ABSTRACT
Comparative politics and constitutional law focus not on the system of polities or states, but on the state as such. When classifying states, lawyers and political scientists make use of several classical categories. Plato and Aristotle long ago distinguished the republic and the monarchy as forms of rule. There are two recurring fallacies, committed by authors conceiving of empire either as a form of rule or as a political regime. In the first fallacy, an empire is considered a special kind of monarchy, assuming that there are no empires without emperors. The second fallacy is the view that empires are authoritarian or totalitarian. Another classical category of state is based on the form of its territorial structure, differentiating between unitary, federal and confederal states. According to Römeris, a federation is a mixed or intermediate form of state structure between a unitary state and a confederation.
