whatever period of the past they are talking about. Archaic words like
polity seem to be no substitute when strong government is to be
described, even though ‘state’ would not have been understood in any-
thing like its modern sense at the time under discussion. In Political
Theories of the Middle AgeOtto Gierke related ‘The State and Law’
without attention to medieval usages of the word ‘state’, let alone to the
ways they might have changed over time.^7 And in his magisterial study
of The Making of English LawPatrick Wormald finds it necessary to
say that King Alfred’s ninth-century law-code marked the point where
‘law became the aggressive weapon of a new state’, though the word
and the notion did not yet exist.^8
The history of the State needs to keep in step with the changing uses
of the word. But what is the modern concept to which those changing
uses may be shown to lead? Skinner’s definition of the State as ‘a locus
of power distinct from either the ruler or the body of the people’ seems
to create an unnecessary new entity deserving the attentions of
Ockham’s razor.^9 The potency of ‘the state’ derives from the fact that it
can mean both ruler andpeople at the same time; that it signifies, as Sir
Walter Raleigh already knew when he wrote The Prince, or Maxims of
Statein the early seventeenth century, ‘the frame or set order of a
Commonwealth, or of the Governors that rule the same, especially of
the Chief and Sovereign Governor that commandeth the rest’.^10 The key
to the history of the state is the development of the ambivalence which
allows the word to signify both the ordered community which is to be
loved and the regime which does the ordering and may be hated for its
coercive power.
State as regime
The usual meaning of ‘state’ has come to be the regime ‘that com-
mandeth the rest’, so that in the twentieth century the commonwealth
requires to be distinguished by the hybrid term ‘nation-state’.^11 This
2 Introduction. State: Word and Concept
(^7) O. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, tr. with introduction by F. W. Maitland
(Cambridge UP, 1900: repr. 1951), 73 ff; ‘state’ may also appear unwarrantably in translations
from medieval Latin: e.g. for fiscusin a translation of Walter of Guisborough’s chronicle to
refer to the agency confiscating clerical property for Edward I in 1296–7 (see English
Historical Documents, iii.1189–1327, ed. H. Rothwell, London, 1975, p. 225), and in the
mid-15th cent. Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, general editor D. E. R. Watt, vol. 8
(Aberdeen UP, 1987), pp. 216. 24 / 217. 29 (book XVI, c.1), where jura enim publica is trans-
lated as ‘the laws of the state’.
(^8) P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, i.
Legislation and its Limits(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 429.^9 Skinner, loc. cit.
(^10) Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh(London, 1664), 2.
(^11) The Oxford English Dictionary(Supplement, s.v. nation, §9) attributes the first use of
‘nation-state’ to J. R. Marriott in 1918.