请将“Poulantzas then considers how hegemony operates not only to secure the active consent of the dominated classes but also to unify dominant class fractions and/or classes into a coherent power bloc. He follows Gramsci in arguing that political class domination in capitalism rests on a distinctive combination of active consent articulated with constitutionalised forms of coercion. But he also extends Gramsci’s work to argue that the economic fractioning of the bourgeoisie can be overcome only through a state which displays its own internal (class) unity and institutional autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant class fractions. The existence of a relatively unified power bloc cannot be explained in terms of the imposition of the economic-corporate interests of the dominant fraction on other fractions and classes (as suggested in the work of stamocap theorists) nor could it be secured through a state which comprised a disparate ensemble of dislocated powers and counter-powers and so lacked any ability to organise and lead a bourgeois power bloc (ibid., pp. 1050-1058). In short Poulantzas insists that the capitalist state must be understood as an institutional ensemble which has a major function in organising hegemony within the power bloc as well as in the mobilisation of active consent vis-à-vis the dominated classes and thus society as a whole (ibid., pp. 1061-1066).

It should be clear that Poulantzas is indebted to the pioneering work of Gramsci in this essay and that many of his key ideas pre-date his appropriation of Althusserian structuralism. Indeed, not only does he consider the role of hegemony in relation to the dominated classes, he also applies it creatively to the organisation-direction of a power bloc. Likewise, whereas Gramsci tends to see the integral state (i.e., hegemony armoured by coercion) as characteristic of the imperialist era and relates its development to the expansion of civil society (in the sense of ideological apparatuses), Poulantzas derives the crucial role of hegemony from the institutional matrix of capitalism as a whole and relates it to the separation between the public sphere of politics and the private sphere of civil society (considered as the site of economic relations). But both theorists emphasise the important role of intellectual/ideological as well as political practices in constituting hegemony. All these analyses will be taken up and developed in further work by Poulantzas and combined therein with elements of structuralism.

Two important transitional studies in this respect are a critique of Marxist political theory in Britain and a review of Althusser’s For Marx. In the former Poulantzas insists on the utility of Gramsci’s concepts (such as hegemony, power bloc, etc.) when placed in a nonhistoricist, non-subjectivist problematic (cf. Althusser) and proceeds to criticise the twin failings of the quasi-Lukacsian interpretation of Gramsci that he discerns in the work of Anderson and Nairn from the New Left Review (1966a, especially pp. 1699-1701). In the latter Poulantzas affirms the importance of Althusser’s epistemological break in modern Marxist theory but also notes certain difficulties in his approach to economic determination in the last instance (1966b, especially pp. 1971-1982). In both studies Poulantzas begins to juxtapose, combine, and synthesise Gramscian and Althusserian analyses and thereby introduces a tension into his own work that will become more significant with time.

It is in Political Power and Social Classes (1968) that Poulantzas presents his first extended analysis of the capitalist state. It bears the obvious imprint of both Gramscian and Althusserian perspectives - emphasising the Gramscian elements in the analysis of (political) class struggle as the motor force of history, emphasising the Althusserian elements in the analysis of the institutional matrix of capitalism and the global reproduction of the social formation, and, to the extent that Poulantzas attempts to reconcile these elements, emphasising the primacy of the structures over the class struggle. This stress upon the primacy of objective structures reached its highpoint in the first intervention by Poulantzas in his debate with Miliband and it is this controversy that has dominated the English-speaking reception of his work (see Poulantzas, 1969). But, although these tensions remain in more recent studies, there has been a progressive elimination of structuralist formalism and ‘super-determinism’ and a shift to the primacy of class struggle over structure.

Throughout his work (or at least its middle period) Poulantzas stressed the need to develop ‘regional’ theories of the state corresponding to particular modes of production (1965c, p. 878; PPSC, pp. 12, 16-17, 29; SPS, pp. 14-20). He himself focused on the theoretically typical form of the capitalist state (representative democracy) and two of its exceptional forms (fascism and military dictatorship). At first he studied the capitalist state in isolation from the economic region of the CMP - he focused on its organisational role in reproducing political domination and largely ignored more direct state involvement in organizing capitalist economic exploitation (see PPSC, passim). But even here Poulantzas often talked of the role of juridico-political ideology and legal institutions in maintaining the ‘isolation effect’ among dominated classes at the economic level (i.e., the competitive individuation of producers that prevents them experiencing production relations as class relations) (PPSC, pp. 130-137, 139-140, 143, 148, 151, 188, 213-214, 275-276, 291-293, 353) as well as examining its repercussions for the constitution and operation of liberal democracy as the institutional locus of the public unity of privatised, individuated, competing citizens (PPSC, pp. 123-125, 133-134, 136-137, 140-141, 188-189, 214-216, 276-279, 281, 288-289, 291, 353).

