What is a "state"?

Or to put the question slightly differently, what do we mean when we call something a "state"?

Actually, uses of this term tend to be systematically and consequentially ambiguous in both scholarly analysis and everyday public discourse—and the ambiguities are conceptual as as well as strictly terminological. Since these ambiguities comes up in many debates and polemics, and often help confuse or obscure the issues involved, a bit of clarification might be useful. So I thought I would share a relevant passage, highlighting one of these key ambiguities, from one of my handouts for a course on social & political theory. (There are other ambiguities, too.) The course handout deals with a broader range of subjects in Max Weber's analyses of rationalization, discipline, & modernity.

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=> I will preface the next set of points, regarding Weber’s analysis of the modern state and its development, with some background remarks. “State” is one of those words—and concepts—that is persistently used in ambiguous ways (sometimes even by the same person in the same discussion) in both scholarly analysis and everyday public discourse. At least two common meanings of the word “state” are worth distinguishing:

(1) Sometimes, the word “state” means a (relatively) independent politically organized society.
(2) At other times, “the state” refers to a (more or less) coherent, centralized, and effective apparatus of domination and administration that rules over and governs a politically organized society.

Thus, for example, if the word “state” is used in the first sense, one can say that a country like France (or Egypt or India or Japan) is a state. In terms of the second meaning, one would say that France (or Egypt or India or Japan) has a state. The second sense of the word “state” allows us to talk about the relationship between state and society (since the two are not identical), the state and the market, the state and the mode of production, the state and civil or political society, etc. When Weber talks about “the state”, it is almost always clear that he is using the second meaning (unlike, say, Hegel)—though even Weber’s formulations are not always completely consistent in this respect.

Now to the main point. When Weber describes what he sees as the distinctive features of the modern state (as opposed to other kinds of states and other socio-historically significant forms of political domination) he emphasizes two crucial characteristics involving the nature of the state itself and the relationship between state and society. These are related but analytically distinguishable:

(a) The modern state is, to an unprecedented extent, a bureaucratically administered formal organization.
(b) The modern state has, to an unprecedented extent, successfully achieved a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence (especially deadly violence and systematic violent coercion) within a given territory.

You may want to ponder how these two characteristics might be related.

(Of course, the extent to which a coherent and functioning state of this sort actually exists, the extent to which it actually exerts effective control over the society, and the degree to which the state is independent of social forces—these and other factors can and do vary enormously over time and between different societies. Modern states can also decay, weaken, collapse, get challenged, or be destroyed. When that happens, a weakening or breakdown of those two crucial characteristics is usually part of the story.)
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(P.S. As I said, this is not the only important ambiguity one encounters in conceptions of "the state". For example, many discussions distinguish between "the state" and "civil society"in ways that equate "the state" with the political realm as a whole. On the other hand, Tocqueville's political sociology is based on a tripatrite analytical distinction between the state, civil society, and political society—and I think that his approach to distinguishing analytically between the state and political society, and between civil society and political society, is useful and illuminating. But that's a subject for a different discussion.)