The Empire of Civil SocietyOpening with an interrogation of a number of classic realist works, the book rejects outright the goal of theorising geopolitical systems in isolation from wider social structures. In a series of case studiesincluding Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy, and the Portuguese and Spanish empiresJustin Rosenberg shows how the historical materialist analysis of societies is a surer guide to understanding geopolitical systems than the technical theories of