Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State

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 Staatsverstndnis 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 BuciGlucksmann, and Nicos Poulantzas. Although all three have been read as
essentially structural Marxists, their appropriations of Gramsci were markedly
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 BuciGlucksmanns 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).

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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,

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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 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).

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:

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

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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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).

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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 pretheoretical stage of development. Althussers self-appointed intellectual task
was to give it theoretical shape. 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

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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).

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).

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

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 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 selfcontradictory in his account of the state and tried to explain everything about
politics in terms of the permutation of just four concepts: hegemony, force,

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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

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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, 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-

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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.
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

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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).

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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).
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

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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:

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
(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
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

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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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
preconditions for the hegemony of big capital; and how fascist ideology
helped to secure its political, intellectual, and moral leadership. But
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

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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, 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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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

|10

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).
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.

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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-fraudcorruption 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

|11

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 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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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
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 neoliberal rollback of the expanded state in ways that have significantly

|12

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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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 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,

|13

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 (BuciGlucksmann 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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept 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:
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 politicomilitary 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

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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
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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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

|15

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 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

Jessop | Althusser, Poulantzas, Buci-Glucksmann: Elaborations of Gramscis Concept of the integral State
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.
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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.

|16

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