Bret Devereaux

'State' isn't a value judgement, it is an organizational descriptor. Steppe nomads? Super-successful, but generally not organized into states. Classical-period Sparta? Pretty clearly a state to me, but also pretty clearly a garbage society.

ofc you see assumptions that 12th century France was a state (it wasn't) or that the Zulu kingdom wasn't a state (it was) because people read their preconceptions into the definition. But that's why the definition has to be clear and uniformly appliedhttps://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1353170966738849793 …

So I disagree - there is nothing particularly 'western' or 'European' about the state. If anything, a frank investigation of the origins of states makes clear that the state emerged outside of Europe and was (at multiple points) an imported innovation, like so many other things.

And so there is no reason that the term 'state' has to be western-centric in that way. When that happens, the problem is in the scholar, not the term.

Sure, that particular intellectual history emerges in Europe, but that's not the only place we see the state, or thinking about the state. Take a look at how the polity is imagined, for instance, in the Book of Lord Shang (China, 3rd cent BC) and you find...the state.

Both in practice - he is imagining a polity that clearly has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - and in intellectual conception as an entity controlled by but distinct from its ruler.