739 According to Zukin, the "vitality and permissiveness" historically associated with the public life of city streets

are most purely realized in New York in its outdoor markets and sidewalk stalls. These are precisely the venues and activities occupying the bottom of the cultural pecking order. They are constantly being replaced by culture represented as "consumable goods, sites of delectation, and themed experiences" (p. 294). They are subject to being cleared for "higher uses" not only by the institutions representing higher (corporate and consumer) uses, but Zukin suggests, by you and me. As in Pogo, the enemy is us: "Today, peddlers still threaten store merchants' business and damage the image of the shopping street, making it instantly d6class6. Upscaling, the fervent hope of all merchants' associations, from which we middle-class types benefit, is another form of dispossession" (p. 255). Although it is fair to say that Zukin seems to embrace a pessimistic view that the vital, open, and democratic civic culture of New York is in imminent danger of collapse, she concludes her book on an optimistic note, as well she should. There is plenty of material sprinkled throughout her book to support the notion that the negotiation for public space is not always resolved in favor of corporate investors or higher-end consumers. What seems to be unfolding in New York is an organic process in which the sort of public life championed by Zukin, no matter how often or unremittingly displaced, is able to move on to and occupy new spaces, which then become the new cultural battlegrounds. The dance goes on and on, and a fascinating one it is.

University of Missouri-St. Louis

Dennis R. Judd

Paul Thomas, Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved. New York: Routledge, 1994. Written as a "modest essay in retrieval" Paul Thomas's Alien Politics more than succeeds, for it not only discloses space for a renewal of Marxist thinking about modern states; more fundamentally, it urges us not to take the modern disjunction between state and civil society for granted. That deeper challenge is this: our ordinary understandings of the political and the economic are profoundly compromised; they are ideological outcomes of the "great transformation" (as Karl Polanyi called it) that cleared the way for the "disembedded economy" characTheory and Socie O, 25: 739-744, 1996.

740 teristic of capitalism and modernity. Mindful of the history and the revolutionary aspirations of Marxism, Thomas insists throughout on the high political stakes involved in these theoretical matters. "Essay" is a good word for this book, since it is not a study of Marx's writings on the state; neither is it a thorough investigation of the history of Marxist state theory. Nor is it meant to be a contribution to contemporary Marxist theory of the state. Rather, Thomas acts as an underlaborer for future work in Marxist state theory; he draws upon and criticizes Marx and Marxists strategically to clear away the rubbish that has accumulated under the sway of what he calls the ruling-class theory of the state. In the process, Thomas butts up against several pressing methodological and substantive issues that face Marxists: social form and dialectics; the critique of liberalism and its "unencumbered self"; the consequent need for a thicker, shared conception of the good and a thicker essentialism regarding human nature; and the relationship between capitalism and modernity. Throughout the book, the protagonist, alien politics, which Thomas presents as the authentic and superior Marxist theory of the state and whose best exponents in this century are Gramsci and the later Poulantzas, squares off against the antagonist, the ruling-class theory of the state, which (unfortunately) has dominated Marxism, whether in the hands of Lenin, Kautsky, or the latter's secret followers, the Eurocommunists. While one feels by the end of the book that the rulingclass theory has been vanquished - new Left beats old Left - you want to think over just how the notion of alien politics is being used and how exactly to fix the differences between the two competing theories. Here are five sites of contention that I identified. (1) The core difference between alien politics and the ruling-class theory is that alien politics insists on the goal of participatory democracy. For ruling-class theory, belief in the violent, or peaceful, takeover of state power by the working class serves as the surrogate for the "missing links" in Marx's thought, a theory of transition to communism and a theory of workplace democracy. For alien politics, taking over the state without reconfiguring the coordinates of the political and the economic leaves aspiring revolutionaries orbiting in capitalist space. (2) Where alien politics insists that the form of a state be investigated, ruling-class theory treats the state mechanically, as a mere instrument of forces external to it, notably, forces in civil society.

