This chapter considers two claims that have gained widespread acceptance in recent discussions about the state. The first of these is that, when we refer to the state, we are simply talking about the institutions and coercive mechanisms of government. Anglophone political theory has long resisted efforts to grant the state its own distinct form of personality, one that would distinguish it from the particular governments who act in its name. Instead, it has tended to regard the state merely as an apparatus of rule that monopolizes the exercise of legitimate force. The second claim, pressed by many commentators, is that the state is now in a process of terminal decline. Due to a variety of contemporary forces, such as the rise of multi-national corporations and other economic institutions of international reach, the institutions of the state, we are told, are shrinking, retreating, ‘fading into the shadows’. As a result, the concept of the state itself is said to be losing any theoretical significance. What should we think of these two current judgments about the state? Neither of them seems to me at all satisfactory, and I shall devote these remarks to explaining my doubts.