Theories of the State and Early State Formation: New Insights from the Archaeological Turn in Political Theory
"The Government" is something you'll hear people talk about a lot. And you'll even hear everyday people talking about "the State" from time to time, at least in the USA. But usually by "the state" they mean their own state government, as in, "do you work for the state?" If you hear people talking about "the State" in the abstract , well then you're probably talking to someone who has some familiarity with scholarship in fields like political science, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, or history. It's a term I use a lot as a professor of political theory. But like many abstract terms that are useful to social theorists, it's bedevilingly difficult to define. Definitions are over-rated, it's true. But there are certain scholarly fields in which it becomes really hard to avoid the definitional problem. In the case of "the State," it's especially hard for archaeologists and anthropologists to a...
