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This book advances an original conception of the relationship between state and corporate power in the American context, based on extensive archival research into the case of the General Electric Company from 1880 to 1980. Many scholars have reduced this relationship to business lobbying of a passive state. Using what he terms an institutional Marxist framework, the author argues that, far from simply passively responding to interest group pressures, the state is a key agent in the formation and reproduction of business associations. This book tracks the emergence of GE as a pillar of the integral state in the United States by tracing GE’s evolution in relation to state institutions from its formation in the finance capital period (1880 to 1930), through the managerial period (1930-1979), to the restructuring leading up to the age of neoliberalism (1979-present). When contextualized within the specific, historically evolved linkages that traverse and interpenetrate the state bureaucracy, the legislature, the industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance, it becomes clear that corporate civil society organizations do not merely express the pre-existing interests of their corporate constituents, but are also mechanisms through which the state organizes the political power of the capitalist class ? forming what the author refers to as an integral state.