Theories of state

A theory of the state answers three questions: where the state came from, what entitles it to command, and what it is for. The answers given since antiquity fall into recognisable families — the state as a natural growth, as a contract between individuals, as an instrument of one class against another, as an organisation holding a monopoly of legitimate force — and the family a thinker belongs to determines almost everything else in his politics.⁴

Conservatives have been sceptical of every account that begins with individuals in a state of nature deciding to construct a government. Nobody has ever done this. The states that exist grew out of households, tribes, churches, and conquests, and their authority rests on prescription and habit rather than on a founding agreement that no living person signed.

Key Takeaways

• Aristotle treated the polis as natural, arising from the household and the village, with man as the animal formed to live in it.
• Jean Bodin gave sovereignty its modern definition in 1576: a supreme, perpetual power to make law, not itself bound by the law it makes.
• Contract theory from Hobbes through Locke to Rousseau grounds authority in consent, and reaches three incompatible conclusions from that shared premise.
• Max Weber’s 1919 definition — the entity claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in a territory — remains the working sociological description.
• The conservative account treats the state as one association among many, historically grown, entitled to obedience because it is lawful and inherited rather than because it was designed correctly.

History And Context

Aristotle’s Politics argues that the city exists by nature, developing from families and villages toward self-sufficiency, and that it exists for the sake of the good life rather than mere survival. Augustine set against this the two cities, earthly and heavenly, and gave Christian politics its long suspicion of any regime claiming ultimate allegiance. Medieval writers distributed authority between emperor, pope, king, guild, and manor, and no single body held what would later be called sovereignty.

Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), written during the French religious wars, located that undivided power in the sovereign. Thomas Hobbes carried the argument further in Leviathan, published in London in 1651 in the closing months of the English civil wars: individuals in a condition of natural equality and mutual fear covenant with one another to erect a sovereign whose commands are law, because any authority is preferable to the war of all against all.¹ John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689) accepted the contract and rejected the conclusion, holding that natural rights to life, liberty, and property survive its formation and that a government violating them forfeits obedience. Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract (1762) relocated sovereignty in the general will of the assembled people, an idea whose revolutionary application Burke attacked in 1790.

Hegel treated the state as the realisation of ethical life rather than a device for protecting interests. Marx and Engels inverted the claim, describing the state as the organised power of the propertied class. Max Weber, lecturing in Munich in January 1919, set aside purpose altogether and defined the state by its means: the human community that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.⁴

The Conservative Position

Conservatives take the state to be a historical inheritance rather than a construction. Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries was that they treated the constitution of a country as a machine to be redesigned from first principles, when it is a growth whose parts encode judgements made by generations who cannot be consulted. Authority derives from prescription — long, peaceable possession — and from the lawfulness of what the state does, not from a demonstration that rational individuals would have consented to it.

Michael Oakeshott gave the sharpest modern statement of the distinction in On Human Conduct, contrasting civil association, in which people related to one another are subject to common rules while pursuing their own purposes, with enterprise association, in which they are conscripted to a single collective project.² The state as civil association imposes rules of conduct; the state as enterprise association has a plan for its subjects. Conservatives hold that modern government drifts steadily from the first form toward the second, and that the drift is what needs resisting.

The second conservative theme is that the state is not the only association, and cannot supply what the others supply. Robert Nisbet argued in 1953 that the growth of the total state proceeded exactly by absorbing the functions of family, church, guild, and locality, leaving individuals with nothing between themselves and central authority — and then leaving them lonely enough to want more of it.³ Subsidiarity, the principle that matters be handled by the smallest competent body, follows from that diagnosis.

Differing Positions

Contract theorists reply that prescription is not a justification but a description: that a practice is old says nothing about whether it is right, and slavery was also inherited. Locke’s version and its modern descendants, including Rawls’s argument from a hypothetical original position, ask what institutions people could reasonably accept, and treat that test as the only alternative to accepting whatever history happened to deliver.

Marxists reject both the contract and the inheritance. On their account the state is neither a neutral framework of rules nor a growth expressing a people’s character, but an apparatus reflecting the balance of class forces, and appeals to prescription defend a distribution of property that force established.

Conservatives answer the first objection by pointing out that they judge inherited arrangements by inherited standards, which is how the abolition of slavery was argued in Britain — from Christian anthropology and common law liberty, not from a state of nature. To the second, they answer that states in every economic system claim more power than their theories license, which suggests the problem lies in the concentration of authority rather than in who owns the factories.

References

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Andrew Crooke, 1651).
2. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Clarendon Press, 1975).
3. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953).
4. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford University Press, 1946).