In recent years there has been a spectacular growth of Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether this literature has contributed towards a viable, genuinely Marxist theory of the state and to assess the state of current Marxist theorizing more generally. On the basis of a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, from the "classics" to the present, it is argued that: (1) instead of theoretical advances, recent theories have produced a progressive immunization of received orthodoxies against empirical falsification; (2) to the extent that it is nevertheless possible to draw empirical implications from them at all, these have become virtually indistinguishable from those of their "bourgeois" counterparts; (3) what continues to underlie Marxist theorizing is an implicit reliance on "socialism" as the criterion of evaluation of capitalist reality combined with a virtual taboo on explicitly considering the exact nature of this "socialism".
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.76747 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Van den Berg, Axel. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Sociology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000220300, proquestno: AAINL20830, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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