The state is frequently defined as the highest or most comprehensive political association having a recognized claim to primacy--first allegiance or ultimate authority. According to another common definition, statehood is the stable possession of preponderant power by a single authority within a delimited territory. Two impediments, however, stand in the way of any simple definition of the state. The first is that the term has been used quite loosely, to designate any sort of political rule at any period in history ("the Byzantine state," "the Papal states"); and at the same time quite restrictively, to designate the kind of political structure mainly characteristic of post-Renaissance Western societies. The second impediment is that notions about what the state is vary systematically with the various political philosophies: a Lockean liberal who advocates a minimalist state that merely enforces natural law and protects natural rights will never be able to agree with a Hegelian that the state is the concrete actualization of rational freedom on earth, or with a Marxian that the state is a mere committee for the management of the interests of the social class owning the means of economic production. Defining the state is not easy unless one is prepared to declare dogmatically that a particular theory of statehood is correct, to the exclusion of all others. The same difficulty afflicts any effort to say what the state's purpose is. A Benthamite utilitarian will urge that the end of the state is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and that the pursuit of this end gives the state legitimate authority. A Kantian will suggest that the state exists to provide a legal context within which good will and respect for persons is more nearly possible. Nor is the tracing of the origin of the state free of this same difficulty: some have traced the foundation of the state to a desire for security and peace (Thomas \THobbes\t); some have insisted on natural sociability as creating states, believing that the stateless human is either a beast or a god (\TAristotle\t); some have put forward economic motives such as a desire for the division of labor and an economy of scale, which can be obtained only by centralizing power and authoritatively allocating work (Edmund \TBurke\t); still others have stressed human depravity in a fallen world creating the need for the state (Saint \TAugustine\t). In trying, then, to say what the state is, what its purposes are, and where its origin is, the problem always exists that the state is itself not simply a fact but a conceptual artifact. The most reasonable and candid way to treat the state, therefore, is to offer a history of theories about it. Characteristics of the State The word state is ultimately traceable to the Roman legal idea of status civilis, or "the civil condition"; at the greatest level of generality state does indeed mean "condition" or "way of being" ("the state of one's health"). The use of the English term state in its specifically political sense first became current around the 16th century--in England rather later than on the Continent, where the French etat and Italian stato were in use soon after 1500 (by Nicolo \TMachiavelli\t, for instance). The modern term state was usually accompanied by the notion of \Tsovereignty\t. The ideas of state and sovereignty are intimately related; they arose together historically and still make most sense when juxtaposed. Most--although not all--political philosophies would concur that sovereignty is the hallmark of the state. In a general attempt to identify state characteristics that would be recognized by a substantial number of political philosophies, one can say that the state is separated conceptually and historically from other kinds of political rule by (1) its extreme centralization or concentration of power internally, coupled with its rejection of so-called supranational power externally; (2) its secularism, or at least its nonreligious basis, necessitating, at a minimum, toleration of religious diversity; (3) its emphasis on the legal rights of its citizens rather than on the direct participation of all in day-to-day decision making; (4) its reliance on the authority of \Tlaws\t that it makes, interprets, and enforces itself through its own agents; (5) its operation--once law is in effect--through a bureaucracy, or civil service, that exists mainly to perform services for the public; and (6) its refusal to leave decisive portions of power with any private or voluntary association, such as a church or a corporation. The theory of state sovereignty explains and defends--opponents would say rationalizes--the historical process that is thought to have taken place in early modern European history: the removal of power from subnational groups and from supranational institutions. State sovereignty can be contrasted with tribal rule, theocratic rule, patriarchal rule, rule by plain violence, or nonrule by spontaneous consensus (\Tanarchism\t), as well as with \Tfeudalism\t. Early Development of the Concept of the State. Whether