Education and the State in Capitalist Society: Aspects of the Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas

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1 Education and the State in Capitalist Society: Aspects of the Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO University of North Carolina, Greensboro H. Svi Shapiro reviews some of the major works of the French Marxist sociologist, Nicos Poulantzas. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, Political Power and Social Classes, and a number of articles dealing with Western capitalist societies are examined to determine their implications for the educational process. Poulantzas produced an extensive and significant body of work on the class structure of modern capitalist societies, and the role of the state, ideology, and political practice. Because of the difficulty of his style, much of this work has remained largely unread. Nevertheless, his writings represent an important contribution to a fully developed radical critique of schools and education under capitalism. Nicos Poulantzas died in October 1979 at the age of forty-three. The Greek-born sociologist had, in the 1960s and 1970s, made a major contribution to the study of capitalist society and, in particular, the function of the state within it. As a Marxist he wanted to justify the reformist policies of the European Communist and Socialist parties by developing a theory of class struggle within, rather than simply against, the institutions of the capitalist state. He had placed many of his hopes on the French Union of the Left. 1 Its split and subsequent defeat were bitter disappointments both politically and intellectually. Poulantzas saw the institution of the West European state, which he had hoped could be progressively democratized by the Left once in office, become increasingly authoritarian in the hands of a triumphant Right that, to add insult to injury, had appropriated antistate 1 The electoral alliance of the French socialist and communist parties was created in the mid-1960s. In 1977 the French Community party withdrew from the alliance over a demand for more specifics in the program of nationalization. As a result, the Right was able to turn back the challenge from the Left in This introduction draws on a report by DianaJohnstoverbiage. in 2 in In These Times, October 24-30, 1979, p. 9. Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 50, No. 3, August Copyright by President and Fellows of Harvard College /80/ $01.02/0 321

2 Harvard Educational Review While Poulantzas was writing within the context of Western Europe, much of what he wrote can be fruitfully applied to the United States experience. His analyses of the state, social classes, and ideology are rich with insights into the nature of U. S. society. While his primary focus is much wider in scope, schools and education do constitute an important concern in his work both directly and by implication, and his ideas can make an important contribution to the critical analysis of schooling in Western societies. Poulantzas's sociology is written from a Marxist standpoint, and its perspectives and categories suffuse his work. Poulantzas was also a close disciple of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and, unfortunately for many of us, adopted the language as well as the perspectives of the master. The result is a work that is linguistically dense, requiring at times a Talmudic diligence in order to decipher it. The span of Poulantzas's work is broad and its contents complex. I have chosen several themes which seem to offer particular insights into the nature of education, and make no claim to an exhaustive treatment. Poulantzas and the Sociology of Education According to Poulantzas, the obsession of sociologists of education with social mobility, whether of individuals or groups, causes them to overlook the fundamental nature of social classes in capitalist society: "The principal aspect of an analysis of social classes is... not that of the agents that compose them.... The class membership of the various agents depends on the class places that they occupy: it is moreover distinct from the class origin, the social origin, of the agents." 3 Poulantzas's emphatically structuralist argument asserts that the way in which individuals are allocated to various social classes ("who is or becomes a bourgeois, proletarian, petty bourgeois, poor peasant, etc." 4 ) is subordinate to the reproduction of the actual positions occupied by the social classes. Poulantzas argues: "While it is true that the agents themselves must be reproduced 'trained' and 'subjected' in order to occupy certain places, it is equally true that the distribution of agents does not depend on their choices or aspirations but on the very reproduction of these positions." 5 For Poulantzas "it is not the existence of a school forming proletarians and new petty bourgeois which determines the existence and reproduction (increase, decrease, certain forms of categorization, etc.) of the working class and the new petty bourgeoisie; on the contrary, it is the action of the production relations [economic system]... which has the school as its effect." 6 Poulantzas, in short, asserts that it is not schooling but the system of economic production that creates and maintains social classes. While school may direct one individual rather than another toward a particular social position, the positions themselves are created by the system of production and exist prior to their occupation by any particular individual or group. Even a (mythical) situation of perfect mobility, says Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 17. Poulantzas, "On Social Classes," New Left Review, 78 (1973), 49. "On Social Classes," p. 50. "On Social Classes," pp

