Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, man.

Oh, James. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 39, sovereignty,

constitutions, and the state. And I'm your host, James Fodor. In this episode, we're going to

look at the core principles of modern governments and states, including a look at some of the

different terminologies, how the different words like nation, state, country, and so on

are used. And then we'll look at some of the principles of government, including sovereignty,

which is a very important topic in political science, the rule of law, representation, separation

of powers, separation of church and state, and a number of other such things.

Recommended pre-listing for this episode is episode 30 Systems of Government, which will give

you some of the background that will be helpful in understanding the things I'm talking about

in this episode.

Just one clarification.

In episode 30, we looked at the different types of systems of government.

That is the way of running a country.

In this episode, we're going to look at some of the different types of states, which is not the same thing. It's not... types of states is not the way that a

country is run. It's the setup of the country itself. This is not the same, although it's

often related, and I'll clarify the exact difference a little bit more later on when we get

to that part of the episode.

But for the moment, let's start off with some basic terminology and some words that people often get confused in these contexts.

So first of all, we're going to define the most basic term which is state.

A state is a political organization with a centralized government that has supreme independent

authority over a geographic area. You can tell that that's a quote, but it's a good concise

...