Notes to Pages 37–38 163
3.See Rahe, RAM, passim.
- This term was introduced by Machiavelli, who used lo stato to allude to “command over
men,” and it reached its full development in the political science of Thomas Hobbes, who would
have accepted Max Weber’s definition of the state as that entity which “(successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”: cf. J. H. Hexter, “The
Predatory Vision: Niccolò Machiavelli. Il Principe and lo stato,” in Hexter, The Vision of Politics on
the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 150–78,
and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “On the Impersonality of the Modern State: A Comment on Machi-
avelli’s Use of Stato,” APSR 77 (1983): 849–57, with Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78, and see Quentin Skin-
ner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and
Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90–131. The state is an ab-
stract entity constituted by power; and to the extent that it has a tangible existence, it is indistin-
guishable from the arms by which that power is exerted—the police forces, the standing army,
and the bureaucracy that make up the permanent government in every modern polity. The state
is never synonymous with the body politic, and it is never itself a true community. This is evident
enough from the manner in which it is consistently coupled with and distinguished from the in-
dividual, the church, and society. In this connection, one would do well to ponder Nietzsche’s
observation that “State is the name of the coldest of all the cold monsters. Coldly as well does it lie;
and this lie creeps out of its mouth: ‘I, the State, am the People.’ ” As Nietzsche goes on to suggest,
it is “a Faith and a Love,” not the State, that constitute a People. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Also
Sprach Zarathustra 1, “Vom neuen Götzen,” in Nietzsche, Werke, fifth edition, ed. Karl Schlechta
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1966), II 313. This theme has been taken up recently and treated
from an anthropological perspective by Moshe Berent, “Hobbes and the Greek Tongues,” HPTh
17:1 (Spring 1996): 36–59; “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics,” HPTh 19:3 (Autumn 1998):
331–62; and “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence and the Stateless Polis,” CQ n.s. 50:1
(2000): 257–89. Cf. Mogens Herman Hansen, “Was the Polis a State or a Stateless Society?” in Even
More Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, ed. Thomas H. Nielsen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002),
17–47, with Moshe Berent, “In Search of the Greek State: A Rejoinder to M. H. Hansen,” Polis: The
Journal for the Society of Greek Political Thought 21:1/2 (2004): 107–46. As Peter L. P. Simpson,
Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015),
3–5, points out, the only ancient analogues to the modern state with its bureaucracy and merce-
nary, standing army were the despotisms found in China and the Near East and the principate
established by Augustus. - Pure democracy: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed.
Jacob E. Cook (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 10. Pólıs the men: the
references are collected by Charles Forster Smith, “What Constitutes a State,” CJ 2:7 (May 1907):
299–302. Alcaeus: F112.10 and F426 (Lobel-Page). - Inscriptions identify polity with citizens: GHI 1–2. In contrast, the Near Eastern texts
customarily refer to those whom we are inclined to call the Babylonians as “the people of the ter-
ritory of the city of Babylon.” See Fritz Schachermeyr, “La Formation de la cité grecque,” Diogène
4 (1953): 22–39 (esp. 30–33). Identity of soldier and civilian: Yvon Garlan, War in the Ancient
World: A Social History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), 86–103. See also Xen. Ve c t. 2.3–4.
Land and citizenship: Michel Austin and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of
Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 95–99. It took a special decree of
the assembly to extend this right to a noncitizen: Jan Pečírka, The Formula for the Grant of Enktesis
in Attic Inscriptions (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1966). - For an example of the confusion that inevitably arises when one attempts to introduce
the state-society distinction into an analysis of a Greek pólıs, see Stephen Hodkinson, “The Imag-
inary Spartan Politeia,” in The Imaginary Polis, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Det
Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 222–81 (esp. 244–63).
8.Note Arist. Pol. 1280a25–1281a4, see [Dem.] 25.16–17, and consider Ferdinand Tönnies,
Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955). The failure to grasp the
importance of Tönnies’s distinction for understanding the Greek pólıs can lead one to attribute a