Capgras delusion is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor. It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), a French psychiatrist.
The Capgras delusion is classified as a delusional misidentification syndrome, a class of delusional beliefs that involves the misidentification of people, places, or objects. It can occur in acute, transient, or chronic forms. Cases in which patients hold the belief that time has been "warped" or "substituted" have also been reported.
The delusion most commonly occurs in individuals diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but has also been seen in brain injury, dementia with Lewy bodies, and other dementia. It presents often in individuals with a neurodegenerative disease, particularly at an older age. It has also been reported as occurring in association with diabetes, hypothyroidism, and migraine attacks. In one isolated case, the Capgras delusion was temporarily induced in a healthy subject by the drug ketamine. It occurs more frequently in females, with a female to male ratio of approximately 3 to 2.
Signs and symptoms
The following two case reports are examples of the Capgras delusion in a psychiatric setting:
Mrs. D, a 74-year-old married
housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first
psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion.
At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the
diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband
had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with
the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a
gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to
hospitalise her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased
father. She easily recognised other family members and would
misidentify her husband only.
— Passer and Warnock, 1991
Diane was a 28-year-old single woman who was seen for an evaluation at a day hospital
program in preparation for discharge from a psychiatric hospital. This
was her third psychiatric admission in the past five years. Always shy
and reclusive, Diane first became psychotic at age 23. Following an
examination by her physician, she began to worry that the doctor had
damaged her internally and that she might never be able to become
pregnant. The patient's condition improved with neuroleptic treatment
but deteriorated after discharge because she refused medication. When
she was admitted eight months later, she presented with delusions that a
man was making exact copies of people—"screens"—and that there were two
screens of her, one evil and one good. The diagnosis was schizophrenia
with Capgras delusion. She was disheveled and had a bald spot on her
scalp from self-mutilation.
— Sinkman, 2008
The following case is an instance of the Capgras delusion resulting from a neurodegenerative disease:
Fred, a 59-year-old man with a high
school qualification, was referred for neurological and
neuropsychological evaluation because of cognitive and behavioural
disturbances. He had worked as the head of a small unit devoted to
energy research until a few months before. His past medical and
psychiatric history was uneventful. [...] Fred's wife reported that
about 15 months from onset he began to see her as a "double" (her
words). The first episode occurred one day when, after coming home, Fred
asked her where Wilma was. On her surprised answer that she was right
there, he firmly denied that she was his wife Wilma, whom he "knew very
well as his sons' mother", and went on plainly commenting that Wilma had
probably gone out and would come back later. [...] Fred presented
progressive cognitive deterioration characterised both by severity and
fast decline. Apart from [Capgras disorder], his neuropsychological
presentation was hallmarked by language disturbances suggestive of
frontal-executive dysfunction. His cognitive impairment ended up in a
severe, all-encompassing frontal syndrome.
— Lucchelli and Spinnler, 2007
Causes
It is generally agreed that the Capgras delusion has a complex and organic basis (caused by structural damage to organs) and can be better understood by examining neuroanatomical damage associated with the syndrome.
In one of the first papers to consider the cerebral basis of the Capgras delusion, Alexander, Stuss
and Benson pointed out in 1979 that the disorder might be related to a
combination of frontal lobe damage causing problems with familiarity and
right hemisphere damage causing problems with visual recognition.
Further clues to the possible causes of the Capgras delusion were
suggested by the study of brain-injured patients who had developed prosopagnosia. In this condition, patients are unable to recognize faces consciously,
despite being able to recognize other types of visual objects. However,
a 1984 study by Bauer showed that even though conscious face
recognition was impaired, patients with the condition showed autonomic arousal (measured by a galvanic skin response measure) to familiar faces, suggesting that there are two pathways to face recognition—one conscious and one unconscious.
In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a "mirror image" or double dissociation of prosopagnosia,
in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they
might have damage to the system that produces the automatic emotional
arousal to familiar faces.
This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling
something was not "quite right" about them. In 1997, Ellis and his
colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all
diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could
consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic
emotional arousal response.
The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of
strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients with
the disease experience a "loss" of familiarity, not a "lack" of it. Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition. This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2001.
William Hirstein and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran reported similar findings in a paper published on a single case of a patient with Capgras delusion after brain injury. Ramachandran portrayed this case in his book Phantoms in the Brain and gave a talk about it at TED 2007.
Since the patient was capable of feeling emotions and recognizing faces
but could not feel emotions when recognizing familiar faces,
Ramachandran hypothesizes that the origin of Capgras syndrome is a
disconnection between the temporal cortex, where faces are usually recognized (see temporal lobe), and the limbic system, involved in emotions. More specifically, he emphasizes the disconnection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex.
In 2010, Hirstein revised this theory to explain why a person
with Capgras syndrome would have the particular reaction of not
recognizing a familiar person. Hirstein explained the theory as follows:
my current hypothesis on Capgras,
which is a more specific version of the earlier position I took in the
1997 article with V. S. Ramachandran. According to my current approach,
we represent the people we know well with hybrid representations
containing two parts. One part represents them externally: how they
look, sound, etc. The other part represents them internally: their
personalities, beliefs, characteristic emotions, preferences, etc.
Capgras syndrome occurs when the internal portion of the representation
is damaged or inaccessible. This produces the impression of someone who
looks right on the outside, but seems different on the inside, i.e., an
impostor. This gives a much more specific explanation that fits well
with what the patients actually say. It corrects a problem with the
earlier hypothesis in that there are many possible responses to the lack
of an emotion upon seeing someone.
