How should one analyse political power? For much of the twentieth century in European social and political thought, answers to this question were dominated by the massive spectre of ‘the state’. Whilst political theory in the United States up through the 1950s and 1960s was more ‘pluralist’ in its vision of political power, even there, by the 1970s and 1980s, analysts were advocating the adoption of a ‘state-centred’ approach. The modern state was analysed in terms of an apparently ineluctable tendency to centralize, control, regulate and manage. Social and political theorists drew attention to this expanding role of the state, discovered the hand of the state even where it appeared absent, criticized prevailing conceptions of political pluralism because they seemed to ignore the structuring role of the state. In short, they wanted to ‘bring the state back in’ to the analysis of modern society.

Over the last fifteen years, however, many sociologists and political scientists have argued equally vigorously in the opposite direction. They have tried to find ways of thinking about and investigating political power which are not immediately structured in terms of the hegemonic role of the state, which recognize, in different ways, that modern systems of rule have depended upon a complex set of relations between state and non-state authorities, upon infrastructural powers, upon networks of power, upon the activities of authorities who do not form part of the formal or informal state apparatus.