state

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Definition

There is no academic consensus on the definition of the state. The term "state" refers to a set of different, but interrelated and often overlapping, theories about a certain range of political phenomena. According to Walter Scheidel, mainstream definitions of the state have the following in common: "centralized institutions that impose rules, and back them up by force, over a territorially circumscribed population; a distinction between the rulers and the ruled; and an element of autonomy, stability, and differentiation. These distinguish the state from less stable forms of organization, such as the exercise of chiefly power."

The most commonly used definition is by Max Weber who describes the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory. Weber writes that the state "is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."

While defining a state, it is important not to confuse it with a nation; an error that occurs frequently in common discussion. A state refers to a political unit with sovereignty over a given territory. While a state is more of a "political-legal abstraction," the definition of a nation is more concerned with political identity and cultural or historical factors. Importantly, nations do not possess the organizational characteristics like geographic boundaries or authority figures and officials that states do. Additionally, a nation does not have a claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force over their populace, while a state does, as Weber indicated. An example of the instability that arises when a state does not have a monopoly on the use of force can be seen in African states which remain weak due to the lack of war which European states relied on. A state should not be confused with a government; a government is an organization that has been granted the authority to act on the behalf of a state. Nor should a state be confused with a society; a society refers to all organized groups, movements, and individuals who are independent of the state and seek to remain out of its influence.

Neuberger offers a slightly different definition of the state with respect to the nation: the state is "a primordial, essential, and permanent expression of the genius of a specific [nation]."

The definition of a state is also dependent on how and why it forms. The contractarian view of the state suggests that states form because people can all benefit from cooperation with others and that without a state, there would be chaos. The contractarian view focuses more on the alignment and conflict of interests between individuals in a state. On the other hand, the predatory view of the state focuses on the potential mismatch between the interests of the people and the interests of the state. Charles Tilly goes so far as to say that states "resemble a form of organized crime and should be viewed as extortion rackets." He argued that the state sells protection from itself and raises the question about why people should trust a state when they cannot trust one another.

Tilly defines states as "coercion-wielding organisations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise a clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories." Tilly includes city-states, theocracies and empires in his definition along with nation-states, but excludes tribes, lineages, firms and churches. According to Tilly, states can be seen in the archaeological record as of 6000 BC; in Europe, they appeared around 990, but became particularly prominent after 1490. Tilly defines a state's "essential minimal activities" as:

War making – "eliminating or neutralizing their outside rivals"

State making – "eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside their own territory"

Protection – "eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients"

Extraction – "acquiring the means of carrying out the first three activities"

Adjudication – "authoritative settlement of disputes among members of the population"

Distribution – "intervention in the allocation of goods among the members of the population"

Production – "control of the creation and transformation of goods and services produced by the population"

Importantly, Tilly makes the case that war is an essential part of state-making; that wars create states and vice versa.

Modern academic definitions of the state frequently include the criterion that a state has to be recognized as such by the international community.

Liberal thought provides another possible teleology of the state. According to John Locke, the goal of the state or commonwealth is "the preservation of property" (Second Treatise on Government), with 'property' in Locke's work referring not only to personal possessions but also to one's life and liberty. On this account, the state provides the basis for social cohesion and productivity, creating incentives for wealth-creation by providing guarantees of protection for one's life, liberty, and personal property. Provision of public goods is considered by some such as Adam Smith as a central function of the state, since these goods would otherwise be underprovided. Tilly has challenged narratives of the state as being the result of a societal contract or provision of services in a free market – he characterizes the state more akin to a protection racket in the vein of organized crime.

While economic and political philosophers have contested the monopolistic tendency of states, Robert Nozick argues that the use of force naturally tends towards monopoly.

Another commonly accepted definition of the state is the one given at the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States in 1933. It provides that "[t]he state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states." And that "[t]he federal state shall constitute a sole person in the eyes of international law."

Confounding the definition problem is that "state" and "government" are often used as synonyms in common conversation and even some academic discourse. According to this definition schema, the states are nonphysical persons of international law, and governments are organizations of people. The relationship between a government and its state is one of representation and authorized agency.

