WEBVTT NOTE The Rise of the Nation-State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.280 Our topic is the rise of the nation-state. The first problem we must confront is that 2 00:00:13.280 --> 00:00:20.460 most of what is said about the nation-state is not true. The nation-states of the world 3 00:00:20.460 --> 00:00:27.080 present themselves as republics today, or democracies, or even to cover all bases, as 4 00:00:27.080 --> 00:00:37.080 is democratic republics, but they are neither democracies nor republics in any traditional sense of those terms. 5 00:00:37.080 --> 00:00:47.080 Nor are most nation states really nations. Great Britain, for instance, is not a nation for the United Kingdom of at least four nations. 6 00:00:47.080 --> 00:00:52.080 And many things called states are not really states. 7 00:00:52.080 --> 00:01:01.080 Saudi Arabia, for example, I would say, is not a state, but a family oil business. 8 00:01:01.080 --> 00:01:07.080 And further, many people are inclined to identify government with state. 9 00:01:07.080 --> 00:01:12.080 And when it is said, quite rightly, that mankind cannot live without government, 10 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:19.080 we are inclined to read this to mean that mankind cannot exist without the state. 11 00:01:19.080 --> 00:01:23.980 But there is no necessary connection at all between government and state. 12 00:01:23.980 --> 00:01:32.680 Government and political order generally presupposes a relation of authority and subordination. 13 00:01:32.680 --> 00:01:39.080 The family, for example, it could be said to be the primordial political unit 14 00:01:39.080 --> 00:01:44.380 because it contains the relations of authority and subordination. 15 00:01:44.380 --> 00:01:50.700 Indeed, any recognized social authority can be the source of government. 16 00:01:50.700 --> 00:01:55.100 Throughout human history, except for the last three and a half centuries or so, 17 00:01:55.100 --> 00:02:01.100 men have been governed by many sorts of things that were not modern states. 18 00:02:01.100 --> 00:02:06.540 Tribal chiefs, religious leaders, powerful families, federations of powerful families, 19 00:02:06.540 --> 00:02:11.740 aristocratic republics, town councils, principalities, and so on. 20 00:02:11.740 --> 00:02:24.740 In all of these, justice and laws were enacted, war and peace made, taxes raised, money established, children educated, and internal security looked after, without anything that could be called a modern state. 21 00:02:24.740 --> 00:02:35.740 There are many examples today, the United Postal Union, all these stamps just fly around the world, but there's no government enforcing that. 22 00:02:35.740 --> 00:02:42.740 It's arrangement between governments, but no government rules it, yet it's government, it's a way of governing our behavior. 23 00:02:42.740 --> 00:02:57.740 The airline regulations, international telegraph union, and on and on, are forms of people being governed without the coercion of the state. 24 00:02:57.740 --> 00:03:10.740 Now, if we, so what we misleadingly call the nation state is really an artifact of modern European culture, only about three and a half centuries old. 25 00:03:10.740 --> 00:03:23.740 I think we should start calling the state a form of government. The modern state is a form of government, along with monarchy, aristocracy, republics, theocracies. 26 00:03:23.740 --> 00:03:27.740 It is just a distinct form of government. 27 00:03:27.740 --> 00:03:32.740 It's very recent and how long it will last, we don't know. 28 00:03:32.740 --> 00:03:37.740 But if we want to understand it, we can do no better than to study very carefully 29 00:03:37.740 --> 00:03:42.740 Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan published in 1651. 30 00:03:42.740 --> 00:03:48.740 Here we have in bold and memorable language, it's a brilliant work of rhetoric, 31 00:03:48.740 --> 00:03:52.740 An outline of the modern state at its very inception. 32 00:03:53.740 --> 00:03:57.740 Marx was right when he said Hobbes is the father of us all. 33 00:04:00.740 --> 00:04:05.740 Hobbes' theory of the state, of what he calls sovereign power, can be put briefly. 34 00:04:05.740 --> 00:04:11.740 He imagines mankind in a state of nature without any law or morality except that of self-interest. 35 00:04:11.740 --> 00:04:16.740 Everyone in such a condition would be insecure and in fear of a violent death. 36 00:04:16.740 --> 00:04:28.740 The remedy is for everyone to contract with everyone else to give up their natural right to do whatever they please to a sovereign power to either one or many men to rule over them. 37 00:04:28.740 --> 00:04:34.740 Now the contract is made among the people themselves and not between the people and the sovereign. 38 00:04:34.740 --> 00:04:41.900 What they gain is an end to the war of all against all, and a peaceful pursuit of liberty, 39 00:04:41.900 --> 00:04:48.500 now defined as that domain in which the laws of the sovereign are silent. 40 00:04:48.500 --> 00:04:53.080 And his laws are absolute, for the people have conferred on him unlimited authority 41 00:04:53.080 --> 00:04:54.080 for the sake of peace. 42 00:04:54.080 --> 00:05:02.160 And so Hobbes says the sovereignty is indivisible, infallible, and irresistible. 43 00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:06.000 The only check on the sovereign is that of prudence. 44 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:11.700 He knows that if he pushes the people too far, he may drive them back into a state of nature, 45 00:05:11.700 --> 00:05:13.420 and hence rebellion. 46 00:05:13.420 --> 00:05:19.980 But he has no moral or legal obligations to the people as such, for his will is law. 47 00:05:19.980 --> 00:05:26.080 Now what Hobbes had theorized was not a bright idea he had figured out by himself, but the 48 00:05:26.080 --> 00:05:32.960 The Idealization of a Mode of Political Association Already in the Process of Formation in Europe. 49 00:05:32.960 --> 00:05:41.080 There are two features of the Hogsian account that are important for understanding the character 50 00:05:41.080 --> 00:05:43.720 of a modern state. 51 00:05:43.720 --> 00:05:49.200 If nothing else is remembered from this lecture, I'd like you to carry away these two features 52 00:05:49.200 --> 00:05:52.280 to think about. 53 00:05:52.280 --> 00:06:01.240 The first is that Hobbes says the state is vast in scale. He calls it Leviathan. He puts 54 00:06:01.240 --> 00:06:11.860 no limits on its size. It can expand but it can't contract. And the second is the state 55 00:06:11.860 --> 00:06:22.660 is, quote, an artificial man, end quote. Now both of these theses, that the state is big 56 00:06:22.660 --> 00:06:29.900 and artificial, contradict classical political philosophy and indeed medieval philosophy, 57 00:06:29.900 --> 00:06:36.620 which taught that political order, for the most part, should be small and that rule should 58 00:06:36.620 --> 00:06:48.460 would be not by an artificial man but by men of merit. Aristotle says, quote, to the size 59 00:06:48.460 --> 00:06:56.740 of states there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements, 60 00:06:56.740 --> 00:07:06.660 But none of these retain their natural power, when they are too large or too small. 