to use it, entitled a famous essay, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates. State and estate are words which he used indifferently, indicating little difference in his mind between the two things. Indeed, his use of words reveals an abiding uncertainty whether to refer to bodies politic in general terms as states or estates or commonwealths, or more specifically as kingdoms, duchies, principalities, etc. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when more or less absolute monarchs of various ranks held sway in the principal countries of Europe, there was a growing need among political writers for a general term for all bodies politic. There was also a persistent confusion of ideas with respect to states and estates, which is thoroughly repugnant to the point of view of modern times. Voltaire, for example, an enlightened man, judged by the standards of his own time, is reported to have declared that "a state being a collection of lands and houses, those who possessed neither land nor house ought not to have any deliberate voice in the management of public affairs." To this day the French word for state corresponds to the English estate. Yet no one to-day would identify the state with lands or houses or any other portion of the real estate within the geographical area over which the state exercises jurisdiction.

cation of

Many writers, however, seem disposed to identify the Identifistate with its government. Machiavelli himself made no state and clear distinction between the two. His main interest in government The Prince lay in the methods by which men might acquire and preserve dominion over their fellowmen, and whether he meant by state only those men who rule over a body of people or both rulers and ruled together, he does not say. The famous words, L'etat, c'est moi, attributed to Louis

1 Quoted by Mazzini in his Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789. Cf. Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man, Everyman's Library edition, p. 268.

Marx's view

Sorel's view

the Fourteenth, although not actually employed by him, fairly reflect the idea of the state, entertained by the Machiavellian statesmen of the age of absolutism.1 They simply identified the state with themselves, or, strictly speaking, with their nominal sovereigns. Karl Marx, a more influential authority in modern times than Louis XIV, held a like opinion of the nature of the state. In the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, he asserted that “the modern state is but an executive committee for administering the affairs of the whole capitalist class," a theory of the state now firmly established in the political philosophy of Marxian socialism.

Numerous writers since Marx have taken a similar view, though, excepting the socialists, they have generally not followed him in identifying affairs of state with those of the capitalist class alone. Sorel, for example, the radical French critic of Marxian socialism, realized from a longer experience with modern democratic politics that clever manipulators of popular majorities like Louis Napoleon and Bismarck and Disraeli were shrewder judges of human nature than Marx, and that the latter's simple economic interpretation of history afforded an inadequate explanation of the dominant forces in modern politics, and of the working of what the socialists call capitalistic statesmanship. The modern state, Sorel concluded, "is a body of intellectuals, which is invested with privileges, and which possesses means of the kind called political for defending itself against the attacks made upon it by other groups of intellectuals, eager to possess the profits of public employment. Parties are constituted in order to acquire the conquest of these employments, and they are analogous to the state." Those who hold the views of

1 David J. Hill, A History of European Diplomacy, Vol. 1, p. 25. 2 Georges Sorel, La Décomposition du Marxisme, p. 53. Cited by Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, p. 30. See also Sorel's Réflections sur la Violence (English translation, 1915).

Sorel would endorse as a scientific statement of the theory of politics Goldsmith's oft-quoted couplet:

For just experience tells, in every soil,

That those that think must govern those that toil.

view

A similar idea of the state has been held by conservative writers, seeking not to discredit it and thus promote the cause of revolution, but to strengthen and sustain its hold upon the allegiance of the masses of men. By no writer has this idea of state been set forth more elaborately than by the eminent French constitutional lawyer, Duguit, in a Duguit's series of vigorous and graceful works.1 Summarizing his theory of the state, he wrote: "My theory is realistic and positive. . . . One should never speak of the powers and of the duties of the state, but of the powers and duties of the rulers and their agents. To conform with common usage and on grounds of convenience, I shall often use the word, state; but it must be understood that the word means the particular men who in fact hold sway." Possibly this realistic concept of the state is that originally held by Machiavelli. Be that as it may, in modern times, as Duguit says, it renders the use of the word unnecessary. For that reason some writers of this way of thinking have more logically abandoned its use altogether. They speak only of the government, never of the state.3

1 See Leon Duguit, Law in the Modern State, a translation by Frida and Harold Laski, New York, 1919, and the works cited therein. 2 Leon Duguit, Manuel du Droit Constitutionnel, p. 28.

3 See Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government; A Study of Social Pressures. Chicago, 1908. Other writers have gone to the opposite extreme. Instead of reducing the scope of the concept until they have deprived it of all special significance, they have enlarged its content until it includes vaguely a great though indefinite portion of mankind. They have thus obscured the distinction between the state and human society itself. To some of these writers the state is a vast organism, comparable with respect to the relations between its members to colonies of ants or swarms of bees. Cf. Henry Jones Ford, The Natural History of the State. Princeton, 1915. But the modern state, however one may choose to speak of primitive institutions or primeval man, is no mere horde.

Bentham's definition of the

state

2

A realistic definition of the state, more consistent with. common usage and hence more serviceable for most purposes, is that which includes within the state the whole body of people, not only the rulers but also those who are ruled. Such a definition was worked out by the great English law reformer, Jeremy Bentham. "When a number of persons," he wrote, "(whom we may style subjects) are supposed to be in the habit of paying obedience to a person, or an assemblage of persons, of a certain and known description (whom we may call governor or governors), such persons altogether (subjects and governors) are said to be in a state of political society." That is to say, they constitute a state. That which makes the body of people into a state, according to this definition, is the habit of obedience on the part of those who obey, and of authority on the part of those who are obeyed.

It is not necessary, however, that those who obey shall always obey in all things. A body of people may still constitute a state, even though all its members disobey their rulers in some things and some of the inhabitants of the land wherein they dwell disobey in all things. The United States does not lose its character as a political body or body politic, merely because most Americans at one time or another disobey a street traffic regulation, or even because some of them are felons, and certainly not on account of the presence within its borders of alien enemies. or anarchists who deny absolutely the authority of its rulers. It is evident, however, that the more firmly established the habit of obedience is, the stronger will be the authority of the rulers, and that the weaker the habit of obedience, the more circumscribed and precarious the rulers' authority will be. It may become so restricted and

1 Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government, Chapter 1, paragraph 10.

uncertain that the state loses its cohesiveness and the body of people dissolves into its constituent elements, leaving only political chaos or anarchy, or, as is more likely, falls under the dominion of more powerful rulers, capable of imposing their authority upon the reluctant people, and thus is merged into some greater state.

of realistic

the state

One problem which arises under this definition is that of Limitations determining exactly when a state ceases to exist, or comes theory of into existence. Did Scotland, for example, cease to be a state when its hereditary king, James VI, became James I of England in 1603, and the two kingdoms were united under a common sovereign? Or did it retain its statehood. until 1707, when its separate parliament was finally dissolved and Scotchmen received representation in the Parliament of England? Or is it still a state, since it has its own. laws prescribing rules of conduct in many matters different from those of the other parts of Great Britain, and enforced under the supervision of a separate set of officers? And was Ireland a state while it retained its original parliament at Dublin? If so, did it cease to be a state when it was incorporated into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union of 1800? And if it did, was its statehood restored by the formal establishment of an Irish Republic and the refusal of the bulk of its inhabitants longer to recognize the authority of the British government, or by the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State under the nominal sovereignty of the British King?

And how is the existence of a state affected by changes in its form of government? Was Russia, for example, the same state under the provisional government, established by the Duma in the spring of 1917, as under the Romanoffs? If so, was it still the same state under Soviet rule, after the Bolshevist revolution in the autumn of 1917, as under the rule of Kerensky and the moderate Socialists? And would it have been still the same, had the Counter