Types of states

Charles Tilly distinguished between empires, theocracies, city-states, and nation-states. According to Michael Mann, the four persistent types of state activities are:

Maintenance of internal order

Military defence and aggression

Maintenance of communications infrastructure

Economic redistribution

Josep Colomer distinguished between empires and states in the following way:

Empires were vastly larger than states

Empires lacked fixed or permanent boundaries, whereas a state had fixed boundaries

Empires had a "compound of diverse groups and territorial units with asymmetric links with the center," whereas a state had "supreme authority over a territory and population."

Empires had multi-level, overlapping jurisdictions, whereas a state sought a monopoly and homogenization

According to Michael Hechter and William Brustein, the modern state was differentiated from "leagues of independent cities, empires, federations held together by loose central control, and theocratic federations" by four characteristics:

The modern state sought and achieved territorial expansion and consolidation

The modern state achieved unprecedented control over social, economic, and cultural activities within its boundaries

The modern state established ruling institutions that were separate from other institutions

The ruler of the modern state was far better at monopolizing the means of violence

States may be classified by political philosophers as sovereign if they are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Other states are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony where ultimate sovereignty lies in another state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union. A federated state is a territorial and constitutional community forming part of a federation. (Compare confederacies or confederations such as Switzerland.) Such states differ from sovereign states in that they have transferred a portion of their sovereign powers to a federal government.

One can commonly and sometimes readily (but not necessarily usefully) classify states according to their apparent make-up or focus. The concept of the nation-state, theoretically or ideally co-terminous with a "nation", became very popular by the 20th century in Europe, but occurred rarely elsewhere or at other times. In contrast, some states have sought to make a virtue of their multi-ethnic or multinational character (Habsburg Austria-Hungary, for example, or the Soviet Union), and have emphasised unifying characteristics such as autocracy, monarchical legitimacy, or ideology. Other states, often fascist or authoritarian ones, promoted state-sanctioned notions of racial superiority. Other states may bring ideas of commonality and inclusiveness to the fore: note the res publica of ancient Rome and the Rzeczpospolita of Poland-Lithuania which finds echoes in the modern-day republic. The concept of temple states centred on religious shrines occurs in some discussions of the ancient world. Relatively small city-states, once a relatively common and often successful form of polity, have become rarer and comparatively less prominent in modern times. Modern-day independent city-states include Vatican City, Monaco, and Singapore. Other city-states survive as federated states, like the present day German city-states, or as otherwise autonomous entities with limited sovereignty, like Hong Kong, Gibraltar, and Ceuta. To some extent, urban secession, the creation of a new city-state (sovereign or federated), continues to be discussed in the early 21st century in cities such as London.

State and civil society

In the classical thought, the state was identified with both political society and civil society as a form of political community, while the modern thought distinguished the nation state as a political society from civil society as a form of economic society.

Thus, in modern thought, the state is contrasted with civil society.

Antonio Gramsci believed that civil society is the primary locus of political activity because it is where all forms of "identity formation, ideological struggle, the activities of intellectuals, and the construction of hegemony take place," and that civil society was the nexus connecting the economic and political spheres. Arising out of the collective actions of civil society is what Gramsci calls "political society", which Gramsci differentiates from the notion of the state as a polity. He stated that politics was not a "one-way process of political management" but, rather, that the activities of civil organizations conditioned the activities of political parties and state institutions, and were conditioned by them in turn. Louis Althusser argued that civil organizations such as church, schools, and the family are part of an "ideological state apparatus" which complements the "repressive state apparatus" (such as police and military) in reproducing social relations.

Jürgen Habermas spoke of a public sphere that was distinct from both the economic and political sphere.

Given the role that many social groups have in the development of public policy and the extensive connections between state bureaucracies and other institutions, it has become increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries of the state. Privatization, nationalization, and the creation of new regulatory bodies also change the boundaries of the state in relation to society. Often, the nature of quasi-autonomous organizations is unclear, generating debate among political scientists on whether they are part of the state or civil society. Some political scientists thus prefer to speak of policy networks and decentralized governance in modern societies rather than of state bureaucracies and direct state control over policy.

