Simple definitions like the one customarily attributed to Weber are inadequate ; at the very least they require supplementation. I shall argue later that these definition make force or coercion too central and draw our attention away from other important features. What are some of the other features of states ?
A theme of this chapter is that political theorists take states too much for granted. The world was not always organized as a system of states, and it is helpful to recall the ways the world was before the development of states. We can appreciate better the nature of states by contrasting them with the orders they replaced. As states originate in early modern Europe, the contrast that is most revealing is the world of late medieval Europe [see further Chapter 25].