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The notions of state autonomy and power may at first sight seem commonsensical, but in fact they have been the subject of much definitional wrangling that has considerably retarded theoretical progress and tended to discredit ‘bringing the state back in’ as a general trend. Fortunately, Theories of state–society relations 33 despite this confusion it is not too difficult to sort through the verbiage and come up with relatively straightforward and intuitive definitions of both terms that will later be employed in the subsequent chapters.

20 The most interesting and relevant rational choice work of the past two decades has been particularly suggestive with regard to such instances of collective action as the 1989 revolutions, where social passivity was replaced by massive demonstrations and the overthrow of the ruling regime within a startlingly short space of time. Even without taking the whole rational choice project on board, it is possible to gain useful new insights into aspects of public contention not adequately dealt with by other forms of explanation.

The end result is to demonstrate how the structural context acted to reduce the aggregate level of contention, as well as shifting the resistance that did occur towards relatively ineffective methods, and thus enabled the state to achieve dominance over society. The social contract The first set of theories examined has the least to offer in explaining patterns of popular contention and the relationship between Party-state and society in Communist systems. Indeed, their refutation constitutes one of the goals of the book.