History

The earliest forms of the state emerged whenever it became possible to centralize power in a durable way. Agriculture and a settled population have been attributed as necessary conditions to form states. Certain types of agriculture are more conducive to state formation, such as grain (wheat, barley, millet), because they are suited to concentrated production, taxation, and storage. Agriculture and writing are almost everywhere associated with this process: agriculture because it allowed for the emergence of a social class of people who did not have to spend most of their time providing for their own subsistence, and writing (or an equivalent of writing, like Inca quipus) because it made possible the centralization of vital information. Bureaucratization made expansion over large territories possible.

The first known states were created in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. It is only in relatively modern times that states have almost completely displaced alternative "stateless" forms of political organization of societies all over the planet. Roving bands of hunter-gatherers and even fairly sizable and complex tribal societies based on herding or agriculture have existed without any full-time specialized state organization, and these "stateless" forms of political organization have in fact prevailed for all of the prehistory and much of human history and civilization.

The primary competing organizational forms to the state were religious organizations (such as the Church), and city republics.

Since the late 19th century, virtually the entirety of the world's inhabitable land has been parcelled up into areas with more or less definite borders claimed by various states. Earlier, quite large land areas had been either unclaimed or uninhabited, or inhabited by nomadic peoples who were not organised as states. However, even within present-day states, there are vast areas of wilderness, like the Amazon rainforest, which are uninhabited or inhabited solely or mostly by indigenous people (and some of them remain uncontacted). Also, there are so-called "failed states" which do not hold de facto control over all of their claimed territory or where this control is challenged. The international community comprises around 200 sovereign states, the vast majority of which are represented in the United Nations.

Modern state

Cultural and national homogenization figured prominently in the rise of the modern state system. Since the absolutist period, states have largely been organized on a national basis. The concept of a national state, however, is not synonymous with nation state. Even in the most ethnically homogeneous societies, there is not always a complete correspondence between state and nation, hence the active role often taken by the state to promote nationalism through an emphasis on shared symbols and national identity.

Charles Tilly argues that the number of total states in Western Europe declined rapidly from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era during a process of state formation. Other research has disputed whether such a decline took place.

For Edmund Burke (Dublin 1729 - Beaconsfield 1797), "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation" (Reflections on the Revolution in France).

According to Hendrik Spruyt, the modern state is different from its predecessor polities in two main aspects: (1) Modern states have a greater capacity to intervene in their societies, and (2) Modern states are buttressed by the principle of international legal sovereignty and the judicial equivalence of states. The two features began to emerge in the Late Middle Ages, but the modern state form took centuries to come firmly into fruition. Other aspects of modern states is that they tend to be organized as unified national polities, and that they have rational-legal bureaucracies.

Sovereign equality did not become fully global until after World War II amid decolonization. Adom Getachew writes that it was not until the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples that the international legal context for popular sovereignty was instituted. Historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper argue that "Westphalian sovereignty" – the notion that bounded, unitary states interact with equivalent states – "has more to do with 1948 than 1648."

Earliest states

Theories for the emergence of the earliest states emphasize grain agriculture and settled populations as necessary conditions.

However, not all types of property are equally exposed to the risk of looting or equally subject to taxation. Goods differ in their shelf life. Certain agricultural products, fish, and dairy spoil quickly and cannot be stored without refrigeration or freezing technology, which was unavailable in ancient times. As a result, such perishable goods were of little interest to either looters or the king (In ancient times, especially before the invention of money, taxation was primarily collected from agricultural produce.) Both looters and rulers sought goods with long shelf lives, such as grains (wheat, barley, rice, corn, etc.), which, under proper storage conditions, could be preserved for extended periods. With the domestication of wheat and the establishment of agricultural communities, the need for protection from bandits arose, along with the emergence of strong governance to provide it. Mayshar et al. (2020) demonstrated that societies cultivating grains tended to develop hierarchical structures with a ruling elite that collected taxes, whereas societies that relied on root crops (which have short shelf lives) did not develop such hierarchies. The cultivation of grains became concentrated in regions with fertile soil, where grain production was more profitable than root crops, even after accounting for taxes imposed by rulers and raids by looters.

