Ralph Miliband’s major study of the capitalist state begins by rejecting the polite fiction that political institutions stand neutrally above competing social interests.

Looking closely at governments, bureaucracies, courts, armed forces, universities and mass media across Britain, Europe and the United States, he argues that state power is embedded within a wider ruling-class environment: its senior personnel are drawn disproportionately from wealthy and propertied groups, while its institutions absorb the assumptions of capitalist social order as ordinary common sense.

First published in 1969, the book became a foundational work of Marxist political sociology and a central intervention in debates about whether the state is directly controlled by a ruling class or structurally bound to capitalism regardless of who occupies office. Miliband’s approach is empirical rather than incantatory—heavy on institutional evidence, political history and the actual composition of elites. That concreteness also made the book controversial within Marxism, particularly among theorists who thought it placed too much emphasis on individual backgrounds and connections rather than the deeper structure of the state.

Still useful wherever parliamentary democracy is treated as a transparent container rather than a shaped field of power.

Quartet Books, 1976 reprint of the 1973 Quartet edition. Paperback; Open University set-book issue. Light rubbing and shelf wear to covers, minor edge and corner wear, and age-toning to pages. Binding sound and internally clean.