The state is the strange achievement of making political power impersonal — of transferring obedience from a person to an office, from a ruler to an institution that persists when rulers change. How that depersonalization happens, what it makes possible, and where it breaks down is the central puzzle of political life.
When the king of France died, his courtiers cried: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ In that formula is the entire mystery of the state. One man dies; another takes his place; the crown continues. The loyalty was never to the man. It was to something that couldn’t die. Making that something real — giving the invisible institution a body that outlasts any individual — is the political achievement that separates states from every other form of human organization.