Big business is back. After a puzzling absence, business politics and relations between business and the state have once again become a privileged locus of analyses of development and democracy and of contending theoretical perspectives in comparative political economy. I say once again because business-state relations occupied a similarly central locus in the late 1970s in comparative political economy. Then, big business was a prominent protagonist in theories of dependent development and bureaucratic authoritarianism, as well as other efforts to explain highly exclusionary patterns of growth and politics. In the 1980s capitalists faded from the top of the research agenda on developing countries, especially in Latin America. The causes of the untimely eclipse are opaque, but several trends contributed. Attention shifted to nonelite social actors who, through political liberalization, were becoming more politically active and vocal. The retreat from political economy and the return to the autonomy of politics also shifted attention to the formal political arena where capitalists were often only dimly visible. Lastly, much of the debate in the 1980s on economic reform hinged on the dichotomy of states and markets, impersonal markets where big business was not an issue. In fact, as became clear in the wake of neoliberal reform, the opposite of state-led
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