Abstract

The focus of this article is on Nicos Poulantzas’s thinking from a strategic point of view: His theoretical analyses cannot be dissociated from the concrete political perspective of the conquest of the state and the transition to socialism in the European context of the 1970s. Rejecting any instrumental conception of the state, Poulantzas studies its transformations, within the framework of a theorization that bears the mark of structuralism and the strategies of union of the left specific to this period. In this context, it attaches decisive importance to ideological struggle and intellectual activities, with a view to achieving the ‘transformation of the State’ and the ‘deployment of direct democracy’. At a time of a new transformation of the state into an instrument of neoliberal policies, and as its de-democratization accelerates, it is necessary to question the merits and limits of the original approach that Nicos Poulantzas took. But we must also and above all pursue such strategic thinking, so largely deserted today.