DR.

RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA

NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY,
LUCKNOW

ACADEMIC SESSION: 2020-21

TOPIC: CONCEPT OF STATE

Submitted To: Submitted By:

Dr. Monica Srivastava Mohd Ashad

Asst. Professor (Political Science) B.A. L.L.B. (Hons.)

Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National 3rd Semester

Law University, Lucknow Section-A (94)

Table Of Contents

● Introduction

● Definition of State

● Theories of State Legitimacy

● History

● Bibliography

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 INTRODUCTION
A state is an organized political community living under a single system of government.
Speakers of American English often use state and government as synonyms, with both words
referring to an organized political group that exercises authority over a particular territory. States
may or may not be sovereign. For instance, federated states that are members of a federal union
have only partial sovereignty, but are, nonetheless, states.Some states are subject to external
sovereignty or hegemony where ultimate sovereignty lies in another state. The term "state" can
also refer to the secular branches of government within a state, often as a manner of contrasting
them with churches and civilian institutions.

Many human societies have been governed by states for millennia, but many have been stateless
societies. The first states arose about 5,500 years ago in conjunction with the rapid growth of
urban centres, the invention of writing, and the codification of new forms of religion. Over time
a variety of different forms developed, employing a variety of justifications for their existence
(such as divine right, the theory of the social contract, etc.). In the 21st century the modern
nation-state is the predominant form of state to which people are subject. A state is the means of
rule over a defined or "sovereign" territory. It is comprised of an executive, a bureaucracy, courts
and other institutions. But, above all, a state levies taxes and operates a military and police force.
States distribute and re-distribute resources and wealth, so lobbyists, politicians and
revolutionaries seek in their own way to influence or even to get hold of the levers of state
power. States exist in a variety of sizes, ranging from enormous China to tiny Andorra. Some
claim a long lineage, while others are of modern construction. In all but the short term, states are
in flux. They expand and contract as military and political fortunes change. Some, like Poland,
even disappear and re-appear later. Or they may be divided up (sometimes peacefully) by
communities that prefer to go their separate ways (Czechoslovakia). Others, such as Iraq, may be
occupied or run as a colony or protectorate. States can also "fail" - their governing institutions
collapse due to civil war and internal strife (as in Somalia) or because the state has little authority
outside the capital city (Afghanistan). While globalization and regional integration (like the
European Union) challenge the state's powers, the state is still the dominant arena of domestic
politics as well as the primary actor in international relations

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 DEFINITION OF STATE
The term "state" refers to a set of different, but interrelated and often overlapping, theories about
a certain range of political phenomena. The act of defining the term can be seen as part of an
ideological conflict, because different definitions lead to different theories of state function, and
as a result validate different political strategies.And according to Jeffrey and Painter, "if we
define the 'essence' of the state in one place or era, we are liable to find that in another time or
space something which is also understood to be a state has different 'essential' characteristics"

The most commonly used definition is Max Weber's, which describes the state as a compulsory
political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate
use of force within a certain territory. General categories of state institutions include
administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, and military or religious organizations.

Confounding the definitional problem is that "state" and "government" are often used as
synonyms in common conversation and even some academic discourse. According to this
definitional schema, the states are nonphysical persons of international law, governments are
organizations of people. The relationship between a government and its state is one of
representation and authorized agency.

Types of states

States may be classified as sovereign if they are not dependent on, or subject to any other power
or state. Other states are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony where ultimate sovereignty
lies in another state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union. A
federated state is a territorial and constitutional community forming part of a federation. Such
states differ from sovereign states, in that they have transferred a portion of their sovereign
powers to a federal government.

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The state and government

A state can be distinguished from a government. The government is the particular group of
people, the administrative bureaucracy that controls the state apparatus at a given time. That is,
governments are the means through which state power is employed. States are served by a
continuous succession of different governments. States are immaterial and nonphysical social
objects, whereas governments are groups of people with certain coercive powers.

Each successive government is composed of a specialized and privileged body of individuals,

who monopolize political decision-making, and are separated by status and organization from the
population as a whole. Their function is to enforce existing laws, legislate new ones, and
arbitrate conflicts. In some societies, this group is often a self-perpetuating or hereditary class. In
other societies, such as democracies, the political roles remain, but there is frequent turnover of
the people actually filling the positions.