3 Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO Poulantzas, would not eliminate social classes, but would only allow a more thorough displacement of individuals from one class to another. Poulantzas's structuralism is a rejoinder to liberal social scientists and policymakers whose pursuit of equality in the present context seems to ignore the fundamental nature of the social structure. In education, for example, the elimination or reduction of tracking, the introduction of "culturally unbiased" selection procedures, and the implementation of mainstreaming, leave untouched the underlying structure of inequality in the United States. These structures, argues Poulantzas, are rooted in the nature of capitalist society. Most issues in educational policy concern the relative distribution of particular groups of individuals in the social structure not the structure itself. However successful policies may or may not be in redistributing individuals or their offspring to different social classes, they leave untouched both the existence of these classes and the resulting relations of domination and subordination that, according to Poulantzas, pervade all the economic, political, and ideological practices of society. Just as schools play an important role in the reproduction of social classes but are not at their source, so do other institutions maintain rather than create authoritarian social relations. Poulantzas criticizes those who, like Illich, see these relations as a product of institutions like the schools, in other words, the product of "state ideological apparatuses": "We must recognize that these apparatuses neither create ideology, nor are they even the sole or primary factors in reproducing relations of ideological domination and subordination. Ideological apparatuses only serve to fashion and inculcate... the dominant ideology. Thus Max Weber was wrong in claiming that the Church creates and perpetuates religion: rather it is religion which creates and perpetuates the Church."' While this argument can be a difficult one to grasp (having something of a chicken-and-egg quality about it), it is clear that Poulantzas does not believe that institutions like the school are the originators of political and social domination. Even if we accept the argument put forward by Illich that schools provide a training in commodity fetishism 8 and alienation, 9 it is not cleat how their elimination would fundamentally alter other aspects of our social existence. Poulantzas, following Marx, argues that the existence of commodity fetishism originates not in the consumerist 7 Classes, p Commodity fetishism refers to the process by which human qualities, values, and relations are turned into things ascribing to inanimate objects qualities which only human beings can possess. Examples of this process would include the attribution of good or bad tendencies to modern technology rather than to the relations among the people who create, control or use the technology. We see the process at work also in the identification of education with the educated person's grades, diploma or degree, rather than with his changed consciousness, skills, or relationships. As Miriam Wasserman points out, in both these cases lifeless things at once symbolize and mask the human reality (Miriam Wasserman. ed., Demystifying School. New York: Praeger, 1974, p. 35). 9 "Alienation of labor refers to the fact that the wage or salary worker sells his labor power (a significant part of his life energy) for money rather than using it directly to sustain and give meaning to his life. He gives himself up to his employer. He also gives up the product of his labor and meaningful self- or group-directed cooperative relations with his co-workers. For Marxists, this social and human alienation which constitutes the core of capitalist relations of production violates the very nature of man, which is to seek to control and change himself, and together with others, his natural and human environment. "If self-conscious control of our life-work energies and our group destiny are as Marx believed characteristically and uniquely human drives, then alienation from ourselves must be learned. The institution school, with much help from the institution family, teaches the lesson. We may call it alienation training" (Miriam Wasserman, pp ). 323

4 Harvard Educational Review nature of institutions like the school, but in the production process itself, where workers possess only their labor power which they are forced to sell as a commodity. Schools may provide training in, or reinforce, the ideology of capitalist society, but they do not create it. In the very notion that society can be radically altered through deschooling, we may have inadvertently adopted the characteristically liberal tendency to invest the school with greater potency as an agent of social transformation than is warranted. Poulantzas, in fact, rejects the proposition that political and ideological socialization is restricted to certain specialized institutions such as the school, though he does see the school as particularly important in this respect. Enterprises in capitalist society such as factories and offices also have an important role: "As a unit of production... an enterprise is also an apparatus, in the sense that, by means of the social division of labour within it (the despotic organization of labour), the enterprise itself reproduces political and ideological relations concerning the place of the social classes." 