The State

Abstract

States are not the only way of organizing the political life of a community. Kinship, patrimonialism, city-states and empires have also served this purpose. Moreover, as Ernest Gellner tirelessly pointed out, the vast majority of human societies were ordered into neither states nor nations (e.g. Gellner, 1994, p. 62). The state, or more precisely the nation-state, was a central theme and concern of classical social theory and early social science for the same reason that capitalism, industrialism, 'the masses' and urbanism were. Each was associated with the emergence of modern society-of modernity and it was the social, political and economic institutions of modernity and their transformative effects that were both the key stimulus and core concern of what have become the social sciences. None of these concepts has been uncontroversial and some, for example the masses, have largely fallen out of favour. The state is no exception, and for some time it too was a somewhat unfashionable term thought of as a relic of an earlier disciplinary stage no longer in tune with the more empirical and scientific orientation of modern political science (most influentially, Easton, 1953). When the state re-emerged as a concern in social science in the 1970s and 80s it was as a result of a quite conscious effort to 'bring the state back in' and shift the debate away from a society towards a state-centric focus (Evans, Rueschemeyer & Skocpol (eds), 1985). The scepticism of David Easton and likeminded political scientists of the immediate post-war period towards the concept of the state was not, and is not, entirely unfounded. The state is notoriously difficult to define; there is dispute and ambiguity about the scope both historical and geographical of the legitimate application of the term for example, how Eurocentric is it? and, more recently, economic globalization, neoliberalization and the growing influence of international institutions have frequently been said to herald the end of the era of the nation-state.