States and nation-states

States can also be distinguished from the concept of a "nation", which refers to a large
geographical area, and the people therein who perceive themselves as having a common identity.

The state and civil society

In the classical thought the state was identified with both political society and civil society as a
form of political community, while the modern thought distinguished the nation state as a
political society from civil society as a form of economic society. Thus in the modern thought
the state is contrasted with civil society.

The Man versus the state

Antonio Gramsci believed that civil society is the primary locus of political activity because it is
where all forms of "identity formation, ideological struggle, the activities of intellectuals, and the
construction of hegemony take place." and that civil society was the nexus connecting the
economic and political sphere. Arising out of the collective actions of civil society is what
Gramsci calls "political society", which Gramsci differentiates from the notion of the state as a
polity. He stated that politics was not a "one-way process of political management" but, rather,

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that the activities of civil organizations conditioned the activities of political parties and state
institutions, and were conditioned by them in turn. Louis Althusser argued that civil
organizations such as church, schools, and the family are part of an "ideological state apparatus"
which complements the "repressive state apparatus" (such as police and military) in reproducing
social relations.

Jürgen Habermas spoke of a public sphere that was distinct from both the economic and political
sphere.

Given the role that many social groups have in the development of public policy, and the
extensive connections between state bureaucracies and other institutions, it has become
increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries of the state. Privatization, nationalization, and the
creation of new regulatory bodies also change the boundaries of the state in relation to society.
Often the nature of quasi-autonomous organizations is unclear, generating debate among political
scientists on whether they are part of the state or civil society. Some political scientists thus
prefer to speak of policy networks and decentralized governance in modern societies rather than
of state bureaucracies and direct state control over policy.

Theories of State Legitimacy

Divine Right

The rise of the modern day state system was closely related to changes in political thought,
especially concerning the changing understanding of legitimate state power and control. Early
modern defenders of absolutism, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin undermined the
doctrine of the divine right of kings by arguing that the power of kings should be justified by
reference to the people. Hobbes in particular went further to argue that political power should be
justified with reference to the individual, not just to the people understood collectively. Both
Hobbes and Bodin thought they were defending the power of kings, not advocating for
democracy, but their arguments about the nature of sovereignty were fiercely resisted by more
traditional defenders of the power of kings, such as Sir Robert Filmer in England, who thought
that such defenses ultimately opened the way to more democratic claims.

Rational-legal authority

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Max Weber identified three main sources of political legitimacy in his works. The first,
legitimacy based on traditional grounds is derived from a belief that things should be as they
have been in the past, and that those who defend these traditions have a legitimate claim to
power. The second, legitimacy based on charismatic leadership is devotion to a leader or group
that is viewed as exceptionally heroic or virtuous. The third is rational-legal authority, whereby
legitimacy is derived from the belief that a certain group has been placed in power in a legal
manner, and that their actions are justifiable according to a specific code of written laws. Weber
believed that the modern state is characterized primarily by appeals to rational-legal authority.

History
The earliest forms of the state emerged whenever it became possible to centralize power in a
durable way. Agriculture and writing are almost everywhere associated with this process:
agriculture because it allowed for the emergence of a class of people who did not have to spend
most of their time providing for their own subsistence, and writing because it made possible the
centralization of vital information.

The first known states were created in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, the Inca
civilization, and others, but it is only in relatively modern times that states have almost
completely displaced alternative "stateless" forms of political organization of societies all over
the planet. Roving bands of hunter-gatherers and even fairly sizable and complex tribal societies
based on herding or agriculture have existed without any full-time specialized state organization,
and these "stateless" forms of political organization have in fact prevailed for all of the prehistory
and much of the history of the human species and civilization.

Initially states emerged over territories built by conquest in which one culture, one set of ideals
and one set of laws have been imposed by force or threat over diverse nations by a civilian and
military bureaucracy. Currently, that is not always the case and there are multinational states,
federated states and autonomous areas within states.

