The State
Max Weber gave political science its core definition: the state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Every clause matters:
- Monopoly: only state violence is recognised as rightful.
- Legitimate: society accepts the state's claim to rule.
- Territory: authority is bounded by clear geographic borders.
- Successfully claims: power is an achievement, not a mere label.
In international law, the Montevideo Convention (1933) sets four criteria:
- A permanent population
- A defined territory
- A government
- The capacity to enter relations with other states
External recognition is not on this list.
Sovereignty
Jean Bodin defined sovereignty as supreme, perpetual power over citizens. It has two dimensions:
- Internal: no competing authority rules within the territory.
- External: no superior authority rules from outside.
The Peace of Westphalia is traditionally seen as the birth of this sovereign-state system.
Nation and State
A state is a legal and coercive apparatus. A nation is a community united by shared history, culture, or language.
These entities rarely overlap perfectly. The world contains roughly 195 states, but several thousand distinct cultural groups.
Three main traditions explain how nations form:
| Tradition | Core Claim |
|---|---|
| Primordialist | Nations are ancient and natural. |
| Modernist (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm) | Nations are recent products of industrial society. |
| Ethnosymbolist (Smith) | Modern nations build on older ethnic ties. |
Anderson described nations as imagined communities. Members will never meet most peers, yet they feel a shared bond.
The Political System
David Easton modeled politics as a processing system:
- Demands and support enter as inputs.
- The system processes these into outputs, such as laws.
- The feedback loop returns the results to shape future inputs.
Common pitfall: Confusing state, nation, and country. The Kurds are a nation without a state. Use these terms carefully.