Like all other social groups, the state, the most significant of them all, is the specific unity of a multitude of individuals, or at any rate of individual activities, and the inquiry into the nature of the state is fundamentally an inquiry into the nature of this unity. The problem is in what manner, according to what criterion, is this multitude of individuals welded into what we are wont to assume to be a higher unity? How do the separate individuals forming the state, or their individual activities, combine into a super-individual whole? This inquiry is, however, also identical with that concerning the peculiar 'reality' of the state, the specific nature of its being. And if, as is almost taken for granted by modern sociology, in order to consider the state, as also other social institutions, as a natural reality, the same reality or kind of existence is attributed to it as to natural phenomena, then this presupposes that the sociological data by means of which the unity of its object or objects (the social institutions)