Furthermore, Ramachandran suggests a relationship between the Capgras
syndrome and a more general difficulty in linking successive episodic memories
because of the crucial role emotion plays in creating memories. Since
the patient could not put together memories and feelings, he believed
objects in a photograph were new on every viewing, even though they
normally should have evoked feelings (e.g., a person close to him, a
familiar object, or even himself). Others like Merrin and Silberfarb (1976)
have also proposed links between the Capgras syndrome and deficits in
aspects of memory. They suggest that an important and familiar person
(the usual subject of the delusion) has many layers of visual, auditory,
tactile, and experiential memories associated with them, so the Capgras
delusion can be understood as a failure of object constancy at a high
perceptual level.
Most likely, more than just an impairment of the automatic
emotional arousal response is necessary to form the Capgras delusion, as
the same pattern has been reported in patients showing no signs of
delusions.
Ellis suggested that a second factor explains why this unusual
experience is transformed into a delusional belief; this second factor
is thought to be an impairment in reasoning, although no definitive
impairment has been found to explain all cases.
Many have argued for the inclusion of the role of patient phenomenology
in explanatory models of the Capgras syndrome in order to better
understand the mechanisms that enable the creation and maintenance of
delusional beliefs.
Capgras syndrome has also been linked to reduplicative paramnesia,
another delusional misidentification syndrome in which a person
believes a location has been duplicated or relocated. Since these two
syndromes are highly associated, it has been proposed that they affect
similar areas of the brain and therefore have similar neurological
implications. Reduplicative paramnesia is understood to affect the
frontal lobe, and thus it is believed that Capgras syndrome is also
associated with the frontal lobe.
Even if the damage is not directly to the frontal lobe, an interruption
of signals between other lobes and the frontal lobe could result in
Capgras syndrome.
Diagnosis
Because
it is a rare and poorly understood condition, there is no definitive
way to diagnose the Capgras delusion. Diagnosis is primarily made on
psychological evaluation of the patient, who is most likely brought to a
psychologist's attention by a family member or friend believed to be an
imposter by the person under the delusion.
Treatment
Treatment has not been well studied and so there is no evidence-based approach. Treatment is generally therapy, often with support of antipsychotic medication.
History
Capgras syndrome is named after Joseph Capgras, a Frenchpsychiatrist who first described the disorder in 1923 in his paper co-authored by Jean Reboul-Lachaux,
on the case of a French woman, "Madame Macabre," who complained that
corresponding "doubles" had taken the places of her husband and other
people she knew.
Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux first called the syndrome "l'illusion des
sosies", which can be translated literally as "the illusion of
look-alikes."
The syndrome was initially considered a purely psychiatric
disorder, the delusion of a double seen as symptomatic of schizophrenia,
and purely a female disorder (though this is now known not to be the
case)
often noted as a symptom of hysteria. Most of the proposed explanations
initially following that of Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux were
psychoanalytical in nature. It was not until the 1980s that attention
was turned to the usually co-existing organic brain lesions originally
thought to be essentially unrelated or accidental. Today, the Capgras
syndrome is understood as a neurological disorder, in which the delusion
primarily results from organic brain lesions or degeneration.
As noted by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Richard H. Kohn, "civilian control is not a fact but a process".
Affirmations of respect for the values of civilian control
notwithstanding, the actual level of control sought or achieved by the
civilian leadership may vary greatly in practice, from a statement of
broad policy goals that military commanders are expected to translate into operational plans, to the direct selection of specific targets for attack on the part of governing politicians. National Leaders
with limited experience in military matters often have little choice
but to rely on the advice of professional military commanders trained in
the art and science of warfare to inform the limits of policy; in such cases, the military establishment may enter the bureaucratic
arena to advocate for or against a particular course of action, shaping
the policy-making process and blurring any clear cut lines of civilian
control.
Advocates of civilian control generally take a Clausewitzian view of war, emphasizing its political character. The words of Georges Clemenceau, "War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men" (also frequently rendered as "War is too important to be left to the generals"), wryly reflect this view. Given that broad strategic decisions, such as the decision to declare a war, start an invasion, or end a conflict, have a major impact on the citizens of the country, they are seen by civilian control advocates as best guided by the will of the people (as expressed by their political representatives), rather than left solely to an elite group of tactical experts. The military serves as a special government agency, which is supposed to implement, rather than formulate, policies that require the use of certain types of physical force. Kohn succinctly summarizes this view when he writes that:
The point of civilian control is to make security
subordinate to the larger purposes of a nation, rather than the other
way around. The purpose of the military is to defend society, not to
define it.
A state's
effective use of force is an issue of great concern for all national
leaders, who must rely on the military to supply this aspect of their authority. The danger of granting military leaders full autonomy
or sovereignty is that they may ignore or supplant the democratic
decision-making process, and use physical force, or the threat of
physical force, to achieve their preferred outcomes; in the worst cases,
this may lead to a coup or military dictatorship. A related danger is the use of the military to crush domestic political opposition through intimidation or sheer physical force, interfering with the ability to have free and fair elections,
a key part of the democratic process. This poses the paradox that
"because we fear others we create an institution of violence to protect
us, but then we fear the very institution we created for protection".
Also, military personnel, because of the nature of their job, are much
more willing to use force to settle disputes than civilians because they
are trained military personnel that specialize strictly in warfare. The
military is authoritative and hierarchical, rarely allowing discussion
and prohibiting dissention. For instance, in the Empire of Japan, prime ministers and almost everyone in high positions were military people like Hideki Tojo,
and advocated and basically pressured the leaders to start military
conflicts against China and others because they believed that they would
ultimately be victorious.
Liberal theory and the American Founding Fathers
Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were suspicious of standing militaries. As Samuel Adams
wrote in 1768, "Even when there is a necessity of the military power,
within a land, a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and
jealous eye over it". Even more forceful are the words of Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the American Constitutional Convention,
who wrote that "[s]tanding armies in time of peace are inconsistent
with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the
liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive
engines for establishing despotism."
