Feudal state formation and class formation

1. Skocpol comments that it is conceivably possible for a state, in a revolution, to act against the interests of the class that is dominant within it. This is insightful, yet simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. It does not go far enough insofar as it implies this is an exceptional state of affairs, when in fact it is a common situation for pre-modern states. It goes too far in suggesting that the state could contradict the class logic of the social-property relations on which it was based. Instead, the tendency for conflict between the state and dominant classes is produced as an essential feature of the class strategies of feudal social property relations.
2. There is a tendency in studies of state formation to treat social groups as "inputs" into the structure of the state, when in fact they are simultaneously "outputs." This is related to tendency, e.g. in Anderson, to see urban classes as somehow external to the feudal social formations.
3. Even Lachmann errs in speaking of the conflict of multiple elites with different institutional bases, when in fact the institutional set-up that defines positions for resource extraction is itself the form taken by feudal state formation.