ABSTRACT
The theory of the state, or, more accurately, theories of the state, are once again occupying a great deal of our journal space. At one time the state was the central organizing concept and institutional focus of political science. As the state has become a more salient institution within societies, the scope of political economy has enlarged to the boundaries of the state-economy nexus. Increasingly, scholars define political economy largely in terms of state-economy relationships. For Lindblom the simplest "elements" of political economy are exchange, authority, and persuasion. Since there is a large number of differences, both comparative and historical, in terms of the location of various activities, political economy scholars could concern themselves solely with the identification and changing content of these respective spheres. In this version of political economy, boundary-setting and classification of political and economic activities replace a theoretical account of structured interactions between politics and economics.
