Three major historical developments frame theories of the state in Western capitalist democracies: first, the rise of capitalism as a form of social production, resulting in an explosion of the productivity of human labor; second, the expansion of bureaucratic states as power structures maintaining police and military control over potentially rebellious populations and reproducing the conditions for capitalist accumulation; third, the establishment of democratic institutions providing vehicles for political participation by and representation of ordinary citizens.

The fundamental distinction among capitalism, the state, and democracy is the axis around which debates within and among three major theoretical perspectives – which we shall term “pluralist,” “managerial,” and “class” – have revolved. Our purpose in this book is to delineate the mode of inquiry of each perspective, review its partial character, and then offer a synthetic framework for a more comprehensive theory of the state.

Our subtitle is a conscious gloss on Joseph Schumpeter's classic, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy an exemplar of the managerial perspective. By defining socialism as centralized state control of the economy, and democracy as elite competition for mass support, Schumpeter rejected the historical vision of democratic socialism as an economy in which production is socially controlled and a polity in which public participation is genuine and equal. Also, the phrase indicates our view that the state mediates between capitalism and democracy.