As is often the case in the history of language, large etymological shifts followed profound changes in social organization. New vocabulary was needed to describe a radically new situation. To treat the modern state as simply a variation in the history of societies is to ignore the fact that there were no such things as societies in the sense of clearly bounded and unitary systems of interaction until the birth of the modern state. As Anthony Giddens says, traditional social systems are composed not of one society but of many "societies"; the modern unitary society that originated in Europe is
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