61 00:07:06.660 --> 00:07:12.420 And then again he says, if citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according 62 00:07:12.420 --> 00:07:17.660 to merit, then they must know each other's character. 63 00:07:17.660 --> 00:07:22.340 And that requires a human scale. 64 00:07:22.340 --> 00:07:28.420 Now on the point about political size, Aristotle seems to me to be basically right. 65 00:07:28.420 --> 00:07:34.220 Human flourishing does not require vast scale modern states. 66 00:07:34.220 --> 00:07:40.420 Athens, with around 50,000 people that hovered at that population, that includes slaves and 67 00:07:40.420 --> 00:07:46.120 foreigners, in three generations produced a culture of such high level that we still 68 00:07:46.120 --> 00:07:49.260 take much of it as our guide. 69 00:07:49.260 --> 00:07:57.060 The great religions of the world were formed in tiny communities like Israel and Arabia. 70 00:07:57.060 --> 00:08:03.180 Florence, with around 40,000 people, was a leading center of the Renaissance, producing 71 00:08:03.180 --> 00:08:10.380 world-class architecture, painting, sculpture, science, philosophy, literature, opera was 72 00:08:10.380 --> 00:08:14.540 invented there by Galileo's father. 73 00:08:14.540 --> 00:08:20.940 And Florence was a pioneer in modern banking. 74 00:08:20.940 --> 00:08:28.160 The founding fathers of America lived in a world where no city was over 30,000 people. 75 00:08:28.160 --> 00:08:32.260 New York did not reach 100,000 until 1820. 76 00:08:32.260 --> 00:08:36.780 London in 1830 was the first city to reach a million. 77 00:08:36.780 --> 00:08:43.060 So the monster cities such as Mexico City with around 24 million, about a quarter of 78 00:08:43.060 --> 00:08:50.420 of all Mexicans, or Sao Paulo with 19 million, Tokyo, Los Angeles and so on, are very, very 79 00:08:50.420 --> 00:09:00.620 recent phenomena. These are themselves artifacts of the centralizing disposition of that artificial 80 00:09:00.620 --> 00:09:08.340 man that Hobbes theorized to be the essence of the modern state. It's as if the artificial 81 00:09:08.340 --> 00:09:26.340 I would like to entertain now, without argument for the moment, Aristotle's thesis that political order that is rooted in the social nature of man tends to be small. 82 00:09:26.340 --> 00:09:32.340 The modern state is not rooted in the social nature of man. It's a different kind of thing. 83 00:09:32.340 --> 00:09:37.340 If we're looking at the Resilient Political Order, it tends to be small. Let's just assume that for the moment. 84 00:09:39.340 --> 00:09:46.340 If that's true, large scale, we should expect that large political formations would usually be, 85 00:09:46.340 --> 00:09:50.340 and I think this is true, the result of force and domination. 86 00:09:50.340 --> 00:09:56.340 In other words, if it's natural for human beings to have small states, then the big ones are probably going to be the result of force. 87 00:09:56.340 --> 00:10:03.140 And if that's right, there's a moral presumption on behalf of smaller political units. 88 00:10:03.140 --> 00:10:09.420 The burden of proof, then, should be on one who says the state must be large. 89 00:10:09.420 --> 00:10:16.220 Since humans are disposed to cantonize into smaller units, and since large political formations 90 00:10:16.220 --> 00:10:23.360 are evidently not necessary for human flourishing, there is something strange and sinister about 91 00:10:23.360 --> 00:10:28.360 and Hobbes' assumption that the state must be vast in scale. 92 00:10:29.560 --> 00:10:32.120 Nor can this strangeness be eliminated 93 00:10:32.120 --> 00:10:35.240 by considering the weakness of Aristotle's account, 94 00:10:36.520 --> 00:10:39.920 namely that Aristotle did not have the experience 95 00:10:39.920 --> 00:10:44.400 of universal forms of government such as Christianity 96 00:10:44.400 --> 00:10:46.400 that operate on a global scale. 97 00:10:48.920 --> 00:10:51.360 Dr. Reiko said something about that. 98 00:10:51.360 --> 00:10:59.360 and the importance of an international society in the story of liberty in the West. 99 00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:06.360 But Hobbes was aware, unlike Aristotle, of these universal forms of government. 100 00:11:06.360 --> 00:11:14.360 For example, the papacy and that relaxed imperial federation known as the Holy Roman Empire. 101 00:11:14.360 --> 00:11:19.360 But he rejects them as having no authority over the state. 102 00:11:19.360 --> 00:11:27.360 Like Aristotle's polis, the Hobbesian Leviathan is confined to a definite territory, unless it conquers some more. 103 00:11:27.360 --> 00:11:33.360 The difference is that for Aristotle, the political order is and must be within a human scale. 104 00:11:33.360 --> 00:11:40.360 It can, he says, be taken in at a single view or walked across in a single day. 105 00:11:40.360 --> 00:11:46.360 For Hobbes, it is cut off entirely from anything that could be called human scale. 106 00:11:46.360 --> 00:11:54.440 Now, the term Leviathan comes from the book of Job in the Bible and refers to a great 107 00:11:54.440 --> 00:12:00.320 sea monster. God tells Job that he cannot control Leviathan. He cannot get his hook 108 00:12:00.320 --> 00:12:06.240 in him as he can with other fish. The Leviathan in the book of Job is a symbol of the forces 109 00:12:06.240 --> 00:12:14.080 of nature with which man must contend and cannot control. So we may say that what Hobbes 110 00:12:14.080 --> 00:12:20.480 What Hobbes is telling us is that the Leviathan is an artificial man, not a natural force, 111 00:12:20.480 --> 00:12:29.280 beyond human scale, which cannot be controlled and must be endured. 112 00:12:29.280 --> 00:12:34.560 His philosophy is an attempt to show that this is nonetheless a form of political association 113 00:12:34.560 --> 00:12:38.960 demanded by our nature, the sorts of blokes we are. 114 00:12:38.960 --> 00:12:53.960 But in this Hobbes is mistaken. The state, Hobbes theorizes, is not a brilliant idea into the final form of human association, political association, but a historical artifact rooted in contingent circumstances. 115 00:12:53.960 --> 00:13:03.960 To better understand it, it is necessary to set aside political theory and to tell a story about its origins. 116 00:13:03.960 --> 00:13:15.960 Hobbes describes, so I'm going to give an account, a very brief account of this artifact, called the Modern State. 117 00:13:15.960 --> 00:13:23.960 Hobbes describes the sovereignty of the state as absolute command, there being no will, human or divine, superior to the state. 