Myths about the State

Abstract

As a specialist in international politics, I have always believed that my primary business is to study states, those important political, legal and administrative units into which the world is divided. That preoccupation is not, of course, limited to my professional clan. All of political science, whether or not it is formally held to include international politics as a sub-discipline, focuses on the state, although it necessarily deals with other kinds of entity as well. Our academic brethren in such fields as history, economics and sociology also pay quite a lot of attention to the state. For that matter, no human being in today’s world can escape the profound influence of the state, even though he may study nothing at all.

This essay is based on the second E. H. Carr Memorial Lecture, delivered in 1985 at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. It appeared in Review of International Studies, vol. 12 (1986), published by Butterworth Scientific Ltd., and is reproduced by permission of the editor and publisher.