Poulantzas, Nicos (1936–1979)

[Page 499]Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek political theorist who spent his most productive years in Paris from 1960 until his suicide on October 3, 1979. He held several posts at universities in Paris—his last as professor of sociology at Vincennes University—but his work defied conventional disciplinary boundaries in its concern to critique contemporary capitalism. A committed member of the Greek Communist Party of the Interior, he was also active and influential in theoretical and political debates on the French Left. While remaining faithful to the basic methods and tenets of Marxism, Poulantzas changed his position on the state and political strategy several times in response to major disputes and contemporary events. Outside France he was best known for his analysis of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state and, subsequently, for his analysis of the state as a social relation. Crucial in the former regard was his debate in New Left Review with another Marxist theorist, Ralph Miliband, conducted over several years, on the capitalist state (see “Miliband-Poulantzas Debate”). But his most enduring contributions came later, with the development of his argument that the state (or, better, state power) is best seen as an institutionally mediated condensation of the changing balance of class forces.

Following his legal studies in Athens, which included political science and sociology, he completed a doctoral dissertation in 1965 on Marxist legal philosophy and legal theory from a Sartrean perspective. He then turned to political theory, focusing on the nature of the capitalist state and political struggle. He was much influenced by Antonio Gramsci, the prewar Italian communist activist and theorist, and by postwar Italian Marxist thought. He was particularly impressed by Gramsci's analysis of hegemony—the exercise of political, intellectual, and moral leadership—as the key 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 Gramsci's claim that the state apparatuses, broadly conceived, are critical in mediating and organizing a power bloc (a durable coalition of dominant economic and political class forces) and disorganizing subordinate classes. This view was soon integrated into a broader perspective on the state's role in capitalist societies influenced (not always to the good) by the French structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar. The most developed presentation of this approach is Political Power and Social Classes (French edition, 1968; English translation, 1973).

Poulantzas then began a slow retreat from the immobilizing effects of structural Marxism and turned increasingly to more strategic issues—such as the nature of fascism and military dictatorships, the changing contours of imperialism and social class relations, and the role of parties and social movements in modern capitalism. This productive period of study and struggle is evident from his three books on Fascism and Dictatorship (1972/1974), Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974/1975), and Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975/1976). His final studies increasingly addressed problems posed by the self-evident crisis in European Marxism as social theory and as a guide to practice—integrating some of Michel Foucault's arguments about power as a social relation and Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality, critiquing France's neoconservative “new philosophers,” and debating representative and direct democracy. His last, and greatest, work was State, Power, Socialism (1978), which, according to his own immodest claim, presented the central ideas of the hitherto unfinished Marxist theory of the state. The key to this theory was the notion that the state is a social relation (rather than a thing or subject) and that state power is therefore best interpreted as the material condensation of the changing balance of forces. In addition, this text provides rich and insightful comments on the spatiality and temporality of the capitalist state, the mental-manual division of labor and official discourse, the changing political forms of the capitalist type of state, new forms of state intervention, and arguments about the necessity of a democratic transition to democratic socialism.

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