118 00:13:23.960 --> 00:13:31.960 Europe would eventually become an order of such states, but that is not how Europe began, as Dr. Ray Covey has shown us. 119 00:13:31.960 --> 00:13:37.240 Sovereignty in the Middle Ages was always divided, it was divided all over the place. 120 00:13:37.240 --> 00:13:42.680 The church, a universal institution, had long since declared itself sovereign over spiritual 121 00:13:42.680 --> 00:13:47.960 matters and over those temporal possessions and powers necessary to rule in spiritual 122 00:13:47.960 --> 00:13:55.200 matters. It had vast holdings in property and its own law. 123 00:13:55.200 --> 00:13:59.940 As far as secular matters went, Europe was composed of thousands of independent units 124 00:13:59.940 --> 00:14:06.780 of Every Conceivable Kind, Tribal Societies, Kingdoms, Principalities, Dukedoms, Bishoprics, 125 00:14:06.780 --> 00:14:08.700 Republics, City States. 126 00:14:08.700 --> 00:14:16.740 In addition to these particularistic political units, there was the international order 127 00:14:16.740 --> 00:14:22.740 of the Holy Roman Empire, and of course the papacy, as well as numerous leagues, republics 128 00:14:22.740 --> 00:14:26.580 of free cities and the like. 129 00:14:26.580 --> 00:14:33.720 Tax was a matter of negotiation, sometimes with force, between these independent social 130 00:14:33.720 --> 00:14:37.580 authorities. 131 00:14:37.580 --> 00:14:41.180 None of them even remotely resembled a modern state. 132 00:14:41.180 --> 00:14:48.360 A medieval king was so hedged in by a greater array of independent social authorities that 133 00:14:48.360 --> 00:14:53.620 it's hard to imagine today, each of which had sovereignty in its own sphere and titles 134 00:14:53.620 --> 00:15:06.140 When Henry IV ran afoul of divine law and church policy, the church had the moral authority 135 00:15:06.140 --> 00:15:12.100 to bring him quite literally to his knees in the snow. The barons did the same to King 136 00:15:12.100 --> 00:15:16.180 John of England. 137 00:15:16.180 --> 00:15:20.740 A medieval king, beyond his own property, had no steady source of income until after 138 00:15:20.740 --> 00:15:38.420 The King had to constantly go begging for revenue and troops to powerful independent 139 00:15:38.420 --> 00:15:43.340 social authorities who could say no. 140 00:15:43.340 --> 00:15:47.460 Every king's ambition was to become free of this dependence. 141 00:15:47.460 --> 00:15:52.440 To make a long and complicated story short, monarchs eventually, after centuries, gained 142 00:15:52.440 --> 00:15:58.260 this independence, and in the process of doing so, they created, without exactly intending 143 00:15:58.260 --> 00:16:03.780 to do so, the modern state. 144 00:16:03.780 --> 00:16:09.540 By the end of the Middle Ages, the monarchs had defeated the church. 145 00:16:09.540 --> 00:16:16.660 That is to say, its independence had been considerably weakened. 146 00:16:16.660 --> 00:16:21.740 From then on the monarch would be engaged in a battle with the nobility and the towns, 147 00:16:21.740 --> 00:16:27.980 a battle which Charles I, as far as nobility goes, would lose and pay for with his head 148 00:16:27.980 --> 00:16:32.500 and one that Louis XIV would win. 149 00:16:32.500 --> 00:16:38.460 The Thirty Years' War would reduce the Holy Roman Empire to a shadow, or a shadow of a 150 00:16:38.460 --> 00:16:45.060 shade maybe, but thus removing the last international form of government from competition with the 151 00:16:45.060 --> 00:16:51.900 by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, Europe had become 152 00:16:51.900 --> 00:16:57.260 an order of modern centralized states under what was now called absolute monarchy. 153 00:16:57.260 --> 00:17:02.660 Hume, in the middle of the 18th century, says that absolute monarchy is three generations 154 00:17:02.660 --> 00:17:03.660 old. 155 00:17:03.660 --> 00:17:08.360 That's how he thinks of it. 156 00:17:08.360 --> 00:17:13.260 Over a period of 600 years, the kings of Europe had succeeded in centralizing unprecedented 157 00:17:13.260 --> 00:17:18.660 Power and Resources, placed in between two powerful international bodies, the Papacy 158 00:17:18.660 --> 00:17:22.460 and the Holy Roman Empire on the one hand and a host of local and regional sovereignies 159 00:17:22.460 --> 00:17:23.740 on the other. 160 00:17:23.740 --> 00:17:29.040 By carefully playing one of these factors against the other and in bewildering combinations, 161 00:17:29.040 --> 00:17:34.420 the kings were able eventually to destroy the rich and complex system of divided sovereignty 162 00:17:34.420 --> 00:17:40.820 that had characterized Europe in favor of a system of large states, each of which enjoyed 163 00:17:40.820 --> 00:17:50.820 for Absolute Sovereignty Within Its Borders Now, within these borders, which have gotten larger and larger, 164 00:17:50.820 --> 00:17:56.820 were conquered peoples of all sorts, speaking different languages, with different traditions, 165 00:17:56.820 --> 00:18:00.820 and whose loyalties had formerly been given to other social authorities. 166 00:18:00.820 --> 00:18:05.820 To rule this large aggregate, the monarchs developed an administrative system 167 00:18:05.820 --> 00:18:09.820 through which a single will could flow down to millions of individuals. 168 00:18:09.820 --> 00:18:26.820 This sort of thing was new, and it is this administrative machinery that people had in mind when they spoke bitterly in the 17th and 18th centuries about absolute monarchy. 169 00:18:26.820 --> 00:18:34.820 And when you find the founding fathers accusing each other in the constitutional debates of dragging us into monarchy, 170 00:18:34.820 --> 00:18:42.820 They don't mean they'll be an hereditary prince or executive so much as they mean there's going to be this centralization. 171 00:18:42.820 --> 00:18:49.820 So when people complain about monarchy, it's centralization. 172 00:18:49.820 --> 00:18:55.820 The king's bureaucracy by its very nature had to operate according to strict procedures, 173 00:18:55.820 --> 00:19:03.820 which could not be arbitrarily altered even by the king without destroying the utility of the system. 174 00:19:03.820 --> 00:19:12.820 As the king, largely through conquest, centralized more power, the bureaucracy grew, acquiring a life of its own. 175 00:19:12.820 --> 00:19:23.820 With each stage of its growth, it separated itself more and more from society, and eventually from the king himself. 176 00:19:23.820 --> 00:19:32.820 So this artificial man he had created began to, like Frankenstein, get up and walk around. 177 00:19:32.820 --> 00:19:37.380 The most powerful absolute monarch of the 17th century was Louis XIV. 178 00:19:37.380 --> 00:19:43.700 Of his administrative system he boasted, l'état c'est moi, I am the state. 179 00:19:45.060 --> 00:19:49.540 But he was wrong. By then the state was no longer the king's possession. 