741 (3) More specifically, alien politics insists that what Marx called the "political" state in his essay "On the Jewish Question" is not a bare instrument for the domination of the proletariat by the class of capitalists (as suggested by the Communist Manifesto's phrase "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie"). Rather, it is the dialectical counterpart to the exclusion of public decision-making in civil society. As such, the capitalist state presupposes the modern disjunction of state and civil society. What makes this political state capitalist is its form, not the state's being commandeered by capitalist special interests. The very form of the political state, then, makes it unequal to the task of bringing about participatory democracy. As Thomas repeatedly quotes Marx: "The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." Nonetheless, the sublime but flawed moral vision of the bourgeois state possesses utopian might. (4) While the "capitalist" state surely counts as a modern state, we may well wonder if all modern states are capitalist. Alien politics lumps Communist together with welfare states as modern and capitalist. Perhaps a case for this can be made, but some tricky conceptual work is needed to pull it off. When Thomas cites Marx's statement "The abstraction of the state belongs to modern times because the abstraction of private life belongs to modern times" (p. 71), what are we to think? Is alien politics a theory of the modern state or of the capitalist state? Or is the modern state capitalist in some qualified sense? (5) Alien politics charges that ruling-class theory relies on a simpleminded and dogmatic class theory. As Thomas puts it: "dogmatism about class and dogmatism about the state are likely to go hand in hand" (p. 45). Thomas supplies a trenchant critique of Marx's own dogmatism (particularly from 1843 through the revolutionary year of 1848) concerning the proletariat and its purported revolutionary consciousness. Thomas rudely dismisses Marx's Jacobin non sequitur that the class position of workers decides their consciousness, and he points out that dehumanizing workers hardly nurtures them to become revolutionary humanists. By contrast, Thomas finds in Marx's historical texts such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Gramsci's political writings, and in the later writings of Nicos Poulantzas, the supple approach to the connections between class and state championed by alien politics. Alien politics originates in 1843, the year Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question" along with his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

742 Thomas is convinced that the renewal of Marxist state theory hangs on reengaging Marx's early and largely overlooked criticism of Hegel's accommodation to the fracture of civil society and state. Thomas picks up the banner of "human emancipation" which Marx favorably contrasted with the mere "political emancipation" associated with the separation of state and civil society. The shearing of society along the fault of public and private, state and civil society, is the origin and destiny of capitalism. Thomas writes: ' ~ defining characteristic of capitalist society that sets it apart from all other known forms of society is its way of decisively separating the political from the economic spheres" (pp. 18-19). Consequently, the economic and the political, which sort out in capitalist society, are dialectical counterparts, that is, abstractions from the phenomenon of capitalist social life. Both the economic and the political, then, are capitalist social forms. Not that they appear as such. On the contrary, the economic, the metabolism of humans with nature that is shorn of traditional, religious, and political "constraints" appears natural: "Because civil society was no longer politically determined, because it was to all appearances no longer determined by any rules or conventions external to its own, inner working, it looked ... as though a 'natural' core of human activity, economic life, had been latent all along within the political and theological carapace of the feudal past, awaiting only its uncovering and liberation" (p. 61). The phony appearance of the economic as natural actually betrays its capitalist essence. Just as oddly - and what isn't odd about capitalism? - it is precisely the formalism of the modern, political state that marks it as capitalist in nature. As Thomas quotes Lukfics: "The fundamentally formal character of pure democracy is not merely an advantage for the bourgeoisie but is precisely the decisive condition of its class rule" (p. 174). The political state is inherently capitalist because the splitting of the political and the economic that makes it possible is the deepest social transmutation required for and reproduced by capitalism. Any attempt to uproot capitalism by seizing control of such a state is doomed. Although Thomas stresses Marx's claim that the modern conception of the political is essentially capitalist, he is aware of the bigger picture in which correlative considerations apply to the economic. For Marx was not an economist: instead he criticized the very idea of the economic as a dogma of classical political economy. Neither was he a Ricardian: rather he revealed Ricardian value theory, which passes over the decisive issue of the value form, to be capitalist ideology. And Ricardian

