Governance—understood as the set of mechanisms aimed at coordinating social life and regulating conflict—has been a constant feature of human existence from the moment people find themselves living in proximity to one another. Far from being an abstract category, it is a tool for peace and prosperity.
It does not follow, however, that political centralization—so prevalent today—is inherent to every form of governance. Political centralization is not new; the state, however, is.
The state as an institution does not represent a continuation of earlier forms of political organization, but a new historical form that emerged from a series of ideological transformations in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century.
Reflection on the state typically focuses on its capacity for coercion, but what is truly problematic—and what explains that capacity—is its institutional autonomy: the claim to constitute itself as the ultimate source of law without recognizing any authority superior to itself. This quality is not confined to the legal domain; through the production of law, it expands gradually into the rest of society, eroding every institution in its path—whether property, money, the family, the Church, or education.
The Supposed Continuity of the State
Before any consideration of the state, it is essential to distinguish two senses of the term. In its generic use, “state” designates any form of organized political community—in that sense one speaks of the Greek, Roman, or feudal state. In its specific use, it designates a particular historical form of political community with characteristics that make it irreducible to any earlier form.
The problem arises when the generic use slides into the specific and vice versa. In other words, the “state” is presented as a synonym for order and communal life—appropriating classical concepts such as polis or regnum—so that the “state” as a monopoly of law and order comes to be taken for granted.
To project retroactively onto earlier institutional realities the defining features of the state as an institution—features that constitute a difference not of degree but of kind—is an anachronism.
This distortion is not innocent; it serves a fundamental ideological purpose. It grants retroactive legitimacy—if the state has always existed, then questioning it becomes equivalent to questioning the social order itself. It also captures political language, projecting terms such as “politics,” “government,” “public,” and “law” onto a statist framework taken for granted. In doing so, it establishes itself as the unquestionable horizon within which all governance must be conceived, rendering any non-state alternative directly unintelligible.
The state’s existence and justification have ceased to be questioned at all—and that is precisely what makes it such a powerful ideological apparatus.
The Sovereign State: Judge in Its Own Cause
Among the processes that decisively contributed to the emergence of the state, the rupture of Western religious unity during the sixteenth century stands out. While the Church had acted as a source of authority capable of contesting the supremacy claims of temporal powers, its weakening favored the consolidation of a new political conception: the idea that within each territory there must exist an ultimate authority subject to no superior instance. This logic—initially bound to the religious question—would eventually extend to the whole of the juridical and political order.
This vacuum shifted the central political question from justice to power, gradually transforming politics into a technique of naked power without any external moral reference. Jean Bodin takes this point of departure and theorizes it juridically, converting self-referential power into a juridical principle that Hobbes would carry to its most radical conclusion: there is no juridical order possible outside the state because it is the state that produces the juridical order.
The historical novelty introduced by the state is therefore not a greater political centralization, but the claim to erect it as a self-referential principle of law, expressed in the modern notion of sovereignty. It does not invent the juridical justification of power; it monopolizes it, becoming its sole legitimate source.
Its most direct consequence is the elevation of the state to ultimate arbiter of every dispute through the territorial monopoly of jurisdiction. With no external instances capable of regulating its conduct with binding authority, any appeal to an external law—natural, divine, customary—is mediated by the state itself, which decides what constitutes a legitimate foundation. In doing so, it gradually absorbs it within its own juridical framework. The state thus stands constituted as the judge in its own cause.
A State to Rule Them All
Behind this monopoly lies something considerably troubling from an institutional standpoint. If state sovereignty is a self-founding principle, then any domain of the social order that requires coordination or dispute resolution potentially becomes state jurisdiction, because to deny it that role would be to deny the very principle that makes its existence possible. And, since that principle recognizes no external limits, its expansion is not accidental but a logical consequence of its own structure. In that sense, the state is intrinsically a predatory institution whose structural tendency is the absorption of the social order.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: the monopoly of jurisdiction cannot coexist with intermediate forms of authority. It does not matter whether we are speaking of law, education, property, money, banking, healthcare, the church, insurance, the family, security, marriage, social welfare, guilds, arbitration, or militias— all of them will eventually clash with the state, and its solution is total or partial absorption. Absorption is total when the intermediate institution poses a latent threat to the state’s survival—as is the case with the production of law—and partial when the state needs only to have the final word to retain its status, as with education: even when private, the state ensures its oversight.
Modern history, in this sense, is nothing more than the progressive record of that transfer of authority from the various forms of community toward the state; or what amounts to the same thing, the transition from an order that was more or less organic to one fully-founded on coercion, in which any alternative that emerges will be labeled illegal, a vehicle for foreign interests, terrorism, or extremist sects. Every absorption has its justification: the common good, national security, the protection of the weakest.
This is not to say that the past was free of problems relating to political authority, but there is a contrast worth noting. Even the so-called “absolute” monarchy—in which there were no national constitutions, separation of powers, or codified rights—is categorically less “absolute” than the state, whether monarchical or democratic.
Whereas in the pre-state monarchical order there existed established communities of external regulation—family, church, free cities, rural communities, guilds, universities—to which government was subject, and vice versa, the state recognizes none of these instances as an independent source of law. It absorbs them, regulates them, or suppresses them. Any decentralization within the state is, strictly speaking, mere administrative deconcentration—revocable and without any real transfer of authority.
The State’s Limits
Despite lacking external institutional constraints, and despite its internal checks operating within its own sovereign logic, the state does face limits in terms of legitimacy. By absorbing functions from intermediate communities, it generates dependencies that become expectations, and any abrupt change risks a loss of legitimacy. It is those expectations that define the window of the politically thinkable.
This limit is, however, transitory. Because it controls the function, the state can progressively dismantle the communities that once sustained it without the population immediately losing access to the service—and when a crisis, a disaster, or a war demands it, there are no intermediate institutions to appeal to. The state does not necessarily create the emergency, but its structural position guarantees it will be the most relevant response available.
A case in point is banking and money: the state monopolizes minting, imposes legal tender, establishes a central bank, abandons the gold standard. A few decades later, inflation is a daily reality, central bank digital currency is set in motion, and gold survives only in pirate stories.
From all this a direct consequence follows. If the foundation of the state lies not in the size of its apparatus but in the principle that constitutes it—sovereignty as the self-referential source of law—the pertinent question is not how much state but what principle sustains the legal order. Shrinking the state without questioning that principle does not lead to its dismantling; it merely reproduces the same logic in a smaller form. Moreover, a reduction that leaves the presuppositions of sovereignty intact may even reinforce state legitimacy, insofar as the state appears effective while becoming less visible.