the Greek polis or \Tcity-state\t, as theorized by \TPlato\t and Aristotle in the 4th century BC, was really the forerunner of the modern state, is a subject of endless dispute. Some political philosophers, stressing the notion that the polis was an ethical community for the attainment of virtue or goodness, have insisted that the polis was as much a church as a state. Others have insisted on the idea that Aristotle first successfully distinguished politics--defined as the art of ruling and being ruled in turn--from other social activities such as parenthood, slavemastery, and household management (economy). They have argued that Aristotle invented the idea of the state as a public, secular, and legal order. (Aristotle does say that the "most general and inclusive association . . . directed to the most general of all goods . . . is the polis . . . or the political association.") Here, then, it is very much a question of how one interprets Aristotle. Comparatively few, however, view Plato, with his notion of a highly personal rule by the philosophic few who have a vision of the Good, as having as much connection with modernity as Aristotle. Plato's connection with the modern state is distant, even if one grants that in the Laws Plato countenances the rule of law applied by a "nocturnal council" and abandons the concept of philosopher kings. The Aristotelian polis, on the other hand, would be a city with a large middle class which would promote stability and balance the conflicting claims of the poor and the rich. The city's constitution would combine elements of democracy with elements of aristocracy (again, to balance opposing claims); the distribution of scarce and valuable goods would be in proportion to contribution to the good of the polis; the citizens would rule and be ruled in turn, insofar as the mixed social system allowed. The rule of law would prevail, moderated by equity in meeting individual claims. Above everything else, a spirit of moderation would prevail. Some of this theory resembles modern ideas about the state: like Hobbes and Immanuel \TKant\t, Aristotle insists on the centrality of the rule of law. Like G. W. F. \THegel\t, he insists that a substantial middle class will help produce a moderate, stable polity; like Machiavelli, he draws distinctions between what is ideal and what is best in a given set of circumstances. Even so, Aristotle's notion that "any polis which is truly so called . . . must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness," that a true city must not be a mere alliance or covenant that guarantees "men's rights against one another," separates him from much of modern state theory. The State in Roman Thought and Practice. The theoretical attributes of a state--extreme centralization, secularism, legal rights rather than participation, the rule of law, bureaucracy, the divesting of lower associations of their power--were first to be found in a fairly full form in Roman theory and practice. A great deal of the structure of the state as well as theory of sovereignty itself is of substantially Roman origin. Rome exemplified many characteristics of the state. Its internal power, particularly within Italy, was highly centralized, and its external power was all but unshakable for centuries. It was not truly a secular power, but its toleration of dozens of sects promoted considerable harmony. Its emphasis on the legal rights of its citizens was of great importance--the size of the empire made personal participation in a polis life impossible, but a citizen could at least hope for a certain security of legal expectations. Rome's maintenance of services (courts, roads, water supplies, a postal system) administered by a trained bureaucracy pointed the way to the modern state. Finally, a genuine political rule prevailed--at least before the ultimately fatal militarization of the empire. Rome did not leave vast power to groups within society. Rome's reliance on the rule of law, uncharacteristic of many ancient systems, gave great importance to courts, to lawyers, to precedent, and to process; moreover, Rome made, interpreted, and enforced its own laws through its own agents. The Romans virtually invented legal philosophy (see \Tlaw, history of\t) or jurisprudence. The distinction between the ius naturale (\Tnatural law\t), the ius civilis (\Tcivil law\t), and the ius gentium ("law of nations") is largely a Roman invention. To be sure, the content of those notions changed over time: to the Romans, ius naturale meant what was reasonable or customary; whereas to a Christian such as Saint Thomas \TAquinas\t natural law was that part of the divine law which is known by human reason alone, unsupplemented by divine revelation. But either notion of naturalness can be--and has been--used in saying what the state ought to do. The expression of sovereignty through law--very much a Roman idea--is decisive for many later theories of state sovereignty. The State in Medieval Thought and Practice. The fall of the Roman Empire led, in most views, to the fairly rapid atrophy of the state method of