ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an heuristic model for the comparative study of state intervention in agriculture in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines an approach to analysing the form of the state and the nature and types of state intervention and how they vary within the general confines of capitalism. The alternative, “institutional” approach to policy analysis adopts a completely different emphasis. The perfect market model is abandoned except, perhaps, as a myth which allows some understanding of the rationality of individual farmers. There has been a renewed concern with the conceptualization of what constitutes the state and what is the role of the state in directing the process of change and development in advanced industrial societies. The state is a set of social relationships that turn around the issue of domination and subordination and is charged with reproducing extant social structure.
