13 Facts About Nicos Poulantzas

Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher.

Nicos Poulantzas is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s.

Nicos Poulantzas studied law in Greece and moved to France in 1961; there he completed a doctorate in the philosophy of law under the title The rebirth of natural Law in Germany in 1964.

Nicos Poulantzas taught sociology at the University of Paris VIII from 1968 until his death.

Nicos Poulantzas was married to the French novelist Annie Leclerc and had one daughter.

Nicos Poulantzas committed suicide in 1979 by jumping from the window of a friend's flat in Paris.

Nicos Poulantzas disagreed with this because he saw the capitalist class as too focused on its individual short-term profit, rather than on maintaining the class's power as a whole, to simply exercise the whole of state power in its own interest.

Nicos Poulantzas argued that the state, though relatively autonomous from the capitalist class, nonetheless functions to ensure the smooth operation of capitalist society, and therefore benefits the capitalist class.

Nicos Poulantzas has been particularly influential over the Marxist state theorist, Bob Jessop.

Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony, Nicos Poulantzas argued that repressing movements of the oppressed is not the sole function of the state.

The fragmentation of the class system is, for Nicos Poulantzas, a defining characteristic of late capitalism, and any politically useful analysis must tackle this new constellation of interests and power.

Nicos Poulantzas provides a nuanced analysis of class structure in an era when the internationalisation of production systems was shifting power from labour to capitalist classes.

However, by placing class analysis at the center of political analysis, Nicos Poulantzas reminds us that theorists are political agents themselves and that accounts of the political world are suffused with the ambient ideology that they suppose themselves to bracket.