180 00:19:50.420 --> 00:19:56.820 In fact, it belonged more to powerful ministers such as Richelieu and Mazarin than to the king. 181 00:19:56.820 --> 00:20:08.820 It was the centralized administrative system, vast in scale, that Hobbes called Leviathan and an artificial man, and which we know today as the state. 182 00:20:08.820 --> 00:20:24.820 Now nothing shows more clearly how far the state had come in separating itself from society 183 00:20:24.820 --> 00:20:31.820 and the French Revolution, which swept away all traditional forms of society. 184 00:20:34.260 --> 00:20:40.420 The king, the nobility, church, provincial governments, an independent judiciary, and 185 00:20:40.420 --> 00:20:46.020 even space and time as traditionally conceived were swept away as the calendar and the geography 186 00:20:46.020 --> 00:20:49.660 of France were changed. 187 00:20:49.660 --> 00:20:53.380 Everything was eliminated but one thing. 188 00:20:53.380 --> 00:20:59.500 The State Administrative System And indeed it was the state system that was 189 00:20:59.500 --> 00:21:02.300 doing the eliminating. 190 00:21:02.300 --> 00:21:08.140 The machinery of the state was now being operated not by king, nobility and priests, but by 191 00:21:08.140 --> 00:21:14.660 people calling themselves Republicans. 192 00:21:14.660 --> 00:21:21.580 The Republicans, however, did not weaken its power, but increased it a thousand fold. 193 00:21:21.580 --> 00:21:26.900 The first revolution not only demonstrated the immortality of Hobbes' artificial man, 194 00:21:26.900 --> 00:21:33.060 it transformed the very meaning of the state, giving it its specious moral legitimacy it 195 00:21:33.060 --> 00:21:35.220 has today. 196 00:21:35.220 --> 00:21:41.340 Let's see how that works. 197 00:21:41.340 --> 00:21:46.460 Centuries of monarchical rule had accustomed Europeans to think of the state as being above 198 00:21:46.460 --> 00:21:47.460 society. 199 00:21:47.460 --> 00:21:53.460 They called themselves subjects, and they were. I mean, they were subjects. 200 00:21:53.460 --> 00:21:58.460 They thought of themselves as subjects, and the state was above society. 201 00:21:58.460 --> 00:22:03.460 But the French Revolution declared that society must control the state. 202 00:22:03.460 --> 00:22:10.460 Ah, now we're going to be citizens, not subjects. 203 00:22:10.460 --> 00:22:13.460 So the state's not going to be above society. 204 00:22:13.460 --> 00:22:22.460 Yet so strong was the force of habit, that it was still natural to think of the state as expressing a single will. 205 00:22:24.460 --> 00:22:33.460 Instead of the single will, however, of the monarch, the revolution substituted the single will of the French, of something called the French nation. 206 00:22:37.460 --> 00:22:39.460 I ponder that. 207 00:22:39.460 --> 00:22:47.460 Hobbes' artificial man had been transformed from the person of the king to the person of the nation. 208 00:22:50.460 --> 00:22:55.460 For the first time in history, a nation person would appear on the stage. 209 00:22:57.460 --> 00:23:03.460 A thing called France would be declared a republic, one and, quote, one and indivisible. 210 00:23:03.460 --> 00:23:12.460 It always has to be one and indivisible, even on our Pledge of Allegiance. One nation, indivisible. No divided sovereignty, please. 211 00:23:12.460 --> 00:23:22.460 This thing called France would act, would make war, make peace, preserve our honor, and so forth. 212 00:23:22.460 --> 00:23:32.460 The appearance of the nation person was not only a spectacular absurdity, logically, but a long-term moral atrocity. 213 00:23:32.460 --> 00:23:47.460 For it meant the elimination in thought and practice of all those smaller political units and independent social authorities that made up the realm previously known as France. 214 00:23:47.460 --> 00:23:51.460 So to have this French nation, you've got to do a lot of wiping out. 215 00:23:51.460 --> 00:24:02.700 Despite the King's effort at centralization, France was still a highly decentralized region 216 00:24:02.700 --> 00:24:06.740 from its long European experience. 217 00:24:06.740 --> 00:24:13.140 In 1789, for example, there were no less than 80 provinces, each with its own laws, its 218 00:24:13.140 --> 00:24:19.380 own customs, its own political tradition, its own history of resistance. 219 00:24:19.380 --> 00:24:26.140 These histories went back centuries and centuries. One sense of national identity, in so far 220 00:24:26.140 --> 00:24:34.540 as one had one, was tied to these traditional political regions. 221 00:24:34.540 --> 00:24:41.200 And as late as 1871, a study showed to the dismay of the centralizers that two-thirds 222 00:24:41.200 --> 00:24:47.660 of the French public school children did not identify their nation as France, but instead 223 00:24:47.660 --> 00:25:03.160 No more than 13 percent of the people could even speak the language the government designated 224 00:25:03.160 --> 00:25:09.860 as French, and even fewer than that spoke the language on a regular basis, and no one 225 00:25:09.860 --> 00:25:13.700 at all in the South spoke it. 226 00:25:13.700 --> 00:25:19.480 To create the new artificial nation person, all of those independent social authorities 227 00:25:19.480 --> 00:25:25.740 that David Hume said were shaped by the hand of nature, would have to be hollowed out and 228 00:25:25.740 --> 00:25:29.060 flattened out. 229 00:25:29.060 --> 00:25:41.980 Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on September the 7th, 1789, Emmanuel Cies urged this project 230 00:25:41.980 --> 00:25:49.580 of Flattening Out of Great Vigor, quote. 231 00:25:49.580 --> 00:25:57.460 France must not be an assemblage of small nations, each with its own democratic government. 232 00:25:57.460 --> 00:26:00.220 She is not a collection of states. 233 00:26:00.220 --> 00:26:05.700 She is a single whole made up of integral parts. 234 00:26:05.700 --> 00:26:11.740 These parts must not have each a complete existence of its own, for they are not whole 235 00:26:11.740 --> 00:26:24.740 The difference is a big one. Everything is lost once we consent to regard the established 236 00:26:24.740 --> 00:26:32.300 municipalities, the districts, or the provinces as so many republics joined together only 237 00:26:32.300 --> 00:26:40.980 for the purposes of defense and common protection. Now that's real republicanism, you see. So 238 00:26:40.980 --> 00:27:02.980 In reaction to the French Revolution and the imperialism of Napoleon, other European monarchs 239 00:27:02.980 --> 00:27:06.220 accelerated the process of centralization. 240 00:27:06.220 --> 00:27:10.940 Everywhere the rich mosaic of independent social authorities that was Europe were ground 241 00:27:10.940 --> 00:27:20.220 into powder to which Alexis de Tocqueville bore eloquent witness and I quote, the old 242 00:27:20.220 --> 00:27:26.500 localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement and everywhere the 243 00:27:26.500 --> 00:27:32.700 central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs. The whole of Germany, even the 244 00:27:32.700 --> 00:27:40.380 The whole of Europe presents in this respect the same picture. Everywhere men are leaving 245 00:27:40.380 --> 00:27:48.300 behind the liberty of the Middle Ages not to enter into a modern brand of liberty, but 246 00:27:48.300 --> 00:27:56.620 to return to the ancient despotism for centralization is nothing else than an up-to-date version 247 00:27:56.620 --> 00:28:02.060 of the Administration Seen in the Roman Empire." 