State (polity)

• 1. Introduction

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  A state is something most people are born inside and never think to question, yet scholars cannot agree on what it actually is. There is no academic consensus on the definition of the state. The sociologist Max Weber offered the line most often repeated: a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. The earliest forms of states arose about 5,500 years ago. For most of prehistory, before that, people lived in stateless societies with no concentrated authority at all. How did a handful of farming communities harden into the institutions that now carve up almost the entire inhabitable surface of the planet? Why did grain, of all things, sit at the center of it? And why do thinkers from Charles Tilly to Michel Foucault disagree so sharply about whether the state protects us or preys on us?

• 2. The Word's Strange Roots

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  Status, the Latin word meaning condition or circumstances, is the ancestor of state and its cousins across Europe: stato in Italian, estado in Spanish and Portuguese, etat in French, Staat in German and Dutch. Latin status derives from stare, meaning to stand, or to remain or be permanent, lending the political entity a sense of something fixed and almost sacred.

  The English noun arrived in Middle English around 1200, both from Old French and directly from Latin, and at first carried only the generic sense of condition. With the revival of Roman law in 14th-century Europe, the word came to mark the legal standing of persons, including the various estates of the realm: noble, common, and clerical. The highest estates, those with the most wealth and social rank, were the ones that held power.

  The early 16th-century works of Machiavelli, especially The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, helped popularize the word in something close to its modern sense. In his time, stato still referred mainly to the position of a person or group holding political power over individuals. The contrasting of church and state also dates to the 16th century. The phrase attributed to Louis XIV, L'Etat, c'est moi, meaning I am the State, is probably apocryphal and is recorded only in the late 18th century.

• 3. Defining The Undefinable

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  Walter Scheidel found a common thread running through mainstream definitions: centralized institutions that impose rules and back them with force over a territorially bounded population, a distinction between rulers and ruled, and an element of autonomy, stability, and differentiation. These features separate the state from looser arrangements like the exercise of chiefly power.

  Max Weber's formulation remains the most commonly used, describing the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government holding a monopoly on legitimate force within a territory. A state is not the same as a nation, an error that turns up constantly in casual talk. A nation concerns political identity and cultural or historical factors, and lacks the geographic boundaries, officials, and claim to a monopoly on force that a state possesses.

  A state is also distinct from a government, the particular group of people who control the apparatus at a given time. States are immaterial, nonphysical social objects served by a continuous succession of different governments. Neuberger offered a contrasting view, calling the state a primordial, essential, and permanent expression of the genius of a specific nation. The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States in 1933 listed four qualifications: a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

• 4. Protection Or Racket

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  Charles Tilly went so far as to say that states resemble a form of organized crime and should be viewed as extortion rackets. The state, he argued, sells protection from itself, which raises the question of why anyone should trust a state when they cannot trust one another. He defined states as coercion-wielding organizations distinct from households and kinship groups, exercising clear priority over all other organizations within substantial territories.

  Tilly's predatory view stands against the contractarian one, which holds that states form because people benefit from cooperation and that without a state there would be chaos. John Locke gave the goal of the state as the preservation of property, meaning not only possessions but one's life and liberty. Adam Smith saw the provision of public goods, which would otherwise be underprovided, as a central function. Robert Nozick argued that the use of force naturally tends toward monopoly.

  Tilly listed a state's essential minimal activities: war making, state making, protection, extraction, adjudication, distribution, and production. War making meant eliminating outside rivals; state making meant eliminating rivals inside one's own territory. Above all, Tilly insisted that war is essential to state-making, that wars create states and states create wars. The contrast appears in African states, which he and others link to weakness born from the absence of the wars that European states relied upon.

• 5. Why Grain Built Kings

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  Grain, of all crops, turns out to be a maker of hierarchies. Mayshar and colleagues, in work from 2020, showed that societies cultivating grains tended to develop hierarchical structures with a ruling elite that collected taxes, while societies relying on root crops did not. Perishable goods like fish and dairy spoiled quickly and held little interest for either looters or the king. Grains such as wheat, barley, rice, and corn could be stored for extended periods, making them ideal for taxation and worth protecting.

  Mesopotamia is generally considered the location of the earliest civilization, the world's first literate one, which formed the first sets of written laws. Agriculture and writing accompanied state formation almost everywhere, writing because it allowed the centralization of vital information, with the Inca quipus serving as an equivalent. The first known states arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Bronze metallurgy spread within Afro-Eurasia from around 3000 BC, driving a military revolution in bronze weaponry that helped states rise.

