The British idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet offered, in the early twentieth century, a philosophical analysis of the nature of the state which to this day has not been adequately digested.
Bosanquet argues that a philosophical theory of some aspect of experience is an attempt to place that aspect in the context of experience as a whole. Viewing the State thus philosophically, he writes:
“We are thus led to see more plainly the true character of the State as a source of pervading adjustments and an idea-force, holding together a complex hierarchy of groups, and not itself a separable thing like the monarch or the ‘government…’”
Seen from Bosanquet’s vantage point, the justification for the State’s existence is that it is the condition for society forming any sort of unity at all. As such, Bosanquet offers, in advance, a critique of projects such as Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism or Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism: Rather than abolishing the State as they claim to do, these projects are, in fact, recommendations for reconfiguring the State in a form their authors believe will function more justly.