The leading part of this volume focuses on the role of the state in capitalist society, beginning by showing the welfare state as an historical product of the class structure of English agrarian capitalism. The second chapter indicates how, in European colonies such as in Africa, taxation was an important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops, and relating the process to Marx's 'primitive accumulation of capital'. The following two chapters move to the contemporary period, the first suggesting that change in the relationship between the nation-state and capital is rooted in the contradictory needs of labor versus capital, while the next chapter proposes analyzing capitalist institutions by relying, more than hitherto, on an hermeneutic understanding of institutions.