10 Institutions of work, argues Poulantzas, are organized not merely around technical considerations, but to instill in individuals an appropriate acceptance of authority, domination, and subordination. Indeed, he says, for many it is the organization of work (not school) that effectively inculcates an acceptance of hierarchical social relations. Poulantzas has rejected the traditional Marxist dichotomy between base and superstructure. 11 Not everything that occurs in the former, for example, pertains to the economic, nor in the latter, to ideology. The ideological apparatuses, he says, have no monopoly over reproducing the relations of ideological domination. The factory, as well as the school, must be considered a part of the process of socialization. Capitalism, the State, and Education The core of Nicos Poulantzas's work concerns the nature and role of the state in capitalist society. Poulantzas affirms the fundamental Marxist notion that the state in class societies is primarily and inevitably the guardian and protector of the economic interests that dominate them. Poulantzas asserts that while this is undoubtedly the case, it certainly does not appear that way. The state in liberal-capitalist society appears as a neutral body arbitrating between competing social, economic, and political interests. It appears not as the instrument of certain dominant groups, but as the representative of the general will. "By means of a whole complex functioning of the ideological, the capitalist state systematically conceals its political class character.... This state presents itself as the incarnation of the popular will of the people/nation." 12 To buttress the notion that it may act in favor of the interests of any or all social 10 "On Social Classes," p In the more traditional understanding of Marxist nomenclature, "base" and "superstructure" are clearly separable entities. Base refers to the productive technology of a particular society and the specific social relations used to employ it. Superstructure comprises the full range of human consciousness ideas, beliefs, values, moral and aesthetic judgments that are believed to correspond to a particular stage in the development of these economic foundations. Such consciousness is sometimes referred to as the ideology of a society. It is generally asserted that the institutions of a society may be divided between those belonging to the base and those belonging to the superstructure thus the factory is seen as part of the former whereas the school is part of the latter. 12 Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books and Sheed and Ward, 1973), p

5 Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO groups and classes, the state may in the short term resist the interests of the dominant classes and support subordinate groups. In the long term, however, argues Poulantzas, the state will always function to support the interests of those holding economic power. Such a view has important implications for liberal reforms in social or educational policy. It does not rule out the possibility of significant (though not radical) reform through the exercise of state power. It rejects those who follow Marcuse in viewing all social reform as no more than mystification or deception: "The capitalist state's particular characteristic feature of representing the general interest of a national-popular ensemble is not simply a mendacious mystification." 13 Social policy may contain "real economic sacrifices imposed on the dominant class by the struggle of the dominated classes...." 14 On the other hand, Poulantzas is under no illusions about the extent of the changes that can be effected. They cannot under any circumstances call into question the capitalist nature of the state. For Poulantzas the neutrality or independent nature of the state is an illusion. The schools, no less than the other ideological apparatuses of the state, while purporting to stand above specific ideological interests and positions (or under the guise of pluralism, representing them all), serve to inculcate in students the ideology of the dominant social interests. In this respect, the significant work in this country on the "hidden curriculum" substantiates Poulantzas's thesis. 15 In seeing the state as a neutral entity in the social formation, the role of school and education is obscured. Education ceases to be seen as part of a process of maintaining the domination of particular classes and interests, or as performing a role in ensuring the cohesion of society through the generalized acceptance of bourgeois ideology. In a 1979 article Poulantzas notes that the notion of the state as a neutral and providential entity standing outside, or between, the struggle of contending social groups is increasingly being threatened. In all Western societies the state's prime role in the development and management of economic crises ("unemployment and inflation directly orchestrated by the state" 16 ), the proliferation of roles and responsibilities (for example in urban affairs, health care, the environment, education), and the direct dependence of many individuals on state employment, has resulted in a considerable politicization of the struggle by working-class and middle-level salaried workers. Increasing numbers of people are confronted directly by the partiality of the state and state policies. The number of conflicts involving state and municipal workers, the attempt to deal with the economic crisis through such policies as Proposition 13, and the struggle around energy and environmental issues in this country are testimony to Poulantzas's argument. Poulantzas's most significant contributions to an understanding of the state come in his questioning of certain traditional Marxist interpretations. Poulantzas attempts to refute the common economist interpretation of Marxism "which considers the state as 13 Political Power, p Political Power, p See, for example, the excellent recent work by Michael Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). 