In Federalist No. 8, one of The Federalist papers documenting the ideas of some of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton
expressed concern that maintaining a large standing army would be a
dangerous and expensive undertaking. In his principal argument for the
ratification of the proposed constitution, he argued that only by
maintaining a strong union could the new country avoid such a pitfall.
Using the European experience as a negative example and the British
experience as a positive one, he presented the idea of a strong nation
protected by a navy with no need of a standing army. The implication
was that control of a large military force is, at best, difficult and
expensive, and at worst invites war and division. He foresaw the
necessity of creating a civilian government that kept the military at a
distance.
James Madison, another writer of many of The Federalist papers, expressed his concern about a standing military in comments before the Constitutional Convention in June 1787:
In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly
given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has
the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing
military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe
companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger,
have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans
it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was
apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the
pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
The United States Constitution placed considerable limitations on the legislature. Coming from a tradition of legislative superiority in government,
many were concerned that the proposed Constitution would place so many
limitations on the legislature that it would become impossible for such a
body to prevent an executive from starting a war. Hamilton argued in
Federalist No. 26 that it would be equally as bad for a legislature to
be unfettered by any other agency and that restraints would actually be
more likely to preserve liberty. James Madison, in Federalist No. 47,
continued Hamilton's argument that distributing powers among the
various branches of government would prevent any one group from gaining
so much power as to become unassailable. In Federalist No. 48,
however, Madison warned that while the separation of powers is
important, the departments must not be so far separated as to have no
ability to control the others.
Finally, in Federalist No. 51,
Madison argued that to create a government that relied primarily on the
good nature of the incumbent to ensure proper government was folly.
Institutions must be in place to check incompetent or malevolent
leaders. Most importantly, no single branch of government ought to have
control over any single aspect of governing. Thus, all three branches
of government must have some control over the military, and the system
of checks and balances maintained among the other branches would serve
to help control the military.
Hamilton and Madison thus had two major concerns: (1) the
detrimental effect on liberty and democracy of a large standing army and
(2) the ability of an unchecked legislature or executive to take the
country to war precipitously. These concerns drove American military
policy for the first century and a half of the country's existence.
While armed forces were built up during wartime, the pattern after every
war up to and including World War II was to demobilize quickly and
return to something approaching pre-war force levels. However, with the
advent of the Cold War
in the 1950s, the need to create and maintain a sizable peacetime
military force "engendered new concerns" of militarism and about how
such a large force would affect civil–military relations in the United States.
Domestic law enforcement
The United States' Posse Comitatus Act,
passed in 1878, prohibits any part of the Army or the Air Force (since
the U.S. Air Force evolved from the U.S. Army) from engaging in domestic
law enforcement activities unless they do so pursuant to lawful
authority. Similar prohibitions apply to the Navy and Marine Corps by
service regulation, since the actual Posse Comitatus Act does not apply
to them. The Coast Guard is exempt from Posse Comitatus since it
normally operates under the Department of Homeland Security versus the Department of Defense and enforces U.S. laws, even when operating as a service with the U.S. Navy.
The act is often misunderstood to prohibit any use of federal
military forces in law enforcement, but this is not the case. For
example, the President has explicit authority under the Constitution and
federal law to use federal forces or federalized militias to enforce
the laws of the United States. The act's primary purpose is to prevent
local law enforcement officials from utilizing federal forces in this
way by forming a "posse" consisting of federal Soldiers or Airmen.
There are, however, practical political concerns in the United
States that make the use of federal military forces less desirable for
use in domestic law enforcement. Under the U.S. Constitution, law and
order is primarily a matter of state concern. As a practical matter,
when military forces are necessary to maintain domestic order and
enforce the laws, state militia forces under state control i.e., that state's Army National Guard and/or Air National Guard
are usually the force of first resort, followed by federalized state
militia forces i.e., the Army National Guard and/or Air National Guard
"federalized" as part of the U.S. Army and/or U.S. Air Force, with
active federal forces (to include "federal" reserve component forces
other than the National Guard) being the least politically palatable
option.
NATO and EU member states
Strong democratic control of the military is a prerequisite for membership in NATO. Strong democracy and rule of law, implying democratic control of the military, are prerequisites for membership in the European Union.
Maoist approach
Maoist military-political theories of people's war and democratic centralism also support the subordination of military forces to the directives of the communist party (although the guerrilla experience of many early leading Communist Party of China figures may make their status as civilians somewhat ambiguous). In a 1929 essay On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party, Mao
explicitly refuted "comrades [who] regard military affairs and politics
as opposed to each other and [who] refuse to recognize that military
affairs are only one means of accomplishing political tasks",
prescribing increased scrutiny of the People's Liberation Army by the Party and greater political training of officers and enlistees as a means of reducing military autonomy. In Mao's theory, the military—which serves both as a symbol of the revolution and an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat—is not merely expected to defer to the direction of the ruling non-uniformed Party members (who today exercise control in the People's Republic of China through the Central Military Commission), but also to actively participate in the revolutionary political campaigns of the Maoist era.
Civilian leaders cannot usually hope to challenge their militaries by
means of force, and thus must guard against any potential usurpation of
powers through a combination of policies, laws, and the inculcation of
the values of civilian control in their armed services. The presence of a
distinct civilian police force, militia, or other paramilitary group may mitigate to an extent the disproportionate strength that a country's military possesses; civilian gun
ownership has also been justified on the grounds that it prevents
potential abuses of power by authorities (military or otherwise).
Opponents of gun control have cited the need for a balance of power in order to enforce the civilian control of the military.
