The State

Ancient Greek (Academy)

The state arises because no individual is self-sufficient; the just city mirrors the just soul, with each of its three classes — producers, guardians, and rulers — doing its own proper work. Political order is sound only when those who truly know the good, the philosopher-rulers, govern, while appetite and spirit are kept in their place. Justice is this harmony of parts, and degeneration into timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny follows once the ruling principle is corrupted.

Republic; Statesman; Laws.

Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)

The polis exists by nature, since man is by nature a political animal, and it comes to be for the sake of life but exists for the sake of the good life. The state is the highest and most inclusive community, prior to the individual in the order of ends, aiming not merely at survival but at virtue and human flourishing. The best constitution is a matter of judgment about circumstances, and a large, propertied middle class gives the most stable form of rule.

Politics; Nicomachean Ethics.

Christian (Patristic)

Earthly states belong to the 'City of Man', built on self-love and marked by the lust for domination, whereas the 'City of God' is founded on love of God. Without justice, kingdoms are but large-scale robberies; yet even a fallen state serves the limited good of earthly peace and restrains sin. Political power is a remedy for and a consequence of the Fall, to be used but never mistaken for humanity's true home.

The City of God (413–426).

Islamic historiography / social theory

Dynastic states rise and fall through the rhythm of 'asabiyya — the group solidarity that lets a cohesive people conquer and found a polity. As the dynasty settles into luxury and sedentary comfort, that solidarity decays over roughly three generations, taxation grows oppressive, and the state falls to a fresher, more cohesive group. The state is thus a natural social organism with a life cycle, governed by economic and sociological laws rather than mere accident.

The Muqaddimah (1377).

Renaissance political realism

The state (lo stato) must be understood as it is, not as we wish it to be; the founder and preserver of a polity must know how to use force and fraud, and to be feared as well as loved. A prince maintains the state through his own arms and virtù against the turns of fortune, while a well-ordered republic with a healthy civic militia can endure far longer. Political survival, not private morality, is the measure of statecraft.

The Prince (1513); Discourses on Livy.

Social contract / absolutism

In the state of nature, without a common power, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', a war of all against all. To escape it, individuals covenant to transfer their right of self-government to a sovereign — the 'mortal god', Leviathan — whose undivided power is the only reliable source of peace and law. The authority of the state rests on consent, but once instituted it must be near-absolute, for divided sovereignty is a recipe for renewed war.

Leviathan (1651).

Classical liberalism

People leave the state of nature and form a state to secure their natural rights to life, liberty, and property more reliably through impartial law and judgment. Government holds its power only in trust for the governed, limited by the ends for which it was established and bound to rule by settled laws and consent. When rulers systematically violate that trust, the people retain the right to resist and to institute a new government.

Two Treatises of Government (1689).

Social contract / republicanism

The legitimate state is the association in which each, uniting with all, obeys only himself and remains as free as before, its acts expressing the general will directed at the common good. Sovereignty belongs inalienably to the people and cannot be represented; the state is legitimate only so far as its laws are the people's own self-legislation. Existing states, born of inequality and force, betray this ideal and must be reconstituted on the basis of a genuine social contract.

The Social Contract (1762); Discourse on Inequality.

German idealism

The state is 'the actuality of the ethical Idea' and 'the march of God in the world' — not a mere aggregate of individuals but the concrete realization of rational freedom. It completes and reconciles the family and civil society, giving particular interests their place within a rational, ethical whole in which citizens find their fuller self. Far from limiting freedom, the rational state is the condition in which freedom becomes objective and actual.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).

Historical materialism

The state is not above society but an instrument of class domination: 'the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'. It arises with class antagonisms and irreconcilable interests, using law, police, and army to protect the dominant mode of production. After a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat abolishes class, the state as an organ of coercion loses its function and 'withers away'.

The Communist Manifesto (1848); Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

Sociology

The state is defined not by its ends but by its means: it is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Its authority rests on one of three grounds of legitimacy — traditional, charismatic, or legal-rational — with the modern state resting on impersonal legal rules administered by bureaucracy. Politics is the striving to share power, and the politician must combine an ethic of conviction with an ethic of responsibility.

'Politics as a Vocation' (1919); Economy and Society.

Collectivist anarchism

The state is inherently an instrument of oppression and cannot be reformed into freedom; every state, however democratic in form, concentrates power and produces a governing minority. Against Marx, he warned that a workers' state would breed a new despotic bureaucracy — a 'red aristocracy' ruling in the people's name. Genuine liberty requires abolishing the state altogether and rebuilding society from below through free federations of self-governing communes and associations.

Statism and Anarchy (1873); God and the State.

Libertarianism

Only a minimal state — limited to protection against force, theft, fraud, and the enforcement of contracts — can be justified without violating individual rights. Such a 'night-watchman' state could arise by an invisible-hand process from private protective associations without anyone's rights being infringed. Any more extensive state, redistributing holdings to achieve a favored pattern, necessarily violates the rights of persons and treats them as means for others' ends.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

Post-structuralism

Modern power cannot be reduced to the state and its laws; it operates through dispersed disciplines, norms, and 'governmentality' that manage populations and shape conduct. From the eighteenth century, power becomes 'biopolitical', concerned with fostering and regulating life through statistics, medicine, and administration rather than mainly the sword. To understand the state we must decentre it and study the mundane techniques through which individuals are made into governable subjects.

Discipline and Punish (1975); 'Governmentality' (1978); Security, Territory, Population.