Bob Jessop

This paper presents a theoretical critique and reformulation of the concept of the developmental state from a regulationist perspective and applies the new notion to the changing role of the developmental state in the emerging period of the so-called knowledge driven economy. The analysis can be divided into five sections: (a) reflections on political economy of market forces and state power; (b) the specificities of the developmental state; (c) the periodisation of capitalism; (d) the emerging knowledge-driven economy; and (e) the changing role of the state in regard to the ‘new economy’. Following a discussion of these issues, I offer some more general conclusions on the developmental state in East Asia.

Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries, diverse fields of practical application, the manifold scales of social life, and different political camps and tendencies. This terminological mobility enables it to organize significant narratives about contemporary social transformation. Yet it is also clear that governance is a polyvalent and polycontextual notion. Its meaning varies by context and it is being deployed for quite contrary, if not plain contradictory, purposes. And, by virtue of these terminological uncertainties, it is doubtful whether governance sans phrase can really provide a compelling theoretical entrypoint for analysing contemporary social transformation or a compelling practical entrypoint for coping with complexity. It is this paradox that I wish to pursue and resolve in the following reflections on governance, with the ultimate intention of providing a clear account of the nature and limitations of governance and metagovernance in a complex world. I will illustrate my more general arguments as appropriate from the case of ‘good governance’, which provides an interesting example of the constitutionalization and ethicalization of governance discourse and practices.

Conjunctural analysis is useful in many fields but has special theoretical and practical significance for critical political economy and left strategy. For the pursuit of politics as " the art of the possible " depends heavily on correct conjunctural analysis and is practised by most successful political forces. Its central role for left politics is seen in the analyses of Hall, among many others. For Lenin, the central focus of political analysis and action is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation (1920: 165) oriented to the correlation of forces. And, for Althusser, the key concept of a Marxist science of politics is the conjuncture: " the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied " (1970: 311). A sound conjunctural analysis depends on: (a) an appropriate set of concepts for moving from basic structural features to immediate strategic concerns; (b) the spatio-temporal horizons of action that define the conjuncture; (c) a clear account of medium-and long-term goals that should guide strategy and tactics in the current moment; and (d) ethico-political commitments that set limits to acceptable action in particular contexts on the grounds that the ends do not always justify any means. Moreover, because one's strategy depends on the likely responses of other key social forces, one must map their conjunctural analyses too. There is scope for infinite reciprocal regress here but it is lower in periods of relative stability that promote stable expectations or, conversely, in the face of urgent crises calling for immediate action. Multi-faceted crises that build over time with sudden, acute phases are more disorienting and place the heaviest demands on conjunctural analysis.

The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics and the more general development of 'new political economy'. Its several schools all adopt a heterodox account of capital accumulation and emphasise the latter's socially embedded, socially regularized nature. They focus on the historically contingent ensembles of complementary economic and extra-economic mechanisms and practices which enable relatively stable accumulation to occur over relatively long periods despite the fundamental contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts generated by capitalism (on different schools, see Jessop 1990). These ideas have been applied most famously to 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism' and extensive interest therein from the mid-80s to mid-90s certainly contributed to the RA's popularity. But even the initial Parisian work addressed other topics and subsequent work has seen  a real deepening and widening of the regulation approach far beyond issues of Fordism and/or post-Fordism.

These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successive generations and developmental trajectories. I then illustrate this account by reviewing the Parisian 'state of the art' and the theoretical innovations introduced by other theorists. I also consider the RA's responses to the failure of its initial alternative economic strategy (due, it should be noted, to lack of adoption rather than subsequent implementation failure) and its relative isolation within mainstream economics; and I also examine how the RA's message has been received and understood outside the discipline of economics. I conclude by asking whether the twenty years of research, scholarship, and exposition invested in the RA have been worth the effort (the standard RA survey is Boyer 1990; on more recent work, see also Boyer and Saillard 1995a).

Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo- political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one- sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various ‘spheres of interest’ and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation.

The conference which inspired this collection was explicitly concerned with the direction of contemporary capitalism. Its final plenary session, to which my own contribution was presented, addressed the historical place and destiny of capitalism. Surprisingly, few papers at the conference explored the basic nature of capitalism, its genesis, overall dynamic, or future. Yet only by examining such issues can one usefully comment on the historical place, the direction, or destiny of capitalism or draw relevant political conclusions. Thus I first consider whether capitalism has a distinctive dynamic and, if so, what this might mean for its future. I argue that it does, indeed, show important developmental tendencies. However, as these are not linked to any final telos, capitalist development remains open within very broad limits. Accordingly I do not try to forecast the long-run future or ultimate destiny of capitalism. Instead I discuss several major economic changes in contemporary capitalism, consider whether they involve a break in capitalist development, and suggest some medium-term implications for the national state and governance mechanisms.

This article explores the roles of markets, states, and partnerships in economic coordination and considers their respective tendencies to failure. The first section addresses the growing interest in governance and seeks explanations in recent theoretical developments. The second section then asks whether the rise of the governance paradigm might also reflect fundamental shifts in economic, political, and social life, such that governance will remain a key issue for a long time, or is a response to more cyclical shifts in modes of coordination. The third section considers the logic of ‘heterarchic governance’ in contrast to anarchic, ex post coordination through market exchange and imperative ex ante coordination through hierarchical forms of organization. It also offers some preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of ‘governance failure’. The final section addresses the state’s increasing role in ‘meta-governance’, i.e., in managing the respective roles of these different modes of coordination.

This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I) and discourse (D) and their analytical relevance for socioeconomic development. It argues that an adequate account of these relations must recognize their inherent spatio-temporality and, hence, their space-time dynamics. This is not an optional extra but a definite descriptive and explanatory requirement. Moreover, while structure is recognized as a product of path-dependent institutionalization and path-shaping (collective) agency, agency is seen in turn as discursively and materially reproduced and transformed. This approach treats structure in terms of a differential spatio-temporal configuration of constraints and opportunities, reference to which informs the empirical analysis of strategic agency within the overall ASID heuristic. The paper concludes with an eightfold typology of particular combinations of ASID features to guide analyses of socioeconomic development in all its (dis-)junctural complexity.

This article explores depoliticization in relation to the three domains of polity, politics, and policy, distinguishing its different meanings in these three contexts, identifying different strategies of depoliticization corresponding to each domain, and exploring their interconnections. Politicisation and repoliticization can be explored in the same manner. The analysis is illustrated from the strategies of depoliticization pursued in relation to the fiscal cliff debate in the USA and the constitutionalization of the Fiscal Compact in the Eurozone, Some general conclusions are also offered.

This article describes the meta-theoretical and theoretical foundations of one approach to critique that moves through up to eight analytically distinct steps. This critique begins with the identification of specific discourses and discursive practices and moves progressively towards a critique of ideology and domination and then to a critique of the factors and actors that, through diverse mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention, reproduce these ideological effects and patterns of domination as a basis for proposing and acting upon emancipatory projects that involve a variable mix of reform and revolution. An important part of these procedures is to deconstruct and demystify sedimented, naturalized discourses and social practices and to propose alternatives based on explicitly stated principles of justice and fairness.

Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative U-turn prompted by rising unemployment and political unrest. Others called for the Labour Party to adopt more radical economic and political policies and to restructure itself as a vehicle for the eventual implementation of a socialist alternative economic strategy. They hoped that this would undermine Thatcherism by refuting its claim that there is no alternative; or that it would at least give the left the initiative when Thatcherism collapsed for other reasons. Yet others concentrated on the ideology of Thatcherism and called for a similarly ideological strategy from the Left. They attributed Thatcherism's success to the initiatives of the new Right in constructing a new hegemonic project and mobilizing popular support for a right-wing solution to the economic and political crisis. Complementing this apparent celebration of Thatcherism is the charge that the Left has failed to adopt a 'national-popular' approach of its own to ideological and political struggle and has fallen back on economistic or voluntaristic analysis of the growing crisis of social democracy and the Left in Britain. This last approach is represented above all in the work of Stuart Hall, but it has since been adopted quite widely on the left. The guiding thread of Hall's work is the argument that Thatcherism rests on 'authoritarian populism'. He argues that 'authoritarian populism' (hereafter 'AP') successfully condenses a wide range of popular discontents with the postwar economic and political order and mobilizes them around an authoritarian, right-wing solution to the current economic and political crisis in Britain. This success is regarded with begrudging admiration because Thatcherism took the ideological struggle more seriously than the Left and has reaped the reward of popular support. Some conclude that the Left must articulate Thatcherite themes into its own discourse, but others, such as Hall, insist that Thatcherism can best be defeated by developing an alternative vision of the future, a socialist morality, and a socialist common-sense. Thus the apparent ideological

In this excellent book Brett Christophers offers an intriguing, historically informed but partially inadequate response to a significant deficit in the regulationist analysis of political economy. Regulationists ask why, despite its inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies, capital accumulation proceeds relatively smoothly for significant periods in specific spatio-temporal settings. They explain this through the trial-and-error emergence and consolidation of specific growth regimes and corresponding modes of re ́ gulation-cum- governance that, together, create complementary institutional forms and social norms and values that facilitate the integration of different circuits of capital and the development of a workable social compromise. Christophers notes correctly that regulationists often neglect the role of law, litigation, and judicial decision-making in securing this improbable result. This deficit is unfortunate because, as he rightly claims, law has a key role in modulating the balance between simultaneous tendencies to competition and monopoly in ‘capitalist regimes of profitability and growth’. He then explores this topic in two steps: a theoretical account of the complex dialectics of competition and monopoly that frames detailed studies of three successive periods in the development of anti-trust law, which aims to limit monopoly in favour of competition, and of intellectual property rights (IPRs), which are intended to fashion and protect monopoly. (2016: 4).

This article relates changes in higher education and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states in the region. The developmental state is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of developmental states from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge- intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state’s continuing role in higher education and its internationalisation in the region.

The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world. This crisis previously enabled the rise of Thatcherism as a neoliberal and neoconservative project (with New Labour as its left wing) with an authoritarian populist appeal and authoritarian statist tendencies that persisted under the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition (2010 – 2015). The 2015 election of a Conservative Government, which aimed to revive the Thatcherite project and entrench austerity, was the immediate context for the tragi-comedy of errors played out in the referendum. The ensuing politics and policy issues could promote the disintegration of the UK and, perhaps, the EU without delivering greater political sovereignty or a more secure and non-balkanized place for British economic space in the world market.

Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo-political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one-sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. 3 A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various 'spheres of interest' and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation. It is impossible for this chapter to deal with all four sets of issues. Instead it focuses on the former Comecon (or CMEA) countries and reviews the relations between their attempts to move from state socialism to capitalism and proposals for regional

The two studies included in this issue of the IJPE focus on the public finances of post-socialist Poland at a turning point, or better, an epochal shift, which, if it does not yet signal the ‘end of history’, clearly marks the beginning of a new, world-historical period in capitalist development. Moreover, as Schumpeter’s remarks clearly anticipated, the crisis of post-socialist public finances not only reflects events beyond the state but also has its own effects on the crisis dynamics in these societies. It is in this spirit that Stanislav Owsiak and Jerzy Hausner seek to explain the origins and causal impact of the crisis in public finances in post-socialist Poland. Although Owsiak focuses on the transitional deficit in public finances and Hausner on the deeper-seated structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and competing paths involved in moving from a command to a market economy, their studies complement each other and provide a good overall picture of the financial crisis of the post-socialist state from both economic and political aspects.

Among the most important factors generating this financial crisis they cite: (a) various economic and political difficulties inherited from the ‘shortage economy’ associated with state socialism; (b) the economic disruption and transitional deficit occasioned by the abandonment of state socialism and neo-liberal efforts to move towards a market economy; (c) economic policy mistakes which have aggravated this inevitable disruption and its associated financial deficit and thereby further worsened the political crisis; (d) political commitments to various forms of economic and social expenditure required by a transitional political regime desperate to secure its legitimacy; and (e) the political crises provoked by badly flawed efforts to democratize the political system at the same time that efforts are being made to liberalize the economy. In addition to identifying various causal factors contributing to the financial crisis of the post-socialist state, they also trace the reciprocal influence of this crisis on the economic and political difficulties now affecting post-socialist Poland. They conclude, hardly surprisingly, that, given the lack of system integration (‘systemic vacuum’) and the failure to develop any coherent hegemonic project for restructuring post-socialist societies (‘strategic vacuum’), the financial crisis tends to make things worse rather than better. In particular it reduces the prospects of effective co-ordination of economic and political reform and also necessitates cuts in public expenditure which threaten the legitimacy of the overall transformation process.

In a number of articles and two recent books Joachim Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a novel Marxist approach for analyzing capitalist societies (Esser and Hirsch, 1984, 1985, 1987; Haeusler and Hirsch, 1987; Hirsch, 1980, 1983a, 1983b, 1984; and Hirsch and Roth, 1980 and 1986). They combine a fresh perspective on the political economy of capitalism with their own theoretical work on the capitalist state; and apply this approach to a wide range of phenomena - from the nuclear family and the city through party systems and corporatist arrangements to social movements and new forms of subjectivity. Since the scope of these studies is too wide for a comprehensive review in a short article, my critique focuses on their general theoretical strengths and weaknesses and their implications for analyzing the crisis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism.

