The setting up of new so-called 'independent bodies' by governments around the globe in the process of education policy-making has been a common place in recent years. This proliferation of 'independent agencies', 'national commissions' and 'councils' etc., has been based and justified on grounds of 'impartiality', 'reliability', or 'technical competence'. These bodies are compared and contrasted to the various 'bureaucratic' state agencies -which raditionally have been responsible for the formulation of policies in the education field-and the widely accused as 'inefficient' teaching staff of public (State) schools. Based on the analytic work of N. Poulantzas, articulated later on by K. Tsoukalas, about the fundamental principles and structures of the 'Social State' (or 'Welfare State'), I argue that the constitution of these new 'independent bodies' is a response to the post-modern State legitimacy crisis. In other words, using specific examples from various Western states, I intend to describe how the State apparatuses and the various interests around it, 'invent' the notion of the 'independent body' as an attempt to adopt themselves into a new era of socio-economic changes, where there is a contradiction between the ideals of economic liberalism and individualism (the bases of modern capitalist societies), on the one hand, and the 'egalitarian- interventionist Social State', on the other. By including representatives from various interest parties, and acknowledging their equal weight in the respective 'independent body', the dominant interests within the State mechanisms -always in accordance with the current power balance in the various social fields- vest the inherently unequal social relations (unequal distribution of 'allocative' and 'authoritative resources', according to Giddens' terminology) with the magic cloak of 'social partnership'. The functioning of these bodies is based on the assumption that only individuals may come forth and 'require a just solution for the injustice that may have befallen upon them', something that reinforces what Tsoukalas (1990) called a 'competitively redistributive society'.