248 00:28:02.060 --> 00:28:06.820 Not as if people didn't know what was happening. 249 00:28:06.820 --> 00:28:11.020 This process of centralization eventually swept away the monarchs themselves who had 250 00:28:11.020 --> 00:28:15.540 started the process, oh dear. 251 00:28:15.540 --> 00:28:19.980 And most of the states of Europe developed their own version of the French model of the 252 00:28:19.980 --> 00:28:23.420 state as the nation-person. 253 00:28:23.420 --> 00:28:28.380 That's why we see all those tricolors, where you see a little tricolor, Italy, and they 254 00:28:28.380 --> 00:28:32.900 all are imitating this French nation person business. 255 00:28:32.900 --> 00:28:38.260 Here we have an almost magical and mystical transformation in the understanding of the 256 00:28:38.260 --> 00:28:41.300 state, of the nation person. 257 00:28:41.300 --> 00:28:45.980 One that requires careful and in-depth study, which of course can't be carried out here, 258 00:28:45.980 --> 00:28:48.580 but I'd just like to make a few comments. 259 00:28:48.580 --> 00:28:54.580 First, the monarch had created the state merely for the convenience of commanding a large territory. 260 00:28:54.580 --> 00:29:01.580 Everyone knew the state was above society, though all hoped that His Majesty's government would benefit them somehow. 261 00:29:01.580 --> 00:29:07.580 With the collapse of monarchy, the state and the question of its legitimacy became a pressing problem. 262 00:29:07.580 --> 00:29:11.580 Because with the collapse of monarchy, why have this state at all? 263 00:29:11.580 --> 00:29:14.580 They knew the monarchs had created it. 264 00:29:14.580 --> 00:29:24.540 The solution, who's going to give up such a power though? 265 00:29:24.540 --> 00:29:29.260 The solution was to claim that the state was now embedded in society, i.e. the nation, 266 00:29:29.260 --> 00:29:31.780 and was the expression of the nation's will. 267 00:29:31.780 --> 00:29:36.500 In giving the state a social character, namely the nation, which it had not had under the 268 00:29:36.500 --> 00:29:38.500 monarchs, it gained moral legitimacy. 269 00:29:38.500 --> 00:29:51.300 Something Hobbes never even pretended to give it. 270 00:29:51.300 --> 00:29:53.700 But this was a spectacular absurdity. 271 00:29:53.700 --> 00:29:59.280 As we saw in the case of France, there simply was no genuine French nation in existence 272 00:29:59.280 --> 00:30:02.540 prior to the state. 273 00:30:02.540 --> 00:30:07.660 It was the monarchy that had crushed together the quite distinct national characters that 274 00:30:07.660 --> 00:30:12.580 had occupied the vast territory known as the realm of France. 275 00:30:12.580 --> 00:30:18.300 It was not the French nation that expressed its will through the state and the revolution, 276 00:30:18.300 --> 00:30:25.100 but the state that created or thought to create a French nation. 277 00:30:25.100 --> 00:30:32.940 So the French nation itself is an artifact of that artificial man. 278 00:30:32.940 --> 00:30:39.100 Now for this task, it was necessary to use violence and terror, and not even the guillotine 279 00:30:39.100 --> 00:30:46.060 in Napoleon could actually accomplish it. As we saw as late as 1871, French school children 280 00:30:46.060 --> 00:30:52.900 still hadn't gotten the point. And the same would be true of other would-be nation states 281 00:30:52.900 --> 00:30:58.660 in Europe. If you look at them, they're mostly ragtag affairs. You know, there's Italian 282 00:30:58.660 --> 00:31:06.420 and People, Metternich was more right when he said that Italy is a geographical expression, 283 00:31:06.420 --> 00:31:11.060 not a nation, same with Germany and so on. 284 00:31:11.060 --> 00:31:18.260 But they've had great influence, I mean an absurdity can still be very powerful, incoherence 285 00:31:18.260 --> 00:31:23.140 can be just as powerful as coherence. 286 00:31:23.140 --> 00:31:27.780 But like all absurdities in political philosophy, the theory of the nation-state is the warp 287 00:31:27.780 --> 00:31:36.020 This can be seen perhaps in the widespread use of Rousseau as the philosopher of the 288 00:31:36.020 --> 00:31:37.020 nation-state. 289 00:31:37.020 --> 00:31:42.580 Rousseau's famous theory of the general will of the social contract captures an important 290 00:31:42.580 --> 00:31:45.900 truth about the social nature of man. 291 00:31:45.900 --> 00:31:51.100 There is something like a general will that spontaneously occurs when men form social 292 00:31:51.100 --> 00:31:56.260 orders of various kinds, like a market price that spontaneously forms. 293 00:31:56.260 --> 00:32:03.140 But as Rousseau makes very clear, these social orders have to be small for that to happen 294 00:32:03.140 --> 00:32:09.340 and allow face-to-face knowledge, a teaching we've touched on in Aristotle. 295 00:32:09.340 --> 00:32:17.900 Rousseau's theory of the general will applies only to very small republics, so small that 296 00:32:17.900 --> 00:32:24.860 Rousseau will not even allow representatives, but requires that the sovereign people themselves 297 00:32:24.860 --> 00:32:31.420 actually show up to do the business of enacting the laws. 298 00:32:31.420 --> 00:32:36.420 Once you have representative democracy, it's downhill as far as Rousseau goes. 299 00:32:36.420 --> 00:32:40.900 The artificial man begins to grow and appear. 300 00:32:40.900 --> 00:32:43.340 He doesn't want any artificial men. 301 00:32:43.340 --> 00:32:45.940 So the government has to be, the state has to be small. 302 00:32:45.940 --> 00:32:54.840 Here's what he says, quote from Rousseau, size and nations and large extent of states, 303 00:32:54.840 --> 00:33:01.560 These are the principal cause of human misfortunes, and above all of the countless disasters which 304 00:33:01.560 --> 00:33:08.680 undermine and destroy civilized peoples. Nearly all small states, republics and monarchies 305 00:33:08.680 --> 00:33:19.640 alike flourish by reason of being small." Rousseau's theory of the social contract 306 00:33:19.640 --> 00:33:25.040 and the General Will is designed for a small scale, political order, 307 00:33:25.040 --> 00:33:32.240 and therefore it makes no sense and is corrupt to map it on to a scale as large as France, 308 00:33:32.240 --> 00:33:35.040 much less China. 309 00:33:35.040 --> 00:33:38.940 In Mao Zedong's China, Rousseau was the only Western philosopher, 310 00:33:38.940 --> 00:33:45.240 aside from the Marxists, to merit a special celebration. 311 00:33:45.240 --> 00:33:52.340 The General Will and all, and Mao Tse-Tung thought, sounds good to him, map it under China. 