Differing opinions exist as to the desirability of distinguishing the military as a body separate from the larger society. In The Soldier and the State, Huntington
argued for what he termed "objective civilian control", "focus[ing] on a
politically neutral, autonomous, and professional officer corps". This autonomous professionalism, it is argued, best inculcates an esprit de corps
and sense of distinct military corporateness that prevents political
interference by sworn servicemen and -women. Conversely, the tradition
of the citizen-soldier
holds that "civilianizing" the military is the best means of preserving
the loyalty of the armed forces towards civilian authorities, by
preventing the development of an independent "caste"
of warriors that might see itself as existing fundamentally apart from
the rest of society. In the early history of the United States,
according to Michael Cairo,
[the] principle of civilian control... embodied the idea
that every qualified citizen was responsible for the defense of the
nation and the defense of liberty, and would go to war, if necessary.
Combined with the idea that the military was to embody democratic
principles and encourage citizen participation, the only military force
suitable to the Founders was a citizen militia, which minimized divisions between officers and the enlisted.
In a less egalitarian practice, societies may also blur the line between "civilian" and "military" leadership by making direct appointments of non-professionals (frequently social elites benefitting from patronage or nepotism) to an officer rank. A more invasive method, most famously practiced in the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, involves active monitoring of the officer corps through the appointment of political commissars,
posted parallel to the uniformed chain of command and tasked with
ensuring that national policies are carried out by the armed forces. The
regular rotation
of soldiers through a variety of different postings is another
effective tool for reducing military autonomy, by limiting the potential
for soldiers' attachment to any one particular military unit. Some governments place responsibility for approving promotions or officer candidacies with the civilian government, requiring some degree of deference on the part of officers seeking advancement through the ranks.
Technological developments
During the term of Lyndon B. Johnson, the President and his advisors often chose specific bombing targets in Vietnam on the basis of larger geopolitical
calculations, without professional knowledge of the weapons or tactics.
Apropos of LBJ's direction of the bombing campaign in Vietnam, no air
warfare specialists attended the Tuesday lunches at which the targeting
decisions were made.
Historically, direct control over military forces deployed for war was hampered by the technological limits of command, control, and communications; national leaders, whether democratically elected or not, had to rely on local commanders to execute the details of a military campaign, or risk centrally-directed orders' obsolescence by the time they reached the front lines.
The remoteness of government from the action allowed professional
soldiers to claim military affairs as their own particular sphere of
expertise and influence; upon entering a state of war, it was often
expected that the generals and field marshals would dictate strategy and tactics, and the civilian leadership would defer to their informed judgments.
Improvements in information technology and its application to wartime command and control (a process sometimes labeled the "Revolution in Military Affairs") has allowed civilian leaders removed from the theater of conflict to assert greater control over the actions of distant military forces. Precision-guided munitions and real-time videoconferencing with field commanders now allow the civilian leadership to intervene even at the tactical
decision-making level, designating particular targets for destruction
or preservation based on political calculations or the counsel of
non-uniformed advisors.
Restrictions on Political Activities
In the United States the Hatch Act of 1939
does not directly apply to the military, however, Department of Defense
Directive 1344.10 (DoDD 1344.10) essentially applies the same rules to
the military. This helps to ensure a non-partisan military and ensure
smooth and peaceful transitions of power.
Political officers
Political officers screened for appropriate ideology have been
integrated into supervisory roles within militaries as a way to maintain
the control by political rulers. Historically they are associated most
strongly with the Soviet Union and China rather than liberal democracies.
Military dislike of political directives
While civilian control forms the normative standard in almost every society outside of military dictatorships,
its practice has often been the subject of pointed criticism from both
uniformed and non-uniformed observers, who object to what they view as
the undue "politicization" of military affairs, especially when elected
officials or political appointees micromanage the military, rather than
giving the military general goals and objectives (like "Defeat Country
X"), and letting the military decide how best to carry those orders out.
By placing responsibility for military decision-making in the hands of
non-professional civilians, critics argue, the dictates of military
strategy are subsumed to the political, with the effect of unduly
restricting the fighting capabilities of the nation's armed forces for
what should be immaterial or otherwise lower priority concerns.
Case study: United States
The "Revolt of the Admirals"
that occurred in 1949 was an attempt by senior US Navy personnel, to
force a change in budgets directly opposed to the directives given by
the Civilian leadership.
U.S. PresidentBill Clinton faced frequent allegations throughout his time in office (particularly after the Battle of Mogadishu) that he was ignoring military goals out of political and media pressure—a phenomenon termed the "CNN effect".
Politicians who personally lack military training and experience but
who seek to engage the nation in military action may risk resistance and
being labeled "chickenhawks" by those who disagree with their political goals.
In contesting these priorities, members of the professional
military leadership and their non-uniformed supporters may participate
in the bureaucratic bargaining process of the state's policy-making
apparatus, engaging in what might be termed a form of regulatory capture
as they attempt to restrict the policy options of elected officials
when it comes to military matters. An example of one such set of
conditions is the "Weinberger Doctrine", which sought to forestall another American intervention like that which occurred in the Vietnam War (which had proved disastrous for the morale and fighting integrity of the U.S. military) by proposing that the nation should only go to war in matters of "vital national interest", "as a last resort", and, as updated by Weinberger's disciple Colin Powell, with "overwhelming force". The process of setting military budgets forms another contentious intersection of military and non-military policy, and regularly draws active lobbying by rival military services for a share of the national budget.
During the 1990s and 2000s, public controversy over LGBT policy in the U.S. military
led to many military leaders and personnel being asked for their
opinions on the matter and being given deference although the decision
was ultimately not theirs to make.
