Ralph Miliband and the Instrumentalist Theory of the State: The (Mis)Construction of an Analytic Concept

Abstract

The concept of instrumentalism that is so closely associated with Ralph Miliband’s theory of the state is not merely an oversimplification and caricature of Miliband’s political theory, but an artificial polemical construct superimposed on his and others’ historical and empirical analysis of the state in capitalist society (Domhoff, 1990, p. 42). Many, if not most, of the criticisms directed at Miliband’s political theory during the 1970s state debate were actually straw men created by polemical adversaries who introduced an analytic construct called ‘instrumentalism’ that Miliband himself never embraced, and for good reason, as an accurate conceptualization of his published work. G. William Domhoff (1986–87, p. 295; 1990, pp. 40–4) has even argued previously that Miliband’s instrumentalism was willfully distorted and misinterpreted for the purely political purpose of exaggerating the theoretical originality of ‘new’ theories of the state that claimed to be ‘more Marxist’ and ‘more revolutionary’ than Miliband’s theory. From this perspective, the instrumentalism that so many state theorists have sought to move beyond since the Miliband-Poulantzas debate (1969–76) is merely an abstraction that was steadily, artificially, and often deliberately constructed over the course of a polemic that accomplished little more than the fracturing of state theory (Barrow, 2000, 2002).