312 00:33:52.340 --> 00:33:54.540 But the same thing was done in France. 313 00:33:54.540 --> 00:33:58.540 And even Montesquieu will talk about republics, 314 00:33:58.540 --> 00:34:04.040 about France possibly being a republic or European size republics, 315 00:34:04.040 --> 00:34:08.740 as if you could do that on the scale of European countries. 316 00:34:08.740 --> 00:34:09.940 And Rousseau does this too. 317 00:34:09.940 --> 00:34:13.640 I mean, he says they have to be small, but he slips up once in a while. 318 00:34:13.640 --> 00:34:15.140 But the French revolutionaries did that. 319 00:34:15.140 --> 00:34:29.180 Although the modern state has been the greatest destroyer of genuine nations and social authorities 320 00:34:29.180 --> 00:34:35.500 and communities ever devised, it corruptly presents itself in various social guises as 321 00:34:35.500 --> 00:34:41.100 the will of the nation, it destroys nations and then it is the nation, as government of 322 00:34:41.100 --> 00:34:47.100 The Destroyer of Genuine Social Orders and Communities 323 00:34:47.100 --> 00:34:51.100 It with a straight face calls itself socialism or communism. 324 00:34:51.100 --> 00:35:01.100 See these terms, nation, socialism, communism, even fascism are pandering to a deep human need. 325 00:35:01.100 --> 00:35:05.100 Humans need communities, they need society. 326 00:35:05.100 --> 00:35:09.100 And the state having wiped it away, they need it. 327 00:35:09.100 --> 00:35:19.100 And then there's a market for the state to come on the scene and provide society for them, to provide community for them, to provide a nation for them, to bind them together. 328 00:35:19.100 --> 00:35:26.100 Fascism means to bind together. Well, they were bound together before they got torn up. 329 00:35:26.100 --> 00:35:37.100 So we see a pattern here that the modern state destroys, creates a problem, and then presents itself as the solution. 330 00:35:37.100 --> 00:35:45.100 Follows policies that weaken families, destroy families, weaken them, then wonders why there are so many broken homes, etc. 331 00:35:45.100 --> 00:35:51.100 The monarch used, second thing, the monarch used democracy to increase the power of the state apparatus. 332 00:35:51.100 --> 00:35:56.100 That's an important point. 333 00:35:56.100 --> 00:36:03.100 The monarch used democracy to increase the power of the state apparatus. 334 00:36:03.100 --> 00:36:04.100 Let's see how that works. 335 00:36:04.100 --> 00:36:12.100 Centralization is not necessarily at the expense of the people considered as an aggregate or a mass. 336 00:36:12.100 --> 00:36:16.100 Centralization doesn't harm mass society. 337 00:36:16.100 --> 00:36:24.100 Mass society is a bunch of ruthless people and centralization is something they look toward. 338 00:36:24.100 --> 00:36:31.100 But what it operates at the expense of are independent social authorities and smaller political units 339 00:36:31.100 --> 00:36:37.360 of Independence, whose partial sovereignty cannot be tolerated by the modern state. 340 00:36:37.360 --> 00:36:41.900 Now Hobbes saw all this and he called these independent social authorities, quote, worms 341 00:36:41.900 --> 00:36:46.180 in the commonwealth, end quote, you know, as if you had worms eating away at your liver 342 00:36:46.180 --> 00:36:50.780 and your pancreas and so on, and so a state with these independent social authorities 343 00:36:50.780 --> 00:36:55.820 has worms and has to be dewormed of them. 344 00:36:55.820 --> 00:37:01.820 Consequently, a modern state will resist devolution of power. It always will. 345 00:37:01.820 --> 00:37:07.820 And it can never tolerate secession. It is the enemy of all centrifugal tendencies. 346 00:37:07.820 --> 00:37:12.820 But it may set itself up as the friend of the people in the aggregate. 347 00:37:12.820 --> 00:37:16.820 Those who are not incorporated into any kind of social authority. 348 00:37:16.820 --> 00:37:18.820 It sets us up as the friend. 349 00:37:18.820 --> 00:37:23.820 Some of whom may be genuinely oppressed by this or that social authority. 350 00:37:23.820 --> 00:37:29.500 and the people can be used by the central government to do them in, do these authorities in. 351 00:37:29.500 --> 00:37:34.140 So independent social authorities are not necessarily good guys, you know, they can oppress people 352 00:37:34.140 --> 00:37:38.780 and then when they do there's a market for the center to come in and isolate that independent 353 00:37:38.780 --> 00:37:44.060 social authority, wipe it out, get the support of other social authorities and the masses 354 00:37:44.060 --> 00:37:49.900 to do it and they can do it one after the other. And since it's immortal it just waits them out, 355 00:37:49.900 --> 00:38:05.120 Monarchs made this use of the people in the mass in their battle with the church, nobility 356 00:38:05.120 --> 00:38:07.460 in the towns. 357 00:38:07.460 --> 00:38:13.700 The king, for example, staffed his bureaucracy with men of low estate who had nothing and 358 00:38:13.700 --> 00:38:17.700 owed everything to their office and to the king. 359 00:38:17.700 --> 00:38:24.220 As Lord Acton put it in the case of France, the rise of democracy with the help of absolute 360 00:38:24.220 --> 00:38:31.900 monarchy is the one constant theme of French history. 361 00:38:31.900 --> 00:38:36.100 When the kings of Europe were overthrown, their state bureaucracy remained. 362 00:38:36.100 --> 00:38:39.740 What had been nothing more than an instrument of convenience for ruling a vast territory 363 00:38:39.740 --> 00:38:47.260 came now to be seen as a democratic instrument through which the voice of a single will could 364 00:38:47.260 --> 00:39:02.040 Arm with this moral authority, the State could invade and exploit areas of society undreamed 365 00:39:02.040 --> 00:39:04.500 of by the absolute monarchs. 366 00:39:04.500 --> 00:39:13.180 The State would learn to mortgage future revenues and monetize a permanent debt. 367 00:39:13.180 --> 00:39:15.100 It would in time gain control of money. 368 00:39:15.100 --> 00:39:20.020 Indeed, it would do more than that. It would redefine the meaning of money as paper issued 369 00:39:20.020 --> 00:39:28.140 in its own name. It would build a centralizing infrastructure. See, Hobbes, Hobbes' sovereign 370 00:39:28.140 --> 00:39:33.380 didn't even know how to fix the borders. He couldn't exactly have the technology to define 371 00:39:33.380 --> 00:39:38.440 the borders. You know, I mean, people were in the country, and Hobbes' sovereign lives 372 00:39:38.440 --> 00:39:45.020 off an excise tax. Hobbes doesn't even imagine the kind of state that comes later. 