political organization of society, or the body politic, or, more narrowly, the institutions of government. The state is a form of human association distinguished from other social groups by its purpose, the establishment of order and security (public administration); its methods, the laws and their enforcement; its territory, the area of jurisdiction or geographic boundaries; and finally by its sovereignty. The state consists, most broadly, of the agreement of the individuals on the means whereby disputes are settled in the form of laws. In such countries as the United States, Australia, Nigeria, Mexico, and Brazil, the term state (or a cognate) also refers to political units, not sovereign themselves, but subject to the authority of the larger state, or federal union.

The history of the Western state begins in ancient Greece (ancient Greek civilization). Plato and Aristotle wrote of the polis, or city-state, as an ideal form of association, in which the whole community's religious, cultural, political, and economic needs could be satisfied. This city-state, characterized primarily by its self-sufficiency, was seen by Aristotle as the means of developing morality in the human character. The Greek idea corresponds more accurately to the modern concept of the nation—i.e., a population of a fixed area that shares a common language, culture, and history—whereas the Roman (ancient Rome) res publica, or commonwealth, is more similar to the modern concept of the state. The res publica was a legal system whose jurisdiction extended to all Roman citizens, securing their rights and determining their responsibilities. With the fragmentation of the Roman system, the question of authority and the need for order and security led to a long period of struggle between the warring feudal lords of Europe.

It was not until the 16th century that the modern concept of the state emerged, in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (Machiavelli, Niccolò) (Italy) and Jean Bodin (Bodin, Jean) (France), as the centralizing force whereby stability might be regained. In The Prince, Machiavelli gave prime importance to the durability of government, sweeping aside all moral considerations and focusing instead on the strength—the vitality, courage, and independence—of the ruler. For Bodin, his contemporary, power was not sufficient in itself to create a sovereign; rule must comply with morality to be durable, and it must have continuity—i.e., a means of establishing succession. Bodin's theory was the forerunner of the 17th-century doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” whereby monarchy became the predominate form of government in Europe. It created a climate for the ideas of the 17th-century reformers like John Locke (Locke, John) in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques) in France, who began to reexamine the origins and purposes of the state.

Rather than the right of a monarch to rule, Rousseau proposed that the state owed its authority to the general will of the governed. For him, the nation itself is sovereign, and the law is none other than the will of the people as a whole. Influenced by Plato, Rousseau recognized the state as the environment for the moral development of humanity. Man, though corrupted by his civilization, remained basically good and therefore capable of assuming the moral position of aiming at the general welfare. Because the result of aiming at individual purposes is disagreement, a healthy (noncorrupting) state can exist only when the common good is recognized as the goal.

Rousseau's ideas reflect an attitude far more positive in respect of human nature than either Locke or Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas), his 16th-century English predecessor. The “natural condition” of man, said Hobbes, is self-seeking and competitive. Man subjects himself to the rule of the state as the only means of self-preservation whereby he can escape the brutish cycle of mutual destruction that is otherwise the result of his contact with others.

For Locke, the human condition is not so gloomy, but the state again springs from the need for protection—in this case, of inherent rights. Locke said that the state is the social contract by which individuals agree not to infringe on each other's “natural rights” to life, liberty, and property, in exchange for which each man secures his own “sphere of liberty.”

The 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) saw the sphere of liberty as the whole state, with freedom not so much an individual's right, but rather, a result of human reason. Freedom was not the capacity to do as one liked but was the alignment with a universal will toward well-being. When men acted as moral agents, conflict ceased, and their aims coincided. Subordinating himself to the state, the individual was able to realize a synthesis between the values of family and the needs of economic life. To Hegel, the state was the culmination of moral action, where freedom of choice had led to the unity of the rational will, and all parts of society were nourished within the health of the whole. However, Hegel remained enchanted with the power of national aspiration. He did not share the vision of Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel), his predecessor, who proposed the establishment of a league of nations to end conflict altogether and to establish a “perpetual peace.”

For the English utilitarians (Utilitarianism) of the 19th century, the state was an artificial means of producing a unity of interest and a device for maintaining stability. This benign but mechanistic view proposed by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, Jeremy) and others set a precedent for the early communist thinkers like Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) for whom the state had become an “apparatus of oppression” determined by a ruling class whose object was always to maintain itself in economic supremacy. He and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels (Engels, Friedrich), wrote in The Communist (Communist Manifesto, The) Manifesto that, in order to realize complete freedom and contentment, the people must replace the government first by a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which would be followed by the “withering away of the state,” and then by a classless society based not on the enforcement of laws but on the organization of the means of production and the fair distribution of goods and property.

In the 20th century, concepts of state ranged from anarchism, in which the state was deemed unnecessary and even harmful in that it operated by some form of coercion, to the welfare state, in which the government was held to be responsible for the survival of its members, guaranteeing subsistence to those lacking it.

In the wake of the destruction produced by the nationalistically inspired world wars, theories of internationalism like those of Hans Kelsen (Kelsen, Hans) and Oscar Ichazo appeared. Kelsen put forward the idea of the state as simply a centralized legal order, no more sovereign than the individual, in that it could not be defined only by its own existence and experience. It must be seen in the context of its interaction with the rest of the world. Ichazo proposed a new kind of state in which the universal qualities of all individuals provided a basis for unification, with the whole society functioning as a single organism.