governance and finally to feudal fragmentation. To be sure, the church, which long claimed that the Emperor Constantine (r. 306-37) had donated the Western Empire to the papacy, inherited Rome's universalist pretensions. But these pretensions animated the activities of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as well, and three authorities could not be universal at the same time. In any case the church rarely tried to pass for a state, given its view that temporal power is lower than spiritual power. In De Monarchia (On Monarchy, 1308) Dante Alighieri put forth the doctrine that the Respublica Christiana ("Republic of Christendom") is jointly governed by a temporal Holy Roman emperor deriving his authority in unbroken descent from the Roman emperor Augustus and by a spiritual pope deriving his authority in unbroken descent from Saint Peter, and that both authorities should operate harmoniously (within distinct spheres) to produce peace and concord. It was an exceptional, theoretical effort to recover both Romes--the Roman church and the Roman state. More reflective, perhaps, of the realities of medieval fragmentation and of the devaluation of politics generally is Saint Augustine. His Civitate Dei (The \TCity of God\t, 413-26) argues that the Roman state, for all its glory, owed its unity to slaughter and to bloodshed, and that in such a state even a well-meaning judge will sometimes, out of ignorance, torture the innocent in his sincere effort to produce justice. For Saint Augustine, necessity required that the misery of this mortal state be restricted by a legal order that makes feeble stabs at justice; but it is only in the Heavenly City that wretchedness will end. It is usually thought, although on widely differing grounds, that the notions of internal and external state sovereignty began to revive a little in the later Middle Ages, at the beginning of the 14th century. The French monarchy had long claimed its temporal independence from the Holy Roman Empire, which was often supported by the papacy. In political philosophy the rediscovery of Aristotle's doctrines did much to enhance the prestige of temporal government and to weaken the Augustinian view that politics, as a consequence of the Fall, ought to give way to the earthly agents of the Heavenly City. Aristotle as a political writer was fully resuscitated by \TMarsilius of Padua\t's Defender of Peace (1324; Eng. trans., 1535), which quotes Aristotle's Politics approvingly at every turn and treats political secularism, or civil government, as wholly respectable. By the 14th century, in any event, the conditions for the theory and practice of state sovereignty were coming back into existence. The doctrine and the exercise of sovereign power by states can be seen not only as the recovery of antiquity and as an escape from the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, but also as a liberation of individuals as well as of whole nations from the increasingly outdated prerogatives and private laws (privileges) that had come to intervene between individuals and civil authority in the Middle Ages. The destruction of the Western Empire and the subsequent insecurity of about 800 years saw a number of nonpolitical public authorities develop between individuals and the shadowy central authorities of the Middle Ages. Anyone who could manage both to pacify and to control a sizable piece of territory thereby became a landlord. By defending the inhabitants on his lands and by swearing feudal allegiance to a higher authority, he would enjoy political control of those individuals under his protection. Thus, the private prerogatives of the landlord were extended to public authority. At every level the church, which had replaced the defunct Roman state in all matters touching public morality, preservation of culture, and education, exercised enormous public authority. And on top of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies within any particular country were the "universal" authorities, the emperor and the pope. There was a fantastic variety of medieval political forms--feudal monarchies, baronies, earldoms, free cities, ecclesiastical principalities--that contributed to the fragmentation of politics in the Middle Ages; but all these forms could be conceived as part of a vast hierarchy culminating in the empire and the papacy. The doctrine of the sovereign state could act as a liberating agent by destroying the system of private rights acting as public laws. The development of a theory of supreme political power (as contrasted with paternal authority, or theocratic authority, or power based on land control) was a happy way to get out from under the various prerogatives of feudal nobles, prelates, guilds, and corporations. After the Reformation the doctrine of state sovereignty became particularly attractive as a secular rallying point for those who were looking for a new, nonreligious principle of social unity to end religious civil wars. By the 16th century doctrines of internal sovereignty had gradually begun to triumph. By then the doctrine of external, or international, sovereignty was perhaps even more advanced. The idea of universal authorities was no longer plausible. The Reformation definitively ended the universal authority of the pope, but it also dealt a crippling blow to the vestiges of the emperor's universal credit. The Modern State. Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) is commonly treated as the first modern political thinker, and sometimes as the first political scientist. Whether he was also the first modern theorist of state sovereignty is problematic. He did indeed argue that politics has laws of its own. He also argued that the universal authorities (above all, the papacy) are contemptible and weak; that a modern government such as France's is stronger than the Ottoman Empire, for all the apparent strength of Oriental despotism. But his notion of rule was highly personalistic. Machiavelli concerned himself with the charismatic personalities of Romulus and Cesare Borgia rather than with law, bureaucracy, or centralization. Machiavelli advanced the notions of secularism and antiuniversalism that are attributes of the modern state, but that is perhaps all. In fact, his notion of the creative use of personal talent seems closer to the Florentine Renaissance than to the sobrieties of Hobbes or Hegel. A true statist like Hegel, for example, argues that an adequate ruler need not have extraordinary personal qualities at all because a rational state governed by law and bureaucracy is self-sufficient. The first generally recognized theorist of state sovereignty was the French writer Jean \TBodin\t. Bodin defined the state as an authoritative power that can "give laws unto all and every one of its subjects and receive none from them": the state is supreme, not merely one among other lawgiving public authorities. Although Bodin's sovereign was to be above the positive or civil law because he was the law's creator, he was still subject to divine and natural law; the sovereign was also to respect the fundamental constitutional laws of his realm, as well as his subjects' property rights. In short he was--although the highest and the final authority--a lawgiving authority, not an arbitrary or capricious one; the distinction between absolutism and arbitrariness was essential to Bodin, and he would never have countenanced Louis XIV's personalistic "L'etat c'est moi" ("The state, it is I"). Bodin was the first to conceive an absolute political power in this sense; although he allowed medieval corporate bodies to remain in his theory of the state, he reduced them to dependence on the sovereign will, thus ensuring that private prerogative would no longer pass for public law. Bodin not only developed the concept of internal sovereignty; he also denied the existence of a Respublica Christiana, declaring that "since the Roman Emperors were never lords of as much as a thirtieth part of the world, and since the Holy Roman Empire does not form a tenth part of the territories of . . . Rome," there was no universal political authority. States, for Bodin, are as independent externally as they are supreme internally. He further rejected the notion that the inherited Roman ius gentium could be the basis of international relations, and he went on to formulate a theory of international dealings by treaties between sovereign states. Thomas Hobbes, after experiencing the ruinous English Civil War (1642-48), took the doctrines of internal and external state sovereignty to their limits. The Hobbesian sovereign (what he called the "Leviathan"), who absorbed by virtue of the \Tsocial contract\t all the natural rights of his subjects save self-defense, was an absolute lawgiver in the strictest sense. For Hobbes neither morality nor any kind of law exists before it is willed by a sovereign to whom subjects are obligated by a contract of obedience. The Hobbesian sovereign, then, is the creator not only of positive law but of standards of right and wrong, of a civil religious doctrine, and even in part of public opinion. Moreover, if, as Hobbes asserted, the state creates morality and law and humans must submit to it for their self-preservation, then all justice will exist only within closed single-state systems, and the relations between those states, existing in a moral and legal void, will be like the relations between humans before the social contract. The very creation of a supreme state, then, implies the possibility of its hostility to other similar states if medieval natural law and the Roman ius gentium are discarded. For Hobbesians, the doctrine of internal sovereignty, which places states in a "state of nature" while it puts humans under true (positive) law, gives rise by logical necessity to external sovereignty. States, then, being perfectly independent, can be bound only through their own wills, that is, in the same way that individuals are bound to a particular state, through contract or treaty. At this point modern ideas of international relations--inconceivable within a Pax Romana ("Roman Peace," 31 BC-AD c.80) or a Respublica Christiana--begin. Henceforth