16 Poulantzas, "The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State," in Critical Sociology, ed. J. W. Freiberg (New York: Irvington, 1979), p

6 Harvard Educational Review a simple appendage-reflection of the economy." 17 He denies that the political is a mere reflection of the economic realm. This view represents the familiar interpretation of Marx and Engels's formulation in The Communist Manifesto that "the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," which as Ralph Miliband points out, is usually taken to mean not only that the state acts on behalf of the dominant or ruling class, but that it acts at the behest of that class. 18 In asserting that the state is a "relatively autonomous" entity, Poulantzas argues that while it is the ultimate protector of the interests of the dominant groups, this does not mean that it is an instrument these groups manipulate at will. The policies of the state, at least in the short term, may indeed diverge from the interests of the dominant economic classes. In addition, the conflict among the dominant classes themselves requires a state that operates with some degree of autonomy or independence. This view is hardly shared by those proposing a revisionist interpretation of the history of American education. Joel Spring, for example, has argued that from the start of the twentieth century, there was no separation between those holding economic and those holding political power; the two groups coalesced to form a corporate state with no significant distinction between the interests, policies, and ideologies of each. 19 Educational policy as directed by the state immediately reflected the demands of corporate industrialists. The practices of the classroom, it is argued, directly expressed the concerns of those holding state power and the demands of those in dominant economic positions. While it is not clear that educational practice actually does correspond to the needs of economic production (the academic curriculum, for example, represents a residue of past traditions and ideologies far more than it neatly fits the needs of economic life 20 ), there is a still more serious flaw in the argument. To argue for the total integration of political and economic power is to suggest that liberal or bourgeois democracy has already been replaced by some form of fascist or totalitarian state. Surely, in the light of our real historical experience with such regimes, this is a dangerous confusion to create. Curiously, the confusion may also have been created by Poulantzas himself, or so Miliband claims in his critique of Poulantzas. Poulantzas argues that "the principal role of the state apparatuses is to maintain the unity and cohesion of a social formation." 21 Following Althusser, he distinguishes, on the one hand, the "repressive state apparatuses" (which include the army, police, prisons, and judiciary) from the "ideological state apparatuses" (which include education, the church, and the media). Miliband argues, however, that to include within the state all ideological apparatuses is to blur the distinction between bourgeois democracies, where ideological institutions retain a high degree of autonomy, and other forms of government, where the state monopolizes the system of domination (as in communist or fascist societies). To place edu "The Political Crisis...", p Ralph Miliband, "Poulantzas and the Capitalist State," New Left Review, 82 (1973), p. 85. Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). The academic curriculum still emphasizes literacy and the provision of a general education. It comprises experiences that are, for the most part, abstract and removed from the reality of work, home or community. It still contains "gentlemanly" notions of an "all-round" education, rather than a concern with a training that is entirely specialized or utilitarian. Classes, pp

7 Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO cation strictly within the orbit of the state, as Poulantzas does, is to ignore (in the United States, for example) the important issues of the influence of the community in the control of schools and of commercial interests and criteria in the provision of instructional materials and the development of testing procedures. It is also to ignore the autonomy of the educational system (at least at the higher levels) which allows, in however limited a form, the articulation by individuals of ideological positions contrary to those of the dominant interests. Poulantzas's work attempts to refute the mechanical or positivist traditions in Marxism. He argues, for example, that while there is a very definite and determinate relationship between the economic and the political or ideological realm, the latter is not simply a reflection of the former. Education and educational policies thus cannot be seen as mere epiphenomena of the economic domain. Nor do the dominant economic classes merely manipulate school practices to accommodate the needs of the system of production. Such criticism, however, may be leveled at the influential work of Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, as well as other correspondence theorists, whose avowedly Marxist schema sometimes seems closer to a functional analysis. In place of the structural autonomy, conflicts, and contradictions that pervade Poulantzas's social system, Gintis and Bowles present a model in which the needs of each social element fit into or correspond with the demands of others. 