Since the late 19th century, virtually the entirety of the world's inhabitable land has been
parcelled up into areas with more or less definite borders claimed by various states. Earlier, quite
large land areas had been either unclaimed or uninhabited, or inhabited by nomadic peoples who
were not organised as states. However, even within present-day states there are vast areas of

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wilderness, like the Amazon Rainforest, which are uninhabited or inhabited solely or mostly by
indigenous people (and some of them remain uncontacted). Also, there are states which do not
hold de facto control over all of their claimed territory or where this control is challenged.
Currently the international community comprises around 200 sovereign states, the vast majority
of which are represented in the United Nations.

Pre-historic Stateless Societies

For most of human history, people have lived in stateless societies, characterized by a lack of
concentrated authority, and the absence of large inequalities in economic and political power.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes:

It is not enough to observe, in a now rather dated anthropological idiom, that hunter gatherers
live in 'stateless societies', as though their social lives were somehow lacking or unfinished,
waiting to be completed by the evolutionary development of a state apparatus. Rather, the
principal of their socialty, as Pierre Clastres has put it, is fundamentally against the state.

The Neolithic Period

During the Neolithic period, human societies underwent major cultural and economic changes,
including the development of agriculture, the formation of sedentary societies and fixed
settlements, increasing population densities, and the use of pottery and more complex tools.

Sedentary agriculture led to the development of property rights, domestication of plants and
animals, and larger family sizes. It also provided the basis for the centralized state form by
producing a large surplus of food, which created a more complex division of labor by enabling
people to specialize in tasks other than food production. Early states were characterized by
highly stratified societies, with a privileged and wealthy ruling class that was subordinate to a
monarch. The ruling classes began to differentiate themselves through forms of architecture and
other cultural practices that were different from those of the subordinate laboring classes.

In the past, it was suggested that the centralized state was developed to administer large public
works systems (such as irrigation systems) and to regulate complex economies. However,
modern archaeological and anthropological evidence does not support this thesis, pointing to the
existence of several non-stratified and politically decentralized complex societies.

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The State in Ancient Eurasia

Mesopotamia is generally considered to be the location of the earliest civilization or complex

society, meaning that it contained cities, full-time division of labor, social concentration of
wealth into capital, unequal distribution of wealth, ruling classes, community ties based on
residency rather than kinship, long distance trade, monumental architecture, standardized forms
of art and culture, writing, and mathematics and science. It was the world's first literate
civilization, and formed the first sets of written laws.

The State in Classical Antiquity

Although state-forms existed before the rise of the Ancient Greek empire, the Greeks were the
first people known to have explicitly formulated a political philosophy of the state, and to have
rationally analyzed political institutions. Prior to this, states were described and justified in terms
of religious myths.

Several important political innovations of classical antiquity came from the Greek city-states and
the Roman Republic. The Greek city-states before the 4th century granted citizenship rights to
their free population, and in Athens these rights were combined with a directly democratic form
of government that was to have a long afterlife in political thought and history.

The Feudal State

During Medieval times in Europe, the state was organized on the principle of feudalism, and the
relationship between lord and vassal became central to social organization. Feudalism led to the
development of greater social hierarchies.

The formalization of the struggles over taxation between the monarch and other elements of
society (especially the nobility and the cities) gave rise to what is now called the Standestaat, or
the state of Estates, characterized by parliaments in which key social groups negotiated with the
king about legal and economic matters. These estates of the realm sometimes evolved in the
direction of fully-fledged parliaments, but sometimes lost out in their struggles with the

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monarch, leading to greater centralization of lawmaking and military power in his hands.
Beginning in the 15th century, this centralizing process gives rise to the absolutist state.

The Modern State

Cultural and national homogenization figured prominently in the rise of the modern state system.
Since the absolutist period, states have largely been organized on a national basis. The concept of
a national state, however, is not synonymous with nation state. Even in the most ethnically
homogeneous societies there is not always a complete correspondence between state and nation,
hence the active role often taken by the state to promote nationalism through emphasis on shared
symbols and national identity.

BIBLIOGRPAHY

● https://www.globalpolicy.org/nations-a-states/what-is-a-state.html

● philosophy.wisc.edu/hunt/A%20Definition%20of%20the%20State.html

● “POLITICAL SCIENCE” by Aristotle

● “THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO” by Karl Marx

● https://academics101.files.wordpress.com/.../concept-of-political-science.html

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● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)

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