This essay tries to specify the origins, mechanisms and results of the autonomous power which the state possesses in relation to the major power groupings of ‘civil society’. The argument is couched generally, but it derives from a large, ongoing empirical research project into the development of power in human societies. At the moment, my generalisations are bolder about agrarian societies; concerning industrial societies I will be more tentative. I define the state and then pursue the implications of that definition. I discuss two essential parts of the definition, centrality and territoriality, in relation to two types of state power, termed here despotic and infrastructural power. I argue that state autonomy, of both despotic and infrastructural forms, flows principally from the state's unique ability to provide a territorially-centralised form of organization.

Despite the certainty with which our theories of industrial society chorused the demise of the small-scale economy, Italy'ssmall producers have not merely refused to disappear but have continued to nourish, multiply and predominate in the postwar economy. Most explanations for this phenomenon have centred oneconomic factors—whether the old linear notions of delayed development and backwardness (Fuà 1976; Sereni 1966), or the more fashionable centre-periphery model which attributes the survival of small-scale production to Italy's ‘latecomer’ status within the international division of labour (see, e.g., Paci 1979; Bagnasco 1977). In this paper I shall attempt to provide a non-economic explanation for the persistence and reproduction of Italy's small business stratum. The weight and importance of small enterprise in a given economy is not entirely explained by economic factors, since comparative statistics tell us that in many advanced economies petty production is by no means a marginal organisational form. Indeed they indicate that the processes of industrialism, far from generating homogenous and purgative effects, produce a diversity of conditions in which small firms can survive. On these and other empirical grounds, the paper argues that the differences observable in the Italian case are the product of particular social and institutional factors.

A new and curious species of public figure emerged on the international scene after the Second World War, gaining in prominence and conspicuousness in the years that followed. His daily experience is often a trying one, marked by recurrent tension between conflicting commitments. Enjoying from bhth the comforts of the advanced industrial world, he seeks to speak onbehalf of the hungry and impoverished. Educated in the best universities, he lives among countrymen who are predominantly illiterate. He is regarded as an impertinent upstart by the diplomats of wealthier and more powerful nations. At the same time, he is suspected by his own people of compromising himself with the reigning powers of the international arena. He is well-versed and highly articulate in the political vocabulary of the West. Yet he is acutely sensitive to perceived slights against the political traditions of his native land. He is bitter about what the Western presence did to his native society. But the very categories in which he couches his criticisms of that presence—the rights to sovereignty, distributive justice, and national self-determination —are themselves the inheritance of the West. He follows with enthusiasm the latest currents of intellectual life in Europe and America. Yet he is deeply committed, simultaneously, to defending the dignity of his own people's cultural achievements. As a result of his modern education, he cannot help but feel somewhat estranged from the traditional beliefs and practices of his fellow citizens. Yet neither can he feel very comfortable as the mere bearer to them of the colonizer's culture, a culture he rarely regards entirely as his own. Such is the predicament of that loquacious and troublesome child of the post-colonial age, the Third World intellectual.

Minority and majority are correlative terms: to say the one necessarily implies the other.

The notion of minority and majority has for a long time now been part of the Western political vocabulary. How did this happen ? It is a natural question to ask since neither the Latin words from which they are derived, i.e., minor and maior, nor their particular derivations in various European languages originally had a political bearing or implication. In English (and French) for instance minority and majority indicated simply the age of a person, having regard to issues of legal competence. A minor could not act in his own behalf. In due coursethe minor will be able so to act, and we then say that he has attained his majority.

In this paper I want to explore the role of myths of descent and renewal in nourishing a sense of ethnic identity and mobilising ethnic communities for political action. Much of the recent literature on the upsurge in ethnic sentiment, by focussing on the postwar West and concentrating on immediate economic, social and political factors, fails to grasp the deep historical and sociological roots of modern nations and the persistence of ethnic ties and symbols around which nationalists could create their nations. There is a long history of formation and dissolution of ethnie, reaching back to the first recorded cases in ancient Summer, Egypt and Crete, which forms the backdrop to the modern drama of nationalism and the specifically modern revival of ethnicity. Not only are the postwar ethnic autonomy movements simply a recent variation of a wider ethnic and national revival going back to the late eighteenth century in Europe; this latter revival is but the latest of a series of such resurgences, some of them purely local and others widely diffused. In pre-Roman antiquity, just as in the early European Middle Ages, and in the Far East and Africa more recently, that ancient and widespread social formation, the ethnie, has occupied a variable but important position in the hierarchy of human allegiance and has, on occasion, served as a focus for political movements and organisations. Whether we think of the kingdoms of Hittites, Hurrians and Elamites in the second millennium B.C., or the early medieval regna of Franks, Normans and Visigoths, we cannot escape from the fact that these states rested, to a large degree, on a sense of identity and solidarity deriving from elements of their shared culture and their social and political interactions with significant outsiders.