The state is the political institution that governs a defined territory and population through a centralized administrative apparatus. Max Weber's classic sociological definition, from his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, holds that a state is a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a certain territory; the underlying idea of a sovereign monopoly on legitimate violence reaches back further, to Jean Bodin's Les Six Livres de la Republique (1576) and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). States first arose roughly 5,500 years ago in early complex societies, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, made possible by settled agriculture, especially grain cultivation, and by writing systems; for most of human prehistory, people lived in stateless societies with no centralized authority and comparatively little economic inequality.
Facts
Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own accountPolitical institution: the organization Max Weber defined as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. 1 Emergence PeriodSourced to the subject's own accountStates first arose roughly 5,500 years ago in early complex societies including Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes; Max Weber's monopoly-on-legitimate-force definition, the discipline's most widely cited, dates to his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation. 1 Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own account Emergence EraSourced to the subject's own account ScaleSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Associated With
Source Wikipedia: Bureaucracy
The city-state is a specific historical form of the state, a sovereign political entity whose territory and population are centered on and largely coextensive with a single city.
A confederation is itself a form of composite state, a union of otherwise sovereign states that delegate limited powers to a joint central authority.
Federalism is the institutional principle by which a single state divides sovereignty constitutionally between a central government and constituent regional governments.
Government is the institutional apparatus through which the state exercises its authority, administers policy and enforces law over its territory and population.
Source Wikipedia: State (Polity)
Weber's 1919 monopoly-on-legitimate-force definition is the discipline's most widely cited definition of the state.
Source Wikipedia: State (Polity)
Source Wikipedia: Social Movement
Studied By
Source Alexander Parvus (Wikipedia)
Source Antonio Gramsci (Wikipedia)
Source Antonio Negri (Wikipedia)
Source Benjamin Tucker (Wikipedia)
Source Charles Tilly (Wikipedia)
Source Chiara Bottici (Wikipedia)
Source Claude Lefort (Wikipedia)
Source Emma Goldman (Wikipedia)
Source Ernesto Laclau (Wikipedia)
Source Fatema Mernissi (Wikipedia)
Source Fredy Perlman (Wikipedia)
Source Gilles Dauvé (Wikipedia)
Source Goran Therborn (Wikipedia)
Source Gustav Landauer (Wikipedia)
Source Herbert Spencer (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: James C. Scott
Source Jurgen Habermas (Wikipedia)
Source Leo Panitch (Wikipedia)
Source Luigi Galleani (Wikipedia)
Source Mikhail Bakunin (Wikipedia)
Poulantzas structuralist Marxism theorized the capitalist state as relatively autonomous from any single class faction while still functioning to secure capitalist reproduction.
Source Paul Hirst (Wikipedia)
Source Peter Kropotkin (Wikipedia)
Source Pierre Clastres (Wikipedia)
Source Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Wikipedia)
Source Ralph Miliband (Wikipedia)
Source Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Wikipedia)
Source Rudolf Rocker (Wikipedia)
Source Sheila Jasanoff (Wikipedia)
Rokkan mapped the historical cleavages, center-periphery tensions and nation-building processes that shaped the modern European state system.
Skocpol comparative-historical sociology treats the state as an autonomous organizational actor with its own interests, not merely an arena for class conflict.
Source Ulrich Beck (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Vivek Chibber
Source Vladimir Lenin (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Wikipedia: State (Polity)
WikipediaDefinition section
the state is a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory
- Historical emergence section
English Wikipedia, intro text
The earliest forms of states arose about 5,500 years ago.
English Wikipedia, intro text, scale
A state is a political entity that rules and governs society and the population within a definite territory, or in other words, it is referred to as the country itself with various administrative divisions.
Lead, institution-type-category political-regime
A state is a political entity that rules and governs society and the population within a definite territory, or in other words, it is referred to as the country itself with various administrative divisions.
