ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the theoretical notion of comprehensive concepts of control will be used to analyse the intrinsic and complex relationship between economics and politics in advanced class societies, and place it in an international, or global, perspective. In fact, two important features of the development of the contemporary international system (and more specifically the Western, Atlantic world) in the 1970s and 1980s have made it mandatory to rethink this relationship: 1 the introduction of universal suffrage and the subsequent
consolidation of national political systems which are ordinarily designated as parliamentary democracies;
2 the long-term process of the internationalization of capital and the emergence of a transnational bourgeoisie, the characteristics of which have no historical precedent.
