Class, Power, and the State in the 21st Century
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Edited by:
Clyde W. Barrow
Class, Power, and the State in the 21st Century meets the renewed interest in the state – the evolving matrix of persons, institutions, and policies constituting the governing and regulating organization – and its variegated interactions with social class and capitalism.
Edited by leading scholar Clyde Barrow, this series highlights critical research on class structures and class-state relationships today, centered on political science, political economy, political sociology, and state theory. It explores dynamics and transformations in the exercise of different forms of power through empirical, institutional, historical, and theoretical as well as practical analyses.
Contributions to this series study these issues in countries, regions, and organizations around the world, offering in-depth examinations of a wide range of themes, including wealth inequality, labor exploitation, and class struggle; imperialism and challenges to global hegemonies; digitization; and specific events or policies.
This book uses concepts drawn from political economy, power structure research, and critical theory to explain and assess the unsettling American politics of the Trump era. Trumpism represents a form of authoritarian populist nationalism that amounts to a new form of right-wing politics, different from traditional Republican conservatism, in a bid for political power and hegemony. The book probes the historical and comparative roots of the Trump Era, its foundations in the early twenty-first century crisis of neoliberal capitalism, its location in and relationship to the elite American power structure, and its connections to emergent Far Right and Alt Right movements. Close attention is paid to the actual policies of the Trump administration, their economic and class character, and the ways in which they continued, and in some cases departed from, hyper-neoliberalism. The book evaluates the contradictions and prospects of Trumpian politics in light of the 2024 election and its implications for American democracy.
The Science of the State: Race, Class, and National Identity in US Political Science, 1835-1945 traces the origins of US political science as it emerged from the Staatwissenschaft paradigm of post-Hegelian nineteenth century Germany, particularly through the influence of Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Wilhelm G. F. Roscher, and Ludwig von Gumplowicz. The US science of the state emphasized three concepts – race, class, and national identity – which generated two competing theories of the state: a metaphysical theory of the state anchored in the concept of race, and an economic theory of the state anchored in the concept of class. By the 1920s, a new sociological theory of the state laid the foundations for a paradigm shift from the science of the state to pluralism in US political science. The author suggests that the origins of US political science structured its development as a dialectical conflict between the official discipline’s ideological defense of economic and racial inequality and a critical political science, which challenged the structural inequalities of US capitalism and liberal democracy.
