Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Searching for the state in the idea of the crown; 2. From the state as official to the state as machine: the nineteenth-century development of bureaucracy; 3. The state as sovereign and the state as corporation: Austin and Hart in political context; 4. Civil society: the English fellowships and the state; 5. The private life of the state: the crown and the public sphere; 6. A public law without a state: the political commitments of the new administrative law; 7. No rights against the state: government wrongdoing and the law; 8. Privatisation, deregulation and reconceiving the state; 9. (Human) rights against the state; 10. Prospectus.