During his tenure, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
raised the ire of the military by attempting to reform its structure
away from traditional infantry and toward a lighter, faster, more
technologically driven force. In April 2006, Rumsfeld was severely
criticized by some retired military officers for his handling of the Iraq War,
while other retired military officers came out in support of Rumsfeld.
Although no active military officers have spoken out against Rumsfeld,
the actions of these officers is still highly unusual. Some news
accounts have attributed the actions of these generals to the Vietnam war
experience, in which officers did not speak out against the
administration's handling of military action. Later in the year,
immediately after the November elections in which the Democrats gained
control of the Congress, Rumsfeld resigned.
A state is a polity under a system of governance. There is no undisputed definition of a state. A widely used definition from the German sociologist Max Weber is that a "state" is a polity that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, although other definitions are not uncommon.
Some states are sovereign (known as sovereign states), while others are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony, wherein supreme authority lies in another state. The term "state" also applies to federated states that are members of a federation, in which sovereignty is shared between member states and a federal body.
Speakers of American English often use the terms "state" and "government" as synonyms, with both words referring to an organized political group that exercises authority over a particular territory. In British and Commonwealth English, "state" is the only term that has that meaning, while "the government" instead refers to the ministers and officials who set the political policy for the territory, something that speakers of American English refer to as "the administration".
The word state and its cognates in some other European languages (stato in Italian, estado in Spanish and Portuguese, état in French, Staat in German) ultimately derive from the Latin word status, meaning "condition, circumstances".
The English noun state in the generic sense "condition, circumstances" predates the political sense. It is introduced to Middle English c. 1200 both from Old French and directly from Latin.
With the revival of the Roman law in 14th-century Europe, the term came to refer to the legal standing of persons (such as the various "estates of the realm"
– noble, common, and clerical), and in particular the special status of
the king. The highest estates, generally those with the most wealth and
social rank, were those that held power. The word also had associations
with Roman ideas (dating back to Cicero) about the "status rei publicae",
the "condition of public matters". In time, the word lost its reference
to particular social groups and became associated with the legal order
of the entire society and the apparatus of its enforcement.
The early 16th-century works of Machiavelli (especially The Prince) played a central role in popularizing the use of the word "state" in something similar to its modern sense. The contrasting of church and state still dates to the 16th century. The North American colonies were called "states" as early as the 1630s. The expression L'Etat, c'est moi ("I am the State") attributed to Louis XIV of France is probably apocryphal, recorded in the late 18th century.
Definition
There is no academic consensus on the most appropriate definition of the state.
The term "state" refers to a set of different, but interrelated and
often overlapping, theories about a certain range of political phenomena.
The act of defining the term can be seen as part of an ideological
conflict, because different definitions lead to different theories of
state function, and as a result validate different political strategies. According to Jeffrey and Painter,
"if we define the 'essence' of the state in one place or era, we are
liable to find that in another time or space something which is also
understood to be a state has different 'essential' characteristics".
Different definitions of the state often place an emphasis either
on the ‘means’ or the ‘ends’ of states. Means-related definitions
include those by Max Weber and Charles Tilly, both of whom define the
state according to its violent means. For Weber, the state "is a human
community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use
of physical force within a given territory" (Politics as a Vocation),
while Tilly characterises them as "coercion-wielding organisations"
(Coercion, Capital, and European States).
Ends-related definitions emphasis instead the teleological aims
and purposes of the state. Marxist thought regards the ends of the state
as being the perpetuation of class domination in favour of the ruling
class which, under the capitalist mode of production, is the
bourgeoisie. The state exists to defend the ruling class's claims to
private property and its capturing of surplus profits at the expense of
the proletariat. Indeed, Marx claimed that "the executive of the modern
state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie" (Communist Manifesto).
Liberal thought provides another possible teleology of the state.
According to John Locke, the goal of the state/commonwealth was "the
preservation of property" (Second Treatise on Government), with
'property' in Locke's work referring not only to personal possessions
but also to one's life and liberty. On this account, the state provides
the basis for social cohesion and productivity, creating incentives for
wealth creation by providing guarantees of protection for one's life,
liberty and personal property.
Another commonly accepted definition of the state is the one given at the Montevideo Convention
on Rights and Duties of States in 1933. It provides that "[t]he state
as a person of international law should possess the following
qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c)
government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other
states." And that "[t]he federal state shall constitute a sole person in the eyes of international law."
Confounding the definition problem is that "state" and
"government" are often used as synonyms in common conversation and even
some academic discourse. According to this definition schema, the states
are nonphysical persons of international law, governments are organizations of people. The relationship between a government and its state is one of representation and authorized agency.
Types of states
States may be classified by political philosophers as sovereign if they are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Other states are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony where ultimate sovereignty lies in another state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union. A federated state is a territorial and constitutional community forming part of a federation. (Compare confederacies or confederations such as Switzerland.) Such states differ from sovereign states in that they have transferred a portion of their sovereign powers to a federal government.
One can commonly and sometimes readily (but not necessarily
usefully) classify states according to their apparent make-up or focus.
The concept of the nation-state, theoretically or ideally co-terminous
with a "nation", became very popular by the 20th century in Europe, but
occurred rarely elsewhere or at other times. In contrast, some states
have sought to make a virtue of their multi-ethnic or multi-national character (HabsburgAustria-Hungary, for example, or the Soviet Union), and have emphasised unifying characteristics such as autocracy, monarchical legitimacy, or ideology. Imperial states have sometimes promoted notions of racial superiority.
Other states may bring ideas of commonality and inclusiveness to the fore: note the res publica of ancient Rome and the Rzeczpospolita of Poland-Lithuania which finds echoes in the modern-day republic. The concept of temple states centred on religious shrines occurs in some discussions of the ancient world.
