Nico Poulantzas.
 
London: New Left Books, 1976. Octavo. Red cloth boards in a lime green dust wrapper, slightly curled on the upper edge, else fine. 166 pages. First edition. Near fine.
 
Portugal, Spain, Greece. Poulantzas was a structural Marxist in the mold of Louis Althusser who taught sociology at the University of Paris VIII up till his death by suicide in 1968. He embraced a strange variant of Marxism, supporting a multi-party representative system, a robust civil society, and the curtailment of state encroachments on the private sphere. His work on ideology and the state also borrows heavily from Antonio Gramsci. Perhaps he represents a point of reconciliation between the liberal institutionalists, with their distrust of the unchecked masses, and the Marxists, with their hatred of the liberal tradition and its sacred institutions. Then again, perhaps not.   
 
"The Portuguese and Greek regimes were evidently not overthrown by an open and frontal movement of the popular masses in insurrection, nor by a foreign military intervention, as was the case with Italian fascism and Nazism in Germany. What then are the factors that determined their overthrow, and what form has the intervention of the popular masses taken in this conjuncture?"