373 00:39:45.020 --> 00:39:59.780 So, some big changes. The state creates this infrastructure, census, all the rest of it. 374 00:39:59.780 --> 00:40:04.480 It would as much as possible disarm the people. I mean, the British resisted taking the census 375 00:40:04.480 --> 00:40:09.780 right on up, just fought it every step of the way. The government should not know how 376 00:40:09.780 --> 00:40:37.780 The State would drive traditional religion to the margin of society and take over its functions, including education, and educating children who would have a hand in shaping the soul itself. 377 00:40:37.780 --> 00:40:51.380 Philosophers would appear to justify these expanded powers of the state, teaching in a new form what Hobbes had already taught before, that law is what the sovereign power commands, legal positivism, etc. 378 00:40:51.380 --> 00:41:02.980 Hegel would describe the state, quote, as that veritable god on earth, end quote, and he meant every word of it, and as the final form of human political association. 379 00:41:02.980 --> 00:41:08.460 Kojev, one of Hegel's commentators and the teacher of Marx, he believed this and concluded 380 00:41:08.460 --> 00:41:13.060 that moral and political philosophy had actually come to an end. This is the end of philosophy 381 00:41:13.060 --> 00:41:17.740 business. And that the only thing left for a philosopher to do was to become a bureaucrat 382 00:41:17.740 --> 00:41:24.500 in the French state, which he did. What a good life. 383 00:41:24.500 --> 00:41:29.060 In principle, no, but I mean to imagine the hubris thinking that philosophy has come to 384 00:41:29.060 --> 00:41:39.140 In principle, no area of society was free from intrusion by the modern state. 385 00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:43.860 Constitutions and legalistic doctrines of individual rights were mere paper barriers 386 00:41:43.860 --> 00:41:47.220 because it was a center that always would interpret them. 387 00:41:47.220 --> 00:41:52.180 The only effective barriers were those remaining independent social authorities and traditions 388 00:41:52.180 --> 00:41:56.220 that had the moral strength to resist. 389 00:41:56.220 --> 00:42:01.120 So as Hume said, authority is based on nothing but opinion, not based on force, it's based 390 00:42:01.120 --> 00:42:09.340 on the opinion of right, and if people have the moral strength, there will be resistance. 391 00:42:09.340 --> 00:42:15.180 They need communities and a larger scale of the individual to do that. 392 00:42:15.180 --> 00:42:19.180 Where these communities were strong and traditions were strong, as in Britain and the United 393 00:42:19.180 --> 00:42:22.480 States, centralized power was to some degree checked. 394 00:42:22.480 --> 00:42:26.780 Where they were weak, as in Russia and Germany after World War I, nearly every aspect of 395 00:42:26.780 --> 00:42:29.720 social life came under central control. 396 00:42:29.720 --> 00:42:33.760 But it must be said, and that will happen here if they ever get sufficiently weak, but 397 00:42:33.760 --> 00:42:40.220 it must be said that totalitarianism is intimated in every modern state as only a matter of degree. 398 00:42:40.220 --> 00:42:46.640 This can perhaps be best brought out by considering the state's ability to exploit society for 399 00:42:46.640 --> 00:42:47.640 the purposes of war. 400 00:42:47.640 --> 00:43:01.200 War. So I want to turn to that now. The Battle of Roquois in 1643, which made France the 401 00:43:01.200 --> 00:43:09.680 dominant power in Europe, numbered around 48,000 in total. That's 1643. Big battle there. 402 00:43:09.680 --> 00:43:15.800 Three decades later, the largest battle in Europe was fought at Malpeque in 1709 with 403 00:43:15.800 --> 00:43:18.400 The total of 200,000. 404 00:43:18.400 --> 00:43:20.920 So you can see what centralization has probably done. 405 00:43:23.080 --> 00:43:24.760 Though they were said to be absolute, 406 00:43:24.760 --> 00:43:27.080 European monarchs were really limited 407 00:43:27.080 --> 00:43:30.520 in the resources their state apparatus could take from society. 408 00:43:31.460 --> 00:43:34.480 They did not have the luxury of an income tax, for example, 409 00:43:34.480 --> 00:43:37.060 or the ability to order universal conscription. 410 00:43:38.840 --> 00:43:42.400 But all that changed when the state could present itself 411 00:43:42.400 --> 00:43:44.080 as the will of the nation. 412 00:43:45.800 --> 00:43:50.000 That's where the democracy comes in. 413 00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:57.040 The French Republic was the first to order universal conscription, August 25th, 1792. 414 00:43:57.040 --> 00:44:05.960 The decree called the Leveille en Masse mobilized all men and old men, all women and even children 415 00:44:05.960 --> 00:44:06.960 for war. 416 00:44:06.960 --> 00:44:11.320 Not that they'd all fight, but the children had to pick lint out of things and so on. 417 00:44:11.320 --> 00:44:13.520 But everybody was mobilized. 418 00:44:13.520 --> 00:44:21.280 The state, however, did not have the infrastructure sufficient to implement it. 419 00:44:21.280 --> 00:44:25.800 It was a very warming thing and they wanted it read twice to them because it sounded so 420 00:44:25.800 --> 00:44:26.800 good. 421 00:44:26.800 --> 00:44:29.760 It simply did. 422 00:44:29.760 --> 00:44:36.200 Except for males between 18 and 25 who were unmarried, the others weren't mobilized. 423 00:44:36.200 --> 00:44:40.980 The males were and some of these had to be dragged and changed. 424 00:44:40.980 --> 00:44:45.940 The size of armies the monarchs could afford had not changed much since the time of Louis 425 00:44:45.940 --> 00:44:54.300 XIV. Louis XVI had around 200,000 troops, Frederick the Great a slightly smaller number. 426 00:44:54.300 --> 00:45:02.300 In 1795-96, however, the French nation-state raised an army of 800,000 for this draft. 427 00:45:02.300 --> 00:45:07.500 By the time Napoleon had been brought to bay, the French had raised an army of around three 428 00:45:07.500 --> 00:45:16.460 Napoleon, the largest ever assembled in the history of the world. 429 00:45:16.460 --> 00:45:22.620 And war was more vicious, whereas monarchs had to be frugal with the use of troops and 430 00:45:22.620 --> 00:45:27.620 use elaborate tactics to maneuver to gain victory with minimum loss, Napoleon developed 431 00:45:27.620 --> 00:45:33.100 aggressive tactics of mass assault which used troops as cannon fodder knowing that 432 00:45:33.100 --> 00:45:37.060 he could order another conscription. 433 00:45:37.060 --> 00:45:50.420 The army Napoleon raised to invade Russia was three times as large as any army that had been assembled in a single theater since the dawn of history, according to Martin Van Krebbel. 434 00:45:50.420 --> 00:46:00.780 Now, the huge destruction of modern wars is often chalked up as a tendency to always want to say these things are natural. 435 00:46:00.780 --> 00:46:07.140 Well, you know, all this destruction is because of modern technology, so that means you can't do anything about it. 436 00:46:07.140 --> 00:46:10.340 It's just the result of something like that. 437 00:46:10.340 --> 00:46:13.980 But here we see very clearly that it's not the result of technology. 