Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
My understanding of political order and institutions draws on two seminal international 
relations books:
Bull, Hedley (1977) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics,  New York: 
Columbia University Press.
Keohane, Robert (1989) International Institutions and State Power,  Boulder: Westview.
To mention are also:
Fukuyama, Francis (2014) Political Order and Political Decay, New York: Farrar, Straus and 
Giroux.
Huntington, Samuel (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University 
Press.

---

The abstract categories of politics we have gone through thus far find a first con-
crete appearance in the institution that ever since has been central – with some 
exception and much flexibility – in the configurations of political order known in 
the history of human societies: the state. Obviously, this entity has already popped 
up in our reconstruction of the workings of politics, but now we will define the 
meaning of this elusive word, then look at how in European modernity the state 
emerged in the shape known all over the world; the state’s relationship to society 
and the nation will be next, while we will end with a look into the changes and 
challenges that this paramount political institution is presently experiencing.
1.   The state and sovereignty
The state is the institution exerting over a population and a territory a legitimate power 
that is guaranteed by its monopoly of force.
This is, with a slight variation, the definition Max Weber formulated (Weber 1922,