State Theories – An Overview

Abstract

The aim of this study is to overview and to analyze the current situation of the Hungarian state theory. The state-theoretical stocktaking was made unavoidable by the autonomy of the political sciences in disciplinary and institutional sense and by the history of science’s turn of its departure from jurisprudence. The starting point and the guideline of the analysis comes from the problem formulated in the thesis of „the state exists, the state theory vanishes”. The study distinguishes seven trends of the Hungarian state-theoretical research, and it argues in favour of that the reflexive state theory developed in the context of the sociological social theory research program is able to lay down the foundations of the political sciences’ autonomy, and to determine its science-taxonomic position.