You are on page 1of 23

21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop

http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 1/23
Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-
Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis
Concept of the integral State
Bob Jessop / February 1, 2014
This on-line version is the pre-copyedited, preprint, English version. The published
version can be found here:
Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Weiterentwicklung von Gramscis
Konzept des integralen Staats, in S. Buckel and A. Fischer-Lescano, eds,
Hegemonie gepanzert mit Zwang. Zivilgesellschaft und Politik im Staats-
verstndnis Antonio Gramscis, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 43-65, 2007.
***
This chapter explores some ways in which Gramscis analyses of the integral state and
hegemony in the Prison Notebooks (1929-35) were interpreted, critiqued and developed
during the 1960s and 1970s by two French Marxists and a Greek Marxist based in France:
Louis Althusser, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and Nicos Poulantzas. Although all three have
been read as essentially structural Marxists, their appropriations of Gramsci were markedly
Home News Books Short Works Audio Video CV Contact
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 2/23
different and, indeed, mutually antagonistic. There is no space to present Gramscis work
as a reference point for this exercise, even were an innocent reading possible. Thus I begin
with Althussers generally critical reception of Gramscis philosophy of praxis and his
alternative account of ideology and the ideological state apparatuses. I then review three
steps in Poulantzass far more positive reception of Gramsci, notably regarding the
historical specificity of the bourgeois struggle for national-popular hegemony and the
capitalist states role in securing bourgeois class domination. I end with Buci-Glucksmanns
philosophical re-reading of Gramscis notes on hegemony and the integral State (stato
integrale) in terms of her new concept of expanded State (stato allargato).
From Ideological State Apparatuses to Aleatory Materialism
Althusser returned regularly to the theme of the state and politics from his first book,
Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (1959/1972), and, at various times,
developed his account of the state in dialogue with Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin,
and Gramsci. His most distinctive contributions concern contradiction and
overdetermination in revolutionary conjunctures; the states role in the reproduction of class
domination, with special reference to the roles of the repressive state apparatus and
ideological state apparatuses; ideology and subjectivation (assujetissement); the state as an
apparatus, machine, and body of armed men; and the conditions making for a durable
form of government. Although Althusser occasionally praised Gramscis historical materialist
approach to the state in these contexts, he did not undertake a symptomatic reading of
the Sardinians work on this topic. At best, he cited Gramscis distinction between civil
society and political society and the importance of civil institutions and organizations for the
reproduction of economic, political, and ideological class domination. At worst, Althusser
accused him of absolute historicism and, on one notable occasion, rejected the entire
Gramscian problematic of hegemony and its postwar reception (see below). This suggests
that, rather than reading Althussers arguments about the state as if they were directly
drawn from Gramsci, it might be better to read them as a direct, critical alternative thereto.
For, while there are some superficial and insignificant similarities, their differences are
profound and fundamental.
Althussers most positive comment on Gramsci for our purposes occurs in For Marx, which
claimed that Marxism still lacked an adequate theory of the specificity and efficacy of the
superstructures and that, after Marx and Lenin, only Gramsci had really worked on this
before Althusser himself (1977/1968: 114). He also commented favorably on Gramscis
expanded concept of intellectuals (105n; cf. Althusser and Balibar 1968/1970: 128) and
argued that, to fully understand the overdetermination of economic factors, it was
necessary to develop the theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other
circumstances, based on an elaboration of the theory of the particular essence of the
specific elements of the superstructure (1977/1968: 113, 114, italics in original). A research
note on ideology and ISAs written in 1969 as part of his longer work on reproduction
expands this: Gramsci is, to our knowledge, the only person who advanced on the route
we have taken. He had had the singular idea that the state was not reducible to the
(repressive) state apparatus, but comprised, as he said, a certain number of institutions of
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 3/23
civil society: the church, schools, unions, etc. Unfortunately Gramsci has not
systematized his intuitions, which have remained in the form of acute, but partial, notes
(1970/1995: 281n, my translation; cf. 1976/1990: 257; 1978/2006: 138-9). Elsewhere
Althusser included Gramsci among the few Marxists who, like himself, recognized that the
working class needs philosophy in the class struggle (1974/1976: 37). And, in two later
essays on Machiavelli, he noted that Gramsci had correctly interpreted the Florentines call
for a new prince in a new principality to unify Italy under a republican national state (1972-
1986/1999).
Despite such praise for Gramscis contributions on historical materialism and the class
struggle in philosophy, Althusser draw on them only gesturally when developing his own
account of the state apparatuses, ideology, and class struggle. This is probably because of
his dismissal of Gramsci as someone who played a very important part from the left in the
development of revolutionary humanism and historicism and was therefore a principal
antagonist in Althussers claim that Marxism should be anti-humanist and anti-historicist
(Althusser and Balibar 1968/1970: 119-20). Although careful to distinguish between
criticism of Gramscis failings in regard to dialectical materialism and acknowledgment of
his great contributions to historical materialism (op. cit.: 126), Althusser nonetheless
concludes that Gramsci tends to make the theory of history and dialectical materialism
coincide within historical materialism alone, although they form two distinct disciplines (op
cit.: 130). He therefore confuses the development of philosophy and real history, fails to
distinguish between ideology and science (thereby treating Marxist theory as just another
worldview), treats Marxism as a direct expression of a particular historical period and hence
as part of the superstructure, and dissolves theoretical practice into practice in general (op.
cit. 130-7). This wild, inaccurate charge is typical of Althussers cavalier rejection of most
schools of Marxism that differ from his own authorized version, whatever it might have
been from time to time (cf. Elliott 1987: 41-5, 131; for a spirited rebuttal of the charge of
historicism against Gramsci, see Buci-Glucksmann: 1975/1980: 15-16, 49, and passim). It
nonetheless meant that Althusser needed to locate any theory of the state, ideology, and
ideological state apparatuses in his own dialectical materialist framework rather than risk
theoretical contamination from the absolute historicism he discerned in Gramsci (for an
alternative reading of his historicism, see Morera 1990). Thus, commenting on apparent
similarities between Gramscis account of hegemony and his own analysis of ISAs, he
wrote:
it seemed [sc. to my critics] that what I was suggesting had already been said, and
said much better, by Gramsci (who did indeed raise the question of the material
infrastructure of the ideologies, but provided a rather mechanistic and economistic
answer to it). The general assumption was that I was discussing the same thing in
the same register. It seems to me that Gramscis work does not, in fact, have the
same object in view Gramsci never talks about Ideological State Apparatuses; his
term is hegemonic apparatuses. This leaves a question hanging in midair: what
produces, in Gramscis apparatuses, Gramscis hegemony-effect? Gramsci, in sum,
defines his apparatuses in terms of their effect or result, hegemony, which is also
poorly conceived. I, for my part, was attempting to define the ISAs in terms of their
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 4/23
motor cause: ideology. Furthermore, Gramsci affirms that the hegemonic
apparatuses are part of civil society (which is nothing but the whole set of them,
unlike traditional civil society, which is all of society minus the state), on the pretext
that they are private (1978/2006: 138-9, italics in original).
Althussers alternative theorization of the state (1970/1977) starts out from inadequacies of
the base-superstructure metaphor. Gramsci had also been strongly critical of economism,
in both its theoretical and political forms; but Althusser proposed another solution that
appropriated structuralism against humanism as well as economism (cf. Elliott 1987: 60-3).
