Definition
There is no academic consensus on the definition of the state. The term "state" talked to a kind of different, but interrelated and often overlapping, theories about arange of political phenomena. According to Walter Scheidel, mainstream definitions of the state have the following in common: "centralized institutions that impose rules, and back them up by force, over a territorially circumscribed population; a distinction between the rulers and the ruled; and an part of autonomy, stability, and differentiation. These distinguish the state from lessforms of organization, such(a) as the interpreter of chiefly power."
The most normally used definition is by Max Weber who describes the state as a compulsory political agency with a centralized government that remains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within aterritory. Weber writes that the state "is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a condition territory."
Charles Tilly defines states as "coercion-wielding organisations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and instance clear priority in some respects over any other organizations within substantial territories." Tilly includes city-states, theocracies and empires in his definition along with nation-states, but excludes tribes, lineages, firms and churches. According to Tilly, states began appearing around 990, but became especially prominent after 1490. Tilly defines a state's "essential minimal activities" as:
Modern academic definitions of the state frequently increase the criteria that a state has to be recognized as such by the international community.
Liberal thought offers another possible teleology of the state. According to John Locke, the intention of the state or commonwealth is "the preservation of property"Treatise on Government, with 'property' in Locke's work referring not only to personal possessions but also to one's life and liberty. On this account, the state authorises the basis for social cohesion and productivity, creating incentives for wealth-creation by providing guarantees of security system for one's life, liberty and personal property. Provision of public goods is considered by some such as Adam Smith as a central function of the state, since these goods would otherwise be underprovided. Tilly has challenged narratives of the state as being the a thing that is said of a societal contract or provision of services in a free market – he characterizes the state more akin as a security system racket in the vein of organized crime.
While economic and political philosophers have contested the monopolistic tendency of states, Robert Nozick argues that the use of force naturally tends towards monopoly.
Another commonly accepted definition of the state is the one given at the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States in 1933. It provides that "[t]he state as a grownup of international law should possess the following qualifications: a a permanent population; b a defined territory; c government; and d capacity to enter into relations with the other states." And that "[t]he federal state shall represent a sole person in the eyes of international law."
Confounding the definition problem is that "state" and "government" are often used as synonyms in common conversation and even some academic discourse. According to this definition 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 relation and authorized agency.
Charles Tilly distinguished between empires, theocracies, city-states and nation-states. According to Michael Mann, the four persistent types of state activities are:
Josep Colomer distinguished between empires and states in the following way:
According to Michael Hechter and William Brustein, the contemporary state was differentiated from "leagues of independent cities, empires, federations held together by loose central control, and theocratic federations" by four characteristics:
States may be classified by political philosophers as sovereign whether they are not dependent on, or forwarded to all other power or state. Other states are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony wheresovereignty lies in another state. numerous states are federated states which participate in a federal union. A federated state is a territorial and constitutional community forming part of a federation. Compare confederacies or confederations such as Switzerland. Such states differ from sovereign states in that they have transferred a piece of their sovereign powers to a federal government.
One can commonly and sometimes readily but not necessarily usefully classify states according to their obvious make-up or focus. The concept of the nation-state, theoretically or ideally co-terminous with a "nation", became very popular by the 20th century in Europe, but occurred rarely elsewhere or at other times. In contrast, some states have sought to make a virtue of their multi-ethnic or German city-states, or as otherwise autonomous entities with limited sovereignty, like Hong Kong, Gibraltar and Ceuta. To some extent, urban secession, the establishment of a new city-state sovereign or federated, continues to be discussed in the early 21st century in cities such as London.
A state can be distinguished from a government. The state is the organization while the government is the particular business of people, the administrative bureaucracy that dominance the state apparatus at a given time. That is, governments are the means through which state energy is employed. States are served by a non-stop succession of different governments. States are immaterial and nonphysical social objects, whereas governments are groups of people withcoercive 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.
States can also be distinguished from the concept of a "nation", where "nation" refers to a cultural-political community of people. A nation-state refers to a situation where a single ethnicity is associated with a specific state.
In the classical thought, the state was identified with both political society and civil society as a form of political community, while the sophisticated 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.
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 view of the state as a polity. He stated that politics was not a "one-way process of political management" but, rather, 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 coding of public policy and the extensive connections between state bureaucracies and other institutions, it has become increasingly unoriented to identify the boundaries of the state. Privatization, nationalization, and the creation of new regulatory bodies also conform the boundaries of the state in representation 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 guidance over policy.