Organization Of The State

States are the most important political organizations in the modern world. In the last four centuries or so they have come to a large extent to dominate and subsume other forms of territorially based political organization such as empires, cities, feudal structures, tribes, and villages. However, their organizational character is problematic and contested, especially in the context of globalization in the 21st century.

The organizational supremacy of the state rests on two analytically distinct but inextricably intertwined foundations. In the first place, the state, as an organization or institution, is embodied in particular factors including: (a) a set of generally accepted “rules of the game”; (b) the distribution of resources in a particular society; (c) a dominant ideology; and (d) the capacity of the state to use force, whether the “monopoly of legitimate violence” (in Max Weber's phrase) or a range of legal, economic, and social sanctions, to impose particular decisions and ways of doing things upon both individuals and the society as a whole. In the second place, the state, like other organizations and institutions, is populated by a range of actors within and around the state apparatus. These state actors make decisions and impose outcomes on nonstate actors. In other words, the state is both a structured field of institutionalized power and a structured playing field for the exercise of social or personal power.

The most important organizational characteristic of states is that they are differentiated organizations. In other words, states are organizationally distinct from families, churches, classes, races, interest groups, and the like; from economic institutions like firms or markets; and indeed, from nonstate political organizations such as interest and pressure groups or social movements. They are in legal and philosophical principle (and to some extent in practice) both discrete and autonomous, in that they are not subordinate to, incorporated within, or morphologically determined by (structurally subsumed into) other organizations, institutions, or structures. The state stands on its own.

Nevertheless, the state is a contested category both conceptually and in practice. The modern state as it has evolved in recent centuries is often taken as a given of political, social, and economic life. However, it is more useful to see it as problematic—as a starting point for analysis and debate. The very notion of the state is what philosophers call a reification—that is, seeing an abstract concept as if it were a material thing. But states, like ideas, have real consequences. The state can be seen as contested on at least three levels.