Pettit, Philip. The State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 376. $39.95 (cloth).

Philip Pettit uses the term ‘state’ to refer to something other than government per se. Government is the “body of authorities or officials who run its business” (15), whereas the state is “the entity in whose name all such agents and agencies operate” (16).

The state has not been with us forever. Still, today’s states are in no danger of withering away, for three reasons. We need states to protect us from other states. No state is powerful enough to appoint itself a world government. And peoples don’t trust each other enough for any given state to be salient as a candidate for world government (1).

Thus, the “inescapability of the worldwide state system means that the future and welfare of our species—and perhaps that of others too—depends on how states perform. It is only if we can recruit states individually and collectively to the service of human flourishing that we can hope to deal with climate change, pandemic threat, chronic deprivation, and the eruptions of inhumanity that seem to come with our genes” (2). So we hope, although Pettit hastens to add that the state has a decidedly mixed record (2). Many entities we recognize as states today are failed states (3).

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