ABSTRACT
This chapter examines John Chamberlain’s work containing a series of essays on economics and politics, republished or rewritten from various journals. The central one is Chamberlain’s conception of the state. One may say that there are today roughly three main schools of state theory: the philosophical idealists see the state as the embodiment of some idea of justice or order or creativeness, transcending group and class visions; the Marxians and their allies still cleave to a primarily class theory of the state; and the pragmatic liberals see the state as the arena in which various pressure groups contend for supremacy. It is hard not to be attracted by the indigenous flavor of Chamberlain’s thought, his lack of pretentiousness, his journalist’s eye for the concrete, his nervous, alert, and occasionally vernacular style. For all his allusions to the class-domination theory, Chamberlain nowhere squarely confronts the basic problem it presents.
