Modern social theory offers three main models of the state: an instrumentalist, a realist and a pluralist. These models can be respectively represented by the names Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Of those three theorists, perhaps only Marx can claim to be a key originator of ‘his’ model of the state. In Weber’s political sociology the influence of political realism stretching back at least as far as Machiavelli and Hobbes is quite transparent. Furthermore, while rejecting any form of socialism and what he took to be the economic reductionism of Marxist theory, Weber nevertheless sought to retain elements of a materialist methodology denuded of its original political aim. Finally, Weber’s conception of power as an expression of will, and his view of both politics and society as increasingly rationalised (and ‘disenchanted’) and as sites of eternal struggle owe a great deal to his reading of Nietzsche. His achievement might be described as one of synthesising elements of realism, materialism and nihilism, and of translating these into the language of the modern social sciences. In Durkheim’s political sociology the influence of both French and German political theory is no less evident. His view of the state as the deliberative organ of political societies and as the guardian of their conscience collective echoes Rousseau’s general will, French socialist thought (in particular Saint–Simon’s) and Comte’s positivist approach to the study of society. Moreover, his emphasis upon the normative role of secondary associations (as both a source of identity and as a counter-balance to the growing power of the state) has precedence not only in Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but also in those German political theorists who tried to rescue elements of the ‘Standestaat’ (polity of estates) for a modern pluralist society. Durkheim’s objective was to use scientific method to show how the individual and the social, the value of freedom and the requirement of solidarity, might be reconciled.