Revising State Theory

Revising State Theory PDF Author: Fred Block
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9780877224655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Socialist Review Book Award, Socialist Review, 1987 This volume makes available in one place a complete statement of Fred Block's perspective for students and participants in the ongoing debate on state theory. His substantial Introduction serves as an intellectual autobiography in which he assesses the field-including the theories of Domhoff, Poulantzas, and Skocpoland situates his own work within it. Block also discusses his relationship to different strands of Marxism. In his analysis of the relationship between business and the state, Block argues that while business interests have far more influence over state policy than other constituencies, state actors still have substantial autonomy in formulating policies. In particular, the business community's internal divisions and difficulties in assessing its own interests limit its capacity to control events. Block insists that when business influence is greatest, as during the Reagan years, state policies will be least successful in solving the society's problems. "What is at work here is a relatively simple sociological dynamic--that institutionalized relations of power tend to become visible only when they weaken. When these institutionalized relations are most effective, they tend to be invisible, precisely because the justifying ideologies so dominate people's commonsense understandings. The classic recent example is the existence of women's subordination. In the fifties, people would have responded to the claim that women were systematically discriminated against in American society with incredulity because they had so totally accepted an ideology that justified differential treatment of men and women as normal and natural. The full-blown analysis and critique of male domination emerges only in the seventies, when patriarchal arrangements are already weakening.... "In state theory, the development is analogous. In the fifties, pluralist arguments dominate because the exercise of power has been rendered invisible. The relation between business and the state works so well that it leaves few traces. Moreover, there is little real debate about how the society should be structured, so the extent to which everyone's basic assumptions fit with the interests of corporate capitalism is not at all obvious. Since nobody was even asking the big questions of who should make investment decisions and how should income and wealth be distributed, it was not apparent that the narrow limits of debate fit exactly with the interests of business.... However, the cumulative impact of Vietnam and racial conflict in the late sixties, the drama of Watergate, and the growing economic difficulties of advanced capitalist societies in the early seventies served to make the exercise of power in American society widely visible. The previous functional relation between the state and business had been disrupted and the efforts by each side to advocate its own interests became more apparent." --From the Introduction

Revising State Theory

Revising State Theory PDF Author: Fred Block
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439903522
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
An analysis of the relationship between business and the state.

The State of State Theory

The State of State Theory PDF Author: Davita Silfen Glasberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498542492
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In The State of State Theory: State Projects, Repression, and Multi-Sites of Power, Glasberg, Willis, and Shannon argue that state theories should be amended to account both for theoretical developments broadly in the contemporary period as well as the multiple sites of power along which the state governs. Using state projects and policies around political economy, sexuality and family, food, welfare policy, racial formation, and social movements as narrative accounts in how the state operates, the authors argue for a complex and intersectional approach to state theory. In doing so, they expand outside of the canon to engage with perspectives within critical race theory, queer theory, and beyond to build theoretical tools for a contemporary and critical state theory capable of providing the foundations for understanding how the state governs, what is at stake in its governance, and, importantly, how people resist and engage with state power.

An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

An Introduction to Classical and Contemporary Social Theory PDF Author: Berch Berberoglu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742524934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book provides a critical analysis of classical and contemporary social theory from a class perspective. It is concise, lucid, and well written.

Toward a Critical Theory of States

Toward a Critical Theory of States PDF Author: Clyde W. Barrow
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143846181X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
We have recently lived through the turmoil of a global financial crisis that originated in the United States and, despite the platitudes of neo-liberal ideology, nation-states were deeply involved in managing this crisis. If "the state" is again a preeminent actor in the global economy, then state theory and the problem of the state should also return to the forefront of political theory. Toward a Critical Theory of States is an intensive analysis of the 1970s debate between state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, including its wider impact on Marxist theories of the state in subsequent decades. Clyde W. Barrow makes unique arguments and contributions to this continuing discussion in state theory and lays the foundation for more theoretically informed empirical and historical research on the state in the age of globalization. He argues that by merely moving past the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, as some have recommended, scholars have abandoned much that is valuable in understanding the state, particularly the need to comprehend the contemporary transformation of the state form and the state apparatuses as part of the new conditions of globalization and transnational capital accumulation. Building upon themes of state restructuring found in Poulantzas and Miliband, Barrow establishes the outlines of an approach that integrates the thought of both to propose a synthetic understanding of the new imperialism.

