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Myths about the state*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Inis L. Claude Jr
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Extract

As a specialist in international politics, I have always believed that my primary business is to study states, those important political, legal and administrative units into which the world is divided. That preoccupation is not, of course, limited to my professional clan. All of political science, whether or not it is formally held to include international politics as a sub-discipline, focuses on the state, although it necessarily deals with other kinds of entity as well. Our academic brethren in such fields as history, economics and sociology also pay quite a lot of attention to the state. For that matter, no human being in today's world can escape the profound influence of the state, even though he may study nothing at all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1986

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References

1. On Bentham's coinage of this term see Hidemi Suganami, ‘A Note on the Origin of the Word’ “International”’, British Journal of International Studies, iv (1978), pp. 226–232.Google Scholar

2. Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. This is the assumption underlying Vernon Van Dyke's ‘The Individual, the State, and Ethnic Communities in Political Theory’, World Politics, xxix (1977), pp. 343–369.Google Scholar

4. Manning, C. A. W., The Nature of International Society (London, 1962, 1975), p. 23.Google Scholar

5. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York, 1932; London, 1963), p. xi.Google Scholar

6. Trollope, Anthony, Phineas Redux, World' Classics edition (London, 1937), Volume 1, p. 389.Google Scholar