the recognized, political unit is the state, and relations between these states take the form of treaty relations. The rise of state sovereignty had permanent effects on European political thought. It slowly drove out ecclesiastical and private law and prerogative. This gave rise to a progressively more vehement antimedievalism culminating in the French Revolution, at which time most of the corporate bodies intervening between the individual and the state were either abolished or made subject to positive law. This process was reflected in Kant's declaration (1797) that the only natural political relation was that between single individuals and states. By this time the medieval notion of a society made up of smaller societies had been generally discredited. The greatest "statist" after Hobbes was G. W. F. Hegel. For Hegel the modern state was "mind on earth," the "great hieroglyph of reason," the concrete realization of rational freedom. The Hegelian state is not a mere monolith: the Hegelian state is a monarchy moderated by the law-drafting functions of disinterested civil servants and moderated above all by the Hegelian notion that individuals must be able to find subjective satisfaction in their being willing members of a rational, free institution that secures the pursuit of absolute values inherent in philosophy, art, and religion. Even in Hegel--usually seen as the theorist of the modern state par excellence--sovereignty and concentrated power is not all that matters; the state must be instrumental in the pursuit of philosophy, art, and religion. The Limited State. A formidable concentration of sovereign power was never, in fact, the sole (although it remained the primary) attribute of statehood. If even statists could imagine limiting the state--Bodin through natural law, Hobbes through natural rights, Hegel through subjective satisfaction--others were able and willing to conceive much stronger limitations. Hobbes's greatest immediate English successor, John \TLocke\t, carefully refrained from using the terms state and sovereignty at all. Because he saw government as the rule of an impartial judge, set up by voluntary agreement, who simply enforces God-given natural law and defends natural property rights earned by mixing one's labor with the world, Locke's idea of the state was extremely limited. The already slender Lockean state is further limited by the fact that the legislative branch is representative--and hence amenable to popular control (see \Trepresentation\t)--and by the Lockean right of revolution, which can be used by the people to bring down a government that fails to preserve natural law and rights. In Locke, then, there is a balance between the state and what can be comprehensively called society; this balance is usually styled the liberal notion of the state. The most celebrated advocate of a state-society balance is Baron Charles de \TMontesquieu\t. Montesquieu argued that if states are to be moderate and avoid Oriental despotism, central power must flow through, and sometimes be checked by, such intermediate bodies as parliaments, the regional nobility, and the church. Where the executive, legislative, and judicial powers are separately constituted and substantially independent, according to Montesquieu, power can be a check to power, and checks and balances can take the place of a civic virtue that largely vanished with the republics of ancient times. If Locke wished to limit the state in order to protect natural law and rights, and Montesquieu to preserve moderation and liberty, a utilitarian like Jeremy \TBentham\t had different reasons for limiting the scope of state power. According to Bentham, the operation of the state must be at least somewhat painful, because the state's general measures do not and cannot maximize the particular pleasure (utility) of each actual individual. This was sufficient reason for Bentham to limit the state, which he thought should confine itself principally to controlling those pains which are more hurtful--murder and robbery, for example--than the activity of the state itself. Some of Bentham's contemporaries limited the state still further, on very different grounds. They believed that the operation of economic laws, such as supply and demand, could govern society semiautomatically as if by an invisible hand. Adam \TSmith\t and some of the French \Tphysiocrats\t were not far from such a view, in which the state nearly evaporates. Still different reasons for state limitation were adduced by 19th-century liberals such as Alexis de \TTocqueville\t and John Stuart \Tmill\t, who agreed that the democratization of politics and the state following the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the new influence of public opinion, could lead to a possible "tyranny of the majority." This tyranny would be worse than earlier tyrannies, because (in Mill's words) there are "fewer means of escape" where "society is itself the tyrant." Both de Tocqueville and Mill were led to advocate a new kind of aristocracy--not feudal aristocracy, but the leadership