BRINGING THE ECONOMY BACK IN (AGAIN): CONCEPTIONS OF THE CAPITALIST STATE AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

Abstract

This paper considers one of the central issues in contemporary political sociology--the question of the "autonomy" of the state--in the context of recent political and economic events in the U.S. A number of political theorists have challenged the dominance of what they see as an overly-deterministic conception of the state. They advocate "bringing the state back in" by emphasizing the independent influence of state structures, state manager, political parties, and "political" factors over other social and (especially) economic phenomena. Some of this work stressing the "primacy of the political" addresses the deficiencies of previous mainstream orientations in political science and political sociology--for example, pluralist conceptions, or structural functionalism (Cf. Skocpol, 1985:4-5). But most of it is directed toward the recent body of work on the state within the Marxist tradition--with varying degrees of sympathy.