Introduction to Poulantzas

In this issue, we are publishing an essay by Nicos Poulantzas,1 a young

Greek philosopher working in Paris, on the analysis of English history
and society pursued by Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson in New Left
Review, and contested by Edward Thompson in The Socialist Register, in
the past three years. The debate which followed Thompson’s attack
focused on the empirical problems of interpreting and periodizing
English social structure from the 17th century to this day.

Poulantzas takes this historiographic discussion as his point of depar-

ture. But his own study is concerned with the theoretical infrastructure
of the debate. As such, it represents an important advance over previous
discussion, allowing the reader to assess the fundamental conceptual
issues posed by the analyses attempted in NLR. Poulantzas’s essay may
be seen both as a continuation of the debate on English society initiated
in the review, and as a development of the series of essays on Marxist
theory which we have been publishing for the past year. It unites the
two areas of exploration very concretely, by bringing to bear an
Althusserian critique on the Nairn-Anderson theses.

In NLR 41, we published Althusser’s essay ‘Contradiction and Over-

Determination’, in which he makes his famous criticism of the Hege-
lian totality and Hegelian historicism, distinguishing them from the
Marxist totality—always complex and over-determined, never simple
and circular—and from Marxist sociology, which becomes a compara-
tive structuralism. Using these distinctions, Poulantzas criticizes the
Anderson-Nairn theses for historicism in this sense (which has nothing
to do, of course, with the use of the notion by Popper). In doing so, he
raises some crucial questions for Marxist theory generally. In particular,
is ‘class consciousness’ a Marxist concept, as Lukács believed—or is an
illegitimate intrusion into Marxism, as Poulantzas claims? What are the
modal relationships between State and social classes in a capitalist
society? What did Gramsci mean by the concept of ‘hegemony’? In
what sense is it possible to speak of a class as an ‘agent’ of history?
Poulantzas subjects the Anderson-Nairn theses to searching criticism
in the light of Althusser’s categorial system, and thus provides one of
the first tests of its application to a concrete historical problem.
1
Originally published in Les Temps Modernes, March 1966.

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But it should be said that he himself is not an uncritical dis-
ciple of Althusser. His first work was a Lukácsian theory of bourgeois
law. He then wrote a long essay on Hegemony and the State,2 and has
more recently published one of the most serious and original assessments
of Althusser to have appeared,3 in which he points out the difficulty,
within Althusser’s ‘de-historicized’ system, of critically founding
the dominance in the last instance of the economy which distinguishes
the Marxist from the Hegelian social unity—a problem to which
Sartre’s ‘historicist’ concept of scarcity, by contrast, is one solution.
Later this year his book Le Politique et la Lutte des Classes—perhaps
the first systematic work of Marxist theory since the war—will be
published in Althussers’ collection in Paris.

There is a further reason why Poulantzas’s essay is a significant contri-

bution to contemporary Marxist debate. Since the 1920’s, Marxist
discussion has unfolded within provincial national boundaries, virtually
never crossing them in a genuine international confrontation. Criticism
in France of an English debate on English history thus represents a
welcome development—a renewal of the internationalist traditions of
the classic socialist movement. Poulantzas succeeds in unifying an
extremely wide theoretical area in his conceptual analysis itself. Thus
he shows the links between Weber, Lukács and Parsons; he traces in
passing the development of Marcuse’s thought; and he discusses the
relationship between Lenin and Gramsci. This freedom of movement
has been all too rare in the past. The transcendence of national pro-
vincialism is an absolute precondition of theoretical work in Marxism
today. Poulantzas’s essay is an example for the debates of the future.
New Left Review will publish a reply in a forthcoming issue.

2
Preliminaires á l’Etude de l’Hégemonie dans l’Etat,’ Les Temps Modernes, November
and December 1965.
3
‘Vers une Théorie Marxiste,’ Les Temps Modernes, May 1966.

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