Political Science I / The State, the Nation and the Political System
Practice question · Fill in the blanks

Complete the account of the state and the nation.

Weber defines the state by its monopoly of the legitimate use of ______ within a territory. Bodin defined ______ as supreme and perpetual power subject to no other authority. Anderson calls the nation an ______ community, and Gellner argued that ______ engenders nations rather than the reverse.

Word bank: physical force · sovereignty · imagined · nationalism · legitimacy · territory

Hints
  1. The first blank is what the state monopolises.
  2. The last blank reverses the intuitive direction of causation.
Show the answer

Weber defines the state by its monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. Bodin defined sovereignty as supreme and perpetual power subject to no other authority. Anderson calls the nation an imagined community, and Gellner argued that nationalism engenders nations rather than the reverse.

Why

Gellner's reversal in the last blank is the single most useful idea in the lesson. The intuitive story is that nations existed and then demanded states; the modernist claim is that the movement came first and produced the community it claimed to represent.

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