The State's Existence between Facts and Norms. A Reflection on some Problems to the Analysis of the State

Daniel Gaus

ARENA Working Papers from ARENA

Abstract: The state’s mode of existence is still a problem to political science analysis. How can we decide if a political order (for example the EU) is a state or not? This paper discusses the ontological quality of the state and what follows from that to its analysis. It is suggested to view the state in terms of an everyday theory operating in historical societies. As a consequence, three perspectives are logically related in the analysis of the state: a normative,a sociological and a genealogical perspective. The paper illustrates how a full account of the state is dependent on a systematic cooperation between the disciplines of political theory, sociology and the history of ideas.

Keywords: ideas; methodological issues; Nation-state; normative political theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/public ... ers2011/wp-11-11.xml Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:arenax:p0330

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ARENA Working Papers from ARENA
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sindre Eikrem Hervig ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).