsome place somewhere."
Miss Pease was delighted when the cordial invitation came, and actually
written in Gertrude's hand. She was longing for the dear niece to meet the
girls to whom she was so warmly attached, and she was utterly weary of hotel
life after a fortnight's experience, and with but little of her brother's society,
owing to unavoidable causes. So she sent a grateful acceptance on North's
behalf, and herself carried to Mere Side a message from Colonel Pease, who
promised to spend his first spare week there.
The little lady was warmly welcomed by the Whitmore girls on her return, and
her niece was also received in a manner that charmed both. They were all,
however, surprised to find that the new guest, though a girl, was about Mina's
age, instead of Molly's.
The latter expressed what the rest felt when, after embracing Miss Pease with
equal vigour and affection, she exclaimed, "Why, your niece is a grown-up
young lady. I thought she was a girl like me, and that we should all call her
Norah."
"She will be very much distressed if you call her anything else," said the girl
herself. "I am very sorry for the misapprehension, but you must please not
blame my aunt for it. The mistake she made was not a wilful one."
"The fact is, Molly dear, that I never calculated on Norah being grown-up any
more than you did, but kept picturing her as very much the same as when I
last saw her, forgetting that Time had not stood still with the child any more
than with the rest of us."
They felt that Miss Pease had been herself mistaken, and when she added,
"You must not like my Norah any less on account of her aunt's blunder," a
chorus of welcoming words came from the girls, after which the young guest
was conveyed to her room.
"I think she is one of the most charming young creatures I ever saw," said Jo,
and Mina echoed the expression.
"What do you think of Norah, Gertrude?"
"I quite agree with you both," was the answer; and in her heart she added, "I
wish she were not so charming."
Richard was absent when the arrival took place, but on his return in the early
evening, he glanced towards the doorway, and saw not only his pet Molly on
the look-out for his coming, but a sort of glorified Molly near her.
It was a girl with hair of the same shade and a very fair complexion, but taller
and slenderer than his robust young sister. He could see the perfect profile,
and was sure the eyes were beautiful, though he could not discern their
colour. But whilst the features were so fine and delicately cut, there was
nothing of the mere statue-like beauty in the face as a whole. On the contrary,
those who might be at first attracted by the almost perfect features, would
forget these in the greater beauty of expression and the wonderful charm of
manner which Norah Pease possessed.
Richard Whitmore did not see all this at once. But he noted the figure of a girl
in a simple dress of dainty Dacca muslin, only relieved by pale blue bows, and
he thought it exactly suited the place. Norah was not looking in his direction,
but towards something which Molly was pointing out in the distance, and he
slackened his steps in order to take in the sweet picture more fully.
Miss Pease saw him coming, and met him at the door to exchange greetings,
and to be welcomed back by Richard himself. As they crossed the hall
together, Molly, who had become aware of her brother's presence, rushed to
meet him.
"Come, Dick," she said, "and be introduced to Norah. She is older than I am
by more than three years, and not a schoolgirl, but she is just as nice."
Miss Pease was about to introduce Norah to her host in due form, but Molly
spared her the trouble by saying, "Norah, this is Brother Dick. He is such a
darling, and so is she, Dick. You are sure to like one another. Are they not,
Miss Pease?" turning to her elder friend.
"Indeed I hope so," said Richard; and, quite naturally, Norah echoed the wish.
"I can hardly feel strange here," she added, "for my aunt has written so much,
and, since we met, talked so much about every one at Mere Side, that I
almost thought I was going to meet five more cousins, and had a sense of
extra riches in consequence."
"Cousins do not seem such very near relatives after all," said Molly, in a
meditative tone. "Sisters are better. I should like you for one, Norah."
Miss Pease was just a little scandalized at Molly's freedom of speech, and
said, "My dear, you talk too fast. I am afraid Richard spoils you too much."
But there was no trace of self-consciousness on Norah's face as she thanked

