This article is concerned with the perception of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the State and the forms of its reception and critique by readers and opponents belonging to related schools of thought and disciplines such as anthropology. Bourdieu’s theory took shape in French Algeria during his military service and emerged in the liberated intellectual climate of the May 1968 generation. The paper highlights the foundations and backgrounds of this conception by reviewing the most important philosophical approaches from which he drew inspiration or with which he engaged in critical debates (both theoretical and practical) about the concept of the state which he saw as a legal ploy and a fantasy of jurisprudence. Bourdieu argued that the state does not exist; that it is a legal illusion produced by jurists who, by creating the state, simultaneously produced themselves as jurists and lawyers.​​