Despite their very different assumptions and principles of explanation, monetarists, Keynesians and Marxists share a concern with the nature and impact of state intervention in capitalist economies.  Yet, in contrast to the study of market forces, the state itself is strangely neglected as a field of analysis. This is as true of theories that presuppose an active role for the state as of those that entail a more limited role. Indeed, even though Marxists have long claimed special knowledge of the strategic significance of the state in class struggle, it is only in the last ten years that they have rediscovered the state as a problem in political economy. The resulting discussion has ranged from the most abstract methodological issues to quite specific historical problems and has generated a variety of hypotheses and insights. It is unfortunately true that much of the Marxist debate is esoteric and often inaccessible and/or irrelevant to those working in other traditions. But, in the absence of any comparable reappraisal of the state, this debate merits wider consideration. Moreover, since Marxism has long been concerned with the state as well as with production and exchange, it is surely worth assessing to what extent an integrated approach can illuminate economic analysis. Such an enquiry is particularly germane in the current period of continuing world economic crisis and increasing state intervention to restructure the industrial and financial system.

It should be emphasized that the present survey is not concerned with Marxist economics as such. Instead it instead on some recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state. Nor does it develop a new approach; it simply considers these theories in terms of certain given criteria. These comprise general criteria such as logical consistency and theoretical determinacy, as well as more specific criteria relevant to an evaluation of Marxist theories. The latter can be stated quite briefly as follows. A Marxist theory of the capitalist state will be considered adequate to the extent that (a) it is founded on the specific qualities of capitalism as a mode of production, (b) it attributes a central role to class struggle in the process of capital accumulation, (c) it establishes the relations between the political and economic features of society without reducing one to the other or treating them as totally independent and autonomous, (d) it allows for historical and national differences in the forms and functions of the state in capitalist societies, and (e) it allows for the influence of non-capitalist classes and non-class forces in determining the nature of the state and the exercise of state power. To justify the choice of these particular criteria would sidetrack the discussion before it begins; it is hoped that their relevance and importance will emerge as we proceed.

The paper starts with a short review of the approach of Marx and other classical Marxist theorists to the capitalist state. Several different themes in their work are specified and their merits and demerits considered. This provides a framework within which to assess recent developments. Some variations on the themes of the classical texts are then examined and criticized for their failure to advance the Marxist theory of the state. This brings us to the central part of the paper, which deals with recent theories of the capitalist state, evaluated in the light of our criteria. The paper concludes with some general remarks on Marxist analyses of state power in capitalist societies and their implications for other theoretical approaches.

Capitalist growth regimes are analysed drawing on Marx's insights into capital's fundamental contradictions, regulation theoretical arguments about the five basic structural forms of accumulation regimes and their modes of regulation, historical geographical materialism's emphasis on spatio-temporal fixes, and state-theoretical accounts of government and governance in the shadow of hierarchy. This framework is then applied to four growth regimes: Atlantic Fordism, two (among many) alternative post-Fordist trajectories-the knowledge-based economy, finance-dominated capitalism-and a radical 'no-growth' variant of the 'Green New Deal'. The article highlights the crisis-tendencies of the first three and assesses whether the Green New Deal represents an alternative route out of crisis or is the capture of an eco-social project by the forces that brought us finance-dominated accumulation. It concludes with a future research agenda.

This contribution has three main aims, which are pursued at progressively greater length. First, I define globalization as a basis for my own interrogation of its nature, causes, and consequences. Second, I argue, only partly in a wilfully contrarian spirit, that the spatial turn associated with the interest in the globalization of capital has been overdone and that a temporal (re)turn is overdue. For time and temporality are at least as important as, if not more important than, space and spatiality in the logic of economic globalization. I ground this claim in the capital relation and its contradictions. Third, I explore the implications of this approach for some spatio-temporal contradictions of globalization and their implications for national states as they become more involved in promoting globalization and managing its repercussions.

Gramscian terms as a dynamic transformist expression of neoliberalism with a social democratic face. Like his earlier analyses of Thatcherism and New Labour, however, his analysis is stronger on critical discourse analysis and his own political rhetoric than it is on its grasp of political economy and its implications for political practice. Indeed it would be interesting to subject this text itself to a critical discourse analysis to demonstrate the theoretical lacunae and the conceptual slippages in its powerful, persuasive, but ultimately flawed, exploration of this latest transformist project. I will focus on six issues raised by Hall's text and then offer an alternative analysis rooted in a regulation-and state-theoretical political economy. A Critique of Hall First, Hall operates both with superficial analyses of the political scene as a series of points when unconstrained choices can be made and with more detailed analyses of the political scene considered as a 'current conjuncture' characterized by a dialectic of path-dependency and path-shaping. Thus the paper begins with the bold claim that 'the Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of great political opportunity … [that presented] a fundamental choice of directions for the incoming government' (Hall 2004: 1). This suggests that the election was a distinctive moment of unconstrained choice and, if so, this would suggest a voluntarist and decisionist approach. This is clearly inconsistent with Hall's more general analyses here and elsewhere. It also invokes a mythical " Left " that was capable in 1997 of pursuing a

This article develops a heterodox, strategic-relational approach to globalization. This is seen as a multi-scalar, multi-temporal, multi-centric process, involving new forms of time-space distantiation and compression. As such, it is just one face of a complex re-scaling of social processes which can also be interpreted from other scalar viewpoints, such as localization, regionalization or triadization. Five interrelated issues are then addressed: (1) the structural and strategic dimensions of globalization seen in temporal as well as spatial terms; (2) the role of globalization, especially in its neoliberal form, in enhancing the ecological dominance of the capitalist economy, i.e. in enhancing the relative primacy of the capital relation in an emerging world society; (3) the significance of the global scale for capitalist reorganization and its links to other scales of activity ?? especially given the relativization of scale rooted in the erosion of the national spatio-temporal fix associated with Atlantic Fordism; (4) the impact of the new scalar dynamics of globalizing capitalism on the relative primacy and forms of appearance of capital's inherent contradictions and dilemmas and the problems that this poses for a re-regularization of capital accumulation on a global scale; and (5) the implications of globalization for the state and politics.

This article addresses West European and North American developments in theorizing the state. It briefly reviews the first major postwar revival of theoretical interest in the state that began in Western Europe during the mid-1960s. This was mainly led by Marxists interested in the general form and functions of the capitalist state; but a key supporting role was played by Marxist-feminists who extended such ideas to the patriarchal capitalist state.  A second revival during the late 1970s is then described. This involved many more theoretical currents and substantive concerns and was also more institutionalist in overall approach. Although the self-declared movement to 'bring the state back in' originated in the United States, some of the most innovative work in this theoretical movement is rooted in less overtly state-centred approaches originating in Western Europe. Indeed some of them argue that the state as such should be dethroned from its central position in analyses of political power and domination. Thus, in addition to neo-statism, I also consider Foucauldian theory, feminism, and discourse analysis. By the 1990s this proliferation of approaches had contributed paradoxically to an apparent withering away of interest in the state as such. Nonetheless, as I argue below, research on the state is continuing in new and exciting forms and directions.

This article re-interprets and develops Polanyi’s substantive institutionalist analysis of capitalist market economies and the market society in the light of two more recent approaches to the same issues. These are the Parisian ‘regulation school’ on contemporary capitalism and systems-theoretical accounts of the modern economy. All three regard the capitalist economy (or, for autopoietic systems theory, the market economy) as an operationally autonomous system that is nonetheless socially embedded and needful of complex forms of social regulation. For each, an adequate account of economic activities should explore how they are related to the wider social environment; how they are embedded in a wider nexus of social institutions; how the latter assist in reproducing the capitalist (or market) economy; and how their development is coupled to that of these and other environing institutions. There are also some important differences among these approaches, however, which enable an exploration of their respective limitations and also provide useful bases for further theoretical and empirical research. Thus, after presenting these three perspectives on the institutedness and embeddedness of economies, I consider some basic problems in analyzing the improbable stability and reproducibility of the capitalist economy, paying particular attention to governance and meta-governance.

This contribution has three main aims, which are pursued at progressively greater length. First, I define globalization as a basis for my own interrogation of its nature, causes, and consequences. Second, I argue, only partly in a wilfully contrarian spirit, that the spatial turn associated with the interest in the globalization of capital has been overdone and that a temporal (re)turn is overdue. For time and temporality are at least as important as, if not more important than, space and spatiality in the logic of economic globalization. I ground this claim in the nature of the capital relation and its contradictions. Third, I explore the implications of this approach for some spatio- temporal contradictions of globalization and their implications for national states as they become more involved in promoting globalization and managing its repercussions.

The Local Governance Programme was established to pursue a number of theoretical and empirical concerns closely connected to the restructuring of urban economic and political institutions, organizations and relations in contemporary Britain in particular, and Western Europe more generally The central unifying theme is that o governance there is a common emphasis throughout the programme upon the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the emergence of new regimes of urban and local governance. The research programme was designed to encourage a constructive dialogue between different theoretical approaches to issues concerning the transformation of governance regimes, structures, and strategies. Thus, to cite an introduction statement, two of the programmes aims were:

It is now some twelve years since the tragic death of Nicos Poulantzas. His name will be familiar to many SPE readers for two main reasons. First, he was a major contributor to the nee-Marxist rediscovery of the state (notably through the much-cited debate which he began with Ralph Miliband); and, second, he also provoked controversy for his account of changes in postwar capitalism and their implications for classes and the class struggle? Curiously, while he is often praised for his agenda-setting contribution in state theory, he is also condemned for his role in demoting or even denying the primacy of the working class in the struggle for socialism. Unfortunately his celebrity or notoriety (depending on one’s theoretical and political viewpoint) in these debates has hindered a fuller, more nuanced appreciation of Poulantzas’s overall contribu- tion to modern social theory. For his interests and contributions actually went much beyond these two fields; and, even with regard to state theory and class analysis, they also revealed significant shifts in approach which have too often passed unremarked. Thus this paper aims to reconsider the significance of Poulantzas’s work.

This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future (1999) both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalise that project on a global scale. The novelty of recent neoliberal projects lies in their discursive, strategic, and organizational reformulation of liberalism in response to three recent developments: the increasing internationalization and/or globalization of economies; the interconnected crises of the mixed economy and the Keynesian welfare national state associated with Atlantic Fordism, of the guided economy and developmental state in East Asia, and of the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and the rise of new social movements in response to the economic, political, and social changes associated with the preceding two changes.

It is a genuine pleasure to respond to Jonathan Joseph's restatement and refinement of his account of hegemony as a necessary feature of societal organization with both enduring structural and emergent strategic aspects. Our earlier discussions on this topic and the present written exchange have been conducted in the collegial spirit necessary to advance critical realism and examine its relevance to hegemony. We share a methodological commitment to critical realism and enough common substantive ground to attempt to move the dialogue forward from my earlier critique. 2 Joseph has chosen to respond to this by restating his account of hegemony; in turn, my response will elaborate my own strategic-relational approach (SRA) and its relation to form analysis. I hope thereby to deal with two key issues set out in his response: (a) the nature and limits of functional explanation and (b) the nature and limits of the SRA characteristic of Poulantzas's work as well as mine. But we should first see what is at stake by considering the problematic unity of the social totality and the extent to which form problematizes function.

For some time now we have been working both individually and together on a new approach to political economy that does not fit neatly into the standard ways of thinking about political economy as a discipline. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and post-disciplinary in its current intellectual implications. Of course, we are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, there are many signs of increasing commitment among social scientists to transcending such boundaries to better understand the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. We advocate the idea of a 'cultural political economy' and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy. Before doing so, however, we will situate our proposals for cultural political economy in the broader context of exciting recent developments in political economy.

Under the impact of diverse processes referred to as “globalization” states cede authority to supra-national and sub-national levels of government as well as to non-hierarchical spheres of governance. But states also take on new functions in organizing and steering the emerging trans-border governance processes. A restructured territorial state, which is no longer of the Keynesian national welfare type, remains central to the management of capitalism.

Two recent major studies by Manuel Castells and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed the future of the capitalist economy, the modern state, and social struggles in the light of new information and communication technologies, new paradigms of production, and the dynamic of globalization. Castells' trilogy on The Information Age has been acclaimed as a persuasive interpretation of the contemporary economy, society, and culture and is widely used in teaching. Although less student-friendly in style, Hardt and Negri's scholarly volume on the apparently seamless integration of global economic and political power in Empire also became an international best seller and was heralded as offering 'the next big idea'. This article is more modest in its ambition and aims merely to compare and contrast some key arguments in the two texts. It does not provide detailed exegeses of either text in its entirety nor relate them to their respective authors’ wider body of work. Some key arguments in these texts must therefore be ignored and my critique cannot benefit from putting them into their authorial contexts. Both studies can nonetheless be read on their own and in their own terms. It is on the basis of one such reading that I will advance two main claims.  ...

Abstract.This article develops a critical realist, strategic-relational analysis of the gendering of the state. It draws freely from feminist theorists, recent work on masculinity, and some of the insights of ‘queer theory’. My aim is to show the contingently necessary nature of the gender biases in the state’s institutional architecture and operation and show how these can be illuminated through a critical realist, strategic-relational perspective. The article has four main parts. These deal with (a) critical realism and the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA); (b) its implications for analyzing gender selectivities; (c) the gender selectivities of advanced capitalist democratic states; and (d) some implications of strategic selectivity for feminist action.

