ABSTRACT
Political institutions are concerned with the distribution of power in society. Max Weber defined the state as ‘a human community which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. Thus the state is one of the important agencies of social control, whose functions are carried out by means of law, backed ultimately by physical force. It is one association within society, and not society as a whole. And Weber made territoriality one of the characteristics of a political system. We discussed earlier the distinction established between ‘civil society’ and the state,1 which was an important step in the formation of sociology as a science. The early sociologists, having established this distinction, proceeded to examine the relationship between civil society and the state, and to attempt a classification of political systems based upon the different forms of civil society. Their approach was evolutionary; they were interested in the origins and development of the state. Regarding the state as one association within society, and as characterized by definite territorial limits, and being acquainted through the growing literature of ethnography with primitive societies which seemed to have no political organization, they were naturally led to consider the question of origins; and some of them went on to speculate, under the influence of the philosophy of history, about the future of the state. This same philosophy of history (and the political revolutions of the age) determined their interest in the different historical forms of the state, especially in Western civilization. However little we may now accept these schemes of unilinear evolution, the classification of political systems remains a primary task of political sociology, as a basis for generalization, and much can be learned from the nineteenth century writers.
