ideas greatly influenced those of Marx. Like Hegel, Marx sees the Political State and Civil Society as separate, but claims the causal relation between them is in the opposite direction. Instead of society forming under and in accordance with the laws of the State, Marx claims that the actions of the state are determined by society. The function of the laws and institutions of the state is to stabilise Civil Society. Society is dominated by one class, and so the actions of the state stabilise the society in accordance with that dominance. The logic is as follows. The economic relations of production determine the structure of Civil Society, and more specifically, the class structure. The mode of production creates a dominant class. The state acts to stabilise and institutionalise that dominance. Therefore, the state acts in accordance with the interests of the dominant class. Modern Marxist philosophers, in order to tackle criticism, must explain why the state acts in such a way. The most simple way of expressing this theory for a capitalist society is in the form of a 'bourgeois conspiracy'. This means that due to the fact the they are the dominant class in society, they hold power over the state. Their wealth and their ownership of the means of production means they can effectively hold the state to ransom in order to get their way. This is a very crude method of explaining class dominance over the state. Jon Elster elaborates on this in his 'Instrumentalist' view