Revision summary
The liberal approach treats the state as limited public power justified by consent to protect rights, with law and separated offices as its form. Locke, Montesquieu, Mill, Rawls, and even Hayek share that the individual has claims the state must not devour. The Marxist approach treats the modern state as organised class power, from the Manifesto through Lenin’s smash-and-wither thesis. Gramsci and Poulantzas add hegemony and relative autonomy without dropping the class explanation. The theoretical difference rests on anthropology, property, history, and the meaning of emancipation, not only on liking or disliking a particular government.
Model answer
Introduction
Liberal and Marxist theories of the state begin from different pictures of the person, of property, and of history. Liberals ask how political power can be limited so that rights and a civil society may live. Marxists ask whose class power the state organises, and how that organisation can be overcome. The difference is theoretical before it is a quarrel about this or that statute.
Body
The liberal state
Classical liberalism, in Locke, treats the state as a trust arising from consent to protect life, liberty, and property. Law is the public measure of that trust. Montesquieu adds separation of powers. Kant adds a republican constitution and publicity. John Stuart Mill adds representative government and a harm principle. Twentieth-century liberals from Berlin to Rawls and Dworkin keep the state as a framework of equal basic liberties, with disagreement over how far it may redistribute.
Even Hayek and Nozick still need a state for rules. The premise is that individuals have moral claims prior to politics, that power is dangerous, and that a constitutional state civilises that danger. Civil society is not a shadow of the state.
The Marxist state
Marx and Engels treat the modern state as a committee of the bourgeoisie, though The Eighteenth Brumaire allows relative independence of the machine. Lenin in The State and Revolution says the state is organised class violence: it must be smashed and replaced by a transitional dictatorship that is to wither.
Antonio Gramsci adds hegemony: in the West the state sits among trenches of civil society. Poulantzas later called the state a relatively autonomous condensation of class relations. The core remains: explain the state from production and class, not from a contract of equal proprietors.
Grounds of the difference
Liberalism starts from the rights-bearing individual; Marxism from social relations. For Locke, property limits the state; for Marx, the state secures bourgeois property that emancipation must transform. Liberals seek a constitutional settlement; Marxists read the state as a historical form. Liberals want freedom under law; Marxists want an end to class rule. Habermas occupies a middle, but the premises stay distinct.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD L[Liberal state] --> R[Rights consent law] L --> C[Limited power] M[Marxist state] --> CL[Class power] M --> H[Gramsci hegemony] L --> P1[Prior individual] M --> P2[Social relations]
Conclusion
Liberals see the state as a limited public power justified by rights, consent, and law. Marxists see it as class power, with Gramsci adding hegemony in civil society. The split is premised on different accounts of the person, property, history, and what counts as freedom. Dialogue is possible; fusion of the two starting points is not.
Quick related
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Pluralist theory of State.
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Does Marxism deny that constitutions matter?
Classical Marxism explains constitutions as forms of class rule. It does not say legal texts have no effects. It says those effects are not the last word on the state’s nature.
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Is the welfare state a refutation of Marx?
Social democrats treat it as proof that the state can be won for labour. Strict Marxists treat it as a concession that still manages capitalism. That dispute follows from the premises above.
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