Note 7 — Chapter II · DISCOVERY OF THE STATE

This is a convenient place for making explicit a qualification which has to be understood throughout but which is slighted in the text. The words “government” and “officers” are taken functionally, not in terms of some particular structure which is so familiar to us that it leaps to the eyes when these words are used. Both words in their functional meaning are much wider in application than what is meant when we speak, say, of the government and officers of Great Britain or the United States. In households, for example, there have usually been rule and “heads”; the parents, for most purposes the father, have been officers of the family interest. The “patriarchal family” presents an emphatic intensification, on account of comparative isolation of the household from other social forms, of what exists in lesser degree in almost all families. The same sort of remark applies to the use of the term “states,” in connection with publics. The text is concerned with modern conditions, but the hypothesis propounded is meant to hold good generally. So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous functions. The argument concerns these functions and the mode of their operation, no matter what word be used, though for the sake of brevity the word “state,” like the words “government” and “officer,” has been freely employed.