This article develops a distinctive critical realist analysis of structure and agency. It first describes Roy Bhaskar's account of critical realism; then discusses critical realism in general; next introduces Anthony Giddens's structuration theory and two particular applications of critical realism to structure and agency – those of Bhaskar and Margaret Archer; and, finally, presents a third such application based on the strategic-relational approach. The latter goes beyond conventional analyses of the duality, dualism, or dialectic of structure and agency by studying the recursive conditioning, mutual coupling, and complex co-evolution of structure and agency and, above all, by stressing the differential, spatio-temporal relationality of structure and agency. Its advantages over other approaches should emerge as we proceed. Critical Realism and Transcendental Naturalism Although 'critical realism' is a relatively recent term and the package of ideas linked with the Bhaskar 'school' is certainly distinctive and has its own logic, 2 many basic concepts and explanatory principles involved in critical realism have a longer history. A non-partisan, non-teleological genealogy has yet to be written. But Marx would figure as a major precursor both philosophically and in substantive theoretical terms; and others have independently 'discovered' several key themes articulated by Bhaskar and his associates. Moreover, while the initial revival of philosophical interest in the possibilities of critical realism in the social sciences in the last 30 years is strongly (and legitimately) associated with Bhaskar, his own work moved into a complex philosophical and methodological analysis of the dialectic as the pulse of 1 Andrew Sayer gave me valuable comments on this article; the usual disclaimers apply.

This paper develops a state- and regulation-theoretical approach to the European Union as an emerging political system and its role in promoting economic growth. Based on critical reviews of alternative theoretical positions, it argues that: (a) the emerging Europolity is a crucial political site in an evolving system of multi-scalar meta-governance, organized in the shadow of post-national statehood, of the contradictory and conflictual processes of Europeanization in a still emerging world society; (b) the Europolity is a key element in an ongoing transition from different forms of Keynesian welfare national state to different forms of Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime, with the EU having a major role in promoting the knowledge-based economy and the modernization of social policy through new forms of economic and political organization; and (c) an important element in this new role for the Europolity is the open method of coordination, which can nonetheless be seen as flawed, for reasons that in part affect most forms of governance in capitalist societies and in part are specific to the open method of coordination in a European context.

This article explores the implications of making the cultural turn in the engagement of economic and political geography with issues of political economy. It seeks to steer a path between a fetishistic, reified economics that naturalizes economic categories and a soft economic sociology that focuses on the similarities between economic and other socio-cultural activities at the expense of the specificity of the economic. We show how combining critical semiotic analysis with an evolutionary and institutional approach to political economy offers one interesting way to achieve this goal. An evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis enables us to recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as establishing how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized; and Marxian political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. The paper illustrates these arguments with a case study on the Flemish 'anchoring debate' as a specific regional economic development strategy. It concludes with a set of guidelines for the further development of cultural political economy.

This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general propositions are illustrated from ‘economic imaginaries’ (other types of imaginary could have been examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisis-interpretation and crisis-management give this example some substance. The conclusion notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.

Bob Jessop applies cultural political economy to the global economic and ecological crisis. He presents theoretical preliminaries concerning economic and ecological imaginaries, and then goes on to highlight the multidimensional nature of the current crisis and struggles over its interpretation.

This article critiques the institutionalist literature on varieties of capitalism and the more regulationist comparative capitalisms approach. It elaborates the alternative concept of variegated capitalism and suggests that this can be studied fruitfully through a synthesis of materialist form analysis and historical institutionalism within a world-market perspective. It highlights the role of institutional and spatiotemporal fixes that produce temporary, partial, and unstable zones of stability (and corresponding zones of instability) within the limits of the crisis-prone capital relation, and illustrates this from the crisis of crisis-management in the Eurozone crisis.

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky’s work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

This article explores challenges to the state and state power originating in the world market and the world of states. It proposes an approach useful for this and other purposes and identifies reference points for discussing recent challenges. This cannot be the 'state in general' but must comprise well-specified, actually existing state forms. It then explores crises as an objectively overdetermined, subjectively indeterminate condensation of challenges that pose problems of crisis-management and may also lead to crises of crisis-management. It examines the interaction of economic and political crises and their possible role in the alleged decline of liberal democracy.

The article divides the history of Thatcherism into seven main stages from its pre-history before 1979 through to the revival of the neoliberal project by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010–2015. This periodization is based on the changing strategic line of Thatcherism and is related not only to Mrs Thatcher’s practice of conviction politics as a political leader but also to the defining features of neoliberalism considered as an economic and political project. The analysis then reviews the features of the neoliberal regime shift instituted under Mrs Thatcher once it had been consolidated, including the strengthening of the City of London and a finance-dominated accumulation trajectory at the expense of uneven development elsewhere in the United Kingdom and, eventually, the financial crisis that undermined the New Labour Government in 2007–10. This crisis was the pretext for the previously noted revival of the Thatcherite project. The article then considers the dialectic of authoritarian populism and statism and ends with brief remarks on how the recent and continuing fisco-financial crisis has provided an opportunity for the revival of a ‘two nations’ neoliberal austerity politics.

This article examines the use of competition as an object and mode of governance. It first considers how competition might become a principle of economic organization and, relatedly, how it may become part of state projects and practices. Second, it comments on the discursive and material dimensions of competition, considering it as a social construct and as a social constraint. Third, it examines the rather idealized representations of competition in the broader doxa of liberalism and neo-liberalism considered in terms of a rough threefold distinction among economic, political, and ideological imaginaries and the limits to the reproduction of these doxa in terms of the complexities of capitalist social relations. Fourth, it explores the complexities of competition in the actually existing world and their role in differential accumulation. In this context it distinguishes neo-classical, Austrian, and Schumpeterian views on competition and entrepreneurship and their contribution to equilibration or creative destruction. Fifth, it considers efforts to steer competition through, inter alia, the competition state and competition law. Sixth, it relates competition to other modes of governance and identifies limits to its role in this regard and introduces ‘meta- governance’ as a response to these limits. Finally, seventh, it comments on the fetishization of competition as a means to subsume society under the dominance of profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation. It concludes with comments on the limits of competition in relation to fictitious commodities and goods and services that contribute to human flourishing.

On the State comprises edited versions of three lecture courses that Pierre Bourdieu delivered between 1989 and 1992 at the Collège de France during his tenure of a research chair in sociology at that institution (1982–2001). Beginning with the well-worn theme of the difficulties of thinking and studying the state, then illustrating the importance of state effects, the lectures conclude with detailed accounts of the sociogenesis of the dynastic and then the bureaucratic state from the twelfth century onwards. These topics indicate that Bourdieu did not aim to develop a general theory of the state as a universal, or of state formation wherever it occurred, nor to undertake comparative historical analyses of states and empires, nor to provide a comprehensive account of particular states. Rather, he aimed to sketch and illustrate a research programme, based on his own core concepts and the logic of practices, which would explore the genesis of the modern European state and some distinctive features and contradictions of its typical modus operandi. The analysis in On the State draws mainly on secondary analysis of selected studies of England and France with supplementary material drawn from imperial Japan and contemporary China, but it also supplements these cases with earlier or parallel studies conducted by Bourdieu and his collaborators on the state’s role as ‘the central bank of symbolic capital’ in organizing other social fields, such as housing, education, marriage, public opinion, law and the profession ...

This book has been an unconscionably long time in the making. My interest in theories of the state and state power dates back some twelve years or more and my interest in epistemological and methodological issues in theory construction is even longer-lived. But the immediate stimulus to undertake a theoretical investigation into recent Marxist analyses of the capitalist state came from two discussion groups in which I have been involved during the last five years: the Conference of Socialist Economists group on the capitalist state and the ‘Problems of Marxism’ seminar at the University of Essex. Some preliminary results of this investigation were published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1977 and I have since published several other papers on various aspects of postwar Marxist theories of the state, law, and politics. Nonetheless the greatest part of the current book is newly published here and the book as a whole draws together for the first time the principal theoretical and methodological conclusions of my various studies to date on these matters. [...]

Preface
The idea for this book first took shape in early 1979 and it has been some five years in coming to fruition. I have long been interested in theories of the capitalist state in general and the work of Poulantzas in particular. I was able to meet Poulantzas for the first time in April 1979 when he addressed the annual conference of the British Sociological Association at Coventry. There I participated in one of his final interviews (see 1979I.a) and mentioned that I had been approached to write a book on his life and work. With characteristic modesty Nicos thought that it was overdoing things to devote a book to such matters but a month later he wrote saying that he had changed his mind. He declared that no author was completely contemporary with his own intellectual development and that his own work was often hard to understand. Someone who could stand back from it and write a critical interpretation would probably discover hidden aspects and implications and draw out new lines of investigation. Nicos added that he would like to reach a wider audience and hoped that my critique would be less difficult than his own work. Thus encouraged I corresponded further with Poulantzas and we agreed that I should undertake a study with full critical freedom – this was in no way to be an ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ account and no punches were to be pulled. In turn Poulantzas promised every co-operation and offered to reply to any criticisms in an interview to be included at the end of the book.

Some months afterwards, Poulantzas took his own life. The hopes of many that he would continue to make an important contribution to theoretical and political debate on the left were shattered. But his example as a committed intellectual and political comrade still lives on. Although I was unable to proceed with this work as we had planned, I have received much help from Nicos’s wife, Annie Leclerc, and his father, Aristides Poulantzas. Many colleagues, friends, and comrades of Poulantzas also gave much support and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Constantine Tsoucalas for their generous help and support. I also gained much from interviews and discussions with Etienne Balibar, Pierre Birnbaum, Isidoro Cheresky, Georgos Dimitrarkis, Angelos Elephantis, Emilio de Ipola, Kostas Filinis, Nicos Mouzelis, Theodoros Pangalos, Goran Therborn, and Henri Weber. Nonetheless, given the significant theoretical and political differences among them as well as the likely divergences between their views and mine, I take full responsibility for the interpretations and arguments presented below.

Choosing an approach to a theoretical and political work which is as rich and complex as that of Poulantzas is always difficult. As my studies proceeded it became increasingly apparent that many interpretations of his work were fundamentally misleading. Accordingly this book concentrates on presenting as full and accurate an account of Poulantzas’s theoretical and political development as possible. No account can really be theoretically and political innocent, of course; and I do write from the viewpoint of one who believes that Poulantzas has made a substantial contribution to postwar Marxist theory and whose own work has clearly been influenced by his various studies. It is for this reason that the substantive chapters first offer a reconstruction of Poulantzas’s views and then present my own criticisms of some, if not all, of these same arguments. Hopefully readers can then form their own judgements independently of my commentaries and take the opportunity to disagree with my criticisms.

The need to set the record straight explains why I have not dealt at length with the many commentaries and criticisms of Poulantzas’s work or the numerous studies which claim to apply it to specific case studies. For the account presented here is often at odds with the received wisdom about Poulantzas’s work. It would have extended this book inordinately to have replied to each and every critique and I have dealt only with criticisms which help to illuminate the present study. This means that I ignored the most famous critique of all. For the debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas is fundamentally misleading about the theoretical issues and political implications at stake -largely because of the complicity between both protagonists in over-stating the structuralist character of Poulantzas’s arguments. Hopefully this claim will be justified in my comments on Political Power and Social Classes in subsequent chapters. Similar considerations apply to many other commentaries and I hope that, if the current work puts an end to some lines of criticism, it will stimulate many others. Poulantzas himself certainly welcomed ideological contestation as a key to theoretical and political progress and one can only commend this stance.

In writing this book I have received much support and advice from my own friends and colleagues as well as those of Poulantzas. For help with the documentation I would particularly like to thank Petros Stamoulis for his unstinting work in translating many articles, journalism, and interviews of Poulantzas from the Greek and for tracing some of them; George Anagnostopoulos and Grigoris Ananiadis for tracing and translating other pieces by Poulantzas; Annie Leclerc for lending me her archive of Nicos’s French articles, journalism, and interviews; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Isidoro Cheresky for providing two worthwhile articles at a late stage; and Noelle Burgi for chasing references in France when all else seemed to have failed. For help with the argumentation I would particularly like to acknowledge the many comments received from Simon Bromley, who suggested — within one week — both how to start and to end the book; Steven Kennedy, who made several valuable comments on the penultimate draft and whose editorial patience I hope to have rewarded with the final version; and Ruthy Laniado, whose questioning sharpened the ideas on strategy in the concluding chapter. I have also gained much from discussions with Grigoris Ananiadis, Kevin Bonnett, Anthony Giddens, Joachim Hirsch, Ernesto Laclau, Tom Ling, Harold Wolpe, and Tony Woodiwiss. The students on my courses at the University of Essex probably also heard rather more about Poulantzas than they would always have liked and gave me the opportunity to try out ideas. For other kindnesses which have helped to sustain me during this study I would like to thank Kevin Bonnett for his friendship and encouragement over many years; Petros and Angeliki Stamoulis for guiding me round Athens, conducting the Greek interviews, and offering my family their parents’ hospitality; Grigoris Ananiadis and Blanca Muniz for many conversations about the Greek political conjuncture and much else besides; Noelle Burgi for hospitality whilst I was conducting interviews in Paris and Jean-Yves Pôtel for sharing her burden; and, last but not least, Suzanne Bailey for helping to see the book to completion at a crucial stage in my life.

