Marx looked forward to the withering of the state. He was centuries late. Figgis says it already happened in the middle ages:
“As Professor Maitland pointed out, under feudalism there is no public law; all rights are private, including those of the king. It is this absence of a theory of the State as such which characterises especially medieval history, except for the great Church as a whole. In the strict sense of the term, there is no sovereign in the Middle Ages; only as we find even a little later in France, there is an etat which belongs to the king; but there is also an Etat de la Republique , while even a lawyer in the Paris Parlement has his etat . Only very gradually does State come to mean the organisation of the nation and nothing else.”