22 Theirs is a homeostatic schema in which change in one area (the economic) leads to change and accommodation in others. Education (and state policy) follows economy as surely as night follows day. Poulantzas argues against "the long Marxist tradition [which] has considered that the State [in capitalist society] is only a simple tool or instrument manipulated at will by the ruling class." 23 Instead, he insists that the state itself is not a thing but "must be considered as a relation... as a material condensation" 24 of classes. Poulantzas argues that when we talk of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class we must not forget that we are really dealing with an alliance between several fractions of the class who share in political domination. These fractions include those representing industrial, commercial, and financial capital as well as those whose allegiance is to international capital and those who are rooted in the home or national economy. It is important to recognize that each of these fractions possesses its own interests which may conflict or contradict those of other fractions (a current example is the growing divergence between the interests of the predominantly American international oil conglomerates and the needs of the national market). While the state's primary function is to ensure the continuity and cohesion of the entire social formation through its control of the repressive and ideological apparatuses, it also serves to ensure the necessary compromise between these fractions of the dominant class. In Gramsci's words, the state must organize "the unstable equilibrium of compromise" 25 between those groups who comprise the power bloc. But, says Poulantzas, the state does not do this as an entity that is external to the competition between 22 Samuel S. Bowles and Herbert M. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 23 Ralph Miliband, "The Capitalist State: Reply to Nicos Poulantzas," New Left Review, 59 (1970), "The Political Crisis," p Classes, p

8 Harvard Educational Review classes and fractions. The state itself consists of, and expresses, the structure of groups or fractions that comprise the dominant class as well as those representing the subordinate classes whose demands must also be accounted for. "Class contradictions thoroughly constitute and permeate the state... the state establishes the general and long-term interests of the power bloc (the unstable equilibrium of compromise) under the hegemony of a given fraction of monopoly capitalism... a process that, at least for the short term, seems prodigiously incoherent and chaotic." 26 This view of the state and state policy contributes significantly to our understanding of educational development in this century and allows us to reject the kind of linear correspondence principle that has become popular in the radical critique of education. We now realize that educational policy is not a coherent and uniform response of the dominant interest in this country to the development of an educational system so much as it is the outcome of an incoherent, irrational, and contradictory process. Given Poulantzas's assertion that the interests of subordinate groups also interact with, and have an impact on, the social policy of the state, education in the United States is a far more complex structure than correspondence theorists might admit: "The dominant ideology does not simply reflect the conditions of existence of the dominant class.... It is often permeated by elements stemming from the 'way of life' of classes or fractions other than the dominant class or fraction." 27 Education in the United States might best be understood, not as reflecting the interests of one social class (commonly the industrial middle class), but as responding to a complex and heterogeneous configuration of elements (including ideologies that are residual or emergent, as well as currently dominant). It is possible to see education as a response not only to middle-class interests and ideology, but also to surviving aristocratic ideas and traditions, indigenous or otherwise, and to the demands of the lowermiddle class, the working class, and the poor. Clearly, the transformation of education from the exposure of an elite minority to the more esoteric aspects of a "gentlemanly" culture to a commodity exchangeable in the market for money and prestige is the quintessential reflection of bourgeois ideology. At the same time, the persistence of an aristocratic residue in American education the notion of the "Harvard man" and other elite educational identities signifies the continued influence of an aristocratic ideology that imputes not only intellectual superiority but also moral superiority to an exclusive social group. Finally, the movement for community control of schools, equality of access, and elimination of tracking reflects the ideologies of subordinate groups in our society. Schooling and the Division of Labor According to Poulantzas, the school functions as part of the ideological apparatus of the state by ensuring the reproduction of the mental-manual division of labor. His thesis helps to locate the school more accurately in the ideology of capitalist society than do the more commonly considered theories involving the role of tracking and hid "The Political Crisis," pp Political Power, p

