Political Studies

POLITICAL STUDIES. The fate of Left scholarship in political studies has been closely linked to wider social struggles. From World War II until the 1960s, with some exceptions, the field was thoroughly conservative in the United States. Most political scientists believed the political system to be fully open and democratic: all groups able to participate freely; government broadly responsive to all interests, not especially committed to any; and there were no deep or cumulative inequalities. Class, gender, and racial cleavages were barely mentioned. Although political scientists noted the low level of public participation by the poor, they took this acquiescence as evidence of apathy or satisfaction with the system.

The civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s stimulated a wave of Left research, mostly outside political science. C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, Seymour Melman, Frances Fox Piven, and Richard A. Cloward, among others, nevertheless addressed political questions. As Marxist critics later noted, many of these scholars accepted, however, the pluralist theoretical framework by focusing on groups rather than classes, and government institutions rather than the state. Much (but not all) of this scholarship, while critical, was not informed by a socialist or radical vision.

By the 1970s, a second wave of scholarship—this time heavily influenced by European Marxism—shifted focus from government to the state, a move later accepted throughout the political science discipline. The term state signifies that the political and social order do not cohere naturally but are structured by an agency whose primary activity is to reproduce the existing system. The new focus also included examining how the functioning of American capitalism forged class inequalities within the United States and abroad, as well as dictated (and distorted) political priorities.

Initially, scholars assumed that reproduction of a capitalist economy was quite straightforward. A leading example was Ralph Miliband, a British theorist, who argued in The State in Capitalist Society that there was a close link between the economic and political elites within capitalist societies; indeed, at their higher reaches the two groups are close to being one. At the same time, there was a vigorous critique of Miliband’s approach by Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek scholar living in France, who challenged what came to be called Miliband’s instrumentalist understanding of the capitalist political economy. Whereas Miliband emphasized the process by which capitalists deployed superior economic resources to assure political dominance through control of the state, and implicitly regarded the process of assuring stable capital control as unproblematic, Poulantzas asserted that assuring the stability and reproduction of a capitalist order is highly problematic, that is, that it is highly uncertain how a liberal capitalist order can be reproduced or stabilized. His answer: that there is a structural imperative for the capitalist state to be relatively autonomous of the dominant capitalist class, rather than narrowly controlled by it. For if the state is too narrowly dependent on capital, it is ill-equipped to safeguard the longer-run stability and survival of the capitalist system. The state must possess relative autonomous from capital in order to control the resources and have sufficient power to promote reforms that benefit non-capitalist subordinate groups and classes. Such reforms are likely to be opposed by dominant groups and classes because they might involve short-term costs to capital. Yet in fact, by legitimizing and rescuing the capitalist system when it might encounter economic and political crises, such reforms thereby promote and protect the longer-run interests of the capitalist class.

The approach of Poulantzas and the structural Marxist school of which he was a leader were inspired the New Deal in the United States and post-World War II Scandinavian social democratic regimes and the welfare policies. In the United States, a number of scholars heavily influenced by Marxism (directly or indirectly reflecting Poulantzas’ structural analysis) also emphasized the difficulties and challenges in reproducing liberal democracy, rather than seeing its reproduction as unproblematic James O’Connor’s The Fiscal Crisis of the State and books and articles by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis highlighted the tense and inherently conflictual relationship between capitalist production and democratic political institutions. They argued that the state in capitalist democracies is responsible to two constituencies: it obtains its legitimacy from electoral majorities and, in order to gain widespread support, must distribute material and other benefits on a broad basis. The state is also dependent upon capitalists, however, to assure economic growth and prosperity, and in order to gain their cooperation must pursue probusiness policies that conflict with the interests of the majority. The state’s attempt to placate both groups simultaneously provides a key to understanding politics in the United States and other capitalist democracies. Many Left scholars therefore studied the ways in which Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party organized a cross-class alliance that effectively contained class conflict for several decades after World War II. Pro-growth “Keynesian coalitions,” in which limited struggles for distribution of the fruits of capitalist growth replaced struggles over the legitimacy of capitalism itself, were found throughout the Western world but especially in the United States, where the absence of a major socialist party denied workers representation on a class basis in the political system.

The general approach described above inspired a large and vibrant number of studies which invite attention to historically specific—and therefore diverse--forms of political and social struggles within different local, national, and regional settings. They shared a general understanding that there were diverse—albeit limited--trajectories among industrialized capitalist nations. Scholars influenced by Marxism, including Gosta Esping-Andersen, Peter Hall, and Adam Przeworski contributed to a current known, in the title of one of the foundational texts (edited by Peter Hall), Varieties of Capitalism.

Left scholars proved prescient in arguing that the state would be unable to contain class contradictions indefinitely. Their works provided tools for analyzing economic crisis and political instability of the 1970s–1980s. They were less successful, however, in several important respects: (a) recognizing the theoretical and political importance of non-class factors, notably, race, ethnicity, and gender; (b) anticipating the ascent beginning in the 1970s and especially following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 of a populist Right linked to a neo-liberal onslaught seeking to reverse the post-World War II expansion of the welfare state; (c) developing Left proposals aiming to resolve the crisis in a progressive direction. (Notable exceptions are Andre Gorz, A Strategy for Labor; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy).

By the 1980s, the academic left was to a large extent, the victim both of its own success in identifying structural contradictions within liberal democracy, and its failures to address less directly class-based sources of inequality. In subsequent decades, a diffusion of Left themes within the broader political science discipline coincided with a decline of radical political scholarship and the growth of fields of scholarship focusing on other sources of inequality than class, including race, ethnicity, and gender

Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California, 2000.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard, 2020.