Abstract
No treatise on such a large subject as the state should begin without some attempt at definition, but it is difficult to comprehend in one definition the actual variety of states that have emerged over historical time.1 At the same time, it is impossible to discuss the state without some common understanding of its major characteristics, however much they may vary in particular cases. Hence, what follows is a basic typology rather than a formal definition of the key elements of a state structure, including the modern state. This is to be understood as constituting an “ideal type” in the sense that Max Weber intended, as a purely formal construct that aids in ordering and comprehending empirical reality, not as a precise model of any particular existing social or political structure.
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Notes
Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Strayer also points to the difficulty in framing a satisfactory definition of the state, and lists in its stead a number of its key elements that overlap those we have detailed.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78.
See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Mole Editions, 1974), 148–158. Clastres goes so far as to argue that primitive “law” is designed precisely to prevent the emergence of a centralized coercive power and, as such, is literally “written” upon the body in ceremonial initiation rites.
See Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967), Chap. 4, for a general characterization and analysis of these and other elements of more centralized pre-state formations, what Fried terms rank societies.
See I. Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies (London: C.A. Watts and Co., 1956), 211–212, for an example of titular and strong chieftainships in South Africa. Shapera derives the distinction from Lowie.
See Jonathan Haas, The Evolution of the Prehistoric State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 212–213. Haas notes that not all chiefdoms become states, and that under some circumstances the state may evolve out of more “primitive” social organizations.
See Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 282–308. See also Clastres, Society Against the State. Clastres argues that “The economic derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes” (168).
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 129.
Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
See Chester G. Starr, A History of the Ancient World, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. According to Starr, “This was the first empire in history, in the sense that it had the first imperial administration” (131).
C. Leonard Woolley, The Sumerians (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 18.
Hammurabi, The Hammurabi Code and the Sinaitic Legislation; With a Complete Translation of the Great Babylonian Inscription discovered at Susa, trans. Chilperic Edwards (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971), 23.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of Reformation, v. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 349–358. In Skinner’s analysis, the preconditions for the emergence of the modern impersonal state also include the development of political theory as a “distinct branch of moral philosophy.”
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© 2006 Brian R. Nelson
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Nelson, B.R. (2006). State Formations. In: The Making of the Modern State. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983282_2
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