Later Poulantzas shifted attention from the normal capitalist state considered apart from the periodisation of the CMP towards both exceptional and normal states in its so-called ‘monopoly-imperialist’ stage. This stage is supposed to be associated with the rise to dominance within the matrix of the CMP of the political level in place of the economic (PPSC, pp. 55-56, 91, 150, 211, 345; 1971, pp. 20-21, 74-75, 303, 313; 1974, pp. 42, 45, 81, 100-101, 165-168; and SPS, pp. 166-168). Paradoxically this is reflected in Poulantzas’s growing concern with economic intervention and the consequential reorganisation of the capitalist state. Thus, while his analysis of Fascism and Dictatorship (1970) focused on the key political functions of an exceptional form of the interventionist state during the consolidation of monopoly capitalist domination within the CMP, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974) considers the economic functions of the interventionist state in various phases of the ‘monopoly-imperialist’ stage as well as its political functions. This analysis was extended in the final work on state theory (SPS) to include further growth in economic intervention and its implications.

In tandem with this increasing concern with economic intervention and its limitations, Poulantzas also showed increasing interest in the reproduction of the class struggle within (and at a distance from) the state apparatus and its implications for revolutionary strategy. For, while Political Power and Social Classes tended to endow the capitalist state with a structurally determined, objective function in maintaining cohesion and to presuppose its essential class unity, the analysis of the crisis form of state in Fascism and Dictatorship and the enquiry into the collapse of the military dictatorships of Southern Europe presented in the Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975, 1976b) have led Poulantzas to emphasise more strongly than before the primacy of the class struggle over structures and to emphasise the fissured, contradictory nature of the capitalist state. This shift of emphasis is reaffirmed in State, Power, Socialism and, for the first time, is related to the problems of the transition to socialism. In the space available here it is impossible to summaries, let alone critically dissect, all the concepts, assumptions, principles of explanation, and arguments in his work. So neither his concrete historical analyses of exceptional regimes nor his work on class formation are discussed here and I focus instead on the basic ideas underlying Poulantzas’s contributions to a theory of the capitalist state.

THE STATE, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND POWER

In the ‘Introduction’ to his first major text Poulantzas locates his approach in terms of the Althusserian problematic and describes it as an attempt to produce theoretically a complex hierarchy of concepts for the analysis of the political superstructure of the state in the CMP, i.e., to produce a regional theory of the state in a particular mode of production (1968, pp. 11, 16-17). He argues that this cannot be achieved through a simple logical derivation of progressively more concrete concepts from the most abstract concepts nor through the mere subsumption of more concrete concepts and the most abstract as so many particular instances of the latter (1968, p. 13). Instead it requires a complex work of theoretical elaboration in which concepts are precisely located in relation to the process of thought from the most ‘abstract-formal’ level to the ‘concrete-real’ and in relation to the specific object of thought (e.g., the particular region of the CMP) on which they bear (1968, p. 13; cf. pp. 145-146). In this context Poulantzas suggests that a scientific study of the capitalist type of state involves a threefold theoretical elaboration: the development of the historical materialist general theory of modes of production, class-divided social formations, states, and politics viewed in isolation from specific modes of production, the development of a particular theory of the CMP in order to determine the exact place and function of the state and politics in the theoretically typical matrix of its economic, political, and ideological levels, and, to the extent that the capitalist state enjoys a specific institutional autonomy within the CMP enabling it to be a sui generis object of thought, the development of a regional theory of the capitalist state and politics (1968, pp. 12, 16-18, 142). But he does not discuss the problems of constructing concepts on these different levels and/or planes of abstraction nor that of articulating them to produce a concrete analysis of specific societies - at best we are provided with the answers implied in Poulantzas’s order of exposition.”翻译为中文