>
> It looks like that Carrol is bringing us back to the old debates
> concerning strcuturalist versus instrumentalist
> views of the state: Poulantzas (who was a
> disciple of Althusser) versus, say, Ralph Milliband
> or, indeed, Domhoff. I, myself, think that I am inclined
> towards the take that Richard W. Miller took in his
> book, "Analyzing Marx", called for a synthesis of
> the structuralist and instrumentalist views of the state.
A lot of people take this view - there's a collection of essays in a 2002 book, 'Paradigm Lost', sharing a Poulantzas-Miliband synthesis view. It's pretty good. Also, Bob Jessop has developed a pretty good line in most of his stuff since the late 1970s, and his own take on structure and agency with what he calls the 'strategic relational approach'.
Mike Beggs