real problem, and what it shows is that Easton has not done away with the
ambiguities and elusiveness that characterise the state.
Indeed, it has been argued that Easton can only bring his political system down
to earth by making it synonymous with the state, so that we can give some kind
of empirical purchase to the notion of society as a whole. Once we return to the
state, the problems of ambiguity and abstractness remain. The substitution of the
political system for the state has not solved any of the problems that led Easton to
reject the concept of the state in the first place.
The question of existence
Moreover, Easton’s argument suffers from the same difficulty that confronts all who
argue that the state cannot be defined. We have to ask: does the state exist? None
of the critics of the concept of the state suggest that the state as a real-life institution
has disappeared. Easton tries to adopt a sceptical position to the effect that political
life has no ‘natural’ coherence so that we could, for argument’s sake, construct a
political system out of the relationship between a duck-billed platypus and the ace
of spades. But he does insist that a conceptually ‘interesting’ idea must have
‘empirical status’ (1965: 33, 44), and this seems to suggest that there must be
something in the world out there which corresponds to the political system as he
defines it. Such an institution is the state.
Neither behaviouralists, nor linguistic theorists nor radicals argue that the state
does not exist. If states do exist, then the challenge is surely to define them. Weber’s
notion of the state as an institution that claims a monopoly of legitimate force for
a particular territory is a useful definition: as we see it, it is rather silly to talk about
the state and then deny that it can be defined.
Force and statelessness
The value of highlighting force as the central attribute of the state is that it focuses
upon a practice that is extraordinary: the use of force to tackle conflicts of interest.
It is true that states defined in a Weberian way have been around for some 5,000
years, but humans have been in existence for much longer, and therefore an
extremely interesting question arises. How did people secure order and resolve
disputes before they had an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force?
Most anthropologists would dispute Green’s argument that states have always
existed. They argue that in tribal societies, political leaders rely upon moral pressures
- ancestor cults, supernatural sanctions, the threat of exclusion – to maintain social
cohesion and discipline. Although many of these sanctions would strike us today
as being archaic and unworkable, the point about them is that they demonstrate
that people can live without a state.
International relations writers have also become aware of how international
society regulates the activities of states themselves, without a super- or world-state
to secure order. Moral and economic pressures have to be used to enforce
international law and, as the conflict in Iraq has demonstrated, there is nothing to
prevent states from interpreting international law in conflicting ways.
Chapter 1 The state 21