The Fermi-hypernetted-chain (FHNC) theory and the effective hypernetted-chain method are applied to study the composite-fermion (CF) states of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Using this theory we compute, in the thermodynamic limit, the correlation energy, radial distribution function, and static structure factor for all unprojected CF wave functions. The unprojected excitation gaps for (Formula presented) were obtained by adopting in the FHNC a scheme previously used to compute nuclear matter excitation spectra. The results obtained so far are consistent with Monte Carlo simulations and small-number exact diagonalizations. © 1997 The American Physical Society.