Molly for her willingness to adopt her as a relative on such very short
acquaintance. Then Richard, Miss Pease, and she talked on quite
unrestrainedly, and the girl was enthusiastic about the loveliness around her.
Somehow, the aunt and niece drifted into the angle window, while Dick stood
just within, his arm round Molly, and told his young guest the names of the
hills which bounded the view, and various other particulars about the
landscape before them.
"This window is the most charming nook I ever saw," said Nora. "I can
scarcely bear to leave it. And what a wealth of roses you have! The varieties
seem endless."
"If you are not too tired, will you come and look at them before dinner? You
want some flowers to wear, do you not? My sisters always like to have them
and to choose for themselves."
"That is the best of all," said Norah. "I would rather have a knot of wild-flowers
that I gathered for myself than the finest bouquet that could be bought ready
put together by an accomplished gardener."
She turned to leave the recess, but at the instant something struck violently
against the glass and startled her. On looking she could see nothing.
"Do not be alarmed," said Richard. "This is a thing which, unfortunately, often
happens. A poor bird has flown against the pane, and probably wounded itself
so badly that it will die. As the creatures can see through the glass, they
cannot understand that it offers a solid obstacle to their flight, and many are
killed in this way. It is the only drawback to my enjoyment of this window. Will
you not come out this way?" And Richard stepped out through the open sash,
and offered his hand to assist Norah in following.
There upon the ground, feebly fluttering, lay a fine thrush, wounded to death.
Tears sprang into Norah's eyes as she saw it, but, happily, the pains of the
injured bird were not of long duration. A moment after she first saw it the
movement ceased.
Richard picked up the dead thrush, and gently stroked its glossy feathers,
then laid it down amongst some shrubs, saying, "It shall be buried by and by.
You may think me sentimental for a man, but I do not like to cover the poor
little body with earth whilst it is warm with the life that has but just fled."
"I think you feel just as I do. Why should a man be less pitiful than a girl?"
replied Norah.
Richard smiled in reply, and led the way to the roses, for his guest to make
choice amongst them. At first he had felt sorry that Norah should be with only
her aunt and Molly, beside himself, for the other girls were engaged at a tennis
party, to which they had been invited before they knew when Miss Pease
would return. But he never forgot that evening which seemed to bring the girl
guest and himself so near together, and that night he dreamed of the slender
white-robed figure framed by the angle window.
Day followed day, and each developed some new charm in Norah. She had
travelled much, and had a well-stored mind, without the smallest taint of
pedantry. She was a born musician, but though her voice was well cultivated,
she owed less to her teachers than to her natural gifts, and when she sang,
none could help listening with delight.
The Whitmore girls loved her. Even Gertrude felt the spell, for with all Norah
was so sweet, frank, tender, and natural, that she won hearts without effort.
She had won one that hitherto had never been stirred in like manner, for
Richard Whitmore had given to Norah all the love of which his large heart was
capable.
Outsiders began to smile as they saw the young master of Mere Side so
constant in his attendance on his graceful guest. Miss Sharp found something
new to talk about, and whispered to gossips like herself, that any one could
see what Miss Pease had brought Norah to Saltshire for. She had fished for
an invitation for her niece in order to get her a rich husband. How hard it
would be for those four girls to give place to a chit like that!
Gentle Miss Pease had her qualms of conscience lest she might be misjudged
in this matter, though she knew her brother's only child would be a rich
heiress, and no unsuitable mate in that respect for Richard Whitmore.
And Gertrude! She was not blind. She guessed her brother's secret, but said
nothing, though a fierce combat was going on within her. Self was battling
against her love for Richard, and that which Norah had wrung from her in spite
of her will. She felt how well suited they were to each other, and yet she could
not endure the idea of Richard taking to himself a wife.
The other girls had no such feelings, but would have welcomed Norah as a
sister with open arms.
Week followed week, and it was near the end of August. Still Norah stayed on
at Mere Side, and waited in expectation of her father's coming, and still he
was prevented from joining her there. His letters were frequent and full of
regrets, though he expressed the hope that present self-denial would lead to
satisfactory results, and that when these business matters were settled, a
future of rest would be before him.
One morning, however, Norah received a letter which scattered dismay

