In his new book, Goeran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society - looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal state, the capitalist state and the socialist state. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn's enquiry in the 'Future as History'. Written with lucidity and economy, What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules? represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.

The intricate practices of the elite and how they maintain their dominance

About the Author
Goeran Therborn is the Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is also the former co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala. He has worked in, and on, all the populated continents of the world. His works have been published in at least twenty-four languages. He is also a civic intellectual, with a lifetime commitment to universal freedom and equality, a supporter of anti-imperialist and egalitarian social movements, and writes on Marxist and Radical theory. Since his retirement from Cambridge in 2010 he lives at Ljungbyholm, in southeast Sweden.

Reviews
Excellent ... With a dispassionate and erudite command of wide-ranging historical and comparative sources, this book is essential reading. * Choice *
An extremely thought-provoking, wide-ranging book. * Comment *



Book Information
ISBN 9781844672103
Author Goeran Therborn
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 310g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 130mm * 25mm