The state in society: an approach to struggles for domination

Abstract

Ever since Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century, 150 years before the full blooming of capitalism, thinkers have grappled with the increasingly powerful state and its role in society. Following the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and many others devoted themselves to what Karl Polanyi would later call the great transformation. Like Hobbes, they too focused on the state, now in its relationship to the momentous social and economic changes overtaking European societies.