The Life and Times of Poulantzas

Abstract

Why Poulantzas? Why devote a lengthy book to a Greek sociologist whose intellectual production, never easy to read (let alone to understand), was limited to a mere fifteen years? Was not Poulantzas just one of the many Western Marxists of the post-war world? Was he not someone whose work was not only written in an impenetrable language but was also marred by a structuralist approach which has long been superseded? Was he not someone whose work remained at an abstract theoretical level completely devoid of any real political or strategic significance for the revolutionary movement to which he proclaimed his allegiance?