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CHAPTER ONE

1.0     THE NOTION OF STATE AND JUSTICE

1.1     GENERAL NOTION OF STATE

As the saying goes that, no man is an Island, it follows that no man, no matter his status in life, owes the origin of his existence and development solely to himself alone.  Man needs his fellow man to exist and grow in a way that is fitting for him as a rational creature.  This avenue needed for inter-personal relationship is the political organization. General to the early study of political organization by Plato and Aristotle is the concept of ‘Polis’ or the ‘state’. Their study of ‘state’ is restricted within the confines of Greek city.  It is in the modern time that the notion of state became universalized. However, the state, etymologically, comes from the Latin words ‘civitas’ which means city and ‘stare’ which means to stand.  According to the new encyclopedia Britannica a state is: “a government clothed with monopoly of force for the preservation of peace and the other and having a plenitude of authority within…independent of external control”. The state is entrusted with the task of providing for its citizens, the basic rights and duties.  In consideration of the extent of power, which the state possesses, the lexicon Webster’s dictionary defines it as, “the supreme civil authority recognized by a politically organized people of a given geographical area.” In other words, the authority of the state should be supreme since it is in itself the end of man’s quest for good as far as this physical world is concerned. Nevertheless, the above classical definitions are given from the context of the contemporary notion of state.  But prior to these definitions, there have been various opinions among philosophers as regarding the state.  The definitions of the state were considered mainly from the point of view of its origin.  Thus, two camps: the contractualists and the naturalist emerged to tackle this problem.  The former holds that the state originates out of contract or convention while for the later; the state has its origin from nature. For the early Greeks and their philosophers, it is a truism and a self-evident fact that the state is natural to man.  Plato made this distinctively clear in his work, The Republic, when he says:

The origin of a city… is, in my opinion, due to the fact that no one of us is sufficient for himself but each is in need of many things… then man, being in want of many things gather into one settlement many partners and helpers; to satisfy their diverse needs, and to this common settlement, we give the name city…

The state for Plato is a state of type; it is the ideal one, whereby the good is the goal, which everybody in the state aspires to.  But to grasp it means having knowledge of it (the good). This good transcends all customs and conventions, it is natural and permanent.  According to Sabine, “it must belong to nature and not to the shifting winds of customs and conventions”.

However, Plato is not interested with the practicability of the ideal state, rather he sets it as a mode which every state should strive to conform to.  Sabine affaims this when he says:

…the Republic aims not to describe states but to find what is essential or typical in them the general sociological principles upon which any society of human beings depends, in so far as it aims at good life.

Succinctly, Plato’s notion of the state is not a mere narration or description of events in the state, but speculative and prescriptive.

The ancient philosophers mainly, Aristotle and Plato considered the state only from the point of view of Greek ‘Polis’ in particular.  In other words, the state for them refers only to the Greek city.  But the Stoics, the Epicurians and the skeptics changed the whole idea of the state as a particular city of Athens to the universal and international state, where every man is a citizen of the world.  For them the basic law that should guide man in the state is not that which is particular to a city, but the natural law.

This is because the state is natural to man. It arose out of man’s nature as a social being.  And as such, man needs peace and order.  But this cannot be achieved without an administration, invested with power, which should control the affairs of the state.

However, since man is not self-sufficient, therefore, he needs to interact with others in order to develop fully. With the advent of the modern epoch of political philosophy, the notion of state, and its origin changed for them, the state is not natural. It arose out of contract. This seems to stem from the sophists’ principle that, “man is the measure of all things; of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not.” State is a manmade entity, which arose out of cultural evolution of individual man. However, the philosophers of this modern era tend to support absolute sovereignty.

Thomas Hobbes one of the chief proponents and supporters of conventionalism believes that man in his natural state was apolitical.  He tried to justify this position by positing that man originally existed in a state of “Homo-homini Lupus,” a situation in which man is a wolf to man. This state is an unhappy state, full of anarchy, confusion and pandemonium.  There was no morality, no justice and no law.  Each man was egocentrically concerned with achieving his own goal and not considering the goal of others.  Infact, “there is always war of every one against everyone”. However, this ‘war’ is not always a physical combat. 

So, in order to achieve peace, men should renounce their natural rights and enter into a social contract submitting this right to the common wealth-the leviathan. This leviathan, then takes charge of the natural rights of the people.  It becomes the absolute sovereign.  This sovereign can be one man or an assembly of persons.  It in turn owes the citizens security and peace.

Among the contemporary thinkers, Karl Marx came up with his Dialectical materialism.  For him what his predecessors (like Hegel and Plato) called ideal world must be achieved not by mere intellectual speculation but by exertion of physical efforts on nature.  The state is primarily a socio-economic formation, which arises through stages of some historical economic development.

According to him:

The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called social relation, society and specifically, a society at a definite state of historical development… ancient society, feudal society, courgois socilist society are such totalities…

The state and its elements exist in ancient society, feudal society, capitalist society where class struggle reaches its peak. According to Nwoko I.M:

The state is the tool of the dominant, ruling, or oppressing class of the society. Its legal and political order forms a superstructure, designed by the class (the bourgeois) to control the mode of production.

It is therefore to extinguish this antagonism arising between the capitalists who own the forces of production and the proletariat who are merely workers, that brings about the emergence of socialism which then settles down to communism.  For once this communism is established, the state and its elements automatically cease to exist.  There then exists only a classless society, where the factors of production are owned in common.

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