Pg.120
""A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, ... such is the origin of the state." "The state as distinct from tribal organization," says Lester Ward, "begins with the conquest of one race by another." "Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state." "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the agent which has created the state." The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished. "The State," says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force."
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters or herders. For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and enhausts them with the long day's toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The huter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave, and rule.
(It is a law that holds only for eaerly societies, since under more complex conditions a variety of other factors -- greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence -- contribute to determine the issue. So Eqypt was conquered not only by Hyksos, Ethiopian, Arab and Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and England -- though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on an imperialistic scale.)"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.3, Pt.II, 1935
"[...] In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every stage begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting interests of a thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spreads the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive then before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere. "Without autocratic rule," as Spencer said, "the evolution of society could not have commenced."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.3, Pt.II, 1935 (italics added )
"A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination -- the family, the church, the school -- to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for the docile coherence which is indispensable to war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the "subject" sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.3, Pt.II, 1935
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