The Great Conversation:
State

From Plato’s Republic right down to modern debates in the US Supreme Court, the idea of the state is one of the most important and frequent topics of the Great Conversation. One might think, therefore, that defining it would be easy; but of course something that so many different people have weighed in on never is. We tend today to think of the state in terms of government, with connotations of political sovereignty and independence, but in many older sources, “the state” is simply a synonym for society—any sort of society.

Societies, in general, are sometimes equivalent with ethnicities, especially in very ancient or isolated cases. Still, there was probably never a time when most societies were ethnically or culturally homogenous. Even the most primitive records from the Bronze Age show civilizations that are already “mixed” internally and in contact with other civilizations externally. Mesopotamia is a good example: Sumerian city-states like Ur, Eridu, and Lagash not only had constant interchange with each other, but had cultural, economic, and military relations with the Akkadians to the north, Egyptians and Canaanites to the west, and Elamites to the east; conversely, Sumerian influences are detectable even as far away as the Indus Valley and Greece. The same has remained true ever since, and only gotten truer as communication and travel have become more sophisticated over the centuries.

Turning to issues like sovereignty, state authority is often juxtaposed with two other forms of authority, those of the family and of religion. This is partly a consequence of the specific character of European history. The idea of a contrast between secular and religious authority was not really present to the mind of a citizen of classical Athens or republican Rome; paganism was religious, but it was not a church, something with its own internally defined structure, beliefs, and mission. (Indeed, even calling it “paganism” as if it were a single thing is something of a misnomer.) But with the diffusion of Judaism and especially the rise of Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean, the contrast between the two spheres begins to become important. In St. Augustine’s classic The City of God, the two become fully distinct and even metaphysically opposed—despite the fact that this is more than a century after the official conversion of the empire under Constantine. The relations of Church and state in the Orthodox and Catholic powers of Europe have become our paradigm for understanding the relationship of the state to religion, even though few world religions are as formally institutionalized as Christianity; even Judaism and Islam, its closest “relatives” in both history and content, are not exactly churches, and faiths like Buddhism or Hinduism are radically different in structure.

The contrast between family and state authority might be a little clearer, but, insofar as one’s state was one’s people, it was not a contrast anybody was likely to accent. The fact that Dante’s hell ranks treachery to one’s country as worse than treachery to one’s family might strike us as odd today, but back then, country and family resembled each other more closely in conception. When social contract theory began to be proposed in the early Enlightenment, and moreover individual families (often due to their religious loyalties) might travel from one state to another or from their motherland to a colony, the distinction grew more important, until in our own day it is often a sticking point in politics.

This raises the question of what the rights of the state are, as contrasted with those possessed by the family, religious authority, or indeed the individual. The condemnation of Socrates proved to be one of the seminal events of Western philosophy, and the Crito professes to present Socrates’ own reasoning for why he should not defy even an unjust sentence from his city. This would be challenged by most subsequent thinkers; the very concept of an “unjust law” implies that law is, at most, an expression of justice rather than justice itself, and can be in conflict with justice. The Christian martyrs and the liberal opponents of aristocracy, in quite different ways, both took up this idea. In the foment of the early nineteenth century following the French Revolution, one strain of thought even questioned the legitimacy of state authority as such, and came in consequence to be known as anarchism.