He identified three relatively autonomous regions of the capitalist mode of production
economic, political, and ideological and argued that their respective roles and
asymmetrical interaction were determined in the last instance by the economic. The
political and ideological regions thereby acquired a distinct effectiveness both in relation to
the economic region and the capitalist social formation as a whole. Indeed, precisely
because the economy cannot determine everything else as a cause without cause, the
overall reproduction of the relations of production in capitalist social formations depends on
intervention from the superstructural ensemble formed by the repressive state apparatus
(RSA) and diverse relatively autonomous ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). The scope
and importance of ISAs indicates that the entire society is saturated by class relations,
submitted to a class power that is exercised through an ensemble of institutions, including
private entities such as the church, parties, unions, the family, and cultural associations.
These play crucial roles in securing bourgeois domination and must therefore be treated as
part of the state and not, as with Gramsci, part of civil society. The latter notion is
rejected on the grounds that the distinction between public and private is internal to
bourgeois law and, supplemented by its reflection in juridico-political ideology, helps to
maintain bourgeois class dictatorship (cf. 1968/1970: 162fn; 1970/1977: 142fn, 144; Bidet
1995: 11).
The coherence of this combination of relatively autonomous regions depends on:
a certain political configuration imposed and maintained by means of material
force (that of the State) and of moral power (that of the ideologies) (Althusser 1968).
Accordingly, economic class struggle obeys the logic of the supplement: the relations
of production/exploitation that determine, in the last instance, the complex unity of the
state depend for their survival on the state that derives from them, that is, on the
supplementary political and ideological relations of domination that ensure their
reproduction. Both Sur la reproduction and Marx in his limits call this the paradox
of the capitalist state. To end exploitation, it is first necessary to dismantle the state
which, engendered by it, presides over it the lynchpin of the dictatorship that
sustains the capitalist economic regime (Goshgarian 2006: xxxvii, italics in original).
Building on these ideas, Althusser argued that, while Marxism had developed, through
Marx, Lenin, and, perhaps, Gramsci, a valuable descriptive account of the state as an
instrument of class rule, this had remained at an essentially pre-theoretical stage of
development. Althussers self-appointed intellectual task was to give it theoretical shape.
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 5/23
He therefore advanced the following theses: (1) the core of the state is its repressive
apparatus; (2) the state also includes a variety of ideological state apparatuses; (3) each of
these ISAs has its own particular ideology and apparatus logic; (4) the state plays a vital
role in the reproduction of the relations of production and intervenes in all areas that bear
on their reproduction; and (5) while economic class exploitation is foundational, the state
must be changed before the economic base can be radically reorganized. He develops
these basic theses in various rather formalistic ways (e.g., in terms of the secondary
ideological functions of the RSA, the secondary repressive functions of ISAs, and the
possibilities of reversals in the primary functions of specific institutions) but says little about
particular ideologies or the mechanisms of hegemony, let alone about specific historical
situations where hegemony was secured or entered crisis. Instead he offers a formal,
institutionalist analysis with functionalist overtones that gives no sense of how different
political and ideological fields are articulated, let alone unified, apart from the equally formal
claim that one of the ISAs will be dominant (currently the school system though Debray
[1979/1981] and Poulantzas [1978] later claimed that it is now the mass media).
Althusser says little about ideology in general or particular ideologies and focuses instead on
their realization through the ideological mechanism of interpellation and on their
materialization in ISAs (cf. Ricoeur 1986). Indeed his comments on ideology remain mostly
descriptive, noting that, [i]n a class society, ideology serves not only to help people their
own conditions of existence, to perform their assigned tasks, but also to bear their
condition either the poverty of the exploitation of which they are the victims, or the
exorbitant privilege of the power and wealth of which they are the beneficiaries
(1965/1990: 25). Or, again, that while ideology is situated in the superstructure and has its
own effectivity vis--vis law and the State, it must also be thought of as sliding into all the
parts of the edifice, and considered as a distinctive kind of cement that assures the
adjustment and cohesion of men in their roles, their functions and their social relations
(ibid.). What seems to unify the ISAs is their common mode of functioning. There is no
sense that form may problematize function, that the ISAs may be riven by class struggle
and contradictions, that there is a specific role for intellectuals, political forces, etc., in class
struggle, or, indeed, that ideology may also be secreted in the organization of production
(cf. the critiques by Buci-Glucksmann, 1975/1980: 64-7; and Poulantzas 1970/1974: 300-
1n, 304, 305n). Nor do we get any account of the discursive-material mediation of the
consolidation of particular ideologies as different ideological elements are selected and
retained in specific ideological formations (cf. Jessop 2004; Nonhoff 2006). In a subsequent
post-script to his famous ISAs essay, Althusser tried to correct its functionalist tenor by
insisting on the primacy of class struggle over institutions (1978/2006: 138, citing
1970/1977: 170-172). But this disavowal is bound to remain gestural without serious effort
to produce the concepts needed to explore the forms and modalities of class struggle in
and across different fields a task that Gramsci set himself and that has since been
followed by theorists such as Poulantzas (see below).
Althussers subsequent critique of the theoretical limits and crisis of Marxism, especially
regarding the state, ideology, and the organization of class struggle offers important insights
into his ambivalent relationship to Gramsci (1978/2006). Arguing that Marx and Lenin had
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 6/23
failed to develop an adequate theory of the capitalist type of state, he presented a
symptomatic reading of their work. He elaborated the character of the state as a special
apparatus of class dictatorship with its own specificity as a special machine that transforms
violence into legal power and disguises its class nature behind the (illusory) framework of
popular rule and public service. In this context the class struggle is primary and the energy
driving the state machine is force and violence. Moreover, while the states unity is
precarious and its reproduction requires serious political work, Althusser denies that the
state is thoroughly penetrated by class struggle. This comment is a critique of
contemporary interpretations and strategies relying on the intensification of contradictions
and conflicts inside the state to bring about a democratic revolution (cf. the contributions to
Poulantzas 1976). Althusser followed this with a vitriolic attack on Gramscis analysis of
hegemony and, indirectly, on neo-Gramscian Eurocommunist currents, Poulantzas, and
Buci-Glucksmann. In particular, endorsing Perry Andersons critique of the antinomies of
Gramsci (Anderson 1976) and adding his own criticisms, he argued that Gramsci was
blithely self-contradictory in his account of the state and tried to explain everything about
politics in terms of the permutation of just four concepts: hegemony, force, political society,
and civil society. Worse still, hegemony figured three times in this analysis, namely, as
hegemony, as the hegemonic apparatus, and as the hegemony-effect of political society
plus civil society. Furthermore, Gramsci treated the economic infrastructure and the state
as neutral, reduced ideology to culture, and hid the question of the material nature of the
state-machine behind a hyper-allusive invocation of Hegemony (Althusser 1978/2006:
148). The overall result is a confusing, contradictory analysis that indiscriminately lumps
together the concrete realities of economic, political, and ideological class struggles and
empties hegemony of any theoretical or political leverage (Althusser 1978/2006: 139-150).