amongst the family at Mere Side.
She could not bear to tell the contents, but passed it for her aunt to read
aloud, and Miss Pease began, "My dearest Eleanor."
"I thought your name was just Norah," said Molly. "I am always called so,
because—"
Someone entered at the moment, and stopped the girl from telling why her
name had been thus abridged, and Miss Pease continued—
"I am really grieved that after all I cannot at present join you at Mere Side, and
have the pleasure of personally thanking Mr. Whitmore and his sisters for all
their kindness and of making their acquaintance. I must hope for this at some
future time."
"You, dear Eleanor, must come to me with as little delay as possible. I should
like you to meet me on Thursday, and on Saturday I purpose going on to
Paris, where your aunt and cousins now are. A family matter requires that we
should meet. Indeed, she wants my help, and, after all her goodness to you, it
would ill become me to hesitate, if I can be of use to her. Nelly and Beatrice
are in a state of wild delight at the prospect of seeing you."
"Your aunt's maid, Carter, has been visiting her old mother in Lincolnshire, and
I have arranged that she shall bring you from Mere Side, or rather from
Salchester, where she will meet with you, travel to town with you, and cross
with us to the Continent. This plan will prevent your causing any
inconvenience to your aunt."
There were further messages of thanks, regards, and regrets, and then the
letter ended, amid a chorus of groans from the listeners.
Norah's face had grown pale, and Richard's had on it an expression of pain
that was unmistakable.
He had waited, like the honourable man he was, for the coming of Colonel
Pease before speaking to Norah. He thought it would not be right to declare
his affection for the daughter until the father had seen him, and had an
opportunity of judging of his character.
He must not speak now, for this was Wednesday, and on the morrow the girl
was to leave. The bustle of preparation had to be got over, and at ten o'clock
in the morning Norah must be ready to depart.
So much had to be crowded into so short a time that there was little leisure for
uttering vain regrets, though a running fire of these was kept up on all sides
through the day and during the gathering together of Norah's belongings.
"Shall you have any spare time?" asked Richard at luncheon. "Or will it be all
bustle until you step into the carriage?"
"I shall have the whole evening," replied Norah; "all the time, I mean, from four
o'clock. I could not do without a last happy night to look back upon. I can
never thank you all for your kindness to me."
"Thank us by coming back and bringing your father as soon as possible. For
the present, I, for one owe you much, Norah; so the balance is really on the
other side. My home was never so graced before," he added, with a smile and
a look which made a flush cover the girl's fair face, "or seemed so bright a
place to me."
But she looked bravely up at him in return, and said—
"I will certainly come back to Mere Side, if I may, and bring my father too. You
ought to know each other. You only need to meet to be friends."
That afternoon they all had early tea on the terrace, and as they sat there the
old swallows circled round and round, feeding their young ones in the air, and
exercising them preparatory to the long flight before them. Down they came,
skimming the surface of the lake, which was all aglow with the rays of the
declining sun, dipping in its waters, and then gathering on the roof to plume
themselves after their bath.
"The swallows are getting ready for flight, like you, Norah," said Richard. "A
little while and they will all be gone. See, that is a hawk in the distance. I hope
he will not carry off any fledgling to-night."
"You know everything," she replied. "Birds, bees, trees, flowers are all familiar.
You only need a glance to name them."
"I have lived among them always. A country life has interest enough for me;
but I do sometimes wish to see more than these familiar objects, and, but for
an outcry among the girls, I should have joined a scientific expedition this last
spring. I could not leave the mother awhile back, or my sisters in their sorrow.
Perhaps I may give up the idea altogether," he added in a musing fashion,
"though there is such an expedition annually in connection with a society to
which I belong."
"I hope you will not be away when I—when my father comes to Mere Side,"
said Norah.
And Dick responded emphatically—
"I certainly shall not."
Later on in the twilight Norah sat at the piano and sang one song after
another, and then they stole an hour from sleep, and all talked of the happy
days they had spent together, and of their hope of meeting again. At the same
time on the following evening the swallows were skimming to and fro, but
Norah was gone, and the house seemed empty to its master, though all the
rest were left. But as he sat in the library, with his head leaning on his hand,
Richard saw neither books nor aught around him.
He was picturing that slender, white-robed figure as he first saw it in the

doorway. He heard none of the sounds going on around, though the tennis-
players were on the lawn and the bold song of the robins came from every
bush. What he heard was a sweet voice flooding the room with a richer song,
and one that spoke more to his heart than theirs.
And Richard smiled to himself as he said, "The seat in the angle window, the
mother's seat, will be filled again, and I shall hear the dear voice that makes
my heart thrill as no other can, in place of the echo which memory gives me
now. For I felt her little hand tremble in mine, and though she said 'good-bye'
in a brave voice to all the rest, she could not say it to me, though her lips
parted and closed. I had her last look, and tears were shining in her eyes as
she gave it. They are speaking eyes, and they said to me, 'I am sorry to go,
but I will not forget my promise. I will come again.'"
CHAPTER VI.
THE FRAME HAS A PICTURE ONCE MORE.
NORAH wrote as soon as possible to tell of her arrival at Paris, and pour forth
on the same sheet her regrets at parting from the Whitmores, and her
pleasure in being with all her kith and kin. At first there seemed a prospect of
their returning to England; but later on, instead of hearing that a time was
fixed for their coming, news arrived of a contrary character. The doctors
advised Colonel Pease to winter at Cannes, in order that after so many years
spent in India, he might not be too suddenly exposed to the severity of the
season in England.
Richard Whitmore heard this, and began to meditate on the possibility of

