POLSCI 1AB3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Feudalism
16 Jan 2018
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Document Summary
Human communities are, by and large, organized under the authority of states. However - a world divided into separate states is not the only way of thinking about social/political life and how it is organized. A state-centric prism can also be a conceptual prison if we are not careful. According to dickerson and flanagan: "a state is defined by the joint presence of three factors: population, territory, and sovereignty. A state exists when a sovereign power effectively rules over a population residing within the boundaries of a fixed territory. " Implies that there is one final source of authority within a community. The sovereign is recognized as having the authority to overrule all others. There is no higher authority: neither domestic or foreign. Sovereigns (at least in principle) acknowledge that their legal authority does not extend outside of their own borders.