Critical Theories of the State

Critical Theories of the State PDF Author: Clyde W. Barrow
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299137139
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Critical Theories of the State is a clear and accessible survey of radical perspectives on the modern state. By focusing on Marxist theory and its variations, particularly as applied to advanced industrial societies and contemporary welfare states, Clyde W. Barrow provides a more extensive and thorough treatment than is available in any other work. Barrow divides the methodological assumptions and key hypotheses of Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and Post-Marxist theories into five distinct approaches: instrumentalist, structuralist, derivationist, systems-analytic, and organizational realist. He categorizes the many theorists discussed in the book, including such thinkers as Elmer Altvater, G. William Domhoff, Fred Block, Claus Offe, and Theda Skocpol according to their concepts of the state’s relationship to capital and their methodological approach to the state. Based on this survey, Barrow elaborates a compelling typology of radical state theories that identifies with remarkable clarity crucial points of overlap and divergence among the various theories. Scholars conducting research within the rubric of state theory, political development, and policy history will find Critical Theories of the State an immensely valuable review of the literature. Moreover, Barrow’s work will make an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in political science and sociology, and can also be used by those teaching theory courses in international relations, history, and political economy.

State Transformations: Classes, Strategy, Socialism

State Transformations: Classes, Strategy, Socialism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004462260
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
It is often remarked that critical – and especially Marxist – state theory began to lose its central place in the study of comparative politics in the 1980s. Ironically, this shift occurred just as neoliberal policies were transforming the social form and spatial scales of the state, radically restructuring the practices of state economic intervention, and extending the capabilities of the coercive arms of the state. This volume addresses the ‘impoverishment of state theory’ over the last decades and insists on the continued salience of class analysis to the study of states. The book’s title, State Transformations, reflects several central themes in the comparative study of states: the neoliberal restructuring of capitalist states, the changing economic and political architecture of imperialism, and the prospects of a democratic transformation of capitalist states. The essays collected here on these themes are in honor and memory of Leo Panitch, whose influential body of work has shaped debates on the state, imperialism, and socialism over the past four decades. Contributors are: Clyde W. Barrow, Caio Bugiato, Frank Deppe, Ruth Felder, Ana Garcia, Sam Gindin, Doug Henwood, Martijn Konings, Colin Leys, Sebnem Oguz, Bryan D. Palmer, Dennis Pilon, Larry Savage, Charles Smith, Michalis Spourdalakis and Hilary Wainwright

Theories Of Comparative Political Economy

Theories Of Comparative Political Economy PDF Author: Ronald H Chilcote
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429975368
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
"Professor Chilcote has written an extraordinary comprehensive comparison of mainstream, liberal views and alternative, radical views of history, development, class, government, and democracy. This book will be extremely valuable to both students and scholars." —Howard Sherman, University of California, Riverside Theories of Comparative Political Economy builds on die proposition that the study of politics and economics has evolved into political economy in a number of significant ways, and that the new issues and ideas that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s will cany on into the new millennium. This book is a sequel to Chilcote's Theories of Comparative Politics (Westview, 1981), which was substantially revised and published in a second edition in 1994.

Building American Cities

Building American Cities PDF Author: Joe R. Feagin
Publisher: Beard Books
ISBN: 1587981483
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This is a reprint of a 1990 book A comprehensive analysis of how cities grow, change, deteriorate and are resuscitated

Power and Inequality

Power and Inequality PDF Author: Levon Chorbajian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351782231
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Successfully bringing together accessible readings that cover the broad range of issues of importance to those studying politics and society, this new edition of Power and Inequality provides a unique mix of theoretical and empirical pieces, such as state and electoral politics, that address both classic issues in political sociology and more recent developments, such as globalization. With strong integration of race and gender throughout, this collection offers a coherent analysis of power that reflects the contributions of a variety of critical perspectives, including Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, postmodernism, and power structure theory.

Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform

Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform PDF Author: Carmen Sirianni
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection examines not only the enormous diversity of imeanings and forms of worker participation in the contemporary period but also its global character. The chapters cover Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and Japan, China, and the Third World. Each of them is informed in some way by the conviction that worker participation is an eminently political phenomenon- that it is about politics and power at the level of the workplace, and that the larger context of social, political, and economic power and organization shapes what happens to participation locally. In this sense, the volume is not simply about internal workplace reforms. Nor is it a country-by-country survey of laws and institutions, but rather a collection of substantive analyses of the actual dynamics of participation and change.