Relatively small city-states, once a relatively common and often successful form of polity,
have become rarer and comparatively less prominent in modern times, although a number of them survive as federated states, like the present day German city-states, or as otherwise autonomous entities with limited sovereignty, like Hong Kong, Gibraltar and Ceuta. To some extent, urban secession,
the creation of a new city-state (sovereign or federated), continues to
be discussed in the early 21st century in cities such as London.
State and government
A state can be distinguished from a government. The state is the organization while the government is the particular group of people, the administrative bureaucracy that controls the state apparatus at a given time.
That is, governments are the means through which state power is
employed. States are served by a continuous succession of different
governments. States are immaterial and nonphysical social objects, whereas governments are groups of people with certain coercive powers.
Each successive government is composed of a specialized and
privileged body of individuals, who monopolize political
decision-making, and are separated by status and organization from the
population as a whole.
States and nation-states
States can also be distinguished from the concept of a "nation", where "nation" refers to a cultural-political community of people. A nation-state refers to a situation where a single ethnicity is associated with a specific state.
State and civil society
In the classical thought, the state was identified with both political society and civil society as a form of political community, while the modern thought distinguished the nation state as a political society from civil society as a form of economic society.
Thus in the modern thought the state is contrasted with civil society.
Antonio Gramsci
believed that civil society is the primary locus of political activity
because it is where all forms of "identity formation, ideological
struggle, the activities of intellectuals, and the construction of hegemony
take place." and that civil society was the nexus connecting the
economic and political sphere. Arising out of the collective actions of
civil society is what Gramsci calls "political society", which Gramsci
differentiates from the notion of the state as a polity. He stated that
politics was not a "one-way process of political management" but,
rather, that the activities of civil organizations conditioned the
activities of political parties and state institutions, and were
conditioned by them in turn. Louis Althusser argued that civil organizations such as church, schools, and the family
are part of an "ideological state apparatus" which complements the
"repressive state apparatus" (such as police and military) in
reproducing social relations.
Given the role that many social groups have in the development of
public policy and the extensive connections between state bureaucracies
and other institutions, it has become increasingly difficult to
identify the boundaries of the state. Privatization, nationalization, and the creation of new regulatory
bodies also change the boundaries of the state in relation to society.
Often the nature of quasi-autonomous organizations is unclear,
generating debate among political scientists on whether they are part of
the state or civil society. Some political scientists thus prefer to
speak of policy networks and decentralized governance in modern
societies rather than of state bureaucracies and direct state control
over policy.
History
The earliest forms of the state emerged whenever it became possible to centralize power in a durable way. Agriculture and writing are almost everywhere associated with this process: agriculture because it allowed for the emergence of a social class
of people who did not have to spend most of their time providing for
their own subsistence, and writing (or an equivalent of writing, like Incaquipus) because it made possible the centralization of vital information.
Since the late 19th century, virtually the entirety of the
world's inhabitable land has been parcelled up into areas with more or
less definite borders claimed by various states. Earlier, quite large
land areas had been either unclaimed or uninhabited, or inhabited by nomadic peoples who were not organised as states. However, even within present-day states there are vast areas of wilderness, like the Amazon rainforest, which are uninhabited or inhabited solely or mostly by indigenous people (and some of them remain uncontacted).
Also, there are states which do not hold de facto control over all of
their claimed territory or where this control is challenged. Currently
the international community comprises around 200 sovereign states, the vast majority of which are represented in the United Nations.
Pre-historic stateless societies
For most of human history, people have lived in stateless societies, characterized by a lack of concentrated authority, and the absence of large inequalities in economic and political power.
It is not enough to observe, in a now rather dated anthropological idiom, that hunter gatherers
live in 'stateless societies', as though their social lives were
somehow lacking or unfinished, waiting to be completed by the
evolutionary development of a state apparatus. Rather, the principal of
their socialty, as Pierre Clastres has put it, is fundamentally against the state.
Neolithic period
During the Neolithic period, human societies underwent major cultural and economic changes, including the development of agriculture,
the formation of sedentary societies and fixed settlements, increasing
population densities, and the use of pottery and more complex tools.
Sedentary agriculture led to the development of property rights, domestication of plants and animals, and larger family sizes. It also provided the basis for the centralized state form by producing a large surplus of food, which created a more complex division of labor by enabling people to specialize in tasks other than food production. Early states were characterized by highly stratified societies, with a privileged and wealthy ruling class that was subordinate to a monarch.
The ruling classes began to differentiate themselves through forms of
architecture and other cultural practices that were different from those
of the subordinate laboring classes.
In the past, it was suggested that the centralized state was
developed to administer large public works systems (such as irrigation
systems) and to regulate complex economies. However, modern
archaeological and anthropological evidence does not support this
thesis, pointing to the existence of several non-stratified and
politically decentralized complex societies.
Although state-forms existed before the rise of the Ancient Greek
empire, the Greeks were the first people known to have explicitly
formulated a political philosophy of the state, and to have rationally
analyzed political institutions. Prior to this, states were described
and justified in terms of religious myths.
During Medieval times in Europe, the state was organized on the principle of feudalism, and the relationship between lord and vassal became central to social organization. Feudalism led to the development of greater social hierarchies.
The formalization of the struggles over taxation between the
monarch and other elements of society (especially the nobility and the
cities) gave rise to what is now called the Standestaat,
or the state of Estates, characterized by parliaments in which key
social groups negotiated with the king about legal and economic matters.
These estates of the realm
sometimes evolved in the direction of fully-fledged parliaments, but
sometimes lost out in their struggles with the monarch, leading to
greater centralization of lawmaking and military power in his hands.
Beginning in the 15th century, this centralizing process gives rise to
the absolutist state.
