> you're re-purposing the term "state" to describe not an organized institution established for the purpose of exercising power, but to any structure that emerges within any social context

So that seems to be the crux of our disagreement. I consider the notion that a state is necessarily an "institution established for the purpose of exercising power" to be bunk. As such, I use the term "state" fairly loosely: I didn't bring it into the conversation: you introduced the concept of a "political state" and I went along with it. I haven't yet found any particular reason to be nuanced about my definition.

> I agree that nations are far too broad and coarse to be considered substantive social contexts, but - and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong - I have a feeling that you would articulate merely smaller versions of nations as the appropriate scope within which to equate the state with society.

I prefer cities, but it's not something I consider myself on firm ground with. Cities are natural foci for people, but to discount rural zones and more importantly natural resources as demarcated by geography is an obvious mistake.

However, I also believe that it's a good idea to have institutions like the UN, to function as a world government capable of speaking for all of humanity.

So... smaller? Not really. I agree with your list of "families, friendships," etc., but I'm also happy with scaling the notion up to the species level, because there exist policies that we want to express at such a large scope. I can't usefully speak to a larger scope because I am admittedly disinterested in animal rights politics and we haven't met a sci-fi style alien species yet.

None of these are strong opinions, though, because they fall into the area of things I know I don't know.

> What we think of as the institutions of law - judicial institutions, not legislative ones - are merely a failsafe mechanism to be appealed to when disputes and controversies are not sufficiently contained and addressed within their originating social context, and threaten to escalate and spill over into other people's lives.

The problem is that you can't fully isolate problems. Your local religious congregation has members who work in a few dozen different businesses, all of which serve the wider community and more than likely do business in even further communities. This is even more true in the wake of globalization. Something as simple as a teenager deciding to leave his parents because they're stupid is going to call into question what kind of community-level support he can call upon to survive without his parents' blessing.

Every manifested law is going to find some way to clash with other manifested law. Who mediates the disputes for this, and under what rule of law do those mediations take place?

> And when people talk about "the state" and "government" in the sense that began this thread, they're talking about this form of legislative state, not using those terms to describe the bottom-up patterns that formalize the mechanisms of concrete and particular social contexts.

And I object to that. In a democracy, there shouldn't be prescriptive rules imposed by a small group onto the majority. The majority should have participated in the formulation of any prescriptive rules that are proposed. It irritates me that we haven't figured out how to make that happen, and it irritates me even more that I am pretty dry on useful ideas.

I'm going to footnote a thing I wrote [0] last month that gives a more bird's-eye view of my perspective. One of the last things I say there is this: "It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it." On the whole, Americans have given up on the democratic project. Some are trying to establish themselves as oligarchs, while others are trying to find a way to exist anarchically, and those are the ones with opinions on the matter.

But the truth is that America isn't trying to be a better democracy. I want to live in a better democracy. I want other people to want it, too. I want other people to have a substantive vision of how it could be better, and to be motivated towards working for that. Pointing out that the people is the government, or at least should be, is part of that.

> it's absurd to suggest that any actual government operating on that legislative-state model

There is a lack of clarity in whether we're discussing theory or practice here. In practice, I don't consider any existing democracy to be sufficiently competent. And a huge part of that problem is that democracy had to be implemented on the backs of inherently injust political systems rather than magicked out of thin air. That detritus from history stays with us and makes more difficult an already challenging project.

I've felt that, in this thread, we've reasonably made it clear when we're talking about existing, present-day occurrences by citing "in America", but perhaps not?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998145