The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State

by Nicos Poulantzas, James Martin (Editor)

Nicos Poulantzas was one of the leading Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, developing seminal analyses of the state and social classes during the crisis of monopoly capitalism. This volume brings together a wide selection of Poulantzas’ key writings in legal philosophy and political sociology, including some important pieces translated here for the first time. Texts include his early analyses of law, his studies of hegemony, authoritarianism, and social classes, and his debate on the state with Ralph Miliband and Ernesto Laclau.

An essential introduction for the scholar and the student to a body of work that continues to reverberate across the social sciences.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Law, Nonfiction, Theory, Economics

448 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2008

About the author

(Greek: Νίκος Πουλαντζάς). Greek-French Marxist political sociologist. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading Structural Marxist and, while at first a Leninist, eventually became a proponent of eurocommunism. He is most well known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s (e.g. Franco's rule in Spain, Salazar's in Portugal, and Papadopoulos's in Greece).

Reviews

[david · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poulantzas argues that the state is a relation whose form was inseparable from political and ideological dimesnions of struggle. the project of a democratic socialism must be the process of "transforming the state" from within and without , ie: dual power to "democratize the state" and also simultaneously develop alternative structures to it. there is, for Poulantzas, no general theory of the state but rather theories of the state must "elucidate the metamorphosis of its object."

[Jeff Menne]

This is in my queue; not yet in my brain.