MULT10018 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Social Stratification, Norm (Social), Political Organisation
28 Jul 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
History and Theories of the State: From Ancient to Modern
Recap:
● Political Power:
○ power - to VS power - over
○ 4 dimensions of power
● The nature of the state: “... a state is a human community that (successfully claims
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” - Max Weber
● The Question of Authority and Legitimacy:
○ Modernity is usually the question of the state - how to organise and deploy
political power, who should have political power - the one (a king), the few (the
aristocracy), or the many (the people)?
○ Issue of force was fixated upon in defining political power
○ Cyclical nature of legitimacy and the state - states both create and require
legitimacy.
○ Do nations create states or do states create nations?
● Political Obligation:
○ Consent - tasic (simply by living on the territory of the state), hypothetical
(deriving benefits from a social system), constitutional moments (in the creation
of a state)
○ Provision of goods - welfare, freedom, equality
○ Justice - reasonably just
○ Sociological (domestic VS international) - we owe it our obligations because we
act like we owe it our obligation; we follow the actions of others and go with the
flow of what the situation is perceived to be - political obligation is a social norm.
● Sovereignty and Supremacy:
○ Sovereignty is a difficult notion to define; it is the question of what kind of
legitimacy that uniquely the state holds. Sovereignty is the idea of political
supremacy.
○ The state is supreme when it is sovereign.
The State and Political Theory:
● Hegel: political science is “nothing other than the attempt to comprehend and portray the
state as an inherently rational entity,”
● Rawls: “the primary subject of justice (is) the basic structure of society… conceived for
the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies… the boundaries of
these schemes are given by the notion of a self-contained national community.”
● Politics: nature and justification
● Descriptive VS Normative
○ Descriptive Question of Politics: look at how the language around a particular
concept operates and render a particular meaning
○ Normative Project: a perview of political theory - not what the state looks like
now, but what the state should be
● Key Qns: (mis of normative and descriptive qns)
○ What is the Power of the State?
○ What should the state be like?
○ Why do we follow the state?
State in Form and Thought: The History of the State.
● Greek Polis
○ City States - large, localised in one urban centre with a surrounding rural
(agricultural) area - a small community by modern standards.
○ Conditions:
■ Small territory- manageable, where majority of communities could have
face to face contact
■ Deep political inequality - a leisure privileged class of males who had the
potential for political discussion, involvement and engagement VS
widespread slavery, women were not political subjects
○ Why political thought thrived
■ Common language
■ Political diversity
■ Colonisation - relates to modernity; building new colonies all over the
Mediterranean - this allowed for new forms of political power as they
actively engaged in new constitution building.
● Rome
○ Republic VS Empire (Imperial)
○ Law - Roman political thought fundamentally associates the state with legal
construction (the construction of law). Legitimacy directly flows from legal
structures - from this we have derived the concept of contracts.
● Medieval Political Thought -
○ Social hierarchy
○ Great Chain of Being
○ Centralised Power
● Medieval States
○ Decentralised
○ Religious VS Secular Authority - church or secular rule?
○ “‘Political’ organization in medieval Europe, in summary, was complex, and
‘political’ power highly fragmented and decentralized. Allegiances were multiple
and largely personal, and no clear hierarchy of political authority was discernible.
Governance was not territorial; it was largely rule over persons, qua individuals
or qua Christians. The complexity of relations of authority meant that rule was
mediated and not, for the most part, ‘direct’ and institutions did not ‘penetrate’
society in the ways characteristic of our states. There were no ‘self-sufficient’
polities and consequently no ‘international relations’. The modern state did not
yet exist.” - Christopher Morris
Document Summary
History and theories of the state: from ancient to modern. Power - to vs power - over. The nature of the state: a state is a human community that (successfully claims monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory, - max weber. Issue of force was fixated upon in defining political power. Cyclical nature of legitimacy and the state - states both create and require legitimacy. Consent - tasic (simply by living on the territory of the state), hypothetical (deriving benefits from a social system), constitutional moments (in the creation of a state) Provision of goods - welfare, freedom, equality. Sovereignty is a difficult notion to define; it is the question of what kind of legitimacy that uniquely the state holds. The state is supreme when it is sovereign. Hegel: political science is nothing other than the attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity, .
