Conceptualizing Politics

THE STATE

---

58  How politics works
not just the defeat of the nationalist Kuomintang army, but also the erasure of the 
warlords and the local powers that had contributed to the demise of the Republic 
of China proclaimed in 1912.
In modernity, the state is by default sovereign: without sovereignty there is no 
or an insufficient statehood. The word translates the Latin (medieval) expressions 
summa potestas/highest power or imperium/supreme command, thus indicating a 
level of power that is not inferior to anyone else. Especially in modernity, sovereign 
statehood is the cornerstone of whatever version of political order may have mate-
rialised and the mother of all institutions.
Sovereignty has two faces:
•  internal or domestic sovereignty, that is supreme power over all citizens or 
subjects, none excluded, in the entire state territory; there are no limitations to 
this power except by a self-imposed law. A seminal case of self-limitation is the 
abolition of capital punishment, by which the state gives up its claim to sover-
eignty over the lives of the citizens with regard to law enforcement (it does not 
do so in a matter of self-defence, even if it can temporarily renounce conscrip-
tion: conscripted or not, citizens can still be asked to expose themselves to the 
hazard of killing and being killed in combat).
•  external with respect of other states or actors, in the sense of a recognised 
claim to autonomy or to govern itself by its own statutes, held valid in the 
same territory and over the same population: this can be upheld even in case 
of temporary foreign occupation, if the occupant does not attempt to cancel 
the state’s existence or absorb it into another state.
External sovereignty is the pre-condition to the domestic one, which is very much 
subject to the constraints of the international system and cannot be properly studied 
outside this link. Sovereignty depends very much on the recognition granted by other 
states or, since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, by the UN General 
Assembly. In this sense, sovereignty is an interactive legal feature that wraps the state 
into a web of shared rules and entanglements, thus contributing to international order 
by giving legal form to an emerging factual power centre. On the other hand, since 
sovereignty denotes independence as the ultimate shield for the free existence and 
wellbeing of a human group, it also means the ability and the right to wage war (see 
Chapter 6), whatever the wish of other states or international organisations may be.
Let us now go back to the exception and the flexibility mentioned above. 
Strictly speaking, in the early history of humankind and even more in pre-historic 
stages, attempts at establishing a rudimentary political order were made in stateless 
societies, such as tribes and chiefdoms. This is the exception to the universal pres-
ence of the state, which belongs however to the domain of cultural anthropology 
rather than that of political philosophy; while in our days the recurrent claim (in 
protest movements or in some corner of feminism) to be willing and able to man-
age common affairs without resorting to the state belongs to the tradition of radical 
and utopian thought. ‘The political’ and ‘the statal’ are indeed since eighty years (the 

---

The state  59
rise of the welfare state) strongly intertwined more than in the time before, as the 
state was not yet endowed with the financial, organisational and technological tools 
that seem to make it omnipresent and omnipotent. Nonetheless, the two notions 
do overlap neither conceptually nor in fact – think for example of the politi-
cal role recently played worldwide by non-governmental and other transnational 
organisations.
Flexibility has to be shown with regard to the use of the word ‘state’. In accurate 
terms it can be only referred to the modern European state as it was shaped in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth century, and then spilled over to other continents, first 
of all the Americas and much later (in the twentieth century) China, and by far 
not only as a side effect of colonialism: Japan, which was never a colony, adopted 
at the end of the nineteenth century a private law code that largely reproduced 
the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. It was Europe, primarily France, that ‘invented’ 
the modern state in its self-definition and organisation, both unthinkable with-
out the fitting legal system. It was adopted elsewhere because doing so favoured 
the modernisation process in which more and more extra-European countries 
were engaging. Nonetheless, we keep using ‘state’ to indicate the period in Chinese 
history (BCE 453–221) called of the seven Warring States (or Kingdoms), or speak 
of the Roman state, which in fact anticipated many features of its modern cousin.
Neither the history of the word nor that of the thing itself can be told here in a 
way respecting its complexity. Suffice it to say that it derives from the Latin expres-
sion status rei publicae/the state of public matters or – in the English discourse about 
politics – of the commonwealth. The career that later made ‘state’ the key word in 
the lexicon of institutions started in 1513 with the first line in Machiavelli’s Principe 
(1532): ‘All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and 
are either republics or principalities’.
2
 This career was shining in countries with a 
powerful, omnipresent central power such as France and Spain with their empires, 
the Hapsburg Empire, Prussia and Russia with its huge 
Государственное,
3
 while 
the Anglophone culture is likely to have been the last in reluctantly adopting it – 
in the mid seventeenth century Hobbes was still speaking of ‘Commonwealth’.