Understanding Company Policies and the Origin of the State

Company Policies and Their Purpose

In clearer terms, considering their purpose, we can distinguish two kinds of companies:

1. Private Companies: These have defined purposes, voluntarily chosen by their members. Their activities are aimed directly and immediately at the goal that inspired their creation through a conscious and voluntary act.
2. General-Purpose Companies: These have an indefinite and generic purpose, creating the conditions necessary for individuals and other companies that integrate into them to reach their particular purposes. Participation in these societies almost always depends on an act of will.

Companies are commonly referred to as general-purpose political societies precisely because they are not attached to a particular purpose and are not restricted to limited sectors of human activity. Instead, they seek to integrate all social activities that occur within them.

Thus, all political societies are those that, in order to create conditions for achieving the private purposes of their members, are concerned with the totality of human actions, coordinating them in relation to a common end.

Among the political societies, the family reaches a more limited circle of people and is a universal phenomenon. Besides it, many species of political societies exist or have existed, located in time and space, such as tribes and clans. But the most important political society, by its ability to influence and condition, as well as its amplitude, is the state. We come, therefore, to the first notion of the state: it is a political society.

Origin and Formation of the State

Admittedly, the name of the state, indicating a political society, appears only in the sixteenth century.

From the standpoint of the time of emergence of the state, the many existing theories can be reduced to three fundamental positions:

1. For many authors, the State and the company itself have always existed. As long as man lives on earth, he finds himself embedded in a social organization, with its power and authority to determine the behavior of the whole group.
2. A second group of authors agrees that human society has existed without the state during a certain period.
3. The third position is one that has already been mentioned: the authors admit only political society as a State endowed with certain well-defined characteristics.

Examining the major theories that seek to explain the formation of the native state, we arrive at an initial classification of two major groups:

• Theories that argue for the natural or spontaneous formation of the state, with no coincidence between them as to the cause, but having in common the assertion that the state was formed naturally, not by a purely voluntary act.
• Theories that support the formation of the contract states, presenting in common, although they also differ among themselves regarding the causes, the belief that it was the desire of some men, or of all men, which led to the creation of the state.

Non-Contractarian Theories of State Emergence

Concerning the determinants of the emergence of the state, the non-contractarian theories most significant may be grouped as follows:

• Familial or Patriarchal Source: Each primitive family has expanded and given rise to a state.
• Rise in Acts of Force, Violence, or Conquest: With minor variations, these theories hold, in summary, that the superior strength of a social group allowed it to submit a weaker group, rising, the state of combination of dominant and dominated.
• Rise in Equity or Economic Causes: The state formed to take advantage of the benefits of the division of labor, integrating the different professional activities, characterized thus by the economic motive.
• Origin in the Internal Development of Society: According to these theories, whose main representative is Robert Lowie, the state is a germ, a potential in all human societies, which, however, dispense with keeping it simple and undeveloped. But those companies that achieve higher levels of development and achieve a complex form of the state have an absolute need, and then he is. There is, therefore, the influence of factors external to society, including the interests of individuals or groups, but it is itself the spontaneous development of the society that gives rise to the state.