Istvan Meszaros

In Bobbio’s view, Marx and subsequent Marxian theorists, such as Lenin, Luxemburg, and Gramsci, had developed criticisms of the capitalist state from the standpoint of the human “subject,” but their analysis displayed a lack of consideration of concrete “institutions” and the nature of the state under socialism.

Further, the Marxian argument on the “withering away” of the state was seen by Bobbio as lacking any contemporary significance

Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti, decrying the “lack of a theory of the socialist state or socialist democracy as an alternative to the theory, or theories of the bourgeois state and bourgeois democracy.”

Nevertheless, insofar as the latter argued that a Marxian theory of the state was not even possible in principle, since downplaying the rule of law and of institutions was inherently authoritarian, Bobbio, according to Mészáros, simply betrayed his own deep-seated view that the state as a modern entity was exclusively a liberal-democratic phenomenon (196–97).19

Liberal-democratic approaches to the state, associating it with the rule of law (and right), failed to acknowledge the state’s own lawlessness, that is, the frequent transgressions of its own rules, in a situation in which there was no
higher authority.

For Barker, “The state is essentially law, and law is the essence of the state,” defined by their mutual relation.

The state is simply a group or association, like any other, generated by society through voluntary association, but with the specific, higher purpose of promoting law based on the higher authority or sovereignty conferred on the state.23

Thus, in Barker’s words, the state is “constituted by and under this constitution [the legal act or acts establishing its sovereign authority], and thus … the State exists to perform the legal or juridical purpose for which it was constituted.”

Nevertheless, a “liberal socialist” like Bobbio, who sought to construct a social democratic political theory grounded in the principles of liberalism, continually raised crucial questions about what was necessary to control capital.

Yet, though Bobbio was correct in insisting in this way on the need for substantive equality, he was wrong, Mészáros insisted, in thinking that capital was controllable. “Capital—by its very nature and innermost determinations—is uncontrollable. Therefore, to invest the energies of a social movement into trying to reform a substantively uncontrollable system, is a much more futile venture than the labour of Sisyphus.”