Abstract
One Marxist writer, Perry Anderson — without the benefit of whose essays on Britain I could not have conceived this book — has pointed to the fact that:
two orders of reality are customarily separated by a major gap in much Marxist writing today. On the one hand, ‘abstract’ general models are constructed or presupposed — not only of the absolutist state, but equally of the bourgeois revolution or the capitalist state, without concern for their effective variations; on the other hand ‘concrete’ local cases are explored, without reference to their reciprocal implications and interconnections.1
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Notes and References
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, (London: New Left Books, 1974) pp.7–8.
Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Method (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982) p.221. The narrowly polemical basis of this position is clearly evident in this work. His ‘primary guideline’ for the construction of an adequate Marxist theory of the state is that it should not be seen as capable of exercising power in its own right. Such an axiom is fundamentally a device for distancing Marxist theorising on the state from that of other traditions and, as a result, is largely negative and empirically sterile. As Jessop himself concedes: ‘The strength of this first guideline can be demonstrated most easily by considering the implications of rejecting it’ (p.223). The argument is pursued by the positing of a deficient methodological position which he illogically considers to be the only alternative to his own: ‘to treat the state as a real subject (as opposed to formal legal) with a pre-given unity’.
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© 1984 Geoffrey Ingham
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Ingham, G. (1984). Concluding Remarks. In: Capitalism Divided?. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86082-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86082-1_11
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