9 Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO den curriculum, for Poulantzas does not simply regard some aspects of school practice curriculum, extra-curricular activities and organization but the very nature of school itself as being class-biased. The main role of the capitalist school, he says, is "not to 'qualify' manual and mental labour in different ways, but far more to disqualify manual labour (to subjugate it) by only qualifying mental labour." 28 While schools divide students into those fit for mental work and those suited for manual labor, training for the latter does not really take place: "The worker does not acquire his basic professional training and his technical skills in school (they cannot be 'taught' there), not even in the streams and apparatuses of technical education. What is chiefly taught to the working class is discipline, respect for authority, and the veneration of a mental labor that is always 'somewhere else' in the educational apparatus." 29 In some respects Poulantzas's argument resembles that of John Dewey, who, fifty years earlier, had seen the division of education into vocational training and the academic curriculum as reflecting the division of labor inherent in class-divided societies. 30 Poulantzas, however, goes further, suggesting that the vocational-training programs in schools, which in all countries are overwhelmingly filled with the children of working-class families, are far less effective as programs of technical preparation than as a means of reinforcing a particular ontology. They provide a legitimate basis for making a distinction between those with and those without the capacity to engage in mental labor. Most of what goes on in the school curriculum does not represent a direct training for work, but is intended to establish an individual on one side or the other of the mental-manual division of labor: The training of mental labour essentially consists, to a greater or lesser extent, in the inculcation of a series of rituals, secrets and symbolisms which are to a considerable extent those of "general culture," whose main purpose is to distinguish it from manual labour. Once distinguished in this way, mental labour is to a great extent universally employable.... Thus to say that a university degree in social science, literature, law or a certain baccalaureat, etc., does not offer openings that correspond to the "qualification" that it represents, is not strictly correct, in the sense that this degree, is not basically intended to guarantee this or that specialist knowledge, but rather to locate its bearer in the camp of mental labour in general and its specific hierarchy, i.e. to reproduce the mental/manual labour division. 31 Such a view leaves a number of questions unanswered. To what extent is Poulantzas correct when he says that school does not (or cannot) provide real technical or vocational training? There is reason to believe that relatively few students trained in vocational education programs actually enter or stay within their particular occupationallytrained fields. How are we to understand the present thrust toward minimum competency tests? Do they represent a new strategy for locating individuals on one side or other of the mental-manual division? And how can we reconcile the movement toward specialized credentialing in higher education (as opposed to a general liberal-arts ed- 28 Classes, p Classes, p John Dewey. See for example, John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1961, pp Classes, p

10 Harvard Educational Review ucation) with Poulantzas's notion that the purpose of a university degree is merely to locate the bearer in the camp of mental labor? Poulantzas's concern with the division between mental and manual labor stems from his attempt to understand the nature of what he calls the "new petty bourgeoisie" that massive group of salaried workers who are involved in tertiary-sector and office work: civil servants; social-service, educational, and health-care workers; commercial, insurance, accounting, and banking employees. A key aspect of this class is its relationship to mental labor, which, he argues, is characterized far more by its symbolic and cultural form than by any real scientific or technical content: This mental labour is in fact encased in a whole series of rituals, know-how, and "cultural" elements that distinguish it from that of the working class, i.e. from productive labour within the material labour process. If these ideological symbols have little in common with any real differentiation in the order of elements of science, they nevertheless legitimize this distinction as if it had such a basis. This cultural symbolism is well enough known for us not to have to dwell on it. It extends from the traditional esteem given to "paper work" and "clerical workers" in general (to know how to write and to present ideas), to a certain use of "speech" (one must know how to "speak well" in order to sell products and make business deals the "art of salesmanship"), and finally includes ideological differentiations between general culture