In recent times the question of the state has been central to political sociology and it has become, in a quite unexpected manner, an academic industry. Indeed, one might well suppose from the astonishing number of books published on the state that one was dealing with the most important of all such industries. The fact that the Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Paris in July 1985 was wholly devoted to this question is just one more proof enabling us to measure the distance travelled since the Congresses of the 1960s, and even of the 1970s, which were dominated by developmentalist, modernising and behaviourist perspectives. It is not so long ago that the most industrialised societies in the West, Great Britain and the United States in particular, were still living in a period which they believed to be characterised by the end of ideologies, the disappearance of conflicts, and by consensus; in short, during this period the societies in question reckoned that the end of politics had come and, at the same time, the end of history. Political scientists turned their attention wholly towards the study of the political system, to which a number of specific functions, inasmuch as they were subsystems of the global social system, were devolved. There was a convergence between structural–functionalist perspectives derived from Talcott Parsons' model and the systemic paradigms associated with general systems theory and with cybernetics, and this despite the real differences separating them.