Modern state
Cultural and national homogenization figured prominently in the rise
of the modern state system. Since the absolutist period, states have
largely been organized on a national basis. The concept of a national state, however, is not synonymous with nation state. Even in the most ethnically homogeneous societies there is not always a complete correspondence between state and nation, hence the active role often taken by the state to promote nationalism through emphasis on shared symbols and national identity.
Theories of state function
Most political theories of the state can roughly be classified into
two categories. The first are known as "liberal" or "conservative"
theories, which treat capitalism
as a given, and then concentrate on the function of states in
capitalist society. These theories tend to see the state as a neutral
entity separated from society and the economy. Marxist and anarchist
theories on the other hand, see politics as intimately tied in with
economic relations, and emphasize the relation between economic power
and political power. They see the state as a partisan instrument that primarily serves the interests of the upper class.
Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state and hierarchies to be immoral, unnecessary and harmful and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy, a self-managed, self-governed society based on voluntary, cooperative institutions.
Anarchists believe that the state is inherently an instrument of
domination and repression, no matter who is in control of it. Anarchists
note that the state possesses the monopoly on the legal use of violence.
Unlike Marxists, anarchists believe that revolutionary seizure of state
power should not be a political goal. They believe instead that the
state apparatus should be completely dismantled, and an alternative set
of social relations created, which are not based on state power at all.
Marx and Engels were clear in that the communist goal was a classless society in which the state would have "withered away", replaced only by "administration of things". Their views are found throughout their Collected Works,
and address past or then extant state forms from an analytical and
tactical viewpoint, but not future social forms, speculation about which
is generally antithetical to groups considering themselves Marxist but
who – not having conquered the existing state power(s) – are not in the
situation of supplying the institutional form of an actual society. To
the extent that it makes sense,
there is no single "Marxist theory of state", but rather several
different purportedly "Marxist" theories have been developed by
adherents of Marxism.
Marx's early writings portrayed the bourgeois state as parasitic, built upon the superstructure of the economy, and working against the public interest. He also wrote that the state mirrors class
relations in society in general, acting as a regulator and repressor of
class struggle, and as a tool of political power and domination for the
ruling class. The Communist Manifesto claimed that the state to be nothing more than "a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.
For Marxist theorists, the role of the modern bourgeois state is determined by its function in the global capitalist order. Ralph Miliband
argued that the ruling class uses the state as its instrument to
dominate society by virtue of the interpersonal ties between state
officials and economic elites. For Miliband, the state is dominated by
an elite that comes from the same background as the capitalist class.
State officials therefore share the same interests as owners of capital
and are linked to them through a wide array of social, economic, and political ties.
Gramsci's theories of state emphasized that the state is only one of the institutions in society that helps maintain the hegemony of the ruling class, and that state power is bolstered by the ideological domination of the institutions of civil society, such as churches, schools, and mass media.
Pluralism
Pluralists
view society as a collection of individuals and groups, who are
competing for political power. They then view the state as a neutral
body that simply enacts the will of whichever groups dominate the
electoral process. Within the pluralist tradition, Robert Dahl developed the theory of the state as a neutral arena for contending interests or its agencies as simply another set of interest groups.
With power competitively arranged in society, state policy is a product
of recurrent bargaining. Although pluralism recognizes the existence of
inequality, it asserts that all groups have an opportunity to pressure
the state. The pluralist approach suggests that the modern democratic
state's actions are the result of pressures applied by a variety of
organized interests. Dahl called this kind of state a polyarchy.
Pluralism has been challenged on the ground that it is not
supported by empirical evidence. Citing surveys showing that the large
majority of people in high leadership positions are members of the
wealthy upper class, critics of pluralism claim that the state serves
the interests of the upper class rather than equitably serving the
interests of all social groups.
Contemporary critical perspectives
Jürgen Habermas
believed that the base-superstructure framework, used by many Marxist
theorists to describe the relation between the state and the economy,
was overly simplistic. He felt that the modern state plays a large role
in structuring the economy, by regulating economic activity and being a
large-scale economic consumer/producer, and through its redistributive welfare state
activities. Because of the way these activities structure the economic
framework, Habermas felt that the state cannot be looked at as passively
responding to economic class interests.
Michel Foucault
believed that modern political theory was too state-centric, saying
"Maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a
mythologized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than
many of us think." He thought that political theory was focusing too
much on abstract institutions, and not enough on the actual practices of
government. In Foucault's opinion, the state had no essence. He
believed that instead of trying to understand the activities of
governments by analyzing the properties of the state (a reified
abstraction), political theorists should be examining changes in the
practice of government to understand changes in the nature of the state.
Foucault argues that it is technology that has created and made the
state so elusive and successful, and that instead of looking at the
state as something to be toppled we should look at the state as
technological manifestation or system with many heads; Foucault argues
instead of something to be overthrown as in the sense of the Marxist and Anarchist
understanding of the state. Every single scientific technological
advance has come to the service of the state Foucault argues and it is
with the emergence of the Mathematical sciences and essentially the
formation of Mathematical statistics
that one gets an understanding of the complex technology of producing
how the modern state was so successfully created. Foucault insists that
the Nation state
was not a historical accident but a deliberate production in which the
modern state had to now manage coincidentally with the emerging practice
of the Police (Cameral science) 'allowing' the population to now 'come in' into jus gentium and civitas (Civil society) after deliberately being excluded for several millennia. Democracy
wasn't (the newly formed voting franchise) as is always painted by both
political revolutionaries and political philosophers as a cry for
political freedom or wanting to be accepted by the 'ruling elite',
Foucault insists, but was a part of a skilled endeavour of switching
over new technology such as; Translatio imperii, Plenitudo potestatis and extraEcclesiam nulla salus
readily available from the past Medieval period, into mass persuasion
for the future industrial 'political' population(deception over the
population) in which the political population was now asked to insist
upon itself "the president must be elected". Where these political
symbol agents, represented by the pope and the president are now
democratised. Foucault calls these new forms of technology Biopower and form part of our political inheritance which he calls Biopolitics.
