Conclusion

Abstract

In this book I have attempted to argue that the development of state and civil society within the major European capitalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth century was dialectical and therefore uneven in tempo, depth and range; the capitalist social formation is not a homogenous unity of partially autonomous levels but a contradictory structure of the economic, political and cultural, specific levels within which there are further differentiations and contradictions. Therefore, the bourgeois institutions of civil society necessarily strive to contain and assimilate the working class although this process of hegemony is never total nor its effects conscious in direction. It is important to emphasise the undialectical nature of such concepts as ‘the organisation of hegemony’ or ‘the control of working-class opinion’ since they presuppose a subjective and voluntaristic notion of the social formation and postulate a process of social integration which is largely achieved from above and not from within civil society. Equally, the concept of a specific working-class culture existing as a separate (and in some versions totally autonomous) cultural level which stands in opposition to the culture of the dominant class must be rejected as part of left-wing mythology and ahistorical romanticism.