  Irrigation tells a parallel story. In ancient Egypt, no individual farmer could control the floods of the Nile alone, and managing the annual floods required an elaborate network of canals. Bentzen, Kaarsen, and Wingender, writing in 2017, showed that regions dependent on irrigation-intensive agriculture experienced higher levels of land inequality. The concentration of land and water strengthened elite power, and even today countries relying on irrigated agriculture tend to be less democratic than those relying on rain-fed farming.

• 6. The Modern State Emerges

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  Around 990 states appeared in Europe, by Tilly's reckoning, becoming particularly prominent after 1490. He traced states in the archaeological record as far back as 6000 BC. During medieval times the European state organized itself on the principle of feudalism, with the lord and vassal relationship at the center of social life. Struggles over taxation between the monarch and the nobility and cities gave rise to the Standestaat, the state of Estates, with parliaments where key groups negotiated with the king. From the 15th century, centralization gave rise to the absolutist state.

  Hendrik Spruyt identified two main ways the modern state differs from earlier polities: a greater capacity to intervene in society, and the backing of international legal sovereignty and the judicial equivalence of states. Michael Hechter and William Brustein listed four traits that set the modern state apart, including unprecedented control over social, economic, and cultural activities, ruling institutions separate from other institutions, and a ruler far better at monopolizing the means of violence. Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729 and died at Beaconsfield in 1797, wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

  Sovereign equality did not become fully global until after World War II, amid decolonization. Adom Getachew dates the legal context for popular sovereignty to the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper argue that Westphalian sovereignty has more to do with 1948 than 1648. Today the international community comprises around 200 sovereign states, most of them represented in the United Nations.

• 7. Many Kinds Of State

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  Vatican City, Monaco, and Singapore are the modern independent city-states, survivors of a form once common and often successful. Other city-states persist as federated states, like the present-day German city-states, or as autonomous entities with limited sovereignty, like Hong Kong, Gibraltar, and Ceuta. Urban secession, the creation of a new city-state, continued to be discussed in the early 21st century in cities such as London.

  Josep Colomer distinguished empires from states by noting that empires were vastly larger, lacked fixed boundaries, combined diverse groups with asymmetric links to the center, and held multi-level overlapping jurisdictions, whereas a state pursued a monopoly and homogenization within fixed borders. Tilly's typology of empires, theocracies, city-states, and nation-states included those forms but excluded tribes, lineages, firms, and churches.

  A federated state forms part of a federation, having transferred a portion of its sovereign powers to a federal government, which invites comparison with confederations such as Switzerland. The nation-state, ideally co-terminous with a nation, grew popular in 20th-century Europe but appeared rarely elsewhere. Some states made a virtue of their multi-ethnic character, such as Habsburg Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union, while others, often fascist or authoritarian, promoted notions of racial superiority. The res publica of ancient Rome and the Rzeczpospolita of Poland-Lithuania echo in the modern idea of the republic.

• 8. Whose Instrument Is It

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  The state is no more than a composite reality and a mythologized abstraction, Michel Foucault said, whose importance is far more limited than many of us think. He judged political theory too state-centric, arguing the state had no essence and that scholars should examine changes in the practice of government rather than the properties of a reified abstraction. He developed the concept of governmentality, and named new forms of technology biopower and biopolitics, insisting the nation state was a deliberate production rather than a historical accident.

  Marxist theorists drew the opposite map. The Communist Manifesto called the state nothing more than a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Ralph Miliband argued that the ruling class uses the state as its instrument, with state officials sharing the background and interests of the capitalist class. Antonio Gramsci held that state power is bolstered by ideological domination through civil society, its churches, schools, and mass media, while Nicos Poulantzas contributed the idea of the relative autonomy of the state.

  Anarchists regard the state as inherently an instrument of domination, holding that the state apparatus should be completely dismantled rather than seized. Various Christian anarchists, such as Jacques Ellul, identified the state and political power as the Beast in the Book of Revelation. Anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard reach similar conclusions for different reasons, relying on the principles of consent and non-initiation; in Power and Market, Rothbard argued that any government function, including defense, infrastructure, and legal adjudication, could be better fulfilled by private actors.

  Pluralists such as Robert Dahl saw the state instead as a neutral arena for contending interests, naming this kind of state a polyarchy. Critics countered with surveys showing that most people in high leadership positions come from the wealthy upper class. Where state capacity collapses, the state fails: in David Samuels's words, a failed state occurs when sovereignty over claimed territory has collapsed or was never effective at all. Samuels traced weak states to late formation under colonization, where arbitrary borders mixed cultural groups and strongmen captured the social order, a fragmentation that still impedes the consolidation of strong states.