Capstones and Organisms: Political Forms and the Triumph of Capitalism

This paper argues against the dominant tendency in social theory to speak of “the state”. It distinguishes two types of state: the capstone state sitting on top of societies, blocking alternative sources of power, and the organic state allowing and encouraging the co-operation of different power sources, which is held to be characteristic of European development. The main argument of the paper is that the latter type of polity was a necessary feature in the complex that allowed the endogenous creation of a broadly capitalist dynamic in the Occident.