Bob Jessop is a British Marxist academic and writer who has published extensively on state theory and political economy. His major contribution to state theory is in treating the state not as a thing but as a social relation. Thus the state has differential effects on various political and economic strategies in a way that some are more privileged than others, but at the same time, it is the interaction among these strategies that result in such exercise of state power. This approach, called the strategic-relational approach, is an extension and development of Marx's concept of capital not as a thing but as a social relation and Antonio Gramsci's and Nicos Poulantzas's concept of the state as a social relation, something more than narrow political society.
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