Understanding the University: Capitalism, Political Society, and the Struggle over Institutional Rule - Daniel B. Saunders

This book reconstructs the changing relations between higher education, capitalism, and state power in the United States. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, it examines those relations across historically uneven university forms: the corporate university, the market university, and the emerging State university. It shows how each form organizes knowledge, administration, labor, and legitimacy through uneven and contested relations with political society, while asking higher education to carry promises of security, mobility, and democratic possibility that it cannot redeem on its own. The present reorganization of higher education becomes especially visible in Florida, where inherited university forms are being redirected toward more direct political rule. The book concludes by asking how higher education might become a site for rebuilding democratic capacity rather than preserving the neoliberal university or yielding to authoritarian rule.