Such reflections prompted a return to another classical political theorist. Althussers
analysis of Machiavel et nous (1972-86) attempted to theorize the state and politics without
resort to the deterministic base-superstructure schema of historical materialism developed
by Marx and, he alleged, Gramsci. His proposed replacement is an aleatory materialism
that focuses on historical becoming based on the primacy of events or contingent
encounters that excludes in principle the ontological reality of every structural law or
necessary progression in history (Vatter 2004). Althusser claims that Machiavelli raises the
crucial question of how a durable political state emerges ex nihilo and provides an
interpretation of the role of the prince that differs radically from Gramscis account of the
modern prince. He argues that, while the prince founds the modern state, it can only be
stabilized through a shift from a despotic principality to a republic based on the rule of law
as the adequate form of the modern state. Only this form of political rule can secure the
reproduction of reproduction as a whole. This approach marks a radical epistemological
break with the functionalist analysis of the reproduction of the relations of production in his
ISA texts and grounds such reproduction in the contingent, aleatory historical development
and succession of state forms as opposed to the necessary, overdetermined, eternal
nature of reproduction in the ISA essay (cf. Vatter 2004). Moreover, while the people were
passive subjects to be interpellated and mobilized by the ISAs in the ISA essay, now the
people becomes the prime source of resistance and refusal vis--vis the reproductive
powers of political repression and ideological subjectivation. Despite these theoretical shifts,
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 7/23
however, and putting aside his one brutal attack, Gramsci still has a limited, walk-on role in
Althussers theorization of the state.
From Historicism to the Centrality of Hegemonic Struggles
Poulantzas came to Gramsci through his more general interest in Italian Marxism
including the epistemology of the Della Volpean School and work on civil society. This was
part of a transition period as he moved from a Sartrean existentialo-marxiste analysis of law
and legal philosophy towards a structural Marxist analysis of the political region of capitalist
social formations a period when Poulantzas wrote not only on the philosophy of law and
the juridico-political aspects of the state but also on Althussers structuralist Marxism,
Gramscis notion of hegemony, and the historicist Marxism of British state theorists such
as Anderson and Nairn. During this transition, Althusser provided him with the philosophical
means to break with the sur-ontologisme of Sartrean existentialism and thereby go
beyond a humanist and historicist account of the capitalist state; and Gramsci, in turn,
provided the substantive concepts that enabled Poulantzas to situate his ideas about law
and the state in the wider context of capitalist societies.
Poulantzas was rather hesitant about the merits of Gramscis work when he first
encountered it in 1964-68. For Gramsci was often seen in Italy and France as a Western
Marxist who emphasized political class struggle to the exclusion of material circumstances
and structural constraints. Echoing this opinion (especially as articulated by Althusser),
Poulantzas noted that Gramscis political analyses are often tainted by the historicism of
Croce and Labriola and must be handled with care (1968/1973: 39, 138-9, 194, 197, 200-
1; cf. 1966/1967: 68). Thus, while praising his contributions to the analysis of hegemony,
Poulantzas tried to distance himself from historicism by stressing the structural foundations
of class power and the different modalities and possible disjunctions among levels of class
struggle (see especially 1968/1973: passim). He continued to maintain a healthy distance
from Gramsci thereafter although his reasons differed as Poulantzas changed his own
theoretical and political positions.
Nonetheless, from his first encounter with Gramscis writings onwards, he was attracted to
their approach to ideology and to hegemony as the exercise of political, intellectual, and
moral leadership. Poulantzas suggested that hegemonic leadership was the defining
feature of class power in advanced capitalist democracies, which he saw as based
economically on possessive individualism and politically on individual citizenship in a national
state. He also highlighted Gramscis emphasis on the crucial role of the state (understood
in broad terms) in mediating and organizing the hegemony of a power bloc as well as in
disorganizing the subaltern classes. He first presented these ideas in some Preliminary
Remarks on the Concept of Hegemony (1965). A second step was inaugurated with his
integration of these ideas into his more structural Marxist analysis in Pouvoir politique et
classes sociales (1968/1974). They were still influential theoretically in a third stage of his
development, when his work on the capitalist state took a relational turn, but they played
an even smaller role in his ideas about revolutionary political strategy.
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 8/23
Poulantzass preliminary remarks used Gramsci to critique the intrumentalist-voluntarist
approach of orthodox Marxism. He insisted that the state must be treated as a specific
structural ensemble with its own effects on the reproduction of a society-divided-into-
classes and that classes have no abstract, unifying consciousness but are constituted as
political forces through the state itself (1965: 866-9). While capitalist relations of production
create the institutional space for a different kind of state and politics from those
characteristic of feudalism, it is the historically unique role of hegemony as the organizing
principle of the capitalist state that determines its precise form and function. Whereas pre-
capitalist social relations lacked a clear separation between the economic, political, or
social spheres, capitalism rests on an institutional separation between the private sphere of
civil society (the realm of economic exchange) and the public sphere of the political. This
creates an opposition between the particular private interests of individual producers in the
economic sphere and their common political interests in an orderly framework for
exchange relations. The organization of economic life in terms of surplus value production
and market-mediated exchange permits a distinctive, sui generis mode of political class
domination that does not rest on a formal class monopoly of political power. The
economic-corporate states of slave-holding or feudal societies were based on the
monarchical principle or divine right and openly excluded the exploited classes from full
participation in the political sphere. They relied as do bourgeois states in exceptional
periods on force to impose the immediate private economic interests of the dominant
class. In contrast, the normal capitalist state is compatible with popular sovereignty and
can institute the secular responsibility of the state to its people. The people participate in
politics as formally free and equal citizens through universal suffrage rather than in their
capacities as producers. The hegemonic bourgeois state must therefore guarantee (at
least in a formal and abstract manner) the universal, general interest of all its citizens as a
condition of its legitimacy. It does so by mediating the competing private interests of its
citizens and linking them to their general, public interest (1965: 870-6). Political struggle is
oriented to control of this universalizing instance and requires the dominant class to portray
its specific interests as those of the nation as a whole. Thus politics is constituted as the
field of national-popular hegemony rather than class confrontation (880-2).
For Poulantzas, following Gramsci, the modern state cannot unequivocally serve the
immediate economic interests of the dominant class(es). While the conflicting class
interests in the pre-modern state were subject at best to marginal, mechanical
compromise and political power was fragmented, the capitalist state must have a certain
apparatus unity and autonomy in order to organize hegemony. Only then can it impose
short-term economic sacrifices on the dominant class(es) to secure their long-term political
domination. Intellectuals and ideological class struggle are crucial here because all social
relations in capitalist societies appear as relations of consent underpinned as necessary by
resort to constitutionalized, legitimate violence (1965: 882-93). This holds not only for
political relations between dominant and dominated classes but also for those among
different fractions of the dominant class(es). The diversity of their interests requires that they
become unified into a power bloc (Block an der Macht) through the hegemony of a specific
fraction of capital. The capitalist type of state has a key role in organizing this power bloc
as well as securing the active consent of subaltern dominated classes (1965: 1061-66).
