Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn

What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.

The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states.

Fred L. Block - Revising state theory: Essays in politics and postindustrialism (1987)

This volume makes available in one place a complete statement of Fred Block's perspective for students and participants in the ongoing debate on state theory. His substantial Introduction serves as an intellectual autobiography in which he assesses the field-including the theories of Domhoff, Poulantzas, and Skocpoland situates his own work within it. Block also discusses his relationship to different strands of Marxism. In his analysis of the relationship between business and the state, Block argues that while business interests have far more influence over state policy than other constituencies, state actors still have substantial autonomy in formulating policies.In particular, the business community's internal divisions and difficulties in assessing its own interests limit its capacity to control events. Block insists that when business influence is greatest, as during the Reagan years, state policies will be least successful in solving the society's problems.

Stuart Elden - Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and the Question of Fascism

In the early 1930s he wrote increasingly political texts, including “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”, which was published in La Critique sociale in two parts in late 1933 and early 1934 (included in Œuvres completes Vol I, 339-71, as a short book with Éditions Lignes in 2009, and translated in Visions of Excess, 137-60). A crucial moment for Bataille seems to have been the Veterans’ Riot of 6 February 1934, when the police and right-wing groups clashed in Paris, and the leftist protests which followed the next week. This context is usefully discussed by Susan Rubin Suleiman in “Bataille in the Street” and Chapter 1 of Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar’s Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture. Bataille’s editor Denis Hollier reports in the wake of these events that “Bataille planned to write a book titled Le fascisme en France”. This was never completed, but the surviving notes for this project were published in the posthumous Œuvres complètes (Vol II, 205-13, 214-21).

In the mid-1930s Bataille combined these different interests in at least three groups. One was the Collège de Sociologie. The Collège was a loose grouping of intellectuals, founded by Bataille with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. Walter Benjamin, by this time in exile in Paris, regularly attended the Collège’s meetings, but never spoke there. A session was planned, but the war ended the Collège’s work. Famously, Benjamin gave Bataille several manuscripts for safekeeping in the Bibliothèque nationale before he fled Paris in June 1940.

https://progressivegeographies.com/2026/05/31/georges-bataille-roger-caillois-and-the-question-of-fascism/

Fred L. Block - The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (1977)

The Origins of International Economic Disorder is a 1977 book by sociologist and political economist Fred L. Block. It explores the history of United States international monetary policy from the end of World War II through the early 1970s, offering a critical analysis of the forces shaping the global financial system

The Contradictions of Market Socialism: Labour, Capital and Welfare in Privatising China and Vietnam (2026)

Connecting labour and welfare transformations to broader political-economic processes including land restructuring and financialisation the book offers an unparalleled comparative perspective on two of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.