What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism

Therborn, Göran

ISBN 10: 0902308394 / ISBN 13: 9780902308398

Published by New Left Books, London, 1977

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 031250

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism
• Publisher: New Left Books, London
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0902308394
• ISBN 13: 9780902308398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

In his new book, Goran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, "Science, Class and Society" - looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal state, the capitalist state and the socialist state. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn's enquiry in the 'Future as History'. Written with lucidity and economy, "What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules?" represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.

About the Author

Göran Therborn holds the Chair of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and is editor and author of Inequalities of the World, Asia and Europe in Globalization, Between Sex and Power and From Marxism to Post Marxism?