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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
The appropriate powers of the state in Western societies have become a crucial source of political conflict and a topic for theoretical debate. The scope of democratic participation, the capacities of public bureaucracies, the inefficiencies of a regulated capitalist economy, state responses to fiscal crises and structural unemployment have become hotly contested public issues. These political conflicts resonate in the seemingly more dispassionate world of academic discourse. As a result, the state has once again become a central topic for research and theoretical reassessment.
The state and theory
The modern concept of state was formed during the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and represented a decisive shift away from the idea of the ruler maintaining his state to the notion of a separate legal and constitutional order – the state – which the ruler had an obligation to maintain.
One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government. And this in turn enabled the State to be conceptualized in distinctively modern terms – as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens' allegiances.
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