743 value theory remains capitalist ideology even when brandished by selfdeclared socialists. Marx never minced words in his criticisms of the (Ricardian) "bourgeois horizon" of Proudhon, Proudhonists, or the Gotha Program of the German Workers' Party. Thomas's contribution is to make the corresponding point for politics: ruling class theory, in its obliviousness to the capitalist form of the modern state, is a repository of capitalist ideol6gy. With this achievement, Thomas helps restore Marxism to its proper domain, the politically oriented, dialectical theory of social forms. Anyone desiring to follow through on Thomas's accomplishments will want to press his thinking about two matters. One is human emancipation. Marxists need to move past Marx's talk of "human emancipation" and supply some morally and politically acceptable agenda for social transformation that answers to that phrase. Thomas notes that liberalism, not democracy, is capitalism's political counterpart. Marx's critique of liberalism (political emancipation) is profound: liberalism's thin conception of the good, namely, individual liberty and (relatedly) the protection of private property, only appears to leave society a "great scramble" without any organizing goal to social production. The liberal "disembedded economy" actually is embedded in the mad telos of capital's endless quest for accumulation, a final cause whose consequences include the exploitation of wage-laborers and capital's impersonal domination of all. What would it take to surpass liberalism? Thomas points out how critical Marx is of the liberal, "unencumbered self." And Thomas rightly observes that this liberal conception of the person involves a thin essentialism about human nature that is expected to supply norms to modern society, where appeals to custom and religion are no longer legitimate. But if human emancipation is to supersede liberal political emancipation, won't that require a thicker, shared conception of the human good and a thicker essentialism about human nature? Thomas appears to be thinking about human emancipation along these lines when he writes: "Unless private beings become universalized through their social experiences, unless the human species emerges as the universal public, unless, that is, the once merely philosophical ideal of an expansive human nature finally takes root, the political realm of 'universal' existence will always be overwhelmed and stifled by the particularism of egoistic interests in civil society" (116).

744 However, liberal theorists going back at least to Kant have argued that civil society is not susceptible of being universalized this way - human needs are simply too angular and unpredictable - and that a thin essentialism about human nature - sufficient to ground a liberal state is the most we can hope for. To want to merge public and private and democratize civil society is wishful thinking or, worse, a dangerous "fanaticism" (as Hegel thought). If Marxist theory is to develop along the lines Thomas projects, it needs to turn up some convincing answers to liberal objections. The second, related, matter concerns the shape of modern states today. Thomas insists that the dramatic repoliticization of civil society familiar from twentieth-century capitalism does not render the critique of the sundering of civil society and state obsolete: "Even though Marx developed the concept of alien politics to characterize the emergence of a certain kind of relationship between state and society, and even though this relationship is today in some respects surpassed, the distinction of private and public, and the privileging of the former over the latter, has endured" (p. 183). I believe that there is something right about this, but as Thomas himself says, "The question remains: where would a specifically Marxist characterization of the state in its present form proceed?" (p. 180). For an answer, Thomas refers us to Habermas, Offe, Gramsci, and the later Poulantzas. Fine, but what we want is a lucid account of contemporary state forms delivered from the standpoint of alien politics, one that makes good on the claim that the contemporary interventionist state still rests on the cleaving of the political and economic. I wonder if we might accept Paul Thomas's invitation to keep in mind the utopian aspect of the political state (the "perfected Christian state" as Marx once called it) and look at the experience of the repoliticization of civil society in this century as, among other things, a turbulent proving ground for thicker conceptions of the human good and of human nature, where broad agreement is being forged that the human good includes access to education, health care, housing, a safe and attractive environment, employment, security in old age, and social esteem, and that humans are the kind of beings who need these types of goods. Such a hopeful reading of this bleak century would have to be crosscut by attending to current "hypercapitalist" attacks on the welfare state as well as to the underlying judgment of alien politics that, in all its varieties, capitalism is twisted.

Creighton University

Patrick Murray