Finally I would like to thank New Left Books and New Left Review for permission to quote from the English translations of Poulantzas’s books and his critical response to Miliband and Laclau (1976a) Pamela and Julian Jessop helped with the preparation of the final typescript and provide a constant source of inspiration. It is to them that I dedicate this book on the fifth anniversary of Poulantzas’s death and in the hope that they will one day see the better future for which he struggled.

Page 1. STATE THEORY Putting Capitalist States in their Place BOB JESSOP Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. tate Theory utting the Capitalist State in its Place ob Jessop This book makes a very substantial contribution to ic literature on the state. ...

Contents List of figures and tables vii Preface viii Abbreviations xii Acknowledgements xiv Introduction 1 PART I ON THE REGULATION APPROACH 1 Early regulation approaches in retrospect and prospect 13 2 Fordism and post-Fordism 58 3 Fordism, post-Fordism and the capitalist ...

First published in 1974, this study of British political culture provides a radical critique of contemporary theories of working class deference and voting patterns. Drawing not only on previously unpublished opinion poll data but also the evidence of his own surveys, the author provides convincing evidence for his reformulation of the deference and civility themes, which he sees in terms of a theory of social order in class stratified societies. Comparative data from other European countries support this approach. The book ends with some incisive comments on the implications of the revised class perspective for comparative political research and future studies of British political culture.

Neither Luhmann nor Laclau-Mouffe take the state as their principal theoretical object. Luhmann aimed to develop a universal systems theory in which politics was one among several important functional systems; and Laclau-Mouffe have been more interested in developing an ontology of ‘the political’ than in theorizing the state as a distinct ontic structural ensemble. Indeed, although he later modified this view, Luhmann initially presented the state as no more than the self-description of the political system (contrast 1990a with 2000b: 116-118, 244f, 392).; and, although Laclau and Mouffe each referred to the state in different respects before their joint discourse-analytical turn, they subsequently focused on hegemony and radical democracy. Thus we must explore the relevance of their more general arguments to Marx’s state theory.

This chapter offers an alternative regulationist analysis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism based on a strategic-relational re-interpretation of the capital relation. In so doing, it seeks to steer a middle course between the overly economistic 'hard political economy' of the Parisian regulation approach with its solid roots in institutional and evolutionary economics and the overly politicistic 'soft economic sociology' of the regulation approach as interpreted by many non- Marxist political scientists, geographers, and other social scientists. To date the regulation approach has proved itself good at analysing the origins of Fordism, its heyday, and its crisis mechanisms. It has been less good at analysing the development of the crisis of Fordism in real time (as had once been proposed, see Boyer 1990: 111) and even less so in predicting what is likely to replace it. My aim below is to provide an alternative framework for thinking through this issue by returning to Marx's critique of political economy and its concern with the contradictions of the capital relation considered as an economy of time. But it also seeks to extend and concretize Marx's critique through a periodization of capitalism. This is based on the more 'middle-range' institutional analyses of the regulation school, the insights of Gramscian and Poulantzasian state theory, and recent work on the narrative features of the social world. For such an approach allows a positive content to be given to the otherwise vague notion of post- Fordism in terms of multiple strategies for securing a transition to a globalizing knowledge-based economy and the widespread transformation of the social formation to facilitate this. It also allows us to identify some of the obstacles to this transition and the principal contradictions and lines of conflict that would shape the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and learning society. And it allows us to examine the continuities as well as discontinuities and the 'conservation-dissolution' effects with which the transition to post-Fordism is associated.

Globalization has a multitude of contested meanings. Moreover, considered as an allegedly existing process, it lacks any clear causal status. This makes it hard to relate globalization to cities and social movements -- especially as the natures of cities and social movements are themselves disputed. These difficulties have shaped the order of argument in the following discussion. First, before addressing entrepreneurial cities and the scope they might offer to social movements to expand the social economy, I offer some general remarks on the 'chaotic concept' of globalization. I also comment on some of the complex processes which are currently shaping globalization. The second topic is the highly mediated, but nonetheless real, relationship between globalization and the changing economic and social problems said to confront mature welfare states in advanced capitalist societies. After considering the specific ideal-typical features of these welfare states, the emerging features of a new type of welfare regime are briefly discussed. These economic and social problems and their reflection in new forms of economic and social reproduction are especially evident in cities. Thus a third concern is the rise of so-called 'entrepreneurial cities' in response to the manifold crisis of Atlantic Fordism and their efforts to maintain or enhance their position in an intensifying inter-urban competition. A fourth topic is the limits to any and all attempts to enhance the competitiveness of cities within the framework of a globalizing economy. Even successful cities face problems in this regard; and, of course, there are always losers in this process too. One response to these problems provides the focus for the fifth part of the chapter: the renewed interest on the part of some social movements and some urban authorities in the social economy. The concluding section offers some general observations on the role of the social economy in the re-scaling of economic and social life within a global society.

Marxist approaches to power are distinctive in focusing on its relation to class domination in capitalist societies. Power is linked to class relations in economics, politics, and ideology. The aim of much recent Marxist analysis has been to show how class power is dispersed throughout society, in order to avoid economic reductionism. In capitalist societies the state is considered to be particularly important in securing the conditions for economic class domination. Marxists are also interested in why dominated classes collude in their oppression and address issues of resistance and strategies to bring about radical change. In this chapter, as well as a summary of the main trends in contemporary Marxism, Jessop also offers a brief assessment of its disadvantages as a sociological analysis of power: its neglect of social domination that is not directly related to class; a tendency to over-emphasize the coherence of class domination; the continuing problem of economic reductionism; and the opposite danger of a voluntaristic account of resistance to capitalism.

Poulantzas claimed that State, Power, Socialism, his last major work, completed the theory of the capitalist type of state that Marx and Engels had left unfinished (1978a). While this immodest but provocative claim certainly merits discussion, it cannot be seriously evaluated in a short essay. Instead I will advance four main arguments. First, Poulantzas developed a major original contribution to the theory of the capitalist type of state that goes well beyond most conventional Marxist analyses and contrasts markedly with studies of the state in capitalist society. Second, he developed a broader approach to the state as a social relation that holds for the capitalist type of state, diverse states in capitalist social formations, and statehood more generally. Third, he adopted both approaches in his own theoretical and historical analyses. And, fourth, his analysis of the current form of the capitalist type of state was highly prescient, with ‘authoritarian statism’ far more evident now than when he noted this emerging trend in the 1970s. After I have advanced all four arguments, I will also note some basic limitations to Poulantzas’s approach to materialist state theory, concluding that State, Power, Socialism should be regarded as a modern classic.

Corporate governance and its regulation are continuing concerns in modern market economies. Nonetheless the salience of these issues varies – conjuncturally according to the incidence of scandals at the level of the rm or sector and structurally with the outbreak of crises in the overall design and implementation of corporate governance regimes and their regulation. This temporal differentiation is linked to variations across economic sectors and varieties of capitalism. Responses to crisis also vary in these terms. In the spirit of the present book, this chapter develops a general meso- and macro-level account of corporate governance and its regulation (or metagovernance) that builds on complementary perspectives on the political economy of the economy and the political economy of the political. These are the regulation approach in evolutionary and institutional economics and the strategic- relational approach respectively. Both adopt a methodological relational approach and recognize the continued relevance of the critique of political economy. It is nonetheless worth distinguishing them because one is more sensitive to the logic of the pro t-oriented, market-mediated process of accumulation and the other to the logic of the policy-oriented, territorially-grounded exercise of political power. The relative importance of these logics, their structural coupling and their strategic coordination are crucial issues for a coherent account of the form and function of corporate governance regimes, which are located at the intersection of the political economy of the economy and the political.

The regulation approach to capitalism is a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics as well as in the more general development of the 'new political economy'. Moreover, although it originated in economics and many of its principal advocates are still based largely in this discipline, it has also spread well beyond economics. Indeed it has a major role in heterodox analyses of diverse topics in the political, social, and cultural spheres as well as contributing to post-disciplinary studies at the interface of several academic fields. This expansion of the regulation approach beyond economics can be related to its concern to develop a critical political economy of contemporary capitalism that emphasises the role of extra-economic as well as economic factors in the alternation of periods of relatively stable capital accumulation and of its crisis-induced restructuring, re- scaling, and re-regulation. Not only do the various schools and tendencies of the regulation approach (or RA) take extra-economic and economic institutions seriously but they also recognise the transformative role of social action. For regulationists deny that there is anything automatic about periods of stability (capitalism is not self- stabilising) or about capitalist restructuring in response to crises (capitalism is not self-healing). Instead they see a crucial role for social agency in both regards. This interest in social agency extends beyond a concern with likely future scenarios in capitalist development and the social forces that might be mobilised behind them to include, for some contributors at least, spirited advocacy of real emancipatory alternatives -- inspired by socialist, ecological, feminist, or other social movements.

This article develops a strategic-relational approach to the gender selectivities of the state – an approach that I first developed to analyze the complex relations between the economy and the state. Although the substantive theme differs, the general line of argument is the same. In applying it to this topic, I have drawn freely from feminist theorists, recent work on masculinity, and some of the insights of "queer theory".1 My aim is to show the contingently necessary nature of the gender biases involved in the state's institutional architecture and operation and suggest ways to explain this. The essay has four main parts. These deal with (a) the nature of the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA); (b) its implications for analyzing gender selectivities; (c) basic aspects of the gender selectivities of advanced capitalist democratic states; and (d) some implications of strategic selectivity for feminist action. The article ends with some general observations on the complexities of describing and explaining gender selectivities within an anti-essentialist framework.

This chapter relates four main forms of neoliberalism and their development to the interaction of capital's economic logic and the territorial logic of imperialism in the world market and interstate system. An important, but by no means exclusive, role is played by US transnational capital and imperial interests. For, despite the loss of American economic hegemony and multiple challenges to its domination from the 1980s onwards, the ideational and structural capacity of US economic and political power to shape the world remains preponderant on a global scale. This is related to the active and/or reactive integration of key features of US economic paradigms into strategies pursued by many of the key economic and political forces in other economies and to the formation of transnational blocs organized under US hegemony (or, at least, dominance) that promote policies on scales ranging from the global to the local that tend to favour the interests of an imperial USA and its major economic and political allies. This reflects and tends to reproduce the continuing 'ecological dominance' (see below) of forms of financial innovation that have been promoted by the US federal government, related international economic apparatuses, and transnational financial capital.

To re-read the Communist Manifesto today is to engage in a strange and paradoxical encounter in time and space. There are some passages which seem so prophetic that they could have been written just a few years ago and others that are clearly dated, if not antiquated or plain wrong. The language of the Communist Manifesto is certainly not that of the media-hungry politician of today's audio-visual age nor is it that of today's ‘value-neutral’ social scientist. But who can deny the vivid imagery of the Communist Manifesto or the power of its arguments? Another text by Marx, the 1859 Preface to a ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, which is more theoretical than political, has also significantly influenced the interpretation of Marx’s intellectual project, historical materialism, and Marxism more generally. This chapter considers both texts and asks, among other things, whether they offer useful guidelines for the transition from capitalism to socialism or, conversely, from state socialism to capitalism.

This chapter is not directly concerned with the emergence of sub-regionalism in East Asia or its relationship to the so-called 'Asian Crisis'. Instead it offers some conceptual and theoretical ground-clearing both to clarify what is at stake in studying sub-regionalism and to relate the latter phenomenon to the more general re-scaling of economic, political, and social processes that has recently been occurring. It suggests how sub-regionalism can be studied as the product of interaction among the wide range of processes and strategies that are often subsumed under the popular, if vague, labels of globalization and regionalization. And it proposes some ideas about how the resulting 'politics of scale' are being resolved through the restructuring of the state, politics, and policy-making. In this context my remarks are organized around three main issues.

This article examines the social embeddedness and governance of economies from three apparently contrasting but potentially complementary viewpoints. These comprise: first, Polanyi's pioneering historical analyses of the institutedness, general embeddedness, and the dis- and re-embedding of substantive economic activities; second, the French 'régulation approach' to the socially embedded and socially regularized nature of the capitalist economy; and, third, systems-theoretical accounts of the operational autonomy of the modern economy, its material, social, and temporal interdependence with other systems, and the problems that these properties pose for the governance of the interrelations among these functionally differentiated systems.

This chapter considers selected aspects of welfare state restructuring in Britain and certain other advanced western capitalist economies. More specifically it identifies some major shifts in the functions, the scale and modes of delivery of the state's involvement in securing the economic and social conditions for capital accumulation. It explains these shifts in terms of some general economic, political and sociocultural changes in advanced capitalist societies and their implications for economic and social policies. My analysis has three implications for issues relevant to this volume: the relation between changes in social and economic policy; how the territorial scale on which social policies are designed and implemented has changed in line with the re-scaling of the economic and political systems; and the changing balance between market, state and civil society in social policy delivery. In particular, I argue that, relative to the earlier post-war period, social policy is becoming more closely subordinated to economic policy; it is acquiring increasingly important supra- and sub-national dimensions; and its delivery has been subject to a partial rollback of the state in favour of market forces and civil society. Unfortunately a brief chapter requires a one-sided, over-simplied approach. This does not imply that social policy can be explained only through capitalism’s changing dynamic nor that given policy changes always have identical causes or follow the same course. Rather, this chapter aims to reveal aspects of welfare that other accounts overlook. In particular it illuminates Claus Offe’s paradoxical claim that ‘while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state’

The state is a complex institution that has been studied from diverse entrypoints and standpoints. No single theory could ever exhaust its intricacies. This chapter defines its core features and presents five approaches that provide some theoretical and empirical purchase on its roles in local and regional development. It also advocates studying the state in terms of its central role in meta-governance, i.e., in articulating government and governance at different scales and across different social fields. Analyses should also draw on several disciplinary perspectives, consider different kinds of state and political regime, and explore how they are embedded in wider sets of social relations. These suggestions imply that, despite recurrent tendencies to reify the state and treat it as standing outside and above society, the state and its projects cannot be adequately understood apart from their relations to wider sets of social relations.

