The state claims, through the institutions competent within its territorial order, the exclusive right to employ coercion and violence as legitimate means within that territory, and legitimates that claim through its circle civilisation.
- Explanation.
- The institutions through which this claim is exercised need not be concentrated at a single territorial or administrative level. Competences may be distributed among institutions operating at different territorial levels and may be constitutionally assigned, delegated, shared or otherwise delimited.
- For the purposes of the theory, it is therefore not decisive at which institutional level a particular collectively binding competence is exercised, nor whether the territorial circle itself forms part of a wider political order. What matters is that, within a territorially delimited social order, institutions possess recognised competences to establish collectively binding rules and that compliance with those rules can ultimately be supported by coercive means regarded within that order as legitimate.
- A territorial circle can accordingly possess the characteristics by which the state is defined in this theory, while itself being embedded in a wider territorial political order. The theory does not determine in advance which territorial units must or may be designated as states; it identifies the social mechanisms associated with territorially organised, collectively binding and coercively enforceable institutional orders.The particular distribution of competences between territorial levels is itself institutionalised and may therefore become the object of political struggle and social change.
- Note. Education as an instrument of deliberate civilising through state institutions. Education provides a potentially important historical case for examining how political and administrative actors may use state institutions to deliberately civilise individuals and circles:
- Education provides a potentially important historical case for examining how political and administrative actors may use state institutions to deliberately civilise individuals and circles. The development of Dutch education from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries onward can be studied not only in terms of why education became increasingly regulated through state institutions, but also in terms of the personal and societal civilisation that political and administrative actors sought to promote through it.
- Within the conceptual framework of The Art of Revolution, such research could examine which civilisation elements were transmitted through education: assumptions about reality and authority, norms and values, behavioural repertoires, and goals and ideals. Relevant sources would include not only explicit curricula and teaching content, but also textbooks, history teaching, disciplinary practices, expected manners and behaviour, school routines, the position and authority of teachers, and institutional rules.
- A second question concerns institutionalisation. Civilisation elements promoted through education can become embedded in legislation, supervision, curricula, teacher training, examinations, textbooks, and other educational institutions. Once institutionalised, they may be reproduced across generations without remaining dependent on the original political actors who introduced them. This makes education particularly relevant to the reproductive civilising loop described by the theory. The general theory explicitly distinguishes such institutional fixation from individual internalisation.
- Citizenship education provides a particularly useful field of inquiry. It raises the empirical question of which conceptions of the citizen, the state, legitimate authority, social order, and the common good were transmitted through education in different historical periods. Such research should distinguish between the civilisation intended by state actors, actual educational practice in schools, and the extent to which pupils subsequently internalised the civilisation elements offered to them.
- Education can therefore be studied as a historical case in which state institutions, deliberate civilising, source authority, institutionalisation, internalisation, and intergenerational reproduction interact. It may provide an empirical test of how an existing state civilisation is reproduced, while also showing the limits of deliberate civilising: what the state intends to transmit, what schools actually transmit, and what individuals eventually internalise need not coincide.
- See also Proposition 097. Education is also relevant to the role of the governing elite in defining and promoting conceptions of the general interest, since educational institutions may be used to transmit and reproduce such conceptions across generations. This process is recursive (see Proposition 058): institutionalised education also civilises future members of the governing elite, who may later participate in defining, maintaining, or modifying the very educational institutions and civilisation elements that contributed to their own formation.
- Relevant literature. Ramirez, Francisco O. & John Boli (1987): The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutionalization”, Sociology of Education, 60(1), 2–17. The authors analyse the rise of state educational systems in nineteenth-century Europe and interpret mass schooling as an important instrument of nation-building and the institutional formation of the modern state.
Last updated: 4 October 2026