ABSTRACT
The ideological and cognitive importance of the state in contemporary life is paramount. Marxist theory has always held the position that its goal is not simply to make sense of the world, but to change it, to transform reality through a critical and demystifying understanding of it. The 'as if' act by state theory is a fetishizing act because it endows the state with ontological qualities not its own and abstracts its existence from the realm of social relations. This reification is present in both dominant conceptualizations of the state within Marxist and neo-Weberian state theory: the state as subject and the state as object. Society either has meaning and specificity in relation to the state or in conjunction with a state as its modifying pronoun. What state theory has to do in order to explain the state is to explain the causes of these categorizations, the public-private and the domestic-foreign.
