Geographies of the State: Nicos Poulantzas and Contemporary Approaches to State/Space

Abstract

Nicos Poulantzas deals theoretically with space and time in his book State, Power, Socialism (1980), while in his edited volume La crise de l’ Etat (1976), four chapters have an explicit geographical/spatial focus. In this short chapter, I argue that Poulantzas first, he initiated a state problematic in which the multiple geographies which constitute its existence materially and symbolically were always present; and, second and perhaps more important, his work was and remains highly influential to those political and social geographers and planners who studied everyday life in cities and regions of capitalist states in the global North. In doing so, I look on the role of the State in the production of space and the reproduction of uneven capitalist development; on the organization of social space and the everyday life; and finally criticizing the post-modern theory of ‘territorial trap’.

Another version of this paper is published in Greek in: Golemis, C., Economou, H. (eds.). (2012). Poulantzas Today, Athens: N. Poulantzas Institute/Nissos, pp. 171–182 (in Greek).