Based on the conference "Miliband and Poulantzas: In Retrospect and Prospect," held in April 1997.

Incluye referencias bibliográficas e índice.

Miliband-Poulantzas debate: an intellectual history / Clyde W. Barrow -- State and contemporary political theory: lessons from Marx / Adriano Nervo and Renato Monseff Perissinotto -- Bringing Poulantzas back in / Paul Thomas -- Impoverishment of state theory / Leo Panitch -- Stateless theory: Poulantza's challenge to postmodernism / Andreas Kalyvas -- Eras of protest, compact, and exit: on how elites make the world and common people sometimes humanize it / Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven -- Withering away of the welfare state? Class, state, and capitalism / Rhonda F. Levine -- Globalization and the national state / Bob Jessop -- Relative autonomy and its changing forms / Constantine Tsoukalas -- Unthinking the state: reification, ideology, and the state as a social fact / Peter Bratsis -- Global shift: a new capitalist state? / Stanley Aronowitz.

Annotation With increasing globalization, the meaning and role of the nation-state are in flux. At the same time, state theory, which might help to explain such a trend, has fallen victim to the general decline of radical movements, particularly the crisis in Marxism. This volume seeks to enrich and complicate current political debates by bringing state theory back to the fore and assessing its relevance to the social phenomena and thought of our day. Throughout, it becomes clear that, whether confronting the challenges of postmodern and neo-institutionalist theory or the crisis of the welfare state and globalization, state theory still has great analytical and strategic value.