Please clarify your post, entitled, "The Political State," as to what
*other* kinds of state may have existed, or might ever exist. Claims to
this effect are legion in recorded history, but they never wash. For instance,
the sociologist Michael Mann accepts the claims to "Ideological" power which
emerged from a snowball fight at canossa, Italy, in 1077, where Gregory VII
outbeaned his opponent, Henry IV, with more and harder snowballs than the
other way around; it being entirely beside the point that the civil adminis-
tration in Germany at this time consisted entirely of bishops appointed
hitherto by the secular power.
The aforementioned event was taught to me in all seriousness by eminent
sociologists, citing still more eminent (and dead) sociologists as having
been one of those incidents unique to so-called Western Civilization, and
as having contributed to making the latter whatever it is today, anent which
no comment. The facts, however, say otherwise. Specifically, that in 404,
the Buddhist monk Hui-yuan wrote a *Treatise explaining the reasons why monks
are not obliged to pay homage to sovereigns*, *Shamen bujing wangzhe lun*.
This went far beyond the Gregorian Reforms, asserting that the Church was
entirely free to ignore the secular power altogether. (The year 404 saw the
state taken over by a thuggish military dictator, Liu Yu, subsequently first
ruler of the Liu Song dynasty, 420-79.) Which, moreover, represented at the
time a far more profoundly popular sentiment, in the capital of the Southern
Empire, than was was true of Gregory's appeal in the miserable little ruined
village that was eleventh century Rome.
Similar claims, by Muslims and "Authorities on Muslims," have been made
anent the Islamic state. Likewise, there was the Kirkpatrick doctrine which
distinguished between the Totalitarian (sensu Communist) and the Authoritarian
("our sonofabitch") states, whereby the former, once installed, endureth
forever (empirically falsified 1989-91); where the latter was susceptible
to amelioration (which you may inquire of Zaireans and Indonesians about).
Briefly, is Mann's IEMP just another sociological Tetragrammaton, like
Parsons' AGIL?
Daniel A. Foss