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 9/23
Poulantzass analysis of ideology is indebted to both Gramsci and Althusser. He criticized
three prevalent views: first, state power is the immediate expression of the class
consciousness of the politically dominant class qua subject of history; second, the unity of a
social formation is an effect of the imposition of the distinctive world view of a hegemonic
class subject; and, third, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class,
whose unity is taken for granted (1965: 864, 868, 870-1; 1966/1967: 62-4; cf. Althusser
1978/2006: 136-7). Such arguments must be rejected because they deny any intrinsic
autonomy to the political superstructure as a specific level of the social formation
(1968/1973: 42, 199-200). As noted above, Poulantzass alternative was to highlight the
significance of the power bloc as a contradictory unity of various classes and fractions
and to stress the crucial institutional and organisational mediations that are involved in
securing the cohesion and hegemony of this Block an der Macht. He also emphasises the
possibilities of disjunctions among different forms of class domination (economic, political
and ideological) and/or between the apparent class content of the dominant ideology and
its objective role in realising ideological class domination (1966/1967: 65; cf. 1968/1973: 41,
89-91, 155, 171, 203). Disjunction and correspondence among different levels must alike
be related to their articulation in a complex structure in dominance as analysed by
Althusser and to the role of the dominant ideology in cementing together the social
formation as indicated by Gramsci and, in a different context, Althusser (see above).
These summaries show that key themes of Poulantzass account of the state stem directly
from Gramsci and pre-date his adoption of certain structural Marxist positions directly
inspired by Althussers symptomatic re-reading of the economic, political, and philosophical
texts of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci. Nonetheless Poulantzass encounter with Althusser did
lead him to reject two themes from his initial Gramscian problematic. First, in a shift that
actually brought him closer to Gramscis own position, he rejected his earlier distinction
between civil society and the state as the basis for theorizing the distinction between
particular and universal interests because it grounded the former in exchange and
circulation rather than production. And, second, Poulantzas became more ambivalent
about Gramscis concept of hegemony because of its alleged contamination by historicism
and sought to purify it by grounding its necessity even more firmly in the historical specificity
of the capitalist mode of production and its distinctive state form.
This shift is reflected in the organization of Poulantzass first book-length contribution to
state theory, Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1968/1973). Inspired by Althussers
structural Marxism, he argued that a scientific study of the capitalist type of state requires
three interrelated theoretical developments: (a) a general theory of modes of production,
class-divided societies, states, and politics all viewed in isolation from specific modes of
production; (b) a particular theory of the capitalist mode of production that determines the
exact place and function of the state and politics in its overall structural matrix; and,
because the state is institutionally distinct within capitalism, (c) a regional theory of the
capitalist state and politics (1968/1973: 12, 16-18, 142). Althusser provided the concepts of
dialectical and historical materialism for the first step and the initial rationale for the relative
autonomy of the capitalist state and politics in the second step. In turn juridico-political
theory (especially Pashukanis) provided key concepts for identifying the distinctive
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 10/23
institutional matrix of the capitalist type of state that were needed to complete the second
step and provide a bridge to the third step. Thus Poulantzas defined the normal form of the
capitalist type of state as a sovereign territorial state based on the rule of law in which the
dominant class(es) enjoyed no formal monopoly of class power. Law and juridico-political
ideology thereby duplicate the fracturing of the private economic sphere in constituting
the public as mutually isolated, individual citizens and/or political categories. Given this,
the states role is to produce a unifying effect to counteract this isolation effect in
economic and political relations. So the state is presented as the strictly political (i.e., non-
economic), public unity of the people-nation considered as the abstract sum of formally free
and equal legal subjects (1968/1973: 125, 133-4, 188-9, 213-6, 223-4, 276-9, 288, 291,
310, 348-50).
It is in analyzing the substantive form of this cohesion and unity that Poulantzas draws
once again on Gramsci and indicates how it reproduces class domination. For the capitalist
state performs two contrasting but complementary functions. First, it must prevent any
political organization of the dominated classes that might end their economic isolation
and/or social fracturing and enable them to struggle as a united force. And, second, it
must work on the dominant class fractions and/or classes to cancel their economic
isolation and secure the unity of the power bloc and its hegemony over the dominated
classes (1968/1973: 136-7, 140-1, 188-9, 284-9). This occurs under the leadership of a
specific class (fraction) that manages to present its global political interests as those of the
people-nation as a whole. This involves a continual, conflictual negotiation of interests in an
unstable equilibrium of compromise (citing Gramsci) and requires real (albeit limited)
material concessions to the economic-corporate interests of subordinate classes
(1968/1973: 137, 190-1). This dual role is possible because the formal separation of the
sovereign territorial state from the capitalist market economy enables short-term economic
concessions and long-term political manoeuvre; and because its form as a democratic
constitutional state encourages the main political forces to link their interests to the
national-popular (or universal) (1968/1973: 190). Concessions to maintain social cohesion
in a class-divided society also help disorganize the dominated classes and reinforce the
appearance that the democratic state promotes the general interest. In short, state power
must be seen in relational terms, i.e., as founded on an unstable equilibrium of compromise
among class forces rather than as the monopoly of one class (fraction) (1968/1973: 191-3).
In arguments strongly reminiscent of Gramscis earlier remarks, Poulantzas examines how
the capitalist type of state functions as the political party of the dominant classes and helps
in the organization-direction of the power bloc in the face of its internal divisions. A power
bloc is a long-term, organic relation that extends across the economic, political, and
ideological fields and its durability depends on the capacity of one class fraction to
transform its economic interests into a political project that advances the shared interest of
all dominant classes and fractions in continued economic exploitation and political
domination (1968/1973: 239). The clearest account of hegemonic class leadership can be
found in Fascism and Dictatorship (1970/1974). This showed how fascist parties and/or
states established the structural preconditions for the hegemony of big capital; and how
fascist ideology helped to secure its political, intellectual, and moral leadership. But
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 11/23
Poulantzas did not explain how specific programmes and policies consolidated support and
neutralized resistance during the various stages of the fascist period. Nonetheless, this
would become a major theme in his work on authoritarian statism in the 1970s (cf.
Poulantzas 1978)
Poulantzas also suggests that national-popular hegemony and hegemony within the power
bloc are generally concentrated in the same class or fraction. However, whereas
hegemony over the power bloc depends on the political place occupied by the hegemonic
class (fraction) in the circuit of capital, popular hegemony depends on the ideological
capacity to define the general interest of the people-nation (1968/1973: 240). But he also
recognizes that these two forms of hegemony can be dislocated or unevenly developed.
But, in all cases, it is the general form of the state or regime that is crucial. For the specific
ties between classes and parties in particular conjunctures can vary considerably without
changing the fundamental political relations within the power bloc and their determination
through the states general institutional matrix (1968/1973: 314-21). Here and in earlier
analyses, Poulantzas draws heavily on Gramsci as well as Marx, Engels, and Lenin for the
wide range of concepts mobilized in his analysis of concrete political struggles at the level of
the political scene as well as its underlying structural patterns of class domination.
Compared to Gramscis own writings, however, little real attention is paid to the role of
intellectuals in this regard.
Poulantzas wrote his first major state-theoretical work before Althusser had introduced the
concept of repressive and ideological state apparatuses. He first referred to them in his
critique of Miliband (Poulantzas 1969) and then integrated them into his own state theory in
his analysis of fascism (1970/1974) and later theoretical and empirical studies (1974/1975;
1978). Following Althusser, he defines the ISAs in terms of their principal function
ideological inculcation and transmission as opposed to repression and also insists that
they are part of the state system. This is because they help to maintain social cohesion
(which is the generic function of the state) and because their operation depends on the
indirect support of the RSA. He also concedes, with Althusser, that the ISAs have a
greater degree of autonomy from each other and from the RSA than do the different
branches of the RSA. Even so, every important modification of the state affects not only
the RSA but also the relations among the ISAs and between the ISAs and the RSA. Thus
a transition to socialism must not only break the RSA but also transform the ISAs (1969,
76-9; cf. Althusser 1995: 179-86).