taking Miss Pease and his sisters to spend the winter in the Riviera, but he
decided to let January come first, and then to journey South for the three
following months.
Once more came a message from the angle window which put an end to his
plans and froze to the death the glad hopes that he had been nourishing in his
heart.
Gertrude was sitting there with Miss Pease, reading a letter aloud, when he
entered the morning-room. She was not very fond of pet names, and often
called her sisters by theirs at fall length instead of using the diminutives, Mina
and Jo, and roused Molly's wrath by calling her Florence Mary. Since she had
been aware that Norah was only short for Eleanor, Gertrude usually spoke of
their late guest by her full name also.
As Richard entered the room he heard his sister say, "So Eleanor is actually
engaged to Sir Edward Peyton. Is it not rather a sudden affair?"
"Perhaps it may be deemed so in respect to the engagement itself, but they

have been long acquainted. While Norah was here she often spoke of his
frequent visits and attentions when we were alone, but so long as there was
nothing definite it was scarcely likely she would allude to such things before
others."
Richard paused a moment to recover himself after the blow. Then he

advanced towards Miss Pease, saying, "I was not an intentional
eavesdropper, but I heard the news of your niece's engagement, and I
suppose I must congratulate you on the event."
"Yes, Eleanor is engaged," said the little lady, all sympathetic smiles and
blushes. "Sometimes I think when such events occur, condolences would be
more fitting for those they leave behind. When there is but a single parent and
few children, or only one, a break brings pain as well as pleasure, even
though caused by marriage."
Richard begged Miss Pease to give his congratulatory messages, and then
stole away into the library to think over what he had heard, and find comfort as
best he might.
There was only one picture that came constantly before him, and that was the
angle window without an occupant, and a dying bird on the terrace below.
And Richard whispered to himself, "Just another wounded bird. I could almost
wish that I, too, had been injured even unto death. If it were not that I am
needed, specially by Molly, I should say it in earnest. As it is, I must run away,
lest the rest should see the wound."
Richard's mind was promptly made up. There was to be an expedition for the
purpose of observing a total eclipse of the sun, visible in Southern latitudes,
but not in England. He announced his intention of joining it, pleaded that he
wanted a shake-up, that he was growing old and rusty by dint of over-petting
and self-indulgence; and, in short, that he must go.
Before Miss Pease received another letter conveying a message of thanks for
his congratulations, Richard had completed his arrangements and was on his
way to Mauritius.
Whilst there he saw in the "Times," for February 27, an announcement of the
marriage, at Cannes, of Sir Edward Peyton, Bart., and Eleanor Pease. It was
simply worded, and as the "Queen" did not fall into his hands, Richard missed
many details about dresses, bridesmaids, etc., some of which might have
proved interesting.
He wondered a little that almost nothing was said in subsequent home letters
about this marriage. Miss Pease did just mention that Eleanor's wedding had
taken place, and there were allusions in some of his sisters' epistles to the
good match made by her niece, but Norah, as the Norah of Mere Side, was
not mentioned, or only in the most cursory way.
"Perhaps they guess," thought Richard, "and are silent for my sake. Thank
God, for Norah's! From all I have been able to ascertain she has married a
good man, and I pray that she may be happy. I would not grudge her to the
husband of her choice, but somehow I cannot believe that any tie existed
when she was with us. If I had only spoken, or gone when she did to meet her
father—but it is too late."
It was not until the May twelve months after leaving home that Richard
Whitmore set foot in England again.
He joined one scientific party after another, and went to and fro, adding much
to his store of knowledge, and finding in change of scene and the habit of
close observation, which gave him work for every day, the best remedy for the
wound which healed but slowly.
Then he had to come home, to open his hands for more wealth. A distant
cousin had left him thirty thousand pounds. When the news reached him he
said, "This, divided into four and added to the little belonging to the girls, will
give each of them ten thousand pounds, for the Maynards do not want it.
There will be more for them by and by, from their bachelor brother, for I shall
never marry now."
He did not tell them this, or even about the legacy at first. He had to hear of all
that had passed during his absence, to note that Molly, now turned seventeen,
was more like Norah Pease, slenderer and more thoughtful-looking than of
old.
It was Dick's absence that had made her the last. Little Miss Pease's hair was
greyer, but it just suited her delicately fresh complexion. Nina and Jo had
altered less than Molly, but Gertrude was the most changed of all.
There was a new light in her eyes, a softer flush on her cheek, a gentleness of
manner foreign to the old Gertrude. Molly's welcome was not more hearty
than hers, or her sisterly embrace more tender or more entirely voluntary than
was Gertrude's.
Nobody had told Richard anything, but he looked at his eldest sister and
guessed her secret rightly.
The girl had given her heart to a good, but not a rich man, one who at first
feared to offer his own to Miss Whitmore, of Mere Side, lest he should be
suspected of seeking a rich bride whose wealth would make amends for his
own small means.
For once Miss Sharp's tongue did good service without its being intended. Her
keen eyes, ever on the watch, detected something in Gertrude's manner
favourable to Mr. Kemble, of whose views she decided there could be no
doubt.
"He is in the Civil Service, and has an income of three hundred a year," said
Miss Sharp. "I dare say he thinks Gertrude Whitmore is an heiress, but I shall
open his eyes, and show that proud minx what he is really looking after."
Miss Sharp carried out her resolution, and managed to let Mr. Kemble's sister
and niece, visitors in the neighbourhood, know the exact amount to which
Miss Whitmore was entitled under her father's will. The result astonished her.
Instead of packing up and departing at once, Mr. Kemble manifested the

