The organizational view defines the state as the apparatus of government in its broadest sense: that is, as that set of institutions that are recognizably 'public' in that they are responsible for the collective organization of social existence and are funded at the public's expense. The virtue of this definition is that it distinguishes clearly between the state and civil society (see p. 8). The state comprises the various institutions of government: the bureaucracy, the military, the police, the courts, the social-security system and so on; it can identified with the entire 'body politic'. This makes it possible to identify the origins of the modern state in emergence in fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century Europe of a system of centralized rule that succeeded in subordinating all other institutions and groups, spiritual and temporal. the modern notion of sovereign statehood was, indeed, formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia 1648. Moreover, the organizational approach allows us to talk about 'rolling forward' or 'rolling back' the state, in the sense of expanding or contracting the responsibilities of the state, and enlarging or diminishing its institutional machinery.