Abstract
This article is a meta-critique, from an Althusserian and Poulantzasian perspective, of critical accounts of the British state. It is based on a ‘symptomatic reading’ of key texts written by Andrew Gamble, Colin Hay and Chris Howell, which demonstrates that they misconstrue the dynamics of capitalism and the effects of state interventions and class conflict. Against this backdrop, the article outlines an approach to state analysis based on the concept of ‘capitalist class domination’, which avoids the tendency of both critical political science and comparative capitalisms scholarship to substitute the study of specific aspects of capitalism for the analysis of capitalism as a structured whole.
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