greatest delight. He would have shrunk from the heiress, but he dared to ask
the girl he loved to share his lot, when he found out that there was not much
disparity in their means, and none in social standing; and she accepted him
with this proviso, that Richard must give his consent, though she was of age.
Gertrude told her brother this, sitting in the angle window, and with the moon
shining in thereat.
Dick kissed her, rejoiced with her, and told her there was no need to wait for
the advance of salary which Kemble was sure of in another year.
"True hearts should not be parted without a needs-be, my dear, and none
exists in your case," he said. Then he told her how he had always put by a
considerable portion of his income, in order that his sisters might not be
dowerless maidens.
"I counted on this sort of thing coming to one of you at a time, you know, and I
was fairly ready for your first turn, my dear, before something else happened,
which has given me at a stroke enough for you all."
He told her of the legacy, and the share he had mentally appropriated to
herself, then added, "As I am a cut-and-dried old bachelor, there will be more
for you in the long run."
He was not prepared for what followed.
Gertrude broke into a flood of passionate tears and sobs, and between these
she cried, "Dick, dear brother Dick, can you forgive me? I do not deserve
anything from you. I have been hard and selfish and ungrateful. I have tried to
make the others so, and cared nothing for your happiness, only how I could
keep all good things to myself. It was when I learned to love Bertram that I
knew what I had done to you."
The girl sank on her knees and hid her tearful face in her hands as she bowed
her head over Dick's lap, and her frame shook with sobs.
Love had conquered at last, as he always believed it would, and Richard's

