The Concept of the State

A state exists wherever there is a political apparatus of government -- institutions such as a parliament or congress, together with a body of civil service officials -- that rules over a defined territory, with its authority backed both by a formal legal system and by the capacity to use military force to enforce its policies. Sociologists disagree, predictably, on what the state fundamentally represents: the functionalist view treats the state as representing the interests of society as a whole, while the conflict view treats it as representing, above all, the interests of society's dominant sections.

Modern states differ from earlier, traditional forms of political authority in being organised around three linked ideas: sovereignty, citizenship, and, usually, nationalism. Sovereignty refers to a state's undisputed political authority over a given territory. Importantly, sovereignty on its own did not originally guarantee citizens any right to participate politically; early sovereign states could be entirely undemocratic. The rights of political participation that we now often take for granted had to be won through struggle -- through movements that limited the power of monarchs or overthrew them outright, of which the French Revolution and India's own independence movement are two well-known examples.

Citizenship itself is best understood as a bundle of three distinct kinds of right. Civil rights cover an individual's basic freedoms -- to live wherever they choose, to speak and worship freely, to own property, and to receive equal treatment before the law. Political rights cover the right to participate in elections and to stand for public office; historically, most governments were slow to grant universal suffrage, excluding not only women but also large sections of the male population who did not own enough property to qualify, and women in particular had to wait considerably longer than propertied men to win the vote. Social rights, the third kind, concern every individual's claim to a minimum standard of economic welfare and security -- things like access to healthcare, unemployment support, and a legally guaranteed minimum wage. As this third category of rights expanded in the twentieth century, it gave rise to the welfare state, first firmly established in Western societies after the Second World War, and taken furthest in the former socialist countries; in most developing countries, by contrast, this kind of social provision remained thin or largely absent. In recent decades, social rights of this kind have increasingly come under attack worldwide, criticised as costly liabilities that hold back economic growth rather than defended as a basic entitlement of citizenship. …