Nicos Poulantzas

Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political philosopher and sociologist, born in 1936, who moved to France in 1960 and became a leading figure of the structuralist Marxist school in the 1970s. Initially influenced by the existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, he later became associated with the structuralist approach of Louis Althusser. His 1968 book Political Power and Social Classes set out a structuralist theory of the state as relatively autonomous from direct control by the capitalist class, functioning instead as a factor of cohesion holding a social formation together. His later books Fascism and Dictatorship (1970) and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974) extended this framework to exceptional state forms and to the class structure of advanced capitalist societies. He died in 1979.