What is the Marxist and liberal approach towards the state ? On what grounds the theoretical differences between them are premised ? Explain. (Answer in 350 words)

- What is the Marxist and liberal approach towards the state ? On what grounds the theoretical differences between them are premised ? Explain. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Liberalism sees the state as a neutral, consensual instrument for protecting rights; Marxism sees it as the political expression of class domination. The quarrel is not about policy but about what the state fundamentally is.

Body

1. The liberal account, state as umpire: Descending from contract theory, the state is an artificial device created by consenting individuals. Locke confines it to protecting life, liberty and estate, and holds it as a revocable trust.
2. Its internal range: Nozick's minimal state may only enforce contracts and punish force; Green, Keynes and Rawls extend it to enabling self-realisation; Dahl's pluralism treats it as a neutral arena where organised groups compete.
3. The Marxist account, state as class instrument: The Communist Manifesto calls the modern executive a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, shows the state arising with class antagonism and destined to disappear with it.
4. Its internal range: Miliband's instrumentalism stresses elite personnel; Poulantzas's structuralism stresses a relative autonomy needed precisely to serve capital as a whole; Gramsci extends the state into civil society, where hegemony secures consent.
5. Individual versus class as the unit: Liberalism is methodologically individualist, Marxism explains politics through relations of production. Macpherson replies that the liberal individual is a possessive one who already presupposes the market.
6. Consent versus contradiction as origin: One derives the state from agreement and rational choice, the other from force and irreconcilable class conflict.
7. Property: Liberalism treats property as a pre-political natural right the state exists to protect; Marxism treats property relations as the thing the state is built to reproduce.
8. Permanence: For liberals the state is perpetual and perfectible; for Marxists it is historically transient, superseded once the dictatorship of the proletariat has withered it away.

Conclusion
The premise dividing them is whether power precedes property or property precedes power. Practice has blurred the line, and Bardhan reads the Indian state as autonomous between dominant proprietary classes, but the underlying disagreement is unresolved.