The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results

Abstract

This article was published for the first time in English in 1984 in the magazine Archives Europénnes de Sociologie, and afterwards in the compilation of Michael Mann’s works States, war and capitalism: studies in political sociology. We take up Pablo Sánchez León’s translation, published in 1991 in the magazine Zona Abierta. Mann argues that: “the state is merely and essentially an arena, a space, and that however these is the precise source of its autonomy.”