Thank you CountArach for your detailed commentary.

I'm of the opinion that the state is a "legal fiction" in the true sense of the word - the state has been created to maximise the efficiency and create an organised system of living for a political community. The state is just imagined, more or less, we perceive it as a "phantom fortress" that is there to remind us that we live in a community, political, social, economical...

When considering your question with regards to the "studying of the state", we are mainly imprinting our own idea of the modern state and applying it to the state that existed in the Ancient and Medieval times. In many aspects, the Medieval kingdom-vassalage relationship and the Ancient absolute monarchy can be considered a state - it provided an organisation, a political community, an economic and social system and above all always had the "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" as Max Weber has said. In a way you are right, there is a lack of objectivity perhaps, but we see the modern state as a model in itself. Plato was concerned with the best regime that a political community could have - we have our own idea of a perfect state which more or less we imprint over the states that have existed in history.

Would it be more profitable to look at what people thought it was?

The question that remains here is this - who do we consider for this? The modern state is founded on democratic and republican principles, so when we consider a state we consider all of the people. But back in those times, who do we consider? The middle class was only restricted, it was a working (slave / serf class ) social strata, the nobility and those in between that were craftsmen, scholars, clergymen, merchants... Hypothetically speaking, by considering the opinions of the people from those times, the opinions of those who had political, economical and social weight, we can see that the state is not really a modern invention. But if we consider the opinions of those from all social strata, then we see that the state in itself is a modern invention because the state from Ancient and Medieval times was highly restrictive and it only existed for those who had the power and the wealth to sustain themselves in that social position.

Looking at the literature concerning this aspect, and looking at how should we define the state, the question that you have posed will always remain - is the state really modern? Are we really studying the state or we only look to it with the lens of a modern world?

Personally I am of the opinion that the state was invented from the moment people organised themselves in political communities. The modern state is exactly what it is, a modern interpretation of the state/political community where all social classes are considered equal and thus benefit equally from the efficiency and organisation that a state creates.