face looked beautiful in the moonlight, as he bent over his sister and insisted
on raising her from the ground and drawing her head on his breast.
"You do forgive me, Dick. Your kind touch tells me so without words; but
please listen, I want you to know everything—" and the girl went on and laid
bare all the envy, ingratitude, and selfishness that had begun during that visit
to the Tindalls, and how these things had grown and for a long time influenced
her life for evil. "Then," she said, "you were so persistently loving that I began
to see the beauty of your life and disposition, and to loathe the ugliness of my
own—till Norah came."
Richard started at the mention of that name, and Gertrude felt his heart beat
fuller and faster.
"No one, not even I, could help loving Norah," she said, "and often I thought
what a perfect mate she would be for you, dear Dick; but I could not endure
the idea of her coming here as mistress and turning us all out of Mere Side. I
thought you cared for her, and she for you, but nothing came of it, only I was
glad when she went away, though I expected you and she would soon meet
again. You would have done so if you had not set out for Mauritius, for we
were invited to the wedding, only we did not go as you were absent."
"How could I have gone?" asked Dick, with a groan of anguish that went to the
listener's heart and told her something of what he had suffered.
"Then you did think it was Norah who married Sir Edward Peyton. I thought
you misunderstood, and yet I purposely held my tongue. I know what my
silence has done. I felt it when I realised what it would be if I were called on to
part with Bertram. You will never forgive me, never."
"For pity's sake tell me what you mean, Gertrude! I am not often so impatient,
but suspense will drive me mad. Is Norah married?"
"No, Dick, neither has she ever been engaged. Do you remember that
morning when Miss Pease was reading the colonel's letter, in which he called
his daughter 'Eleanor'? Nora was going to explain why she was never
addressed by it at her aunt's, but someone interrupted. She told me
afterwards that Eleanor was her grandmother's name, and that her elder
cousin bore it as well as herself. To distinguish between them, one was called
Nelly; that was the girl whom Miss Pease described as having been 'all
elbows' when she was just in her teens, and the other, our Eleanor, was Norah
to everybody. Nelly is Lady Peyton, and Norah is Norah Pease to-day."
An irrepressible thanksgiving broke from Richard's lips, and confirmed

Gertrude's conviction, whilst it increased her penitence.
"You must know all," she added. "All the rest believed that you knew which of
the girls was engaged to Sir Edward Peyton. I led them to think so, without
directly saying it; and though they had thought you cared for Norah, when you
went away so suddenly they concluded either that they had made a mistake
or that she had refused you. This is why they scarcely named her in letters."
"Are Colonel Pease and Norah in England?" asked Richard, in a voice unlike
his own, so moved was he.
"Yes; and they are coming here to-morrow. They were to have come together
so long ago, but they have been wintering abroad and travelling about with the
other family ever since."
There was a short silence, and again Gertrude faltered out—
"Can you forgive me, now you know all?"
"Thank God, I can, as I hope to be forgiven. He has overruled all for good—
even my rashness and blindness."
For a little moment Richard still held the weeping girl to his breast, and then
he kissed her once more, and, gently placing her on the seat whence he had
risen, left her alone in the moonlight.
The next day brought Norah and her father, and the first sight of the dear fair
face told Richard as plainly as words that she had come back unchanged, and
was glad to be there.
A few more happy days, and then Richard told the story of his love, and knew
that the treasure he desired above all others was his very own, with her
father's full consent.
He spoke and she listened, in the fittest place of all—the angle window, which
is no longer a frame without a picture. A white-robed figure sits on what was
once the mother's seat, and gives her husband an answering smile when he
looks in that direction from amongst the roses.
Colonel Pease has bought a fine estate in Saltshire, with a house on it ready
to his hand, and his gentle little sister presides over his domestic
arrangements.
Gertrude's home is in the outskirts of London; Mina will soon follow her sister's
example, and go to a new nest. The other girls will do as they have done
since Dick's marriage—flit between Mere Side and Overleigh, the colonel's
home; for the old soldier is never happier or Miss Pease more in her element
than when they have young faces about them.
It is said that Miss Sharp has greatly affected the society of Miss Pease since
she began her rule at Overleigh; but there is no fear for the colonel; he is too
old a soldier.
Brother Dick is as truly blessed as his unselfish nature deserves to be, now he
has quite recovered from the wound he received through the angle window.
A MERE FLIRTATION
CHAPTER I.
"IT seems strange that Dr. Connor should advise your going away again in
such lovely weather, and from a place to which other people come in search
of health. He might let you have a little peace."
So spoke Norah Guiness to Jeannie Bellew, an only child, a probable heiress,

