For him the state was only an organizational system through which some human beings are enabled to act on behalf of (or against) others. … Men and women need in their rulers a power of agency which they can themselves only very marginally control. The subjects of every state are committed permanently by their political subjection to acts the character of which they cannot know and the consequences of which may embellish or devastate their lives.

XREF: Relates to Hobbes's Leviathan and theories of state sovereignty where subjects delegate agency they cannot control.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 1222