The State is a powerful reality and a still more powerful abstraction. An abstraction which conservatives who believe in 'political order' affirm; which revolutionaries hope to smash or negate; which planners and technocrats make use of in order to propound ideologies of state managed development; and the influence of which others who see it as the captive of class forces minimise. All the essays in this issue of the IDS Bulletin attempt to penetrate behind this abstraction by looking at various state institutions in a concrete way