Poulantzass account of fascism both elaborates and criticizes these views. He argued that
the only ideologies are class ideologies and that the concept of ISA must be rigorously
related to class struggle and, in this context, criticized Althussers approach to ISAs as
abstract and formal. He argued that Althusser derived the unity of the ISAs from their
alleged permeation with the ruling ideology produced by the class that holds state power.
This is inadequate because it equates the ruling ideology with the mechanism of ideology
in general. Hence it ignores the intense ideological contradictions within the ISAs that stem
from the struggle among ideological spokesmen of different classes and ignores potential
dislocations in state power between the RSA and the ISAs (1970/1974: 300-1n, 304,
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 12/23
305n). Poulantzas also suggests that Althusser cannot establish the relative autonomy of
the ISAs either one from another or from the RSA and suggests himself that this is
directly founded in the ideological class struggle that pervades them (1970/1974: 304).
Poulantzas also notes that the failure of the working class to conquer the ISAs as well as
the RSA could permit the bourgeoisie to reconstitute itself as the dominant class through
bastions among the ISAs. This is supposed to have happened, for example, in the Soviet
Union (1970/1974: 230-3). More generally Poulantzas argues that ISAs often constitute the
favoured refuges and favoured spoils of non-hegemonic fractions and classes and can
provide not only the last ramparts of power for declining fractions or classes but also the
first strongholds for fractions or classes on the ascendant (1970/1974: 230-1, 308; cf.
1978). Finally he notes that the struggles of the popular masses are reflected in the ISAs
and have a particularly marked influence upon those such as trade unions and social-
democratic type parties concerned with mass integration (1970/1974: 309). In short,
once due account is taken of the class struggle and the resulting game of class power
played out between the RSA and the ISAs, one can neither postulate, as does Althusser, a
mechanism of ideology in general to explain the operation of ISAs nor assume, as Althusser
does, that the state apparatuses operate in a unified manner.
These ideas are further developed in Staatstheorie. This argues that the state has a key
role in constituting social classes because it resorts to organized physical repression and
also intervenes in the organization of ideological relations and the dominant ideology.
Indeed, the ruling ideology is embodied in the state apparatuses and constitutes an
essential power of the ruling class. While the ISAs have a key role in elaborating,
inculcating, and reproducing that ideology, this is also performed by the RSA and the
Economic State Apparatus which, it is now conceded, is distinct from both the RSA and
the ISAs (1978: 28). In elaborating these arguments, however, Poulantzas concedes that
the ISA/RSA couplet is at best descriptive and nominalist and also misses the importance
of ESA in the contemporary state, which is the site where the power of the hegemonic
fraction of the bourgeoisie is essentially concentrated (1978: 33).
Poulantzas also extended the idea of the integral state from political and ideological class
analysis to economic relations. For he studied social classes in terms of their extended
reproduction rather than from the narrow economic perspective of their place in
production, distribution, and consumption. The former encompasses economic, political,
and ideological relations and involves the state and the mental-manual division as well as
the circuit of capital and non-capitalist relations of production. Indeed, Poulantzas always
placed the social relations of production in this expanded, or integral, sense at the heart of
his analysis of class struggle. And he also came to analyze social reproduction in terms of
the reproduction of the inter-related economic, political, and ideological conditions bearing
on accumulation (1968/1973, 1974/1975, and, especially, 1978). This can be seen as a
creative and important extension of Gramscis ideas, reminiscent in part of his
reinterpretation of Ricardos concept of mercato determinato as well as his notes on
Americanism and Fordism and the problems of transferring this new mode of growth and
societalization to Europe (for further discussion, Boothman 1991 and Jessop and Sum
2006).
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 13/23
Notwithstanding these many borrowings and affinities, Poulantzass state theory cannot be
reduced to its Gramscian moment. From his first encounter onwards, he criticized Gramsci
and sought to remedy his alleged failings by integrating his work into a more
comprehensive theoretical framework. For example, he argued that the Italian had failed to
locate the specificity of the various regions of capitalist society in terms of its particular
institutional matrix. Instead of establishing the distinctive articulation of the economic,
political and ideological regions in capitalism, he operated with a simple contrast between
the hybrid character of politics grafted onto economics in feudal societies and the
separation of civil society and state under capitalism (1968/1973: 139-40). This criticism is
rather brazen because Poulantzas adopted the same position in his own preliminary
comments on hegemony and the state (1965: see above). More generally, while
Poulantzas agreed that the state is actively involved in helping to constitute and modify the
unstable equilibrium of compromise, he was far more sensitive than Gramsci to how this
occurs through the specific institutional materiality of the capitalist type of state and its
different forms at different stages and in different conjunctures. In contrast, Gramsci was
more attuned to the many and varied modalities through which social forces sought to
maintain class domination and social cohesion from inclusive hegemony through passive
revolution to force-fraud-corruption and direct, open class war.
Thus Poulantzas interpreted state power as a form-determined condensation of the
balance of forces in political and politically-relevant struggle. This requires attention to two
aspects of the state system: (a) the state form as a complex institutional ensemble
characterized by a specific pattern of strategic selectivity that reflects and modifies the
balance of class forces; and (b) the constitution of these class forces and their strategies
themselves, including their capacity to reflect on and respond to the strategic selectivities
inscribed within the state apparatus as a whole. Gramsci had little to say about this in
concrete terms, partly perhaps because of the fluidity of the Italian case and partly
because of his more general interest in the social bases of state power rather than the
details of institutional design.
State, Power, Socialism seems to mark a partial retreat from Gramsci under the influence
of his emerging relational approach and Foucauldian ideas. Thus Poulantzass focus shifts
from hegemonic class leadership towards two other topics: (a) the prodigious incoherence
of the micro-policies pursued by the state; and (b) the states role in strategically codifying
these micro-relations. He also argued that there is typically no rationally formulated, global
political strategy and that the general line of political class domination (or hegemony?) more
often emerges post hoc from a plethora of micro-strategies and tactics mediated through
the strategically selective terrain of the state. This seems to call the concept of hegemonic
class leadership into doubt and to dissolve it in favour of a more Foucauldian than
Gramscian perspective. Poulantzas also argued that Gramsci had failed to appreciate the
importance of representative democracy, pluripartism, and the rule of law for a transition to
democratic socialism. This is supposedly associated with a certain panpoliticism in
Gramsci that is reflected in his treatment of the whole of civil society as intrinsically political
and his view of the communist party as the centre through which all the various private
spheres are coordinated and subordinated to a global political strategy. In contrast
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 14/23
Poulantzas sees the state as an institutional ensemble that crystallises class contradictions
and conflicts within itself and can therefore be undermined from within). The same concern
emerges in Poulantzass claim that Gramscis war of position strategy is still Leninist
because it treats the state as a monolithic entity to be encircled. In opposition to these
alleged problems in Gramsci, Poulantzas calls for a Copernican revolution in socialist
political thought.
