State

Broad and Narrow Accounts

The general characterization previously offered is a good starting point, but it is insufficiently detailed for many purposes. We should first distinguish between broad and narrow characterizations of the state. For some purposes—for instance, the investigations of anthropologists and archeologists—broad characterizations are appropriate. States here contrast with decentralized anarchic communities (e.g., tribes without rulers). Early humans lived in comparatively egalitarian communities that were segmentary or acephalous (without rulers). Kinship relations determined obligations between members. The emergence of chiefdoms, with rulers who possessed a right to command and to tribute, is a significant development. Power is concentrated and political hierarchy introduced. To investigate these transitions, we need only a general or broad characterization of the state, something like that previously expressed. Most political theorists, however, are interested in questions about the conditions of contemporary political societies and focus their attention on modern times. To understand our world requires understanding the state, that is, the modern state. For this, a narrower and more detailed characterization is needed.

Our world is a world of states. The state is being challenged from many directions, and our world may be changing. Still, it is a remarkable fact that virtually every piece of land on the globe today is the territory of a state. That was not the case 100 years ago, though even then most European polities were states (at least after 1918). Equally remarkable is that the state dominates our political imagination. We worry whether the United Nations (UN) or the European Union (EU) will become a giant state (as opposed to something different); we categorize the Vatican as a state (rather than the seat of a once-powerful Christian Empire) and do not know what to do with other remnants of a world left-behind—for instance, Monaco (a principality), San Marino (a republic), or Andorra (under the joint suzerainty of the President of France and the Bishop of Urgel, Spain). Secessionists want a state of their own. Our world is one of states, and few can think of alternative ways of organizing political societies. And the questions that preoccupy political theorists—questions about justice, obligation to obey the law, the scope or limits of government, or citizenship, nationality, and multiculturalism—take this context for granted, though this is starting to change.

The modern state emerged first in Western Europe. There the victory of kings and other political actors over their rivals—the church and the Holy Roman Empire on the one side, the nobility and the independent towns on the other—led to the development of institutions and practices that give us our states. The political organization of medieval Europe was quite different from that of our world. Medieval Europe consisted of complex, crosscutting jurisdictions of towns, lords, kings, emperors, popes, and bishops, without clear hierarchies of political authority or unitary systems of law. Governance tended to be indirect or mediated. No single person or agency had power to [Page 1321]control most people outside of a small area. In fact, no agency even knew how many people there were in a realm, much less where exactly the borders were. Without statistics or maps, or the bureaucracies necessary, rulers could not do very much. Equally important, political rule was characteristically personal, consisting in relations between individual kings, princes, lords, vassals, and others. There was no clear distinction between a ruler's realm and his property. Rule over subjects and land could be acquired by purchase, conquest, marriage, or inheritance. People's rights and obligations depended on their place in complex relations with others, and not on their location in a particular territory. What is distinctive about the modern state is most apparent when one concentrates on the features of late medieval and early modern Europe from which it emerges. Thus it is worth highlighting some of these.

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