and the object of enough thought, care, and indulgence to spoil a much finer
nature than she was gifted with.
"It is always a doctor's way. He must order something different from what you
have, however good that may be. I have everything that money can buy, and
instead of being allowed to enjoy it in peace, am sent hither and thither at the
doctor's will. Look at me, Norah. Am I like an invalid?"
Thus appealed to, Norah surveyed Jeannie as she lay back in a folding-chair
and challenged her scrutiny with a half-defiant air.
Truly there was nothing of an invalid about the girl. There was a rich colour on
her fair face, her figure was symmetrical, and the shapely hand on which her
curly head partly rested was plump and well-rounded. Norah thought there
was no trace of illness, and said so.
"The doctor should know what is best," she replied; "but as an invalid you
appear to me an utter fraud."
A ringing, musical laugh greeted these words, then Jeannie started from her
seat, kissed Norah, declared she always was a dear, sensible darling, whose
judgment was worth that of all the doctors put together, danced round the
room, and finally dropped panting into her seat again, with a considerably
heightened colour.
Norah noticed that Jeannie's hand was pressed to her side, and looked grave.
"Are you wise to indulge in such violent exercise?" she asked.
"Perhaps not, though it is only the having been pampered and waited on hand
and foot that has made me so susceptible. I must really begin to live like other
girls now I am so well again," said Jeannie.
"Only do not make such a sudden start. Have you any pain?"
"Not a bit, now. I had a little twinge or two, but it is all gone. The strongest girl
would have felt as much if she had been prancing round as I did a minute ago.
I am as well as you are, Norah. It is downright wicked of Doctor Connor to say
that I must have another change for a month or so, and then he will decide
about next winter. As though one lost nothing by leaving a home like mule with
all its comforts. I have often thought that the loss of them counterbalanced the
good done by the 'entire change' the doctors are so fond of ordering. If I could
take Benvora and all belonging to it, Jet included, away with me, I should care
less. And I would have you, Norah, if I could."
"That is impossible, dear. I am quite indispensable at home. But there is Jack

Corry. You will want him most of all, now your engagement is a settled thing."
"Want Jack with me!" exclaimed Jeannie. "Why, Norah, what can have put
such an absurd notion into your head? If you realised my feelings the least
little bit, you would know that the sweet drop in my cup of banishment from
Ballycorene is the thought that I shall leave Jack Corry behind me. He bores
me to death. He follows me like a lapdog, gives me no chance of wishing to
see him, for he is here so often that I am at my wits' end to get rid of him half
the time. Jack Corry, indeed!" And Jeannie gave her pretty head a toss, as
though she and the individual in question had neither thought nor wish in
common.
Norah looked utterly bewildered, and heard without understanding her friend's
words.
"I thought you cared so much for Jack," she said. "If not, why did you act in
such a way as to make him think you did? 'Why did you accept his offer, and
allow your engagement to be announced, if—"
Norah hesitated to put her thoughts into words. She was true to the core
herself, and infinitely above the petty vanity and cruel selfishness combined
which make up the character of a flirt—vanity, which is ever craving for
admiration, and never satisfied with what it gets; selfishness, that cares only
for gratifying the whim of the moment, without heeding what the amusement
may cost some true heart; vanity, that loves to parade the homage that is
rendered, yet only values it so far as it can be displayed and utilised to
advance its own importance, or to while away time that would otherwise hang
heavily; selfishness, that having had its turn served, its little day of triumph,
never asks whether the moths that fluttered round had merely sunned
themselves in the light and suffered no harm, or whether they had been
cruelly scorched whilst suspecting none.
Hard hearts are like diamonds. The flirt's weapons glance harmlessly aside
from them and leave no wound, as the best-tempered tool leaves no scratch
on the surface of the precious stone. But those same weapons have pierced
many a true and tender heart, and virtually killed its faith in womanly truth, and
taught it to doubt the possibility of honest girlish affection.
It seemed too dreadful for Norah to associate the idea of vanity and
selfishness with her friend Jeannie, a girl just eighteen, and looking even
younger, with her fair face and childish head covered with a crop of short
curls. Yet as she gave a mental glance at the past she felt that Jeannie's
actions and words belied each other.
Jack Corry had long been deemed quite first favourite in the neighbourhood.
He was bright, kindly. To young and old alike, he was ever ready to render a
service, and people used to look at him and say that this was his one fault. He
was the same to all, and no person could detect any sign of preference
towards any of his fair neighbours.
Jeannie Bellew had spent two winters in the Riviera. Whether there now
existed any cause for anxiety on her behalf, there had been enough to justify
the fears of her parents and her own banishment.
A sharp attack of inflammation of the lungs, brought on, if truth must be told,
by her own wilfulness, had left the girl without absolute disease, but extremely
sensitive to every change of temperature. After her second winter in the
South, she had returned home with greatly improved strength and looks, but
in other respects rather changed than improved.
Jeannie, the little schoolgirl, with her artless country manners and winsome
ways, was gone, and in her stead there returned to Ballycorene one who was
a girl in age and looks, but who brought with her more knowledge of the world
than all her feminine neighbours put together could boast of.
Mrs. Bellew had accompanied her daughter on both occasions, and a middle-
aged, trusty servant waited on the two. But the mother dreaded the loneliness
of life in apartments, where everything and every person were strange around
them, and so the pair spent the two winters in a large hotel, and gained many
experiences which the younger especially would have been much better
without.
Before Jeannie's reappearance, Ballycorene gossips had begun to couple the

