*Two metaphors are helpful in understanding the State: (i) that the State acts as a network, conveying decisions made by the responsible parties so that it is both the medium of constitutional and strategic change, and also the expression of constitutional and strategic change; and (2) that the State depends on society the way a virus depends on the nuclear material of a cell, so that it is both made in time—has a birth and life and decay—and made of time, that is, what we know of it is the narrative of this morphology, the story of its adaptation to the conditions of society. The State, that is, both composes history (1) and is composed of history (2).