I would like to advance three theses on Poulantzas’s State, Power, Socialism (SPS 1978). First, Poulantzas formulated a contribution to the theory of the capitalist type of state that goes well beyond conventional Marxist analyses of the state in capitalist society. Second, he conceived the state as a social relation, a concept that holds for the capitalist type of state, diverse states in capitalist social formations, and statehood more generally. Third, his analysis of the current form of the capitalist type of state was highly prescient, with ‘authoritarian statism’ far more evident now than when he noted this emerging trend in the 1970s. Despite some basic limitations, SPS should be regarded as a modern classic.

There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of new forms of governance to solving co-ordination problems in and across a wide range of specialised social systems (such as the economy, the legal system, the political system, and the health system) and in the life world (or, broadly understood, civil society). This interest is reflected in growing ambiguities about the meaning of governance. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I adopt a relatively narrow definition of governance. Thus governance is defined as the reflexive self-organisation of independent actors involved in complex relations of reciprocal interdependence, with such self-organisation being based on continuing dialogue and resource-sharing to develop mutually beneficial joint projects and to manage the contradictions and dilemmas inevitably involved in such situations. Governance organised on this basis need not entail complete symmetry in power relations or complete equality in the distribution of benefits: indeed, it is highly unlikely to do so, almost regardless of the object of governance or the ‘stakeholders’ who actually participate in the governance process. All that is involved in this preliminary definition is the commitment on the part of those involved to reflexive self-organisation in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence.

Poulantzas wrote well before the current hype about globalization took off and before claims about the death of the nation-state had become common. But his work during the 1970s did address some key issues involved in a serious Marxist analysis of the relation between (a) changes in the capitalist economy on a world scale and (b) the basic form and functions of the contemporary capitalist national state. These issues were first broached in a lengthy and important essay on ‘The Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation State’ (1973b in French, 1974b in English, but cited below from 1975, 37-88). They were further discussed in three books, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975), Crisis of the Dictatorships (1976), and State, Power, Socialism (1978). My contribution to this volume will review Poulantzas’s overall argument in the 1970s, noting how it changed in some key respects during this period, and distinguishing between his general theoretical approach and its particular application to Europe (especially France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain) in a specific phase of imperialism. I argue that Poulantzas’s general approach is theoretically more sophisticated and strategically more relevant to the left than much of the current ‘globaloney’ over the future of the national state in an era of globalization. However, I also suggest that his general approach was marred by class reductionism and that he also failed to anticipate future changes in the internationalization of capital. This in turn meant that his specific prognoses were, in key respects, mistaken. Nonetheless his analyses can be improved by introducing additional theoretical considerations which are consistent with the overall Poulantzasian approach as well as by noting certain novel features of the current phase of imperialism. Accordingly, my paper is divided into two main parts: first, a critical appreciation of Poulantzas’s arguments and, second, an account of current changes in the national state from a modified Poulantzasian stance. It concludes with some more general comments on the relevance of Poulantzas’s work and my own remarks to possible changes in the European Union considered in state-theoretical terms.

Complexity is complex. This is reflected, especially in the social sciences, in the status of complexity as a chaotic conception. Thus, I must first reduce the complexity of complexity in order to connect it to governance rather than another topic. Indeed, faced with complexity, such acts of simplification are inevitable for any agent or operating system. This is because ontological complexity enforces selection on natural and social systems alike. One way to classify and interpret such systems is in terms of how they select selections. For social systems this involves simplification through specific meaning systems, forms of representation and limited action repertoires. Thus, we should examine the selectivity of systems and the reflexivity of agents, and explore the dialectic between the complexity of the real world and the manner in which the real world comes to be interpreted as complex. Issues of governance enter here because, if complexity is a feature of the real world (and not just a social construction of particular observers of that world), it has serious implications for attempts to govern complexity. This section revisits arguments about the governance of complexity presented 10 years ago and argues for ‘romantic public irony’ as a response to recognition of the complexity of governance.

My main focus is the changing governance of welfare. But changes in this regard are inseparable from broader changes in the welfare regimes that emerged in advanced western capitalist states in the postwar Atlantic Fordist boom. Thus I will also discuss the social and economic functions that current welfare regimes are expected to perform and the scales on which these functions are undertaken. My analysis starts from the interest in more or less radical reform of postwar welfare states and relates this to the weakening of their governance structures as well as their policy effectiveness by the interaction of various economic, social and political factors.

It is a frequently remarked paradox that democratic institutions should exist in class societies since majority rule seems inconsistent with minority exploitation. But there is less agreement about the implications of this paradox. For it is uncertain whether it justifies the conclusion that the bourgeois democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism or that capitalism is a necessary condition for the full realisation of democracy. Conversely one might question whether democracy permits the tendential elimination of capitalist exploitation and/or if such exploitation is incompatible with the effective functioning of democratic institutions. It is such problems that concern us in this paper. However, rather than confront them immediately and directly, we intend to examine them through the development of a theory of ‘pure democracy’. This analysis is then linked to the nature of the state and class struggle in bourgeois societies. In this way it is hoped to draw out certain conclusions about the contradictions of capitalist democracy that might otherwise remain unstated.

This chapter explores some of the changing forms of competition in an increasingly global economy and the associated reorientation of state activities to secure national competitiveness. Although we try to introduce some order into the confusing and often contradictory political economy literature on competition and competitiveness, the most distinctive feature of our account is its particular approach to the state and the official discourse about competition. We therefore examine the state’s structural selectivity and strategic capacities and relate these to shifts in official discourse about competitiveness.

The Life of Marx: 1818-83 | Marx’s Work on Political Economy | Marx before Marxism | Marx and the Communist Manifesto | Das Kapital and Capitalism | Marxist Method and the Dialectic | Marx’s Approach to Social and Political Analysis | Marx and Engels | Marx’s Originality

Drawing on the French regulation approach and neo-Marxist state theory, this chapter addresses three closely related sets of issues. First, what exactly is involved in theorising the post-Fordist welfare state? Second, approaching the latter as a theoretical object, what might its core features comprise? And, third, is the British state acquiring these features? Arguments about these issues are often vague and, when taken together, frequently prove inconsistent. There is little agreement about the nature of Fordism and post-Fordism in general or the trajectories which might link them—let alone about the post-Fordist state in particular or the transitional regimes which might connect it to its putative Fordist precursor. Unless these problems are resolved, however, it would be premature to anticipate the core features of a post-Fordist welfare regime. Moreover, until these features are spelt out, if only in a preliminary manner, there can be no referent for assessing whether Britain has been moving towards some form of post-Fordist welfare state. It is these three issues in their interconnection that define my agenda here.

This chapter examines the relatively distinct economic and political logics behind government attempts since 1979 to make the City more flexible. We will describe the neoliberal accumulation strategy intended to save Britain from economic decline and the ‘two nations’ popular capitalist political strategy which is meant to save us all from creeping socialism. Although we believe that there is a strong strategic element to Thatcherite politics and policies and that the best way to make sense of Thatcherism is to explore its strategic dimensions, we do not claim that there is one single, overriding strategy: the strategic line is emergent and tendential, subject to change or reversal in the light of new circumstances, and even includes important ad hoc elements as well as broader, long-term objects. Thus, we will argue that, although they have both been clearly discernible as key elements in the emerging strategic line of Thatcherism from 1979 onwards, the purpose, weight and vehicles of neoliberal and popular capitalist objectives have changed several times. We will also argue that, in certain crucial respects, these twin strategies are internally inconsistent, individually self-defeating and mutually contradictory. In particular we will suggest that the Thatcherite government’s neoliberal strategy was ill-suited to the needs of the intense international race for modernisation and that it was further deformed through their concern to secure political support through popular capitalism and social division.

Twenty-five years ago the Labour Party entered office committed to a strategy of economic and social modernisation under the pragmatic leadership of Harold Wilson. Sold under the slogan of ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’, the strategy signified Labour’s attempt to abandon its old cloth-cap image and to complete the reconstruction of Britain it had begun in 1945. Labour now aimed to boost productivity through indicative planning, the sponsorship of large firms to increase economies of scale, an active science and technology policy, regional policy to boost manufacturing employment and reverse industrial decline, and state-sponsored industrial training. The resulting growth would finance political modernisation and an expanding welfare state with strong commitments to education and health. Labour could not realise its programme, however, and soon retreated to short-term economic crisis-management.

Drawing on recent developments in regulationist economics and neo- Marxist state theory, this contribution begins with a brief comment on the nature of social reproduction regimes and the importance of taking proper account of the 'mixed economy of reproduction'. It then addresses four interrelated sets of questions about the recent restruc- turing and possible transcendence of the post-war social reproduction regime associated with Atlantic Fordism, especially in its north-West European guise of the Keynesian welfare state. First what is involved in theorizing 'post-Fordist' social reproduction regimes? Second, con- sidering the latter in relatively abstract theoretical terms, what might its core features comprise? Third, moving to more concrete-complex terms, how might post-Fordist social reproduction regimes be dis- tinguished one from another? And, fourth, what are the respective roles of the state (whether at supranational, national, or local level) and other forms of governance in such regimes? Unfortunately space constraints preclude a detailed answer to all these questions but I will at least try to suggest how they might be addressed.

This volume is most directly concerned with the changing relations between trade unions and the state in the current economic crisis. The contributors do not restrict themselves to this issue, however, since it is closely connected to many other questions. Some of these questions concern the specificity of different national formations and conjunctures and are discussed more fully in the relevant parts of the present volume. Here we intend to examine the economic crises whose specific national character and political repercussions form the backdrop to the following essays. In general terms economic crisis as such has no immediate and unequivocal consequences for union-state relations. To argue otherwise would involve neglecting the complex mediations involved in the organisational forms and strategies of trade unions, various branches and agencies of the state, and other significant economic and political actors. It would mean neglecting the crucial role played by the organisational and political repercussions of economic crisis in prodding the immediate stimulus for reshaping and reworking such relations. This is nowhere mer obvious than in the changing significance of unemployment and inflation and the fact that governments today can be re-elected with record levels of unemployment: a politically unimaginable event in the years when the Keynesian welfare state was at its height. But many other examples could be cited.

In this paper I discuss the prospects for corporatism and monetarism in Britain and, in particular, for their combination in a corporatist monetarism. Let me make it clear at once that I am not arguing that such a system of political economy, with its apparent contradiction in adjecto, is bound sooner or later to arrive in Britain. My argument does not seek to resuscitate Pahl and Winkler’s now ailing prediction of a ‘coming corporatism’ (1974) simply through adding yet one more adjective to the growing list of terms that qualify current discussions of corporatism. Indeed the careful reader will already have noted that the present paper is concerned, not with the prospects for a monetarist corporatism, but, rather, with those for a corporatist monetarism. More precisely still it is concerned with the prospects for the corporatisation of monetarism in Britain.

We have argued above that the recent cuts in public expenditure should not be seen only in quantitative terms. They are part of a more general restructuring of the British state in response to the economic crisis and its political repercussions. This section of our book is therefore concerned to relate the cuts to the broader changes in the British state that have occurred since the early 1960s. This period has witnessed a startling increase in institutional innovations in the organisation of the state apparatus. Initially these changes were aimed at ‘modernising’ key areas of British economic, political, and social organisation and so enabling Britain to cope with and overcome the relative decline of British capital in the world economy. However, not only did these changes fail to halt this decline, they also tended to reinforce various aspects of the crisis of British capital. It is in this context that we must locate the changes in the British state as it attempts to secure greater control over public expenditure, state employees and those with whom the state comes into contact. At the same time, it attempts to ensure that the interventions of the state are better suited to the various needs of capital accumulation. Here we are concerned with the imposition of ‘bourgeois forms’ on the state apparatus rather than with the expansion of the state apparatus into growing areas of social and economic life.

This chapter investigates the reorganisation of the state in post-war Britain. It focuses on four interrelated sets of political relations: (a) the structure of political representation, (b) the social bases of state power, (c) the structure of the state apparatus, and (d) the nature and scope of state intervention. In addition to her involvement in various international economic and political organisations and her integration since 1973 in the European Economic Community, Britain has also experienced major changes in her domestic state system. The main tendencies here are: the increasing importance of functional as opposed to parliamentary representation, the fundamental social democratisation and incipient corporatisation of the social bases of state power, the growing concentration and centralisation of the state system (including the growth of para-state bodies, the strengthening of the coercive apparatus, and involvement in an emergent European state), the development of economic and social programming, and the increasing ‘politicisation’ and ‘étatisation’of social relations in the economy and civil society.

