This lecture presents the text of Quentin Skinner's 2008 British Academy Lecture on the Genealogy of the Modern State, in which he attempts to explain that investigating the genealogy of the state reveals that there has never been a single, universally agreed-upon concept to which the word "state" corresponds. The lecture suggests that any moral or political term so deeply entangled in so many ideological disputes over such a long period is destined to resist any attempt at definition.
In retrospect, The Genealogy of the Modern State is a condensed but expanded version, incorporating new documentary sources and commentary, of what Skinner had begun earlier in his work, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, in the 1970s. One of its central aspects is his concern with the study of the origin and evolution of the concept of "state."