- Associated With: Max Weber
View the Source Wikipedia: Bureaucracy
Wikipedia: Social Movement
WikipediaAssociated With: Social Movement, definitions sectionView the Source Antonio Gramsci (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Antonio Gramsci, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Antonio Gramsci, Lead section
Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class-the bourgeoisie-use cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies.
View the Source Antonio Negri (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Antonio Negri, LeadQuote, Studied By: Antonio Negri, Lead
Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory.
View the Source Fredy Perlman (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Fredy Perlman, LeadQuote, Studied By: Fredy Perlman, Lead
His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination (and domination generally) through a poetic investigation of the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
View the Source Gustav Landauer (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Gustav Landauer, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Gustav Landauer, Lead section
His major works, including Skepsis und Mystik (Skepticism and Mysticism, 1903) and Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Call to Socialism, 1911), articulated his view that the state is not an institution to be violently overthrown but a social relationship that can be replaced by creating new, voluntary forms of community.
View the Source Leo Panitch (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Leo Panitch, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Leo Panitch, Lead section
Panitch was the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and nine books including Working-Class Politics in Crisis: Essays on Labour and the State (1986), The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (2001), and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination (2008) in which he argued that capitalism is inherently unjust and undemocratic.
View the Source Mikhail Bakunin (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Mikhail Bakunin, Wikipedia body text, notable works (1)Quote, Studied By: Mikhail Bakunin, Wikipedia body text, notable works (1)
From 1870 until his death in 1876, Bakunin wrote his longer works such as Statism and Anarchy and God and the State, but he continued to directly participate in European worker and peasant movements.
View the Source Pierre Clastres (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Pierre Clastres, Selected works listQuote, Studied By: Pierre Clastres, Selected works list
Society Against the State (La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1974
View the Source Ralph Miliband (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Ralph Miliband, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Ralph Miliband, Lead section
He published several books on Marxist theory and the criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism (1961), The State in Capitalist Society (1969), and Marxism and Politics (1977), and he edited the Writings of the Left series (Jonathan Cape and Grove Press, 1972-1973).
View the Source Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lead section
For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment.
View the Source Wikipedia: Vivek Chibber
Studied By: Vivek Chibber, Career, first paragraphQuote, Studied By: Vivek Chibber, Career, first paragraph
the literature on developmental states had unduly ignored the constraints that class power imposed on state-building
View the Source Vladimir Lenin (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Vladimir Lenin, Wikipedia body text, notable work (The State and Revolution)Quote, Studied By: Vladimir Lenin, Wikipedia body text, notable work (The State and Revolution)
There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the proletarian state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society.
View the Source Herbert Spencer (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Herbert Spencer, Article textQuote, Studied By: Herbert Spencer, Article text
" Spencer argued that the state is not an "essential" institution and that it will "decay" as a voluntary market organisation comes to replace the coercive aspects of the state.
View the Source Sheila Jasanoff (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Sheila Jasanoff, Article textQuote, Studied By: Sheila Jasanoff, Article text
She is also the founder of the Science and Democracy Network, a group of scholars interested in the study of science and the state in democratic societies that has met annually since 2002.
View the Source Jurgen Habermas (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationStudied By: Jürgen Habermas, Article textQuote, Studied By: Jürgen Habermas, Article text
According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public; and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out.
View the Source Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Article textQuote, Studied By: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Article text
This ethical socialism has been described as part of the liberal socialist tradition which is for egalitarianism and free markets, with Proudhon, among other anarchists, taking "a commitment to narrow down the sphere of activity of the state".
View the Source Benjamin Tucker (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Benjamin Tucker, Article textQuote, Studied By: Benjamin Tucker, Article text
But under system of a free market without state monopolies and privileges, which he believed to, among others, prevent zero-interest loans from being accessible to the workers, the capitalists would have a right to suppress aggressive strikers.
View the Source Emma Goldman (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Emma Goldman, Article textQuote, Studied By: Emma Goldman, Article text
Goldman was a committed war resister and was particularly opposed to the draft, viewing it as one of the worst of the state's forms of coercion, and was one of the founders of the No-Conscription League for which she was ultimately arrested and imprisoned in 1917 before being deported in 1919.