Technological change and rationalisation of production and/or the labour process have always accompanied periods of economic, social, and political development in capitalist societies. Crises have frequently been triggered or exacerbated by the obsolescence of long-established production and labour processes and its inhibitory effects on economic growth and capital accumulation. Conversely, recovery from a major economic crisis has often been accompanied by the introduction of a new technology, which creates new markets and facilitates increased productivity. Throughout its history, industrial development has seen cycles in which a phase of renewal brought about by dramatic technical advance in which the existing technical and social aspects of the labour process are improved and refined. In the period of innovation, particularly at plant and sectoral level but also in the economy as a whole, technological change and rationalisation have led to abrupt adaptation. Conversely, the longer periods of diffusion and maturation which follow have typically involved more gradual processes of modification.

This paper attempts to locate current discussions of corporatism in relation to Marxist political economy and to assess the political and economic significance of corporatist tendencies in the capitalist state. The critique of recent work beings with a review of the most influential definitions of corporatism, then considers the approaches to the state that underpin these definitions, and ends with a reformulation of corporatism as a form of articulation of political representation and state intervention. This critique is followed by some prefatory remarks concerning Marxist theories of the capitalist state with special reference to the analysis of state forms. We then discuss parliamentarism, corporatism, and tripartism and consider their nature, preconditions, and effects. The analysis is followed by some brief reflections on the social bases of different state forms. This helps us to distinguish the role of corporatism in fascist and social democratic regimes in terms of its differential articulation to other forms of representation and intervention and its significance in consolidating the social bases adequate to each form of regime. We conclude with some general observations on the theoretical and empirical analysis of corporatism and its future in advanced capitalist states.

This concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in his efforts to theorize the overall structure and dynamic of capitalism. It has since been widely used, mainly in Marxist political economy and historical studies, to analyse various economic systems. Although there is broad agreement on its general field of application, different approaches exist towards defining and distinguishing particular modes of production. Some of the resulting problems are considered below.

Marx used the concept of mode of production in two main ways; to analyse the economic base and to describe the overall structure of societies. Thus he employed it to specify the particular combination of forces and relations of production which distinguished one form of labour process and its corresponding form of economic exploitation from another. He also employed it to characterize the overall pattern of social reproduction arising from the relations between the economic base (comprising production, exchange, distribution and consumption) and the legal, political, social and ideological institutions of the so-called superstructure. The latter usage is particularly problematic. Its conceptual basis is fuzzy and it encourages monocausal economic analyses of whole societies. But even the more rigorously defined and carefully theorized analysis of production proper involves problems. For Marx concentrated on the capitalist mode of production, discussed it in relatively abstract terms, and considered pre-capitalist modes largely in terms of their differences from capitalism. Many of these ambiguities and lacunae survive today so that the meaning and scope of the concept are still contested.

In this chapter I consider Anthony Giddens’s various contributions to theories of the modern state from two viewpoints.  will first relate his growing interest in the state to his concurrent attempts to criticize and move beyond historical materialism and to develop a theory of ‘structuration’ based on the ‘duality of structure’. And then I will compare his approach to the state with four other recent attempts to ‘bring the state back in’ to social and political theorizing. In combining an immanent critique with such comparisons, a balanced assessment of Giddens’s contributions should be possible.

This chapter explores the constitution of the knowledge-based economy as an increasingly hegemonic meta-object of governance (and, indeed, meta-governance) in response to the crisis of Atlantic Fordism.  It interprets the knowledge-based economy (KBE) as a complex, heterogeneous, and variable assemblage of social relations, which are articulated to a distinctive set of subjectivities and mediated through material objects and social institutions. It also traces the rise of the KBE as a provisional, partial, and unstable product of distinctive discourses and material practices. It should be emphasized at once that this approach does not imply that capitalism is always characterized by such hegemonic meta-objects of (meta-)governance nor that the latter have some predetermined lifespan (let alone a predetermined life-course) that coincides with a preordained logic of capitalist development. Instead the following analysis is concerned with what I have elsewhere termed the ‘contingent necessity’ of durable institutional orders and with what actor-network theorists have elsewhere described as the problem of how Leviathan (and, by extension, other institutional ensembles) get ‘screwed down’ and actors are enrolled behind them (Jessop 1982; Callon and Latour 1981; Callon and Law 1982).

It is a commonplace that Marx did not produce an account of the state to match the analytical power of his critique of the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital. Indeed, although this great work was to have included an extended treatment of the state, Marx did not succeed in committing it to paper. Instead his legacy in this respect comprises an uneven and unsystematic collection of philosophical reflections, journalism, contemporary history, political forecasts, and incidental remarks. It was left to Engels to develop a more systematic account of the origins and nature of the state and to discuss the general relations between state power and economic development. However, while it was Engels rather than Marx who first adumbrated a class theory of the state, the 'General' was no more successful than Marx himself in developing this insight into a complete and coherent analysis of the capitalist state. But this commonplace should not be taken to imply that Marx made no lasting contribution to political analysis. On the contrary it is as much for his theory of proletarian revolution as for his critique of political economy that Marx merits his eponym and continues to have an exceptional posthumous influence. Likewise Engels is as well known for his work on the state and politics as he is for his indictment of early English capitalism or his philosophy of 'scientific socialism'. In this respect it is worth noting that, although Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci also failed to produce a systematic analysis of the capitalist state, their contributions to Marxism are nonetheless heavily weighted towards political analysis and revolutionary practice. Accordingly it is most unfortunate that the rich and varied work of these five leading Marxists (and others) on the state and political power has still to be elaborated and transformed into a coherent theoretical analysis. Such a task is clearly beyond the scope of the present paper but some first steps can be taken in relation to the work of Marx and Engels.

Claus Offe once suggested that 'while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state' (1984: 153, italics in original). Some might dismiss this as a mere rhetorical flourish without theoretical meaning or empirical application. In fact, Offe did attempt to ground his argument in the nature of capitalism; he also noted some of its practical implications. Indeed, his analysis is generally compelling and still repays careful reading. Its main problem lies elsewhere. For, like much theorizing about the crisis of the welfare state in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was shaped by the economic and political horizons of its time. Offe developed his analysis in the context of the postwar Keynesian Welfare State (hereafter KWS) in Europe, North America, and Australasia and did not fully address the more general difficulties involved in capital accumulation. As the Atlantic Fordist system declines further, however, we now have a better understanding of its nature and limitations. It is also easier to distinguish between its particular features and those characterizing capitalism as a whole. Hence my contribution aims to re-specify Offe's analysis for the current stage of capitalism and to ground it in more general aspects of the capital relation.

The idea of nation-state is confused and confusing. It sometimes refers to relatively large territorial states (as opposed to, for example, city-states like Singapore or small principalities like Liechtenstein) and sometimes to states constituted on the basis of an imagined national community whose boundaries coincide with that state’s frontiers. This implies that: (a) not all states are national territorial states; (b) not all national territorial states are nation-states – some are multi-national or have no clear national basis; and (c) not all nations are associated with their own nation-state. In the last case, this could arise because their national identity is denied political expression in the form of statehood and/or because their members are distributed among several states. This raises interesting theoretical questions, which are explored in the conceptual part of the chapter. It also raises important substantive and political questions about the character of European national identity, if any, and the future of the European Union considered as a territorial state and/or nation-state. I address these issues in part two. Lastly, I ask what a post-national world state or polity might entail and address this in terms of whether cosmopolitanism, in some form or other, can transcend national identities, rivalries, and confrontations and provide the basis for a post-national world society.

It is well-known that Gramsci’s ideas were firmly rooted in the historical conjunctures of his native Italy and, more broadly, in the Europe, United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, and the wider international system of his time. But he was also a theorist and activist who was well ahead of his time. Indeed, in certain respects, he can be seen as our own contemporary. This could be illustrated in many ways. I will do so by presenting some of Gramsci's economic ideas and their relevance to recent economic changes.

The present volume comprises six essays. They have been written during the last four years and represent some significant developments in, and departures from, my previous work. The latter has been concerned for some years with the relation between the economic and the political in capitalist social formations. I would now describe this relation in terms of the dialectic between the path-dependent structural coupling and the path-shaping strategic coordination of the economic and political moments of the capital relation in and across different spatial and temporal horizons of action. This is certainly not how my intellectual project was initially conceived more than two decades ago. But it is how I understand it now. For my various studies into this complex set of issues have themselves evolved dialectically. At first I focused on issues in state theory; then I turned to the radical critique of political economy; the next step was to analyze the changing articulation between the state and capital as forms of social relation and to understand attempts to re-design the ways in which the extra-economic conditions for profitable capitalist accumulation are secured; and, most recently, I have become interested in questions of scale and, especially, the dialectic of globalization-regionalization and the consequent re-scaling of economic and political relations. This introduction aims to sketch the genealogy of this project, to note some of its further developments as reflected in the current essays, and to suggest how these ideas can be elaborated in research on the multi-scalar, multi-temporal political economies of the economic and the political.

‘You don’t have to be a postmodernist’, Harvey Molotch argues, ‘to suspect efforts that cast all cities as uniform in their response to larger economic changes’ (1990: 175). Nor, of course, do you have to be an unreformed structuralist to discern intriguing parallels and telling similarities in the responses of contemporary cities to wider forces, such as neo-liberalism and economic globalization. Nowadays most places, it seems, have their very own booster committees, complex networks of public-private ‘partnerships’, and entrepreneurial urban strategies. Indeed, Harvey (1989) has even suggested that a generalized transition is underway from an urban managerialism of the (Fordist) past to an urban entrepreneurialism of the (post-Fordist?) future. Harvey’s concern is not simply with local features of this transition but also extends to the inter-urban context in which they are embedded. He writes that, as ‘inter-urban competition becomes more potent it will almost certainly operate as an “external coercive power” over individual cities ... [bringing] them closer into line with the discipline and the logic of capitalist development [while inducing] ... repetitive and serial reproduction of certain patterns of development (1989: 10).

In this essay I consider the changing articulation of the economic and the political in contemporary capitalism. This topic is often reduced to the changing relationship between markets and the state. The following account broadens such analyses by examining the cultural and social embeddedness of market and state and their discursive and the ways in which they are articulated both discursively and extra- discursively. To illustrate this claim I refer substantively to changes in the state form that has been centrally associated with Atlantic Fordism.

This chapter critically addresses globalization in four ways: (a) contesting the often unstated assumption that globalization comprises a coherent causal mechanism -- or set of causal mechanisms -- rather than a complex, chaotic, and overdetermined outcome of a multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and multi-centric series of processes operating in specific structural contexts; (b) questioning the intellectual and practical search for the primary scale -- whether global, triadic, national, regional, or urban -- around which the world economy is currently organized as if this would somehow be directly analogous to the primacy of the national scale in the thirty years of postwar growth in the circuits of Atlantic Fordism; (c) relating the resulting 'relativization of scale', i.e., the absence of a dominant nodal point in managing interscalar relations, to some basic contradictions and dilemmas of capitalism, the changing bases of accumulation, the changing relation between the economic and political, and the increased competitive importance of the social embeddedness of economic activities; and (d) noting how these problems are being addressed through economic and political projects oriented to different scales -- with little consensus as yet on how these projects and scales might be reconciled.

The title suggested by the editors for my contribution for this Festschrift poses interesting questions of historical interpretation. I am reminded of the -- possibly apocryphal -- story about the Chinese ambassador in Paris who, when asked to comment on the historical significance of the French Revolution after 200 years, replied that 'it was too soon to say'. His enigmatic response may have been no more than a diplomatic evasion; but it can also be seen as having a deeper methodological and political relevance. For all events are potentially polyvalent -- both materially and symbolically. Their substantive historical significance will change as their material repercussions are modified through subsequent actions; and their symbolic significance may be changed if they are articulated into different interpretive frameworks. This is already evident from the New Labour victory in the British general election of May 1st last year. For not only did a new leadership exploit the previous two general election defeats in 1987 and 1992 to radically change the Labour Party organizationally and programmatically -- thereby creating the conditions for a landslide victory in 1997; but that very landslide victory is already being re-interpreted by leftist critics as a lost chance to break with the legacy of Thatcherism.

It is odd to begin a book on key sociological thinkers with Karl Marx. He had two career ambitions as a student: journalism or university teaching. After disruptions due to censorship, suppression, and political activism, he did eventually eke a living from extensive economic and political reporting. He never secured an academic post. Even had he succeeded, he would not have practised sociology. For he dismissed this discipline as ‘rubbish’ on reading its founding father, Auguste Comte; and its real intellectual 'takeoff' occurred much later in the 19th century.  Moreover, contrary to what one might infer from the history of Marxism after his death, Marx had little political or theoretical influence in his own lifetime. The Communist Manifesto, intended as a popular account of scientific socialism, had little impact when published. His collaborator, Engels, was better known than Marx in the 1840s and 1850s—especially for his damning account of the condition of the English working class; and, even after Capital was published, it was Engels’s popularizing works on historical materialism that stimulated study and debate in international socialism. In short, for a leading sociologist, Marx seems to have been an apostate and failure.

Volume 1 The Parisian regulation school: background and general presentation some early works commentaries and critiques. Volume 2 European and American perspectives on regulation: the Grenoble school social structures of accumulation the Amsterdam school the German regulation approach Nordic models commentaries and critiques. Volume 3 Regulationist perspectives on Fordism and post-Fordism: introduction to key issues and approaches the origins of the Fordist labour process the crisis of Fordism beyond Fordism to...? general reviews. Volume 4 Country studies: North America Europe Japan other East Asian societies socialism and post-socialism. Volume 5 Developments and extensions: recent theoretical innovations social movements and identity politics space and scale cities globalization some emerging issues recent reviews.

