Part 1 Setting the problem: Marxist reductionism and neo-realist epistemology - neo-realist epistemology and historical materialism, monism versus Pluralism; Marxism versus post-Marxism - "core" Marxism - closed or open, the displacement of institutional analysis, the relative autonomy of the political, methodological Holism and authoritarianism. Part 2 The economic and the political - towards a non-reductive framework: technology, appropriation, ideology - beyond the base - superstructure dichotomy - historic materialism - from philosophical to historical analysis, substantive and methodological issues, technology, appropriation, ideology, the mode of domination concept; application - sociopolitical transition in 19th and early 20th century Greece - Marxism and the sociology of development, Greek Marxist historiography and the dilemmas of class analysis, pre-capitalist Greece and the consolidation of oligarchic parliamentarianism, the demise of oligarchic parliamentarianism. Appendices: types of reductionism in Marxist theory; ideology and class politics - a critique of Laclau.

Mouzelis puts forward a post-Marxist conceptual framework which overcomes economic reductionism while retaining some distinctive features of the Marxist paradigm which are seen to be indispensable for an examination of how whole social orders are constituted, maintained and transformed.