View the Source Peter Kropotkin (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Peter Kropotkin, Article textQuote, Studied By: Peter Kropotkin, Article text
Thus, Kropotkin wrote that maintaining the state would paralyze any true social revolution, making the idea of a "revolutionary government" a contradiction in terms:
View the Source Alexander Parvus (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Alexander Parvus, Article textQuote, Studied By: Alexander Parvus, Article text
Parvus was the primary author of the "Financial Manifesto" of December 1905, which urged citizens to undermine the state by withdrawing their deposits from banks in gold.
View the Source Gilles Dauvé (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Gilles Dauvé, Article textQuote, Studied By: Gilles Dauvé, Article text
This involves the simultaneous destruction of the state, wage labour, and the proletariat's own existence as a class.
View the Source Claude Lefort (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Claude Lefort, Article textQuote, Studied By: Claude Lefort, Article text
A dictatorship does not aim for the destruction and absorption of society, and a dictatorial power is a power of the state against society, that presupposes the distinction of the two; the plan of a totalitarian party is to merge state with society in a closed, united and uniform system, subordinated under the fulfilment of a plan, "socialism" in the case of the USSR.
View the Source Luigi Galleani (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Luigi Galleani, Article textQuote, Studied By: Luigi Galleani, Article text
He defended the principles of revolutionary spontaneity, autonomy, diversity, self-determination and direct action, and advocated for the violent overthrow of the state and capitalism through propaganda of the deed.
View the Source Charles Tilly (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Charles Tilly, Article textQuote, Studied By: Charles Tilly, Article text
According to Tilly, through war-making the state is able to monopolize physical violence, enabling the state to title any other entity practicing violence as unlawful.
View the Source Wikipedia: James C. Scott
WikipediaStudied By: James C. Scott, Article textQuote, Studied By: James C. Scott, Article text
What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.
View the Source Fatema Mernissi (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Fatema Mernissi, Article textQuote, Studied By: Fatema Mernissi, Article text
Furthermore, Mernissi analyzes the role of the state in gender roles as well as the outcome of a state that ultimately supports inequality.
View the Source Goran Therborn (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Goran Therborn, Article textQuote, Studied By: Goran Therborn, Article text
Topics on which he has written extensively include the intersection between the class structure of society and the function of the state apparatus, the formation of ideology within subjects, and the future of the Marxist tradition.
View the Source Rudolf Rocker (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Rudolf Rocker, Article textQuote, Studied By: Rudolf Rocker, Article text
Rocker decried nationalism as the religion of the modern state and opposed violence, championing instead direct action and the education of the workers.
View the Source Ulrich Beck (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Ulrich Beck, Article textQuote, Studied By: Ulrich Beck, Article text
Institutions such as the nation-state and the family are globalized 'from the inside'.
View the Source Ernesto Laclau (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Ernesto Laclau, Article bodyQuote, Studied By: Ernesto Laclau, Article body
Laclau's early work was influenced by Althusserian Marxism and focused on issues debated within Neo-Marxist circles in the 1970s, such as the role of the state, the dynamics of capitalism, the importance of building popular movements, and the possibility of revolution.
View the Source Paul Hirst (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Paul Hirst, Article bodyQuote, Studied By: Paul Hirst, Article body
His later work, with Grahame Thompson resulted in an influential criticism of fashionable theories of economic globalisation, demonstrating the continued importance of the nation-state.
View the Source Chiara Bottici (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Chiara Bottici, Article bodyQuote, Studied By: Chiara Bottici, Article body
Bottici's work examined the history and function of the metaphor of the state as a person within modern European political philosophy and reflected on its fate in the contemporary epoch, a time in which challenges to the traditional notion of state sovereignty question the idea of clear-cut boundaries, and therefore the possibility of drawing any analogy between states and individuals.
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