Introduction - post-socialism, the negotiated economy and other Western models, Jarry Hausner et al. Part 1 Theoretical perspectives: structural competitives and strategic capacities - rethinking state and international capital, Bob Jessop et al institutional theory and the influence of foreign actors on reform in capitalist and post-socialist societies, John Campbell catching up and institutional learning under post-socialism, Bjorn Johnson and Bengt-Ake Lundvall. Part 2 Scandinavian perspectives - the negotiated economy: the negotiated economy - general features and theoreticl perspectives, Klaus Nielsen and Ove K. Pedersen natural resource-based industries - big business and the role of the state - the case of Norway's oil and gas, Ole Beerfjord and Per Heum towards a new Swedish model, Victor A. Pestoff the institutional history of the Danish polity - from a market and mixed to a negotiated economy, Ove K. Pedersen private industrial policy in the Danish negotiated economy, Niels Akerstrom Andersen and Peter Kjaer. Part 3 Post-socialist perspectives - the Polish case: trends and perspectives in the development of a system of interest representation in post-socialist societies, Jerzy Hausner and Andrzej Wojtyna out of corporatism towards neo-corporatism, Jaroslaw Gorniak and Jan Jerschina social limitations for efficient allocations of resources in the post-socialist countries, Jan Czekaj and Stanislaw Owsiak impact of political changes in processes occurring in an enterprise, Stanislaw Rudolf prospects for employee ownership in the process of privatizing the Polish economy, Julian Pankow the drifting society, Jerzy Mikulowski Pomorski.

Critical realism and semiosis (revised version). Fairclough, Norman and Jessop, RD and Sayer, A. (2004) Critical realism and semiosis (revised version). In: Realism, discourse and deconstruction. Routledge, London, pp. 23-42. Full text not available from this archive. ...

Lively debates over the future of the state resurfaced in the 1980s as scholars, critics, and politicians began to suggest that the scale of national states had become too small to solve the world's big problems and too big to solve its little ones. The most frequently cited problems included: (1) the rise of an uncontrolled, possibly uncontrollable, process of capital accumulation that is increasingly and allegedly irreversibly integrated on a world scale; (2) the emergence of a global risk society, (3) the challenge to national politics from identity politics and new social movements based on local and/or transnational issues; (4) the difficulties facing national states in dealing with the particularities of local, metropolitan, or regional economic crises and challenges and overcoming uneven social development and new forms of social exclusion through customized solutions, local participation, and capacity-building; and, more recently, (5) the threat, real or imagined, of new forms of protest, terrorism, and decentralized network warfare. Disputes continue about the impact of such �problems� on the future of the state. Prognoses range from the rise of a new global empire; the rise of a Western hemispheric state; the rise of regional states; the re-scaling of its powers upwards, downwards, or sideways with an important residual role for the national state; a shift from state-based government to network-based governance; a shift from the welfare state to the competition state that entails accelerating rather than moderating economic and social inequalities between persons and places due to uneven development; or a series of incremental changes in secondary aspects of the nation-state that leave its core intact. All of these prognoses refer to various spatial dimensions of the state � political territoriality, place-making and spatial planning, parallel power networks cross-cutting administrative boundaries and territorial borders, and rescaling and changes in their overall articulation. This should provide a warning about reducing changes in the state to their scalar features and about the limits of scalar analysis. This does not, however, justify calls to ignore or deny the role of scalar changes as opposed to putting scale �in its place� within a broader spatio-temporal perspective on the state and its embedding within the political order and its wider social context. Accordingly this chapter undertakes three successive tasks that reflect important concerns in the political economy of scale raised in the introduction to this volume. It first addresses the nature and limits of the scalar turn, identifies different forms of scalar trap, and proposes some ways to reinvigorate scalar analysis within a broader concern with spatiality. It then presents a set of concepts for dealing with the scalar nature of the state in this broader context. In particular, it highlights the importance of focusing on the changing articulation of different dimensions of spatiality, including spatial imaginaries and horizons of action as well as emergent structural properties, as one way to grasp, albeit incompletely, the historical specificity of different state forms. Next it illustrates these arguments through a model of multi-scalar meta-governance as an alternative interpretation of the changing forms of European statehood within the broader context of the world market, the global inter-state system, and world society. Here I respond to the call in the introduction to explore the interconnection between scale and network rather than to treat them in isolation and, in this context, I propose that scale and network have replaced place and territory as the primary axes around which state spatial strategies are developing (Mahon and Keil, this volume). Whereas the meta-theoretical arguments about scale and spatiality have wide-ranging implications, the substantive focus of my analysis is more limited. Specifically, I focus on the implications for the national state of the rescaling of economic and political relations associated with (but not exclusively caused by) the increasing integration of the world market. Different conclusions might follow from focusing on other �problems� � although, on my reading, neo-liberal globalization is currently the most powerful influence on global dynamics (Jessop 2001, 2002b).

This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of state space in historical and contemporary capitalism. The first volume to present an accessible yet challenging overview of the changing geographies of state power under capitalism. A unique, interdisciplinary collection of contributions by major theorists and analysts of state spatial restructuring in the current era. Investigates some of the new political spaces that are emerging under contemporary conditions of 'globalization'. Explores state restructuring on multiple spatial scales, and from a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives. Covers a range of topical issues in contemporary geographical political economy. Contains case study material on Western Europe, North America and East Asia, as well as parts of Africa and South America.

Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon Macleod, State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 355 pp. Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 368 pp. Allen J. Scott, ed., Global City-Regions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 467 pp. John Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 194 pp. Groupement Economie Mondiale, Tiers-Monde, Developpement (GEMDEV), under the direction of Annick Osmont and Charles Goldblum, Villes et citadins dans la mondialisation (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 300 pp. World Bank, World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003), 250 pp. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Territorial Outlook (Paris: OECD, 2001), 291 pp. "Integrating Rural Development and Small Urban Centers: An Evolving Framework for Effective Regional and Local Economic Development," seminar summary from the Rural Development-Urban Development Joint Seminar, World Bank/IFC Headquarters, Washington, D.C., 18-19 March 2003. United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN Habitat), Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements 2001 (London: Earthscan Publications, 2001). Spatial development focuses on geographical areas as opposed to sectors or issues. Spatial policy is important because it attempts to tackle global problems and to unite and motivate people. This review examines a number of books and reports that help to realistically relate trends to a norm-driven spatial vision or strategy. Two major problems need addressing. The first is that modernization is pushing the globe in directions that deny many of the ends of the good life for different "communities" (any bounded space) and put the environment of the planet at risk for future generations. New spatial visions may be a dialectic join of history and its current unfolding but ought not be dismissed out of hand as mere nostalgia or ideology. Economic growth is a means and not an end--and not the only means. In this review essay, the megacities with sharpening social fragmentation are given as the major examples with repercussions to all other problems. The second is part consequence of the first--that bonds of spatial and social order have broken down with increased interdependency and not been replaced by a new and acceptable global order. The form of spatial governance and government from village to global is taken as the major issue area, and the books are examined for problem trends, objectives, and pathways where the means of global norms and action can begin to move. Global dialogued norms can do three things: set the global spatial vision broad enough to reconcile urban dynamics with rural respect for nature everywhere; give the framework in which bounded communities can decide their own futures; and define transgression and grade intervention by a higher spatial level in the affairs of a lower level--including social justice between communities and the preservation of order. There are two conceptions of vision in the literature: interpretive vision devises strategies to address anticipated spatial development trends; norm-driven vision aims to control and to circumscribe these trends. The prospect of forty-two new megacities inhabited by more than 10 million people being created over the next fifty years, with only one in the developed world, is unsettling. In 2001, of seventeen megacities, four are in developed countries. (1) What is the strategic vision contained in the World Bank's World Development Report 2003 that encourages both global and in-country migration? The report claims that the demand for low-cost labor in developed countries and the supply in poor countries will grow. Neither megacity multiplication nor massive migration flows are victories but rather the defeat of spatial vision. …

Corporatism and syndicalism have a certain family resemblance as political philosophies and political projects committed to functional representation, but they also differ in other, more fundamental respects. Viewed as forms of economic and political interest intermediation, their crucial common feature is explicit organization in terms of the functions performed in the division of labour by those represented through such organizational forms. Such representation can be organized in various ways, however, which enables one to distinguish syndicalism from corporatism and their variant forms. Both historically and comparatively, syndicalism is simpler and so easier to define. Essentially it comprises an economic and political movement of the working class that is avowedly both anti-capitalist and anti-statist; and its ultimate goal is to abolish capitalism and the state in favour of a loose decentralized federation of worker-owned and worker-managed production units. Corporatism is harder to encapsulate in a sentence or two. But there is broad agreement that most corporatist projects accept the legitimacy (or, at least, medium-term inevitability) of both market forces and state institutions but also seek to limit, modify and guide their operation by linking them formally and substantively to functional representation.

Crises have been studied in academia in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. However, recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, primarily due to the pervasiveness of crises throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and onwards, and an associated inflation in crisis discourses. The 1970s witnessed a range of political and economic crises - the Nixon Shock, the 1973 oil crisis, stagnation, and intensified class struggles as well as the emergence of new social movements - which contributed to the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the US and the UK, respectively. The 1980s in turn witnessed high-profile commercial, industrial, and technological disasters (e.g., the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill) that reignited interest in disasters as well as crises and how to prevent, manage, or resolve them. A further major boost came with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Indeed, this led to greatly increased funding and efforts to enhance coordinated research and planning. Thus, as Boin, McConnell and ‘t Hart point out, this has triggered efforts to unify “a disjointed, segmented set of niches within the social sciences” concerned with crises (2008, p. 6). The newly rediscovered terror threat in the “homeland”, the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis in the “heartland” of finance-dominated neoliberal accumulation, and the rise of new forms of instability and popular resistance accentuated by the economic and political turmoil consequent upon the 2008 financial crisis, have all contributed to a diversification of the study of crises. One current is preoccupied with the cause and nature of crises, another focuses on crisis management, and a third on learning and lesson-drawing processes post-crisis. These currents may overlap. As Shrivastava notes, the “expansion of crisis research and practice is undeniably impressive”; however, “there is no single paradigm guiding research” and there are “many different disciplinary voices, talking in different languages to different issues and audiences” (1993, p. 33). This is reflected in crisis research in the fields of organizational studies, economics, political science, public policy, and sociology, as well as international relations. A plurality of perspectives and approaches is appropriate to complex phenomena because each may reveal what others cannot see. However, without serious efforts at synthesis and at rendering commensurable different paradigms and perspectives, the result can be a mosaic with contrasting impulsions and problematiques, creating a ‘tower of Babel’ effect, leading to “difficulties in communication of research results within the research community” (ibid.). It can also lead to serious questioning about what gets lost or overlooked if crisis narratives and an inflationary use of the concept of crisis marginalize other ways of examining recent events and social processes that challenge established inherited routines and experiences (cf. Roitman, 2015; see also Chapter 3). In this sense, while crisis and critique have been closely coupled in the modern era (cf. Koselleck, 1988), it may be time to critique a one-sided concern with crisis at the expense of other ways of construing and explaining significant and/or disruptive events in the modern world. To offer some guidance through this literature, we distinguish crisis from other forms of disruption, identify a key distinction between two broad kinds of crisis, highlight the challenge of symptomatology when it comes to interpreting the nature and significance of crises, and, as the special contribution of this collection, explore different aspects of what we call the pedagogy of crisis. 1. We distinguish disasters from crises in terms of the more accidental nature of disasters, which have the character of one-off events even if they occur regularly or frequently, and the more systemic and recurrent nature of crises, rooted in systemic processes of individual systems and/or the patterned interaction among a plurality of systems. This is reflected in two different, if overlapping, kinds of literature, concerned respectively with the prevention and management of disasters and the regulation of crisis tendencies and challenges of crisis management (see Chapter 3).

Volume 1 The Parisian regulation school: background and general presentation some early works commentaries and critiques. Volume 2 European and American perspectives on regulation: the Grenoble school social structures of accumulation the Amsterdam school the German regulation approach Nordic models commentaries and critiques. Volume 3 Regulationist perspectives on Fordism and post-Fordism: introduction to key issues and approaches the origins of the Fordist labour process the crisis of Fordism beyond Fordism to...? general reviews. Volume 4 Country studies: North America Europe Japan other East Asian societies socialism and post-socialism. Volume 5 Developments and extensions: recent theoretical innovations social movements and identity politics space and scale cities globalization some emerging issues recent reviews.

Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe exageram os aspectos textuais da pratica social em suas reflexoes pos-marxistas. Os autores desenvolveram uma descricao de praticas sociais e da coesao social a partir de termos da linguistica e da teoria do discurso. Seu trabalho traz uma crescente rejeicao ao economicismo e ao reducionismo de classe, e uma enfase crescente na construcao discursiva contingente e contestada da sociedade. A contingencia e a pre-condicao da hegemonia – o terreno em que ocorrem lutas pela hegemonia e a construcao do populismo. Nesse sentido, eles substituem a nocao marxista de primazia causal da economia por uma “primazia do politico”. Isso leva a um anti-fundacionalismo discursivo, no qual e impossivel construir uma sociedade unificada, porque todos os significados e identidades sao contestados, e seus fundamentos institucionais sao potencialmente reativados. O artigo conclui comparando essa exorbitacao da linguagem com uma abordagem de economia politica cultural mais l...

