Book contents
1 - Before the state: prehistory to AD 1300
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
Summary
Definitions of the state have varied widely. The one adopted here makes no claim to being exclusive; it is merely the most convenient for our purpose. The state, then, is an abstract entity which can be neither seen, nor heard, nor touched. This entity is not identical with either the rulers or the ruled; neither President Clinton, nor citizen Smith, nor even an assembly of all the citizens acting in common can claim that they are the state. On the other hand, it includes them both and claims to stand over them both.
This is as much to say that the state, being separate from both its members and its rulers, is a corporation, just as universities, trade unions, and churches inter alia are. Much like any corporation, it too has directors, employees, and shareholders. Above all, it is a corporation in the sense that it possesses a legal persona of its own, which means that it has rights and duties and may engage in various activities as if it were a real, flesh-and-blood, living individual. The points where the state differs from other corporations are, first, the fact that it authorizes them all but is itself authorized (recognized) solely by others of its kind; secondly, that certain functions (known collectively as the attributes of sovereignty) are reserved for it alone; and, thirdly, that it exercises those functions over a certain territory inside which its jurisdiction is both exclusive and all-embracing.
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- The Rise and Decline of the State , pp. 1 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999