Definitions of the state have varied widely.
The one adopted here makes no claim to being exclusive; it is merely the most convenient for our purpose. The state, then, is an abstract entity which can be neither seen, nor heard, nor touched.
This entity is not identical with either the rulers or the ruled; neither President Clinton, nor citizen Smith, nor even an assembly of all the citizens acting in common can claim that they are the state. On the other hand, it includes them both and claims to stand over them both.This is as much to say that the state, being separate from both its members and its rulers, is a corporation, just as universities, trade unions, and churches inter alia are. Much like any corporation, it too has directors, employees, and shareholders. Above all, it is a corporation in the sense that it possesses a legal persona of its own, which means that it has rights and duties and may engage in various activities as if it were a real, flesh-and-blood, living individual. The points where the state differs from other corporations are, first, the fact that it authorizes them all but is itself authorized (recognized) solely by others of its kind; secondly, that certain functions (known collectively as the attributes of sovereignty) are reserved for it alone; and, thirdly, that it exercises those functions over a certain territory inside which its jurisdiction is both exclusive and allembracing.
Understood in this way, the state - like the corporation of which it is a subspecies - is a comparatively recent invention. During most of history, and especially prehistory, there existed government but not states; indeed the idea of the state as a corporation (as opposed to a mere group, assembly, or community of people coming together and living under a set of common laws) was itself unknown. Arising in different civilizations as far apart as Europe and the Middle East, Meso- and South America, Africa, and East Asia, these pre-state political communities were immensely varied - all the more so since they often developed out of each other, interacted with each other, conquered each other, and merged with each other to produce an endless variety of forms, most of them hybrid.
Nevertheless, speaking very roughly and skipping over many intermediate types, they may be classified into: (1) tribes without rulers; (2) tribes with rulers (chiefdoms);[1] (3) city-states; and (4) empires, strong and weak.
More on the topic Definitions of the state have varied widely.:
- 2.2. Second exclusion: Power-conferring rules cannot adequately be understood in terms of definitions, conceptual rules, or qualifying dispositions
- After having treated, in the first two chapters, the problems of mandatory norms — rules and principles — and of power-conferring rules, purely constitutive rules and definitions, we will now set out to examine permissive sentences.
- The so-called ‘new institutionalism’ is a relatively recent addition to the pantheon of theories of the state and, like some of the other perspectives considered in this volume, it is by no means only a theory of the state
- Like Henry Higgins who, through his work changed the object of his studies into something other than what it was, the purpose of the Marxist theory of the state is not just to understand the capitalist state but to aid in its destruction. (Wolfe 1974: 131)
- Marxism and the state
- Green critiques of the state
- What is the state?
- The concept of the state
- Beyond the state?
- SANCTION AND THE STATE
- The state as institutional contextualization
- The genealogy of the concept of the state
- The state and problems of legitimacy
- The Weberian definition of the modern state
- Statism and institutionalism.· is there more focus on the state?