of those who, according to Mill, "stand on the higher eminences of thought." According to this view, public power had to be limited because the new democratic public had become potentially dangerous. The State Eliminated: Marxism, Pluralism, Political Science. For the much more radical 19th-century theorists the notion of limiting the state was only self-deception: what the state needed, they felt, was not limitation but elimination. Karl \TMarx\t, for example, believed that the state was no more than a holding company for the bourgeoisie. The mechanism of the state, according to Marx, arose not to realize freedom or to protect natural law and rights but to facilitate the destruction of the old, feudal modes of production and so hasten the advent of a new, urbanized proletariat that could, by being forced to live on subsistence wages, create profits for the capitalists. Marx viewed the state as an "epiphenomenon," or "reflection," of a given all-important economic substructure of society. For Marx, then, the state should and will "wither away"--not merely be limited or reformed. One need not, of course, be a Marxist to be hostile to the idea of the state. For Ernst \TCassirer\t, a Kantian liberal, the "myth" of the state had led to the worship of concentrated power, culminating in \Tfascism\t; without holding Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hegel strictly accountable for this, Cassirer suggested that state-sovereignty doctrines are fatally easy to pervert. A modern pluralist such as John N. Figgis (1866-1919) insists that the notion of state sovereignty is no more than a venerable superstition, a vestigial relic of Tudor pretensions, and that social life is a "series of groups," all of which have some life of their own not merely granted by the state. Arthur Bentley (1870-1957), an immensely influential modern political scientist, argued that whereas the idea of the state has been "very prominent . . . among the intellectual amusements of the past," it is not really true that the state is a kind of "crystalization" of authoritative power; politics for Bentley is a matter of self-interested groups attempting to determine the behavior of other people and other groups. Even if a group seizes the governing apparatus, what still matters is the group and its interests. For H. L. A. Hart (1907- ), perhaps the most eminent post-World War II legal theorist, it is unreasonable to begin political thinking with the state: it is at least as valid to start with voluntary associations or with the international community and then to ask what is left for the state. Much of recent political science, concerned with groups, interests, and processes, has tended to further erode the importance of the concepts of state and sovereignty. In systems theory, for instance, what matters is the whole interactive political system: its "inputs," its "outputs," and its "transactions." The state, then, is today no longer the central concern of political study. Even when dealing with a modern social scientist who is largely sympathetic to the state--for example, Max \TWeber\t--one still finds a tendency to reduce the state to rational bureaucracy alone. Moreover, for Weber in particular, the concept of the state is an ideal construct that political reality only distantly approximates; statehood, in this formulation, loses much of its concreteness. The great age of confident, bold state theories, therefore--unclouded by the reservations of pluralists, group theorists, systems analysts, Marxians, anarchists, and liberals--was the period stretching from Hobbes to Hegel. Today it is a great deal less clear than in Hobbes's or Hegel's day whether people should agree with the once-eminent legal theorist Johann K. Bluntschli (1808-81) that political inquiry is "the science that is concerned with the state," or whether they should side with Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903- ) in his assertion that it is quite wrong to reduce politics to dangerous "absolute, infinite, perpetual" state power. The main support of modern states lies in the indubitable fact that most modern humans share a view of the state's necessity that roughly approximates Frederick Watkins's (1910-72) elegant formulation that the "whole structure of modern civilization would inevitably collapse in the absence of those conditions of ordered peace that have been ensured through the integrating activities of the sovereign state." This does not, however, settle what modern civilization and the sovereign state are worth--whether they have a value equal to the cost (in every sense) of realizing them. This uncertainty reinforces, therefore, the idea that states--especially with respect to their purpose--are in part only artifacts of political visions. Patrick Riley Bibliography: Avineri, Shlomo, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (1972); Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, The Theory of the State, 2d ed. (1971); Cassirer, Ernst, The Myth of the State (1946); d'Entreves, A. 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