From the Critique of Economism to the Expanded State
Buci-Glucksmanns magnum opus on Gramsci and the State is an original reconstruction
of Gramscis analysis of the state in terms of a novel concept: the expanded state
(1975/1980). There is some confusion about the meaning of this new term both for
Gramsci and Buci-Glucksmann. As Guido Liguori notes, Gramsci himself writes of lo stato
integrale, the state in its inclusive sense, rather than of lo stato allargato (or expanded
state) (Liguori 2004: 208). But he adds that Quaderno 4, which is the crucial first text in this
regard, does talk famously of the state as comprising political society + civil society, of
hegemony armoured by coercion, and so forth in ways that could well justify this new
concept (Liguori 2004: 209, 213-15, 220-221). My own view, however, is that, while it
would be wrong to conflate Gramscis account of lo stato integrale with the idea of lo stato
allargato, the latter is useful in understanding the historical specificity of the state in a
particular period. In other words, while the concept of stato integrale (the state in its
inclusive sense) has a general methodological value in treating the state as an ensemble of
social relations that is always, albeit differentially, embedded within a wider set of social
relations, the concept of stato allargato has a specific historical value linked to specific
stages of capitalist development and/or varieties of capitalism.
Buci-Glucksmann herself seems to indicate this in the preface to the English translation of
Gramsci et ltat (1975/1980). For she notes that, for Gramsci, the expanded state refers
both to a reorientation in the general Marxist theory of the state and to the expansion of
the capitalist state in a particular period of capitalist development (1980: x-xi; cf. Liguori
209-10). Consistent with this, the main text refers both to the Gramscian expansion of the
state concept as political society + civil society (68, 70, 72, 91-2, 111, 273) and to the
expansion of the hegemonic apparatus in the era of Americanism and Fordism deep into
the organization of production and consumption relations as well as various fields of the
superstructure (83-6). A possible bridge between these positions is her suggestion that the
integral state is a distinctive form of capitalist state that has superseded the economic-
corporate phase of state building and is able to rule through hegemony protected by the
armour of coercion (90-1, 274-5, 280-1, 283-5). There could be several forms of such an
integral state, however, and not just that typical of Americanism and Fordism (cf. 280, 310-
24). Thus it seems valid to distinguish (a) the state in its inclusive sense (political society +
civil society) as a theoretical concept for the analysis of the capitalist state that enables
Gramsci to contrast the state in its narrow sense (of government tout court) and its broad
or integral sense and, thereby, to identify the theoretical and political limits to
instrumentalism and voluntarism as well as the empirical variabilities and complexities of
state intervention during crises (92-3, 100-110); and (b) the historical concept of the
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 15/23
expanded state as a particular articulation of the state in its inclusive sense. This second
meaning is certainly the one deployed in Buci-Glucksmanns and Therborns later
discussion of the social democratic Keynesian welfare state in the thirty years of postwar
economic expansion (1982; cf. McEarchen 1990). The importance of this distinction is
reinforced by the recent neo-liberal rollback of the expanded state in ways that have
significantly transformed the articulation between political society + civil society and also
produced a new form of capitalist state (cf. Poulantzas 1978, on authoritarian statism;
Hirsch 1995 on the nationale Wettbewerbsstaat; and Jessop 2002 on Schumpeterian
workfare postnational regimes).
None of this should detract from the importance of Buci-Glucksmanns careful
reconstruction and contextualization of Gramscis theoretically and politically sophisticated
analysis of state power. Whereas Althusser regarded him as irredeemably idealist in a
tradition shaped by Hegel, Croce, Gentile, etc., and Poulantzas attempted to rescue him
from his contamination by historicism, Buci-Glucksmann read Gramsci as a theorist who
was seeking a new revolutionary strategy appropriate to the West in an era of mass politics
that was marked by a crisis of the workers movement in the face of its defeat by fascism
and by the historical turning point of Americanism and Fordism and its emerging state form.
We might describe this as the period when the integral state began to be enlarged,
becoming thereby an expanded state. In any case, from 1924 onwards, Gramsci is said to
have devoted all his political reflections to the concept of hegemony and its theoretical and
political implications. According to Buci-Glucksmann, he argued that this crisis was also
the crisis of a certain form of Marxism, of a false and unilateral analysis of the state. He
was therefore the first Marxist to challenge an instrumentalist conception of the state
based on the mechanistic and economistic distinction between infra-structure and
superstructures (1980: x) and he did so by developing the idea of the expansion of the
state (die Erweiterung des Staates) and exploring its implications for revolutionary strategy.
In particular, he introduced (a) the interrelated concepts of hegemony, organic intellectuals,
organic ideology, apparatus of hegemony, historical bloc, and expanded state (sic) to
address the aporia of the superstructures; and (b) a new revolutionary strategy based on
the maximum development of the superstructural moment of class power in order to
create political, intellectual, and moral leadership before the final military resolution of class
struggle (1975/1980: 260, 263, 268-70).
I will address these two innovations in turn but should first note that this section cannot
possibly summarize the important philological work in and through which Buci-Glucksmann
reconstructs Gramscis intellectual and political development. It is concerned, instead, with
her own use of his ideas (as she reconstructs and interprets them) about the integral and
expanded states. First, then, regarding the nature of hegemony, Buci-Glucksmann draws,
like Poulantzas (1965, 1968/1973), on Gramscis familiar distinction in Quaderno 3 between
the medieval and capitalist states:
In the ancient and medieval state, both politico-territorial and social centralization
were minimal (the former being a function of the latter). In a certain sense, the state
was a mechanical bloc of social groups, often of different races. Under the constraint
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 16/23
and military-political pressure that bore on them, and could at certain moments
assume an acute form, the subaltern groups maintained a life of their own, with
specific institutions (Q318, cited 274).
Still citing Gramsci, she continues that the modern state replaces this mechanical bloc of
social forces with the subordination of subaltern groups to the active hegemony of the
leading and dominant group. It abolishes certain forms of autonomy, which are reborn in
other forms: parties, trade unions, cultural organizations. This transition from a mechanical
bloc to an organic bloc is precisely the historic bloc in power. Consequently, the history
of states is the history of leading classes (274). The historic bloc involves more than class
alliances or a fusion of workers and intellectuals into an undifferentiated class front. For it
presupposes a leading class that can exercise hegemony and a social group that can
ensure the homogeneity of the historic bloc (i.e., organic intellectuals) (275-9; cf. Portelli
1972). It also presupposes a hegemonic apparatus, i.e., a complex set of institutions,
ideologies, practices and agents (including the intellectuals), [which] only finds its unity
when the expansion of a class is under analysis (48). In this respect, it should be noted, a
hegemonic apparatus involves far more than ISAs la Althusser: for it not only
encompasses the role of intellectuals but is also used to analyse different forms of political
transformation from Jacobinism to passive revolution (48-60).
In proposing this new approach and, in particular, the concept of historic bloc, Gramsci
intended to maintain, in the new conditions of the war of position, two fundamental
theses of Marxism and Leninism: (1) Economics is determinant in the last instance; (2)
Politics cannot but have primacy over economics: it is in command. But these two
theses call for new discoveries, a new investigation of the state in its relations to the
historic bloc (Buci-Glucksmann 1975/1980: 277; cf. Althusser 1995: 112, on the relation
between economics and politics). In other words, the historical bloc neither escapes the
determining role in the last instance of the economy, nor class antagonisms, nor again the
state, which forms part of the superstructures (278). In developing this concept, he could
also resist economist and spontaneist arguments that one-sidedly emphasized economic
determinism or political action. In addition, Gramsci emphasized the material reality of
ideologies and their location in a hegemonic apparatus that formed an integral part of the
state (277-9; cf. Althusser 1970/1977). For the Gramscian historic bloc is cultural and
political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and
intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led (286).