name of Jack Corry with that of Norah Guiness, and to say that at last the way
to his heart had been discovered. Also that if he had the luck to gain Norah's,
he would win the greatest treasure that could enrich his life and brighten a
home, though she would be almost a dowerless maiden.
Perhaps it was because no word or act of Norah's gave Jack Corry cause to
think she bestowed a thought upon him, that he began to devote much
thought to her. She practised no little coquettish airs, did not pretend to shun
him, in order to hire him to seek her. She met him, as she did others, with the
bright smile, the honest look devoid of all self-consciousness, the kindly
greeting which was natural in one whom he had known all his life, and no
more.
No girl looked on Norah as a possible rival. All regarded her as a true-hearted

friend, and saw in her a self-devoting daughter, the one comfort of her father's
life, and a sister almost worshipped by his three motherless lads. None could
accuse her of striving to attract Jack Corry, and so, when it seemed that he
was likely to be attracted, all the girls with one consent voted, "Better Norah
than anyone else."
Then Jeannie Bellew came back to Benvora, changed as aforesaid, a

fashionable young lady instead of a simple country girl, and yet with the power
to act the latter character to perfection when it suited the whim of the moment.
She was prettier than ever, and had acquired an ease and grace of manner
which, together with an almost inexhaustible wardrobe, threw all the country
girls into the shade.
Jeannie's father was very rich; sole owner of a vast manufacturing concern,
which in his skilful hands was always growing in value.
In what way could wealth be better applied than in surrounding his only child
with every luxury that it could purchase? Mr. Bellew was a good master, and
paid his hands liberally. No man ever applied to him in vain if help was wanted
for any good object, and so, as he was generous to all beside, was he likely to
stint where Jeannie was concerned?

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State Power, Global Power xi

to produce a Marxist theory of the state. To understand the utility and

The Speciﬁcity of State Theory

think the potential analytical and strategic value of Miliband, Poulantzas,

Globalization, Institutions, and the Vicissitudes of State Power

Empire; it is a genuine eﬀort to reintroduce juridical regulation in order

What is signiﬁcant about this point is that modern territoriality is not

This means that territoriality is a property not simply of a “state,” but of

The nation-states remain a mainstay of global arrangements. To take

with “nomadic” intellectuals linked, somewhat mystically, to multitudes

they are conceived of as independent variables that are not to be explained

occupations. Moreover, most experience this decision as having been

intervention, and a theoretical advance over earlier work in Marxist state

capital is a relationship between capital and labour; and it is because it

Indeed, regional power blocs—the most ubiquitous is undoubtedly

relations and that its privileging of the nation-state as a theoretical and

In the Marxist scheme, the “ruling class” of capitalist society is that

The state has the particular function of constituting the factor of

What Is the Miliband–Poulantzas Debate?

Miliband (1969, 6, 7 n. 1) describes favorably as “a major attempt at a

same time, it is my contention that the conceptual aspects derived strictly

Background to the Debate

Biographical Background: The 1960s

Touraine 1971 for background). However, Poulantzas was catapulted to

Intellectual Background: Bourgeois Social Science

that there are a number of loci for arriving at political decisions . . .

Thus, as Miliband (1969, 2, 3) concludes, the state seemed unimpor-

the political component of the social system is a center of integration

Similarly, although relying more on the structural functionalism of

ture with “deﬁned responsibilities for the maintenance of the system of

Intellectual Background: The Marxist Tradition

Be Done? and State and Revolution. Signiﬁcantly, although references to

as far as capitalist societies are concerned, his [Marx’s] main view of

prise that Poulantzas’s epistemological attitude toward these texts was

in order to use the texts of the Marxist classics as a source of informa-

Consequently, for Poulantzas (ibid., 21), the concepts required for a

exemplify the regional or particular theory, or (2) to provide raw mate-

Miliband’s Theory of the State

In empirical terms, Miliband identiﬁes the corporation as the initial

Social Class and Political Practice

What Is the State?

blies—which make up the ‘the state,’ and whose interrelationship shapes