Authors: Kuper & Kuper
Summary: The entry begins by defining the state, then treats its historical development and theoretical foundations. In its widest sense, the term refers to any self-governing group of people who deal with others as a collective. More specifically, the term refers to the form of centralized civil rule which developed in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century. What most distinguishes the state as an organizational entity is the freedom and fluency with which it makes and unmakes law. Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) exhibits a clear grasp of the emerging realities of central power. Jean Bodin's Six Livres de la Râpublique (1578) explicitly theorizes the French state in terms of the idea of sovereignty, as possessing the absolute and perpetual power of both making and unmaking laws.
A pure theory of the state was later presented by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). Hobbes argued that the state is an abstract and impersonal structure, comprised of offices conditionally exercised by particular individuals: what the sovereign declares to be just is ipso facto just. John Locke's Two Treaties on Government (1689) is the chief source of liberal theories of the state: it popularized the notion that governments rest upon the consent of the people, and are limited by the natural rights (to life, liberty and property) with which people entered civil society. In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau made the case for the state as representing a "general will," a commitment to the public interest over and above any particular individual interests. In the nineteenth century, many writers emphasized the misery and repression of modern life and the iniquity of the state. Marx and Engels notably argued that the state was an illusion masking the domination of the bourgeois class, and predicted that after a proletarian revolution the state would wither away.