State as the basic political institution.

A state is an organised political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign in that they enjoy a monopoly of the use of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union. Some states are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony where ultimate sovereignty lies in another state.

The state in classical antiquity

The history of the state in the West usually begins with classical antiquity. During that period, the state took a variety of forms, none of them very much like the modern state. There were monarchies whose power (like that of the Egyptian Pharaoh) was based on the religious function of the king and his control of a centralized army. There were also large, quasi-bureaucratized empires, like the Roman empire, which depended less on the religious function of the ruler and more on effective military and legal organizations and the cohesiveness of an aristocracy.

Perhaps the most important political innovations of classical antiquity came from the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. The Greek city-states before the 4th century granted citizenship rights to their free population, and in Athens these rights were combined with a directly democratic form of government that was to have a long afterlife in political thought and history.

In contrast, Rome developed from a monarchy into a republic, governed by a senate dominated by the Roman aristocracy. The Roman political system contributed to the development of law, constitutionalism and to the distinction between the private and the public spheres.

From the feudal state to the modern state in the West

The story of the development of the specifically modern state in the West typically begins with the dissolution of the western Roman empire. This led to the fragmentation of the imperial state into the hands of private lords whose political, judicial, and military roles corresponded to the organization of economic production. In these conditions, according to Marxists, the economic unit of society was the state.

The state-system of feudal Europe was an unstable configuration of suzerains and anointed kings. A monarch, formally at the head of a hierarchy of sovereigns, was not an absolute power who could rule at will; instead, relations between lords and monarchs were mediated by varying degrees of mutual dependence, which was ensured by the absence of a centralized system of taxation. This reality ensured that each ruler needed to obtain the 'consent' of each estate in the realm. This was not quite a 'state' in the Weberian sense of the term, since the king did not monopolize either the power of lawmaking (which was shared with the church) or the means of violence (which were shared with the nobles).

The formalization of the struggles over taxation between the monarch and other elements of society (especially the nobility and the cities) gave rise to what is now called the Standestaat, or the state of Estates, characterized by parliaments in which key social groups negotiated with the king about legal and economic matters. These estates of the realm sometimes evolved in the direction of fully-fledged parliaments, but sometimes lost out in their struggles with the monarch, leading to greater centralization of lawmaking and coercive (chiefly military) power in his hands. Beginning in the 15th century, this centralizing process gives rise to the absolutist state.

Cultural and national homogenization figured prominently in the rise of the modern state system. Since the absolutist period, states have largely been organized on a national basis. The concept of a national state, however, is not synonymous with nation state. Even in the most ethnically homogeneous societies there is not always a complete correspondence between state and nation, hence the active role often taken by the state to promote nationalism through emphasis on shared symbols and national identity.

It is in this period that the term "state" is first introduced into political discourse in more or less its current meaning. Although Niccolò Machiavelli is often credited with first using the term to refer to a territorial sovereign government in the modern sense in The Prince, published in 1532, it is not until the time of the British thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French thinker Jean Bodin that the concept in its current meaning is fully developed.

Today, most Western states more or less fit the influential definition of the state in Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation. According to Weber, the modern state monopolizes the means of legitimate physical violence over a well-defined territory. Moreover, the legitimacy of this monopoly itself is of a very special kind, "rational-legal" legitimacy, based on impersonal rules that constrain the power of state elites.

There are different theories of origin of the state:

• In theological theory the state origin is explained by God`s Will (Christianity, islam)

• According to patriarchal theory, where state originates from family and the absolute power of monarch is the continuation of the power of father in family (Aristotle)

• Contract theory claims that state appeared as the result of contract between people (Hobbes)

• Psychological theory explains the genesis of state by the inner psychological need for subjection, submission (Freizer)

• Marxist theory holds that the origin of state is the result of society’s division into classes and social groups.

The state as a political organization – is a social organism that is called to protects interests of the people`s of defined territory and to regulate their relations with the help of law norms and institutions.

The attributes of the state:

1) Public power separated from the majority of people;

2) Tax system (taxation)

3) Fixed territory

The attributes of the state are also: officials, army, police, supreme Court, public prosecutor`s office, secret service, prison etc;

The state has a lot of functions. There are internal and external functions of the state.

The Internal functions are:

• Economical

• Humanitarian

• Social

• National and integrative

• Law enforcement (i.e. disobedience to law is persecuted)

• Cultural and educational

• Scientific

The External functions are:

• Diplomatic

• Military

• Protective

The form of government refers to the set of political institutions by which a government of a state is organized in order to exert its powers over a house in the congress body politic. Synonyms include "regime type" and "system of government".The main forms are monarchy and republic.

A republic is a form of government in which the people retain supreme control over the government, and in which the head of government is not a monarch. The word "republic" is derived from the Latin phrase res publica, which can be translated as "a public affair". In the early 21st century, most states that are not monarchies label themselves as republics either in their official names or their constitutions. Here is a list of variations on the term "republic":

Parliamentary republic — a republic, like India, Bangladesh, with an elected Head of state, but where the Head of state and Head of government are kept separate with the Head of government retaining most executive powers, or a Head of state akin to a Head of government, elected by a Parliament.

Federal republic, confederation or federation — is a federal union of states or provinces with a republican form of government. Examples include Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Germany, India, Russia, the United States, and Switzerland.