Borchert Jens - Claus Offe and the Critical Theory of the Capitalist State

This the first book to systemically reconstruct and extend the work of Claus Offe, who provided one of the most powerful analyses of the capitalist state among the first generation of contemporary critical state theorists. Offe was one of the only state theorists to analyse the double bind of legitimation and accumulation and to explore how these contradictory demands on the capitalist state generate policy failure as a systematic feature of the capitalist state. The authors not only provide an excellent reconstruction and analysis of Offes critical state theory, but extend his insights to an analysis of the contemporary financial crisis of global capitalism.

Clyde W. Barrow, Chair, Department of Political Science,
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

This fascinating social analysis, with many intriguing qualities of a whodunnit, creatively explores and systematically interrogates the work of the cheerfully eclectic, frequently contrarian, often misunderstood, conjuncturally sensitive, and always provocative Claus Offe, a seemingly permanent fixture yet moving target in diverse disciplines. While presenting almost everything you need to know about Offe, Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich organize their intellectual and political analysis around Offes distinctive contradiction-sensitive, relational analysis of the conflictual and improbably stable relation between democratic capitalism and the capitalist state, distinguish different phases in his intellectual and political biography as a critical social scientist and public intellectual who is always engaged with important issues, and provide valuable and provocative reasons for why we must continue to engage with Offes work. They show why this Offe is one that we should not refuse!

Bob Jessop, Distinguished Professor of Sociology,
Lancaster University

Back in 1972, German political sociologist Claus Offe published a book on the Structural Problems of Late Capitalism which, for almost two decades, inspired and stimulated an international and transdisciplinary debate on the role of the state in contemporary capitalism. An academic debate which, paradoxically, began to wane as the issues about which Offe had been writing became even more prominent: the Contradictions of the Welfare State (the title of a collection of Offes main contributions to the debate published in English in 1984) and democratic capitalisms reality of the permanent crises of crisis management. Since 2008, it has again become a widely shared diagnosis that advanced capitalism is in crisis. However, there is either scholarly disagreement or (more often so) mere perplexity when it comes to understanding this crisis and to explaining the prevalent patterns in dealing with it.

In this volume, Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich critically combine a reconstruction of Claus Offes approach to state theory with an analysis of the current constellation of democratic capitalism based on that same theory. In doing so, they argue that his relational approach to state theory is much better equipped analytically to grasp the contradictory dynamics of the financial crisis and its political regulation than competing contributions. This is why systematically revisiting the theory of late capitalism is not only of a historical concern, but constitutes an essential contribution to a political sociology of our time.

Jens Borchert is Professor of Political Science at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

Stephan Lessenich is Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich and current Chairman of the German Sociological Association.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit http://www.routledge.com

60Michael A. Weinstein
Action, Contemplation, Vitalism
Edited by Robert L. Oprisko and Diane Rubenstein

61Deep Cosmopolis
Rethinking World Politics and Globalisation
Edited by Adam K. Webb

62Political Philosophy, Empathy and Political Justice
Matt Edge

63The Politics of Economic Life
Martin Beckstein

64The Temporality of Political Obligation
Justin C. Mueller

65Epistemic Liberalism
A Defence
Adam James Tebble

66Hegel, Marx, and 21st Century Social Movements
Democracy, Dialectics, and Difference
Brian Lovato

67Ideologies of Experience
Trauma, Failure, and the Abandonment of the Self
Matthew H. Bowker

68Post-Politics in Context
Ali Rza Taskale

69Claus Offe and the Critical Theory of the Capitalist State
Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich

Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich

First published 2016
by Routledge
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2016 Taylor & Francis

The right of Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Borchert, Jens, 1961 author. | Lessenich, Stephan, author.

Title: Claus Offe and the critical theory of the capitalist state / Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich.

Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge innovations in political theory ; 69 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048434 | ISBN 9781138887428 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315714134 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Offe, Claus. | Capitalism. | State, The. | Political sociology.

Classification: LCC HM479.O34 B67 2016 | DDC 306.3/42dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048434

ISBN: 978-1-138-88742-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71413-4 (ebk)

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by Erik Olin Wright

I first met Claus Offe early in 1974 when I enrolled in a seminar he taught during a semester he spent at the University of California. I dont remember the title of the course itself; but it was unequivocally the most important course I took as a graduate student and it influenced my intellectual formation as a sociologist in crucial ways.

The San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s was one of the vibrant centers of free-wheeling exploration of Marxism in all of its flavors. I had entered the doctoral program in sociology in the fall of 1971 and with fellow graduate students, I helped organize a student-run seminar called Current controversies in Marxist social science, which met in the evenings for many semesters, exploring a wide variety of topics and approaches in Marxism. We debated the labor theory of value and crisis theory, Althusser on ideology and the state, Lukacs on class consciousness, Poulantzas and Miliband on the state, the German state derivation theorists, and much more. No one wanted to be a narrow topical specialist and few people were committed to any particular style of theorizing.