Power, Politics and the State
Chapter 8 Summary

This chapter aims to show how political sociology focuses on power in society and on the relationship between state power and social groups. It examines how sociologists have traditionally adopted society-centred (and often class-centred) approaches in their analyses of power. But it also shows how, more recently, many sociologists have recognised the need to go beyond such analyses. Therefore we give greater attention to the state and state power as an independent source of power and change. We also recognise the diversity and complexity of power relations, political identities and bases of political action and consider power relations and political processes beyond the nation-state, in the context of globalisation and transnational politics and economics.

We begin by detailing the classical accounts of the distribution of power, using the contemporary politics of the Third Way as an exemplar. We go on to examine how different forms of social division and identity other than class may be, and are being, mobilised politically to perhaps form a new kind of politics. The chapter then outlines the nature of the modern state, traces its historical development, and identifies its key features, and it concludes by considering the impact of the process of globalisation on power and democracy and on the prospects for national and international political stability. The conclusion outlines the dynamics of a changing political world.