Second, regarding revolutionary strategy, in contrast to Poulantzas, who appropriated
Gramscian concepts primarily to understand the constitution of bourgeois hegemony in the
capitalist type of state and who continued to rely for some time on a Leninist vanguard
conception of proletarian revolutionary strategy, Buci-Glucksmann not only emphasizes the
nature of the integral state for bourgeois hegemony but also its implications for revolutionary
strategy. Thus, whereas neither Althusser nor Poulantzas utilize the distinction between
East and West or that between war of position and war of manoeuvre, Buci-
Glucksmann considers them essential to a full understanding of the integral state in its
guise as the expanded state and, a fortiori, for revolutionary strategy. Thus, commenting
on the New Economic Policy, she writes that:
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 17/23
the particular insistence that Gramsci placed on a mass hegemonic political
leadership, the place he ascribed to the superstructures in the building of socialism,
and the organic relations he saw as necessary between leaders and led, suggest that
for him, as for Lenin in 1922, what was involved was above all a political alliance,
based on the organization of consent, the struggle for an integral state with a
permanent fit between culture and practice. Gramscis concept of hegemony in the
socialist historic bloc is wider than Bukharins economistic conception (Buci-
Glucksmann 1975/1980: 263).
The proletariat had to construct socialism based on an organic rather than mechanical
unity of the workers movement (270). Thus Gramscis Prison Notebooks emphasized that
the revolutionary process in the West can only be a mass process, in the course of which
the modern Prince, the vanguard party, must struggle to win the masses and combat the
roots of reformism and corporatism, i.e., engage in war of position before moving to a final
politico-military resolution through a war of manoeuvre. This strategic objective is
diametrically opposed to the strategy of permanent revolution. Indeed, a strategy of frontal
attack in the conditions of the developed capitalist societies would reproduce economism
and was bound to lead to defeat (270-1). In short, Gramsci established close links between
the strategy of war of position and the struggle for a new historic bloc, whereby the
revolutionary movement should aim to win state power in an integral sense rather than just
obtain a share in the exercise of existing government powers. This depended in turn on a
political gnoseology of superstructures (281-2).
Buci-Glucksmann and Therborn developed these ideas about the historical transformation
of the capitalist state in an important analysis of various forms of socialism and social
democracy in Europe and elsewhere in their book Le Dfi Social-Dmocrate (1981).
Following some general remarks on different socialist traditions, they apply the notion of
expanded state to the institutionalized compromise and state form of post-war Atlantic
Fordism. In this regard their analysis seems to owe much, directly or indirectly, to the
analyses of the Parisian regulation school (see Aglietta 1976/1979; Lipietz 1987; and
Demirovi et al., 1992).
Specifically, they argue that the Keynesian welfare state that corresponds to the Fordist
accumulation regime enlarges (erweitert) the field of politics and the state and, a fortiori,
also enlarges the field for struggles over hegemony (1981: 118-19). The state is not
situated outside the economy and does not intervene from outside but has a crucial
constitutive role in the expanded reproduction of the economy. Moreover, in place of a
state that secured political class domination through the atomization of the masses in civil
society, the state now organises them by accepting their presence more or less direct,
more or less corporatist, inside the state. In short, rather than remaining outside the state,
the dominated classes are now represented inside it (128-30). For politics inserts itself
directly into the field of economic development, penetrating into reproduction, medical
care, education, family life, etc. In this context, the crucial site for the enlargement of the
state is the welfare state, which is reorganized along Fordist-Taylorist lines and also
generalizes norms of mass consumption and social welfare from organized labour to the
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 18/23
population as a whole (121-5). This produces a radical shift in relations between the
working class (once anathematized as a dangerous class) and the state based on
Fordism-Taylorism-Keynesianism, collective bargaining based on responsible unionism, a
tripartite institutionalized political compromise, an expanded welfare state, and urbanization
(120). In this context social democratic parties become more and more clientelist,
corporatist, interclassist, and technocratic (131). The boundaries between public and
private are also modified with the result that the enlarged state becomes a site of
permanent alliances and compromises. As such, the Keynesian welfare state must be
studied not just in terms of state/economy but also in terms of state/mass. This involves a
necessary connection between state/capital and state/mass through the states role in
articulating a model of economic development and a hegemonic model (130).
In short, the four key features of the enlarged state are: (1) the Fordist wage relation based
on tripartite collective bargaining; (2) a political relation based on concertation rather than
individual citizenship; (3) the superstructural institutions of Keynesian welfare statism; and (4)
resort to rational indicative planning rather than a liberal market or command economy
(130-6). The crisis of this enlarged state emerged from 1965 onwards, was politically and
culturally accelerated in 1968-70, and became economically acute from 1974, thereby
casting doubt on its continued organizational viability and its legitimacy. The authors identify
two possible exit routes from this organic crisis: a turn to liberal corporatism (Sweden) or
the growth of authoritarian statism (Germany) (Buci-Glucksmann and Therborn: 149ff).
Needless to say, the crisis of the enlarged state has intensified since Buci-Glucksmann and
Therborn finished their book and developed events and, while the trend towards
authoritarian statism has certainly intensified (cf. Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 1996), there
have been additional significant transformations in the nature of the capitalist state that
affect its forms of economic and social intervention, its scale and scope of operations, and
its forms of government and governance (cf. Hirsch et al., 2001; Jessop 2002).
Conclusions
The three authors considered here have interpreted Gramscis work on the state and
hegemony in quite different ways. Althusser rejected Gramscis philosophy of praxis as
historicist but approved of certain historical materialist insights about the ideological as well
as repressive nature of the state apparatus. He then developed his own distinctive
structural and in part functionalist analysis of the state apparatus as a special machine
of class domination. Poulantzas followed Althusser in discerning some historicist tendencies
in the Italians work but attempted to decontaminate it by integrating some of Gramscis
key concepts into a more detailed regional (later, relational) theory of the capitalist type of
state. He was most interested in this regard in how the bourgeois democratic state both
disorganized the subaltern classes and organized a capitalist power bloc through enabling
the development of national-popular hegemony. He showed little explicit interest in
Gramscis analysis of the importance of wars of position and manoeuvre, adhering initially
to a Marxist-Leninist vanguardist position and later developing his own revolutionary
strategy based on a combination of struggles at a distance from the state, struggles within
the state apparatus, and struggles to transform the state apparatus. Buci-Glucksmann
showed the most detailed interest in, and familiarity with, Gramscis work and remains
Follow
Follow Bob Jessop
Get every new post delivered
to your Inbox.
Join 380 other followers
Enter your email address
Sign me up
Powered by WordPress.com
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 19/23
closest to it. She made a close philological (or, in Althusserian terms, symptomatic)
reading of his work before and after 1924, which marked, for her, a decisive turning point
in his theoretical and political analyses. She also applied the arguments that developed
after this break in general methodological terms by highlighting the real importance of the
state in its inclusive sense (lo stato integrale) and its links to the ethico-political, to organic
intellectuals, and to the historic bloc. In addition, drawing on some of Gramscis
observations, she developed a distinctive reading of the expanded state (lo stato allargato)
as the product of a specific transformation of the capitalist state that had followed the crisis
of liberal capitalism and the rise of American and Fordism. In their different ways, then,
these texts show that Gramscis work remains classic in the sense that, while the
answers it provides to the theoretical and political problems it had identified in the interwar
period may no longer be regarded as valid, these problems are still pertinent and
provocative and merit continuing serious engagement and elaboration in the search for
better answers.
