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A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. [1] They have existed in many parts of the world throughout history, including cities such as Rome, Carthage, Athens and Sparta and the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan.
City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community: "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own were not unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another ...
Evidence of the earliest known city-states has been found in ancient Mesopotamia around 3700 BCE, suggesting that the history of the state is less than 6,000 years old; thus, for most of the human prehistory the state did not exist. For 99.8 percent of human history people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages.
Urban sociology is the sociological study of cities and urban life. One of the field’s oldest sub-disciplines, urban sociology studies and examines the social, historical, political, cultural, economic, and environmental forces that have shaped urban environments.
As a social science, the discipline often overlaps with sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, political science, economics, and public policy, among others. From a humanities perspective, communication is concerned with rhetoric and persuasion (traditional graduate programs in communication studies trace their history to the ...
Misunderstanding Gramsci, the New Left assigned civil society a key role in defending people against the state and the market and in asserting the democratic will to influence the state. [67] At the same time, neo-liberal thinkers consider civil society as a site for struggle to subvert Communist and authoritarian regimes. [ 68 ]
State formation can include state-building and nation-building. Academic debate about various theories is a prominent feature in fields like anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. [2] Dominant frameworks emphasize the superiority of the state as an organization for waging war and extracting resources.
State capacity is widely cited as an essential element to why some countries are rich and others are not: "It has been established that the richest countries in the world are characterized by long-lasting and centralized political institutions"; "that poverty is particularly widespread and intractable in countries that lack a history of ...