What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and SocialismIn his new book, Gran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society - looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal state, the capitalist state and the socialist state. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn's enquiry in the 'Future as History'. Written with lucidity and economy, What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules? represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis. |
Contents
Science and Politics A Foreword | |
An Analytical Model | |
Provisional Answers | |
Energy | |
State Personnel in InterState Relations | |
Was Lenin Right? A First Conclusion | |
Defining the Class Character of State Power | |
the State in the Reproduction of Society | |
Formats of Representation | |
MovementStatism | |
Processes of Mediation | |
Repression | |
SummingUp | |
The Future as History | |
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administrative advanced capitalist analysis apparatus base basic bourgeois democracy bourgeois revolution bourgeois rule bureaucracy cadre capitalist capitalist countries central Chile class character class relations class rule class struggle co-optation collective Comintern Communist parties concept concrete conjunctural contradictions crisis dictatorship distinction domination dynamics economic effects elected empirical enterprise Europe example existing exploitation Fascism feudal forces fractions France French functions German historical ideological important individual intervention involves Italy labour movement latter leaders leadership Lenin majority Marx Marx’s Marxist mass mediation military mode of production monopoly capital October Revolution organization organizational parliamentary pattern peasants personnel petty bourgeoisie political popular positions post-war problems proletariat regime relations of production relationship representation represented reproduction revolutionary role ruling class Social Democratic social formation socialist society Soviet Union specific strategy structure tasks theory transformation USSR Weber West Germany workers working-class