Literatur
Note: Because of varying dates of the first publication of unpublished MSS or TSS and of
subsequent translations, dates are given first for the drafting of the relevant manuscript or
first date of publication, as appropriate, and second for the edition used. German
pagination may be different.
Aglietta, Michel (1976/1979) A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US Experience, London.
Althusser, Louis [1959/1972]: Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, London:
NLB.
[1965/1990]: Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and
Ideological Struggle. IN Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, and
other Essays, London, 3-42
[1968/1977]: For Marx, London: NLB.
[1970/1977]: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (notes towards an investigation),
in idem, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, London: NLB (second edition), 121-173.
[1972-86/1999]: Machiavelli and Us, London.
[1974/1976]: Elements of Self-Criticism, London: NLB.
[1976/1990]: The Transformation of Philosophy. IN Philosophy and the Spontaneous
Philosophy of the Scientists, and other Essays, London, 241-65.
[1978]: Discutere lo Stato. Posizioni a confronto su una tesi di Louis Althusser, Bari.
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 20/23
[1978/2006]: Marx in his Limits. IN idem, The Philosophy of the Encounter, London:
Verso, 7-162.
[1995]: Sur la reproduction, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne [1968/1970]: Reading Capital, London: NLB.
Anderson, Perry [1976]: The Antinomies of Gramsci. IN New Left Review, 100, 5-78.
Bidet, Jacques [1995]: En guise dintroduction: une invitation relire Althusser. IN Louis
Althusser, Sur la reproduction, Paris: 5-18.
Boothman, Derek [1991]: Gramsci als konom. IN Das Argument, 185, 57-70.
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine [1975/1980]: Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Idem/Therborn, Gran [1981]: Le dfi social-dmocrate. Paris: Maspero.
Debray, Rgis [1979/1981] Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: the Intellectuals of Modern
France, London.
Demirovi, Alex/Krebs, Hans-Peter/Sablowski, Thomas (Hrsg) [1992]: Hegemonie und
Staat: kapitalistische Regulation als Projekt and Proze, Mnster.
Elliott, Gregory [1987]: Althusser: the Detour of Theory, London: Verso.
Goshgarian, G.M. [2006]: Translators Introduction. IN Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the
Encounter, London, xiii-l.
Hirsch, Joachim [1995]: Der nationale Wettbewerbstaat. Staat, Demokratie und Politik im
globalen Kapitalismus, Berlin.
Dies./Jessop, Bob/Poulantzas, Nicos [2001]: Die Zukunft des Staates: Denationalisierung,
Internationalisierung, und Renationalisierung, Berlin.
Jessop, Bob [1985]: Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist theory and political strategy. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
[1996] Vernderte Staatlichkeit: Vernderungen von Staatlichkeit und Staatsprojekten. IN
D. Grimm [Hrsg] Staatsaufgaben, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 43-74.
[2002]: The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity.
[2004]: Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy. IN Critical Discourse
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 21/23
Studies, 1 (2), 159-74.
Idem/Sum, Ngai-Ling [2006]: Gramsci as a Proto-Regulationist and Post-Regulationist. IN
idem, Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place,
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 348-73.
Liguori, Guido [1997]: Etappen der Gramsci-Rezeption. IN Das Argument, 219, 191-201.
[2004]: Stato-societa civile. IN Fabio Frosini/idem (eds) Le Parole di Gramsci, Roma:
Carocci, 208-26.
Lipietz, Alain (1987) Mirages and Miracles: the Crises of Global Fordism, London: Verso.
McEarchen, Douglas [1990]: The Expanding State: Class and Economy since 1945,
Brighton: Harvester.
Morera, Esteve [1990]: Gramscis Historicism: a Realist Interpretation, London: Routledge.
Nonhoff, Martin [2006]: Politischer Diskurs und Hegemonie. Das Projekt Soziale
Marktwirtschaft. Bielefeld: Transkript.
Portelli, Hugues [1972]: Gramsci et le bloque historique. Paris.
Poulantzas, Nicos [1965]: Prliminaires a ltude de lhgemonie dans ltat. IN Les Temps
Modernes, 234, 862-96, and 235, 1048-69
[1966]: Vers une thorie marxiste. IN Les Temps Modernes, 240, 1952-82.
[1966/1967]: Marxist Political Theory in Great Britain. IN New Left Review, 43, 57-74.
[1969]: The Problem of the Capitalist State. IN New Left Review, 58, 67-78
[1970/1974]: Fascism and Dictatorship, London: NLB..
[1973] Clasas sociales. IN: F. Fernandes et al., Las clasas sociales en America latina,
Mexico: Siglo XXI, pp 96-126
[1968/1973]: Political Power and Social Classes, London: NLB.
[1974/1975]: Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB.
[ed] [1976]: La Crise de ltat, Paris.
[1978]: State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 22/23
Accumulation Strategies, State Forms, and Hegemonic Projects
Recovered imaginaries, imagined recoveries: a cultural political economy of crisis
construals and crisis-management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis
Credit money, fiat money, and currency pyramids: Reflections on the financial
crisis and sovereign debt
The Capitalist State and the Rule of Capital:
Problems in the Analysis of
Business Associations
The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Globalizing
Capital and their Impact on State Power
and Democracy
Ricoeur, Paul [1986] Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York: Columbia Universiy
Press.
Vatter, Miguel [2004]: Machiavelli after Marx: the Self-Overcoming of Marxism in the late
Althusser. IN Theory and Event, 7 (4), downloadable at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?
uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.4vatter.html, accessed 15.07.2009
Print Email Twitter 15 Google Facebook 58 More
February 1, 2014 in Short Works. Tags: Althusser, Capitalism, Class politics, Gramsci, Hegemonic
Project, Hegemony, Political economy, Political theory, Poulantzas, SRA, State theory, Strategy
Related posts
Leave a Reply

Like
Be the first to like this.

Enteryourcommenthere...
21/4/2014 Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State | Bob Jessop
http://bobjessop.org/2014/02/01/althusser-poulantzas-buci-glucksmann-elaborations-of-gramscis-concept-of-the-integral-state/ 23/23
Search
Tags
Britain Capital Capitalism Cities Class politics class relations
Competitiveness Complexity Conjunctural analysis Consumption Contradiction
contradictions CPE Crisis Critical discourse analysis Critical realism Cultural economy
Cultural Political Economy Developmental state Discourse analysis Engels
Entrepreneurial economy Epistemology Europeanisation European Union Fordism
Form Analysis Foucault Germany Global governance Globalisation globalization
Governance Gramsci Hegemonic Project Hegemony Imperialism
information economy intellectual property intellectual property right Interdisciplinary collaboration
International political economy Keynesian welfare national state Knowledge Labour
market policy market Marx Marxian analysis Marxism Meta-governance
money form Nation nation-state Neo-Marxism North Atlantic financial crisis
Periodisation Political economy Political theory Post-
Fordism Poulantzas Power Regulation Approach relativization of
scale Semiotics Social policy Spatiality spatio-temporal fix SRA state form state
intervention State theory Strategy Supranational governance
Urban studies Weber
Blog at WordPress.com. Customized Expound Theme.

You might also like