Defining the State

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We all know that the state consist of formal bodies and institutions designed to service human needs as they have developed over the incredibly long history, where most of it unwritten, of the social evolution.

The state is in many respects an extension of the family - the family and also the clan and the tribe, were all designed to ensure minimum of security and well-being for their members and so is the state. The greater impersonality of the state reflects the bureaucracy that comes inevitably with routine, specialization of task, the distribution of benefits in terms of more of merits than personal acquaintance and not least, large number of people living in an extended geographic location.

We also know that the emergence of the state is signaled in part of a self-conscious effort to explain its origins and to lend legitimacy of its institutions, bodies, personnel and policies. States also may differ markedly from one another in many ways, but they all have in common the primary characteristics of geographic extent, a generally constant relationship between economic resources and population needs as well as various patterns of cleavage and consensus that reflect in part the society's cultural characteristics and that also help to define its citizens' sense of national identity.

And states have governments. The state consists in part of governing institutions but the "state" and "government" are not synonymous. The state, is an idea that extends through time and so its characteristics are drawn from a long history of governments, each of which is marked by its own series of crises and accomplishments.

Government consists of specific personnel and policies located at a particular time in history. But no state can be adequately summarized by the actions of any one or several of its governments.

Nor is the "state" is synonymous with "society" or the "nation". Especially to those nurtured with the values of classical liberalism, "society" and "nation" connote the people, culture, traditions and all those enduring qualities of collective social existence that survive the surface changes in mass sociology, popular psychology, written constitutions, formal institutions, their personnel and policies.

In other term, the state is greater than its government and the society and nation are greater than the state. But each is best understood in terms of its relationship to the others.

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