The Future of the State

Interest in the state is once again growing in contemporary critical theory, prompted by changes in state power in the neoliberal period and by decentralized social movements’ inability to meaningfully impact state policy or carve out autonomous spaces beyond the state’s reach. Noting this period of reflexive antistatism since the turn of the millennium, the edited volume The Future of the State rests on two key premises: first, that the ongoing crisis is not just that of the neoliberal state but of the very concept of the state; and second, that the radical Left lacks an affirmative theory of state power and how to exercise it. In the introduction, volume editor Artemy Magun thus points to a project of reviving a theory of the democratic polity and of a possible “state of the future.”