The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), was a provocative and profoundly influential critique of the Victorian nuclear family. Engels argued that the traditional monogamous household was in fact a recent construct, closely bound up with capitalist societies. Under this patriarchal system, women were servants and, effectively, prostitutes. Only Communism would herald the dawn of communal living and a new sexual freedom and, in turn, the role of the state would become superfluous.

This volume develops a novel approach to state theory.

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through ?shortcut? methods of (...) economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, inadequate to convince anyone who lacks libertarian philosophical convictions. Yet “philosophical” libertarianism founders on internal contradictions that render it unfit to make libertarians out of anyone who does not have strong consequentialist reasons for libertarian belief. The joint failure of these two approaches to libertarianism explains why they are both present in orthodox libertarianism—they hide each other's weaknesses, thereby perpetuating them. Libertarianism retains significant potential for illuminating the modern world (...) because of its distance from mainstream intellectual assumptions. But this potential will remain unfulfilled until its ideological superstructure is dismantled. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a spectacular growth of Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society. This literature has been widely hailed as cumulative proof of Marxism's ability to produce a successful theory of the political "superstructure," and as confirmation of the health and vigor of Marxist theory more generally. Axel van den Berg raises serious questions about both claims. Through a comprehensive analysis of Marxist thought on bourgeois politics and the state, from Marx himself to (...) the present, van den Berg radically challenges the viability of a distinctly Marxist theory of the state and of recent Marxist theorizing in general. In an exhaustive review of the literature, van den Berg shows that neo-Marxist theories are, for the most part, not empirically testable. To the extent that it is possible to draw any empirical implications from these theories at all, such implications are virtually indistinguishable from those of "bourgeois" theories. The author further demonstrates that the theories he discusses presuppose the viability and desirability of some ideal socialist society. Nevertheless, Marxism's "anti-utopian" insistence that all criticisms of capitalism must rest on foundations immanent in capitalism itself prohibits any open discussion of such a utopia. (shrink)