Heavily influenced by Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek neo-Marxist
theorist argued that capitalist states do not always act on behalf of
the ruling class, and when they do, it is not necessarily the case
because state officials consciously strive to do so, but because the 'structural'
position of the state is configured in such a way to ensure that the
long-term interests of capital are always dominant. Poulantzas' main
contribution to the Marxist literature on the state was the concept of
'relative autonomy' of the state. While Poulantzas' work on 'state
autonomy' has served to sharpen and specify a great deal of Marxist
literature on the state, his own framework came under criticism for its 'structural functionalism'.
State autonomy within institutionalism
State autonomy theorists believe that the state is an entity that is
impervious to external social and economic influence, and has interests
of its own.
"New institutionalist" writings on the state, such as the works of Theda Skocpol,
suggest that state actors are to an important degree autonomous. In
other words, state personnel have interests of their own, which they can
and do pursue independently of (at times in conflict with) actors in
society. Since the state controls the means of coercion, and given the
dependence of many groups in civil society on the state for achieving
any goals they may espouse, state personnel can to some extent impose
their own preferences on civil society.
Theories of state legitimacy
States generally rely on a claim to some form of political legitimacy in order to maintain domination over their subjects.
Divine right of kings
The rise of the modern day state system was closely related to
changes in political thought, especially concerning the changing
understanding of legitimate state power and control. Early modern
defenders of absolutism (Absolute monarchy), such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin undermined the doctrine of the divine right of kings
by arguing that the power of kings should be justified by reference to
the people. Hobbes in particular went further to argue that political
power should be justified with reference to the individual(Hobbes wrote
in the time of the English Civil War),
not just to the people understood collectively. Both Hobbes and Bodin
thought they were defending the power of kings, not advocating for
democracy, but their arguments about the nature of sovereignty were
fiercely resisted by more traditional defenders of the power of kings,
such as Sir Robert Filmer in England, who thought that such defenses ultimately opened the way to more democratic claims.
Rational-legal authority
Max Weber identified three main sources of political legitimacy in
his works. The first, legitimacy based on traditional grounds is derived
from a belief that things should be as they have been in the past, and
that those who defend these traditions have a legitimate claim to power.
The second, legitimacy based on charismatic leadership, is devotion to a
leader or group that is viewed as exceptionally heroic or virtuous. The
third is rational-legal authority,
whereby legitimacy is derived from the belief that a certain group has
been placed in power in a legal manner, and that their actions are
justifiable according to a specific code of written laws. Weber believed
that the modern state is characterized primarily by appeals to
rational-legal authority.
State failure
Some states are often labeled as "weak" or "failed". In David Samuels's words "...a failed state occurs when sovereignty over claimed territory has collapsed or was never effectively at all". Authors like Samuels and Joel S. Migdal
have explored the emergence of weak states, how they are different from
Western "strong" states and its consequences to the economic
development of developing countries.
Early state formation
To understand the formation of weak states, Samuels
compares the formation of European states in the 1600s with the
conditions under which more recent states were formed in the twentieth
century. In this line of argument, the state allows a population to
resolve a collective action problem, in which citizens recognize the
authority of the state and this exercise the power of coercion over
them. This kind of social organization required a decline in legitimacy
of traditional forms of ruling (like religious authorities) and replaced
them with an increase in the legitimacy of depersonalized rule; an
increase in the central government's sovereignty; and an increase in the
organizational complexity of the central government (bureaucracy).
The transition to this modern state was possible in Europe around
1600 thanks to the confluence of factors like the technological
developments in warfare, which generated strong incentives to tax and
consolidate central structures of governance to respond to external
threats. This was complemented by the increasing on the production of
food (as a result of productivity improvements), which allowed to
sustain a larger population and so increased the complexity and
centralization of states. Finally, cultural changes challenged the
authority of monarchies and paved the way to the emergence of modern
states.
Late state formation
The conditions that enabled the emergence of modern states in
Europe were different for other countries that started this process
later. As a result, many of these states lack effective capabilities to
tax and extract revenue from their citizens, which derives in problems
like corruption, tax evasion and low economic growth. Unlike the
European case, late state formation occurred in a context of limited
international conflict that diminished the incentives to tax and
increase military spending. Also, many of these states emerged from
colonization in a state of poverty and with institutions designed to
extract natural resources, which have made more difficult to form
states. European colonization also defined many arbitrary borders that
mixed different cultural groups under the same national identities,
which has made difficult to build states with legitimacy among all the
population, since some states have to compete for it with other forms of
political identity.
As a complement of this argument, Migdal gives a historical account on how sudden social changes in the Third World during the Industrial Revolution
contributed to the formation of weak states. The expansion of
international trade that started around 1850, brought profound changes
in Africa, Asia and Latin America that were introduced with the
objective of assure the availability of raw materials for the European
market. These changes consisted in: i) reforms to landownership laws
with the objective of integrate more lands to the international economy,
ii) increase in the taxation of peasants and little landowners, as well
as collecting of these taxes in cash instead of in kind as was usual up
to that moment and iii) the introduction of new and less costly modes
of transportation, mainly railroads. As a result, the traditional forms
of social control became obsolete, deteriorating the existing
institutions and opening the way to the creation of new ones, that not
necessarily lead these countries to build strong states.
This fragmentation of the social order induced a political logic in
which these states were captured to some extent by "strongmen", who were
capable to take advantage of the above-mentioned changes and that
challenge the sovereignty of the state. As a result, these
decentralization of social control impedes to consolidate strong states.
