State

The State is a political organization that, through a set of lasting institutions, exercises authority over a population living in a defined territory and claims for itself the legitimate monopoly of the use of force, along with the sovereignty to issue the rules that govern collective life.

The word comes from the Latin status, derived from the verb stare (to stand, to remain), so that originally it designated a stable condition or an established order. The modern political sense took shape in the early modern period, when European absolute monarchies concentrated authority and separated it from the personal powers of lords and estates. Before that, most human societies were organized in other ways, although the first states in a broad sense arose in Mesopotamia and other great river valleys, linked to the growth of cities, writing and centralized administration.

Philosophers have understood the State in very different ways. Thomas Hobbes conceived it as an institution created by a covenant to secure peace and common defence against the state of nature. Hegel saw it as the realization of the ethical idea and the consciousness of a people. Max Weber defined it by its monopoly of legitimate violence within a territory, the most frequently cited definition to this day. Marx read it as an instrument of domination by the class that controls the means of production. Robert Nozick defended a minimal state limited to protecting individual rights, while other traditions call for a state that guarantees welfare and equality.

A simple example helps clarify the concept: a city with no courts or public force to enforce its rules, collecting no taxes and controlling no borders, would not be a State, even if it had local authorities. Today the nation-state is the predominant form, and the concept remains debated: its legitimacy, its reach relative to the market and civil society, the relationship between the rule of law and exceptionality, as Schmitt and Agamben have argued, and the role of states in an increasingly interdependent international order.