However, protection was not the only public good necessitating a centralized government. The shift to agriculture based on irrigation systems, as seen in ancient Egypt, required cooperation among farmers. An individual farmer could not control the floods from the Nile River alone. Managing the vast amounts of water during the annual floods and utilizing them efficiently allowed for a significant increase in agricultural yield, but this required an elaborate network of irrigation canals to distribute water efficiently across fields while minimizing waste.

Such a system exhibited characteristics of a natural monopoly, as its construction involved substantial fixed costs, making it a lucrative asset for the ruling elite. Bentzen, Kaarsen, and Wingender (2017) showed that in pre-modern societies, regions dependent on irrigation-intensive agriculture experienced higher levels of land inequality. The concentration of land and control over water resources strengthened elite power, enabling them to resist democratization in the modern era. Even today, countries that rely on irrigated agriculture tend to be less democratic than those relying on rain-fed farming.

Some argue that climate change led to a greater concentration of human populations around dwindling waterways.

Marxist perspective

Marx and Engels were clear in that the goal of communism was a classless society in which the state would have "withered away", replaced only by "administration of things". Their views are found throughout their Collected Works, and address past or then-extant state forms from an analytical and tactical viewpoint, but not future social forms, speculation about which is generally antithetical to groups considering themselves Marxist but who – not having conquered the existing state power(s) – are not in the situation of supplying the institutional form of an actual society. To the extent that it makes sense, there is no single "Marxist theory of state", but rather several different purportedly "Marxist" theories have been developed by adherents of Marxism.

Marx's early writings portrayed the bourgeois state as parasitic, built upon the superstructure of the economy, and working against the public interest. He also wrote that the state mirrors class relations in society in general, acting as a regulator and repressor of class struggle, and as a tool of political power and domination for the ruling class. The Communist Manifesto claims the state to be nothing more than "a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie."

For Marxist theorists, the role of the modern bourgeois state is determined by its function in the global capitalist order. Ralph Miliband argued that the ruling class uses the state as its instrument to dominate society by virtue of the interpersonal ties between state officials and economic elites. For Miliband, the state is dominated by an elite that comes from the same background as the capitalist class. State officials, therefore, share the same interests as owners of capital and are linked to them through a wide array of social, economic, and political ties.

Gramsci's theories of state emphasized that the state is only one of the institutions in society that helps maintain the hegemony of the ruling class, and that state power is bolstered by the ideological domination of the institutions of civil society, such as churches, schools, and mass media.

Contemporary critical perspectives

Jürgen Habermas believed that the base-superstructure framework, used by many Marxist theorists to describe the relation between the state and the economy, was overly simplistic. He felt that the modern state plays a large role in structuring the economy, by regulating economic activity and being a large-scale economic consumer/producer, and through its redistributive welfare state activities. Because of the way these activities structure the economic framework, Habermas felt that the state cannot be looked at as passively responding to economic class interests.

Michel Foucault believed that modern political theory was too state-centric, saying, "Maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythologized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think." He thought that political theory was focusing too much on abstract institutions and not enough on the actual practices of government. In Foucault's opinion, the state had no essence. He believed that instead of trying to understand the activities of governments by analyzing the properties of the state (a reified abstraction), political theorists should be examining changes in the practice of government to understand changes in the nature of the state. Foucault developed the concept of governmentality while considering the genealogy of state, and considers the way in which an individual's understanding of governance can influence the function of the state.

Foucault argues that it is technology that has created and made the state so elusive and successful and that instead of looking at the state as something to be toppled we should look at the state as a technological manifestation or system with many heads; Foucault argues instead of something to be overthrown as in the sense of the Marxist and anarchist understanding of the state. Every single scientific technological advance has come to the service of the state, Foucault argues, and it is with the emergence of the Mathematical sciences and essentially the formation of mathematical statistics that one gets an understanding of the complex technology of producing how the modern state was so successfully created. Foucault insists that the nation state was not a historical accident but a deliberate production in which the modern state had to now manage coincidentally with the emerging practice of the police (cameral science) 'allowing' the population to now 'come in' into jus gentium and civitas (civil society) after deliberately being excluded for several millennia. Democracy wasn't (the newly formed voting franchise) as is always painted by both political revolutionaries and political philosophers as a cry for political freedom or wanting to be accepted by the 'ruling elite', Foucault insists, but was a part of a skilled endeavour of switching over new technology such as; translatio imperii, plenitudo potestatis and extra Ecclesiam nulla salus readily available from the past medieval period, into mass persuasion for the future industrial 'political' population (deception over the population) in which the political population was now asked to insist upon itself "the president must be elected". Where these political symbol agents, represented by the pope and the president, are now democratised. Foucault calls these new forms of technology biopower and form part of our political inheritance which he calls biopolitics.

