Page 18 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

4 Changing Definitions of Politics and Power

political sociology away from state - centered, class - based models of politi-
cal participation, or non - participation, toward an understanding of poli-
tics as a potentiality of all social experience. It is in this sense that
contemporary political sociology is concerned with cultural politics,
understood in the broadest possible sense as the contestation and trans-
formation of social identities and structures.
In the following three sections of this chapter, we will begin our discus-
sion of political sociology with a look back at how it developed through
the study of the work of the “ founding fathers, ” Marx, Weber, and
Durkheim. We will then go on to consider the “ analytics of power ”

developed by Michel Foucault, the single most influential thinker on the
development of contemporary political sociology, and the work on “ gov-
ernmentality ” that directly draws inspiration from his writings on politics
and power. I will then introduce the most important theoretical themes
of contemporary political sociology and explain why the concept of
“ cultural politics ” is so useful to understanding “ politics of politics ”
today. Finally, there will be an outline of the chapters to follow, indicat-
ing how each one deals with a particular theme in contemporary political
sociology.

1.1 The Marxist Tradition of Political Sociology

In many respects, it is far from evident that the state should have a central
place in Marxist analyses of capitalism, given their overwhelming theo-
retical commitment to the view that it is economic relations which ulti-
mately determine all social and political life. Marx himself, concerned
primarily as he was with capitalism as a mode of production, concentrated
on the economic level, and had relatively underdeveloped and tentative
views on the state. In fact, Adam Przeworski goes so far as to suggest
that, given his theory of capitalism as a self - perpetuating economic system
of production and exchange, there was no room in it for theorizing the
state as contributing to its reproduction (Przeworski, 1990 : 6970).
Although this is an extreme view, based on Marx ’ s later work, it is true
that it has proved very diffi cult for neo - Marxists to give due weight to
ideology and politics without giving up the central theoretical Marxist
commitment to economic class struggle as the motor of history.
The roots of later Marxist theorizations of political power as a transla-
tion of economic power concentrated in the modern state are there already
in Marx ’ s writings. Although Marx had no fully developed theory of the
state, he did discuss it in various ways throughout his writings. Here we