'I am the State' was probably never said by Louis XIV
The line L'État, c'est moi is pinned to Louis XIV, but it is probably apocryphal and is first attested only in the late eighteenth century. The quip still captures an old ambiguity: for centuries the word state described a person's standing and power before it came to mean an impersonal political order.
State and its European cousins, such as stato, estado, état and Staat, come from the Latin status, condition, from stare, to stand or endure. English used state for condition from around 1200, well before any political sense. When Roman law revived in fourteenth-century Europe, the word described people's legal standing, as in the estates of nobles, commoners and clergy, and above all the special status of the king, echoing Cicero's phrase for the condition of public affairs. Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses on Livy, in the early sixteenth century, helped push it toward its modern meaning, though his stato still largely meant the position of whoever held power.
People lived without states for most of prehistory. The earliest emerged about 5,500 years ago, as stratified societies built institutions and centralised governments that grew with cities, often spurred by insecurity and competition for territory. Stateless societies did not vanish; the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is an example of a society without primarily political institutions.
There is no agreed definition. Max Weber's is the most cited: a community that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. Walter Scheidel lists what mainstream definitions share, including centralised institutions that enforce rules over a bounded population and a divide between rulers and ruled. A state is also not a nation; the first is a political and legal unit, the second a matter of identity and culture.
Charles Tilly offered a blunter view, describing states as coercion-wielding organisations with priority over all others in their territory. He listed their activities as war making, state making, protection, extraction, adjudication, distribution and production, and argued that war and states create each other. Contractarian theories instead see states arising because cooperation benefits everyone, while predatory theories stress rulers' capacity to exploit the ruled.
Source: State (polity)
