INTRODUCTION

Modern politics, Jens Bartelson reminds us, is ‘intelligible only in terms of the state’. Western political experience is so conditioned by the structures of sovereign authority, by the apparatus of coercion available to the state, and by the rigid distinctions between the domestic and the foreign, that ‘We simply seem to lack the intellectual resources necessary to conceive of a political order beyond or without the state, since the state has been present for long enough for the concept to confine our political imagination.’ Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the scope, content, functions, and future of the state remain as hard to identify as ever. Conceptually and empirically, it is both present and absent, foregrounded in political consciousness but receding into the distance at each attempt to grasp its specificity. Although many attempts have been made by radical political theorists and – in an ironic mirror of the post-political universe of Marxism – by the neo-liberal prophets of globalisation to envisage a space beyond the state, it seems exceptionally difficult to escape.

The nineteenth century witnessed numerous attempts to think beyond the state, to imagine new forms of human association. Marx's grand vision was but the most ambitious.