Heavily influenced by Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek neo-Marxist theorist argued that capitalist states do not always act on behalf of the ruling class, and when they do, it is not necessarily the case because state officials consciously strive to do so, but because the 'structural' position of the state is configured in such a way to ensure that the long-term interests of capital are always dominant. Poulantzas' main contribution to the Marxist literature on the state was the concept of 'relative autonomy' of the state. While Poulantzas' work on 'state autonomy' has served to sharpen and specify a great deal of Marxist literature on the state, his own framework came under criticism for its 'structural functionalism'.

Late state formation

The conditions that enabled the emergence of modern states in Europe were different from other countries that started this process later. As a result, many of these states lack effective capabilities to tax and extract revenue from their citizens, which results in problems like corruption, tax evasion, and low economic growth. Unlike the European case, late state formation occurred in a context of limited international conflict that diminished the incentives to tax and increase military spending. Also, many of these states emerged from colonization in a state of poverty and with institutions designed to extract natural resources, which have made it more difficult to form states. European colonization also defined many arbitrary borders that mixed different cultural groups under the same national identities, which has made it difficult to build states with legitimacy among all the population, since some states have to compete for it with other forms of political identity.

As a complement to this argument, Migdal gives a historical account of how sudden social changes in the Third World during the Industrial Revolution contributed to the formation of weak states. The expansion of international trade that started around 1850 brought profound changes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that were introduced with the objective of ensuring the availability of raw materials for the European market. These changes consisted in: i) reforms to landownership laws with the objective of integrate more lands to the international economy, ii) increase in the taxation of peasants and little landowners, as well as collecting of these taxes in cash instead of in kind as was usual up to that moment and iii) the introduction of new and less costly modes of transportation, mainly railroads. As a result, the traditional forms of social control became obsolete, deteriorating the existing institutions and opening the way to the creation of new ones, that not necessarily lead these countries to build strong states. This fragmentation of the social order induced a political logic in which these states were captured to some extent by "strongmen", who were capable to take advantage of the above-mentioned changes and that challenge the sovereignty of the state. As a result, this decentralization of social control impedes to consolidation of strong states.

state

state

Article

Notable quotes

Notable quotes

Article

Etymology

Definition

Types of states

State and government

States and nation-states

State and civil society

State symbols

History

Prehistoric stateless societies

Neolithic period

Ancient Eurasia

Classical antiquity

Feudal state

Modern state

Theories for the emergence of the state

Earliest states

Modern state

Theories of state function

Anarchist perspective

Anarcho-capitalist perspective

Marxist perspective

Pluralism

Contemporary critical perspectives

Structural universe of the state or structural reality of the state

State autonomy within institutionalism

Theories of state legitimacy

Divine right of kings

Rational-legal authority

State failure

The problem with state failure

Early state formation

Late state formation

About state

About state

Article

Notable quotes

Notable quotes

Article

Etymology

Definition

Types of states

State and government

States and nation-states

State and civil society

State symbols

History

Prehistoric stateless societies

Neolithic period

Ancient Eurasia

Classical antiquity

Feudal state

Modern state

Theories for the emergence of the state

Earliest states

Modern state

Theories of state function

Anarchist perspective

Anarcho-capitalist perspective

Marxist perspective

Pluralism

Contemporary critical perspectives

Structural universe of the state or structural reality of the state

State autonomy within institutionalism

Theories of state legitimacy

Social contract theory

Divine right of kings

Rational-legal authority

State failure

The problem with state failure

Early state formation

Late state formation