Marx’s analysis of the world market as the historical presupposition and posit of capital and its role in generalizing and intensifying the contradictions of capital on a world scale remains valid. Neo-liberalism and financialization reinforce world market completion, transform North-South relations, and modify relations within the South. Moreover, for Marx, the more integrated the world market becomes, the less scope there is to resolve crises by extending capitalist relations into previously marginal economic zones. When this crisis displacement strategy reaches its limit, increasingly severe general world crises would erupt, thereby indicating the need for a new historical form of production.

This article presents the inaugural memorial lecture at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens. It examines and extends the work of the eponymous Greek legal and political theorist, political economist, and communist intellectual, Nicos Poulantzas, who radically transformed Marxist state theory, made major contributions to the critique of political economy for the era of Atlantic Fordism and post-war American imperialism, and called for a judicious balance between representative and direct democracy to secure a democratic transition to democratic socialism. It first offers some general reflections on the originality, legacy and actuality of Poulantzas's work in these respects and then reconstructs his later views on the critique of political economy before his death in 1979. Noting his neglect of the environment and issues of political ecology, which was typical of the French and Greek left in the 1970s and also rooted in more general features of Marxist theorizing on nature a...

DOI: 10.1177/1742766507078417 2007; 3; 201 Global Media and Communication Nicholas Garnham Habermas and the public sphere ... ■ Nicholas Garnham University of Westminster, London, UK ... Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (eds) After ...

This entry approaches its topic through the perspective of the role of language and ideology in politics and the exercise of state power. It begins by introducing the analyses of Marx (and Engels) on language and its evolution, then considers the relation between their approach to language and ideology in the French Enlightenment sense of the science of ideas (a key influence in Marx’s work), and finally considers the relation between language, ideology, and politics. It notes that Marx rarely referred to ideology as such, usually qualifying the noun (e.g., German Ideology, petty bourgeois ideology) or employing ideology as an adjective to supplement a noun (e.g., ), and then explores the successive ways in which Marx explores ideology, distinguishes it from science, and engages in Ideologiekritik. Referencing, inter alia, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, it also indicates that Marx called for a new political ‘language’ (‘a poetry of the future’) as a precondition for a radical transformation. After some brief comments on the concept of ideology in the Second International and Marxism-Leninism, the analysis turns to the work of Antonio Gramsci, noting the significance of his university studies in philology (specifically historical and spatial linguistics) and then focusing on his Prison Notebooks. It introduces four key concepts and their use in Gramsci’s notebooks: ideology, intellectuals, hegemony, and the state as hegemony armoured by coercion. It also considers folklore, popular culture, and the national-popular. This enables a discussion of the role of struggles for hegemony in the politics of democratic polities or, at least, societies in which mass politics is important. Following another brief interlude on alternative approaches to language and politics in inter-war Western Marxism, the analysis turns to the work of the so-called structural Marxist, Louis Althusser. The key texts here concern those that address ideology, ideological state apparatuses, interpellation, and the expanded reproduction of capitalist social relations. Here I analyse the early analysis of ideological state apparatuses (which involves a critique of Gramsci’s historicism) and a later rapprochement with Gramsci’s work on hegemony. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the work of Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser on language, ideology, and politics, emphasizing continuities as well as discontinuities, and assessing their contemporary relevance.

This chapter approaches global social policy and governance in terms of a strategically-selective and strategically-reflexive dialectic of structure and agency. It links this to the notion of dispositives. These develop in response to a discursively-constituted ‘urgent’ problem (with a ‘real world’ referent) and are consolidated through strategies and apparatuses intended to resolve the problem as this gets (re-)interpreted over time. Global social policy is then disambiguated as an analytical and policy object along several dimensions. Its global nature is explored through the contradictions and dilemmas involved in the co-existence of capitalism and welfare in a single world market with a plurality of territorial states. This generates efforts at metagovernance (or collibration) across territories, places, scales and networks but, given the complexity of global social problems, these efforts are failure-prone.

This chapter explores the origins and aims of the two phases of the WISERD; research programme on civil society. It examines the first phase research agenda and some research results on: locality, community and civil society; individuals, institutions and governance; economic austerity, social enterprise and inequality; generation, life course and social participation. It also outlines the second phase concern with frontiers of civic exclusion and expansion; polarization, austerity and civic deficit; contentious politics of civic gain; material resources, social innovations and civil repair; and data infrastructure and data integration. The influence of David Lockwood’s account of civic stratification is also explored.

Jessop, Bob. 2005. ‘Marx, L’État et la politique by Antoine Artous.’ Historical Materialism 13(2): 241 – 251 DOI: 10.1163/1569206054127282

Artous’s detailed and meticulous book seeks to test the common arguments that Marx either failed to develop a coherent account of the state and politics and/or laid the theoretical foundations for the rise of totalitarianism. Some claim that his work was incomplete, inconsistent, and lacked explanatory power; others, that he could not explain the autonomy of the political and political class struggle but dissolved them into the economic or, at least, the social; yet others, that his ideas about the end of (class) politics, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eventual withering away of the state created the space for a totalitarian political régime. In contrast, Artous sides with those that regard the early Marx as a convincing thinker of the autonomy of the political and as a passionate advocate of the democratic self-institution of the social against the bureaucratic formalism of the modern state; with those that regard the later Marx as a rigorous investigator of bourgeois law, the capitalist state, and their respective roles in the expanded reproduction of capitalism; with those that praise Marx’s analyses of the specificity and effectivity of different political régimes and political class struggles; and with those that regard Marx as a consistent supporter of democratic self-government and the self-constitution of the people. In exploring these issues and debates, Artous has three main objectives: first, to provide a critical exegesis of Marx’s work on the forms of the modern state, law, and political representation, their impact on the nature and dynamics of political struggle, and the prospects for a democratic order that transcends bourgeois liberal democracy; second, to comment on and refute various other interpretations of Marx’s work, primarily those of other Francophone Marxists and social scientists but also of other leading scholars, such as Max Weber, György Lukács, Ernest Mandel, and Jürgen Habermas, whose work has been translated into French; and, third, to outline his own suggestions on the form and functions of the modern state as derived logically from capitalist relations of production. While Artous achieves the first and second aims relatively successfully, he falls seriously short on the third aim, when his arguments are compared to alternative attempts to complete Marx’s theory of the capitalist state, for reasons to be explored below.

This is a curious collection of essays by a prominent contemporary historical sociologist of the state. Hall's earlier work has been quite influential in the study of state formation and one opens this book with high expectations. The topics that the author addresses are certainly important, controversial, and topical; all but one of the essays were penned in the 1990s. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and short conclusion, there are eight essays covering: the rise and consolidation of capitalism in the west and its failure in the Chinese empire, the political stability of liberal democracy, the collapse of state socialist regimes, the role of 'bounded autonomy' in shaping patterns of late development in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the problems of democratic transition and the consolidation of democracies, the historical trajectory of nationalisms, and problems of hegemonic decline in Britain and the USA. Given this wide range of major topics and the author's penchant for historical sociology, one might expect trenchant comments on alternative perspectives and powerful new insights into these problems. Although some readers may find such expectations satisfied, this reviewer was left frustrated and disappointed.

This edited collection presents eighteen selected papers from a conference organized by the editor at Rutgers University in 1998; it appeared in hardback in 2000 and was re-issued in paperback in 2002. It is yet one more contribution to the rapidly expanding literature on globalization with the additional but by no means distinctive selling points that it also deals with regionalism and includes another major buzzword in its title, namely, the increasingly ubiquitous term, ‘knowledge based economy’ (hereafter also KBE). Indeed, its title could be said to encapsulate the currently hegemonic discourse for the after-Fordist era, namely, the globalizing knowledge-based economy. Whether the book delivers on this promise or the title is better interpreted as a marketing device is another matter.

This book is a worthy successor in ambition, theoretical rigor, and empirical grounding to Peck's earlier study, WorkPlace: the Social Regulation of Labor Markets (1996). It not only builds directly on that major intervention into the economic geography of labour markets but also extends it in new theoretical and empirical directions. In particular, Peck now emphasizes the discursive dimensions of the overall reshaping of labour market regimes and the disciplining of workers. He also highlights the role of political struggles, policy making, policy learning, and policy transfer as well as the many scales on which labour market policies are (re)made. In these respects Workfare States addresses what one might call the 'cultural political economy' of the increasingly evident transition in the anglophone economies from the familiar, but apparently discredited, postwar Fordist welfare states towards the naturalization of new workfare regimes that are purportedly more suited to the contemporary era of globalization and neo-liberal hegemony. Peck explores incisively the discursive struggles over the crisis of the welfare state and workfare's contribution to its resolution – initially in the USA and then, spreading through various discursive, economic, and policy channels, in Canada and the United Kingdom and even some social democratic welfare regimes in Continental Europe. He also presents a series of well-researched case studies on the complex political economy of local workfare experiments in Massachusetts and California, their adoption elsewhere in the United States, their translation to Canada (especially in Ontario) and Britain. And he dissects their economic context, their regulatory logic, their role in reinforcing contingent labour markets, their role in reinforcing gender and ethnic stereotypes and differences in the marginal labour force, and their current limits and likely future difficulties. This is an especially important contribution to the overall merit of the work because it enables Peck to interweave his discourse analysis, political analysis, and policy analysis with a detailed account of local labour markets and their place within a broader macroeconomic context.

The two books reviewed here both come from a series edited by Joel Mokyr on the economic history of the western world. But they do not seek to provide exclusively economic explanations for economic history –instead they look to political factors such as territorial organization, taxation, trade, and warfare. Indeed, a key feature of both studies is their critical engagement with issues of socio-spatiality, especially terrestrial and maritime distance, the role of city-states and city-state networks, the territorialization of political power, and centre-periphery relations. Although Grafe focuses primarily on the development of the Spanish state over a 150-year period and Stasavage has far broader canvass geographically and presents data for a 500-year period, both authors mention the influence of the late Stephan Epstein's work on the jurisdictional fragmentation of states and the problems that this poses for centralized political control and the capacity to raise revenues through predation and taxation. Conversely, although both authors refer to the new institutional economics of North and Weingast on the role of elected assemblies in enabling states to raise revenues from taxes rather than predation, Grafe regards their work as an elegant but historically erroneous model whereas Stasavage uses game theory and case studies to provide qualified support for their analysis. Each author not only draws on archival research but also deploys original data sets to challenge conventional wisdom (notably about the role of warfare in territorial state formation), to test old ideas, and develop new insights. They are excellent examples of trans-disciplinary scholarship that employs qualitative and quantitative analysis to produce important revisionist readings of the historical record. This review summarizes the arguments of each text and then draws some general conclusions about the importance of these studies for our understanding of the socio-spatiality of state formation and the key role of representation, taxation, and trade in this regard.

This book, originally published in hardback in 1997, has now appeared in a very welcome paper back edition. Its author, Fritz Ringer, is well-versed in German intellectual history. This enables him to offer the reader an excellent reconstruction of Weber's views on methodology, situate them in the major contemporary debates in Weber's Germany, and assert their continuing (and, indeed, insufficiently appreciated) relevance to current issues in the cultural and social sciences. Ringer's approach is influenced in part by Bourdieu's notion of the intellectual field.1 He therefore interprets Weber's attempt to unify the methodologies of the historical, cultural and social sciences in the light of the specific debates that structured Weber's own formulation of problems and his attempts over time to respond to the issues raised therein. In this context, Ringer sees Weber as a good example of 'the clarifying critic who restates, rationalizes, and thus partly transcends the assumptions of his own culture' (Ringer 2000: 168). Thus he was 'at once a causalist and a sophisticated interpretationist, and he simultaneously renewed and transformed his methodological heritage' (Ringer 2000: 6). In reviewing this work I have three aims: first, to set out the main arguments, second, to locate them in relation to contemporary debates in critical realism, and, third, to show the relevance of Weber's work to a reconstruction of Marxism and historical materialism.

This article presents some background information on the work of Jack Rasmus, summarizes his work on crisis, especially the concept of systemic fragility, and his criticisms of alternative approaches, and offers some comments on the overall approach proposed by Rasmus.

Cultural Political Economy (CPE) is an emerging approach with post-disciplinary horizons. It engages with ‘cultural turns’ in the study of political economy to enhance its interpretive and explanatory power. Intellectually it arose from a synthesis of critical discourse analysis, critical political economy, neo-Gramscian state theory, neo-Gramscian International Political Economy, feminism, post-colonialism, governmentality and governance studies. This three-day conference and associated workshop gives researchers and post- graduate students an opportunity to take issues in/ with CPE in philosophical, methodological and empirical terms. It invites discussions at the interface of ‘cultural turns’, critical realism, critical discourse analysis and political economy. Specifically, it focuses on the cultural (and semiotic) dimensions of political economy considered both as a field of inquiry and as an ensemble of social relations. In the light of multiple crises at many sites and scales in the global economic, political, and social order, the organizers invite papers that address theoretical or substantive aspects of the changing nature and dynamic of neoliberalism and democracy.