and savoir-faire on the one hand, and technical skills (manual labour) on the other. All these things, of course, require a certain training: learning to write in a certain way, to speak in a certain way, to dress in a certain way for work, to take part in certain customs and usages. This "certain way" is always the other way, opposed to that of the working class, and moreover, it claims to be the sign of a particular "savoir-faire," which is evaluated positively in opposition to that of the working class. Everything that needs to be known in this respect is that which the others (the working class) do not know, or even cannot know (through original sin); this is the knowledge that matters, genuine knowledge. "Brain workers" are defined in relation to others (the working class). The main thing in fact is to know how to "intellectualize" oneself in relation to the working class; to know in these practices that one is more "intelligent," that one has more "personality" than the working class, which for its part, can at most be "capable." And to have the monopoly and the secrecy of this "knowledge." 32 In many of their recent attempts to explicate the school's role in the production of hierarchy and inequality, theorists have concentrated on the informal aspects of the institutional experience. Poulantzas, in contrast, connects the curriculum itself with these phenomena, a line of inquiry now being pursued in the new British sociology of education but remaining undeveloped in this country. 33 The literature produced in the United States in the 1960s describing the schools as overwhelmingly repressive, conformist, and authoritarian in nature was limited in its capacity to analyze the roots of the problem. Since then a second round of studies has taken us a good deal further down the road, particularly in our understanding of the development of education in the United States. The far more analytical nature of this 32 Classes, p See for example, Michael F. D. Young, ed., Knowledge and Control (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971); or N. Floud and J. Ahier, eds., Educability, Schools and Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1974). 330

11 Sociology of Nicos Poulantzas H. SVI SHAPIRO work has indicated the extent to which schools have been instrumental in maintaining the structures of authority and inequality in this society. A significant shortcoming of much of this work has been the inadequacy of the theoretical framework that governs it. Proponents have oscillated between the use of conspiracy theories, functionalism (of a coercive rather than consensual type), and a mechanical Marxism. 34 Poulantzas's work affirms the authoritarian and class-based nature of society and the important role of schools in maintaining and reproducing the social formation, but it demands a far more elaborate and complex understanding of the relations between them. In the world of Poulantzas, economic, social, political, and ideological instances are, only in the final analysis, a determined part of the whole. In the interim, each of these elements possesses a degree of autonomy, a life of its own; no element merely reflects or responds mechanically to another. Contradictions and conflict are far more common to the social system than correspondence is. At the same time, however, in utilizing Althusser's notion of "ideological state apparatuses," Poulantzas also runs the risk of offering a typically functionalist view of the school. Two British sociologists, Michael Erben and Denis Gleason, write: Not unlike Parsons, Althusser portrays a model of a man as a puppet or cultural fool constrained completely by agents or mechanisms of the system. In over-emphasizing those passive features of socialization to the exclusion of active features, Althusser fails to consider adequately the ambiguities in production which influence men's abilities to make decisions in the face of intimidation, fear and violence.... His analysis of apparatuses exaggerates those over-determined structures of dominance, and ignores processes which characterize men as active producers of knowledge and social change. 35 Despite these tendencies, Poulantzas's work offers important insights for those concerned with the development of a radical critique of education in contemporary society. His work makes clear that in order to understand the relation of education to class structure, one must consider political (particularly state) power and ideology, and realize that the relations between those elements are neither frictionless, nor uniform, nor coherent. It is clear that the purposes, organization, and methodology of education will be marked, no less than in other areas of our social experience, by contradiction and dissonance, a conflict reflecting the struggle between competing social classes and interests. In attempting to understand the nature of educational institutions in Western capitalism, it may be that the affirmation and developing of that particular dialectical perspective will represent Poulantzas's greatest contribution. 34 For a further discussion of this argument see, for example, Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey, "Educational Research: A Review and an Interpretation" in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. Karabel and Halsey. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977). 35 Michael Young and Geoff Whitty, eds., Society, State and Schooling (Surrey, Eng.: Palmer Press, 1977), pp

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