438 00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:15.980 Technology can make it worse. 439 00:46:15.980 --> 00:46:23.980 Nothing had changed much in the technology of war since the early 18th century. 440 00:46:23.980 --> 00:46:29.580 At the beginning of the 18th century, you could shoot at a man all day at 100 yards and probably not hit him. 441 00:46:29.580 --> 00:46:34.460 At the end of the 18th century, you could still shoot at him all day and not hit him. 442 00:46:34.460 --> 00:46:36.900 And the fastest you could go is what a horse could do. 443 00:46:36.900 --> 00:46:39.900 So nothing had changed. 444 00:46:39.900 --> 00:46:40.620 Technology. 445 00:46:40.620 --> 00:46:44.900 What had changed, the vast scale of warfare that now could be carried out 446 00:46:44.900 --> 00:46:50.620 was due entirely to a change in the nature of political authority. 447 00:46:50.620 --> 00:46:56.940 The artificial man was able to do what the ordinary man couldn't do, or the kings couldn't do. 448 00:46:56.940 --> 00:47:01.980 The new nation-state could now plunder resources of society that powerful independent social 449 00:47:01.980 --> 00:47:05.620 authorities had closed off to the monarchs. 450 00:47:05.620 --> 00:47:10.100 And all of this could be done not in the name of the egoism of a king, but in the name of 451 00:47:10.100 --> 00:47:13.860 the nation and its ideals of the rights of man. 452 00:47:13.860 --> 00:47:19.700 And now liberty itself is a justification for this. 453 00:47:19.700 --> 00:47:24.220 The liberty has a lot to answer for, you know, what crimes are done in thy name. 454 00:47:24.220 --> 00:47:26.500 Napoleon claimed to be the voice of the people. 455 00:47:26.500 --> 00:47:31.500 When you say that you're expressing the voice of the French nation, how do you know, how do you know you are? 456 00:47:31.500 --> 00:47:36.500 Certainly, as Rousseau said, you certainly don't take a vote. 457 00:47:36.500 --> 00:47:40.500 I mean, you can take a vote, but that's just a rough, empirical thing. 458 00:47:40.500 --> 00:47:45.500 So you're always going to have the central government having some agency, the Supreme Court of the United States, 459 00:47:45.500 --> 00:47:47.500 or some agency saying what the will of the people. 460 00:47:47.500 --> 00:47:52.500 Well, here's what the French came up with, or here's what Napoleon came up with. 461 00:47:52.500 --> 00:47:56.140 Napoleon claimed to be its voice, listen to this, quote, 462 00:47:56.140 --> 00:48:02.140 the revolution is closed, its principles are fixed in my person, 463 00:48:02.140 --> 00:48:06.780 the government and being is the representative of the sovereign people, 464 00:48:06.780 --> 00:48:12.540 there can be no opposition to the sovereign, end quote. 465 00:48:12.540 --> 00:48:15.900 You know, you can't resist the people. 466 00:48:15.900 --> 00:48:19.780 To check Napoleon, other states would have to imitate the worst features of the French 467 00:48:19.780 --> 00:48:46.780 By 1873 all states would have instituted conscription. By 1914 they would have the income tax. When the nation state leviathans clashed in World War I they had no idea what power they had amassed and what kind of war they had unleashed. They didn't have a clue. 468 00:48:46.780 --> 00:49:00.780 They went into that thing like a sporting event. We're going to whip some German butt, you know, or some French butt, and it wasn't anything that had nothing to do with butt. It had to do with artificial men clashing. 469 00:49:00.780 --> 00:49:13.780 And the only way you defeat another artificial man is through attrition. And then they come back to life. See, they're immortal, like that horror movie. 470 00:49:13.780 --> 00:49:21.660 Now, in World War I, there were about 10 million battle deaths, historians tell us. 471 00:49:21.660 --> 00:49:27.660 This was more than all the battle deaths in the previous two centuries of warfare in Europe. 472 00:49:27.660 --> 00:49:34.180 An equal number probably died of battle-related ailments, not to mention those mutilated. 473 00:49:34.180 --> 00:49:38.140 It shattered the social fabric of Europe. 474 00:49:38.140 --> 00:49:45.380 World War II resulted in 40 to 60 million deaths, military and civilian, but that was 475 00:49:45.380 --> 00:49:52.780 not even the worst, if we're to believe R.J. Rommel's work in his book Death by Government, 476 00:49:52.780 --> 00:49:58.140 Rommel, R-U-M-M-E-L, R.J. Rommel. 477 00:49:58.140 --> 00:50:03.340 In Death by Government, he argues that nearly four times as many people have been killed 478 00:50:03.340 --> 00:50:09.240 by Modern States in Pursuit of Totalitarian Ideologies and Other Projects Against Their 479 00:50:09.240 --> 00:50:15.180 Own People, that in all the wars, domestic and foreign, fought around the globe from 480 00:50:15.180 --> 00:50:22.580 1900 until 1994, when his book was published. 481 00:50:22.580 --> 00:50:24.780 He's done studies on a lot of other things, too. 482 00:50:24.780 --> 00:50:32.540 One of his things is try to understand just the magnitude of people killed by governments. 483 00:50:32.540 --> 00:50:37.060 Now if this order of magnitude that he gives us, nearly four times as many people killed 484 00:50:37.060 --> 00:50:42.180 by governments as by war, if it's anywhere near correct, it shows that the greatest threat 485 00:50:42.180 --> 00:50:51.580 to human life in the 20th century has not been war as such, bad as they've been. 486 00:50:51.580 --> 00:51:02.340 I mean, the Soviet Union killed more of its own people than the Germans did. 487 00:51:02.340 --> 00:51:11.940 The greatest threat to human life is in the vast power concentrated in the hands of that artificial man, which Hobbes identified with the modern state. 488 00:51:11.940 --> 00:51:17.060 No human being should have such power, but there's a sense in which no human being does. 489 00:51:17.060 --> 00:51:20.180 The bureaucracy has it. 490 00:51:20.180 --> 00:51:27.340 And when Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil, having met Eichmann, you know that, she got that from the Ospreys, 491 00:51:27.340 --> 00:51:31.740 It's dawned on, in writing this, it dawned on me that there's nothing special. 492 00:51:31.740 --> 00:51:38.140 All she was pointing out was that Eichmann was a mild-mannered, decent-looking fellow and all. 493 00:51:38.140 --> 00:51:44.040 He was a bureaucrat running the machinery of state. 494 00:51:44.040 --> 00:51:49.640 But the banality of evil she saw in Eichmann is to be seen in McNamara, 495 00:51:49.640 --> 00:51:54.040 who's running the machinery of state against Vietnam, in Vietnam. 496 00:51:54.040 --> 00:51:56.380 is to be seen in liberal states. 497 00:51:56.380 --> 00:51:58.640 The banality of evil is to be seen 498 00:51:58.640 --> 00:52:01.720 when Americans bomb civilians at high altitude 499 00:52:01.720 --> 00:52:04.040 and won't fight them on the ground. 500 00:52:05.360 --> 00:52:07.800 And then, you know, the banality of evil 501 00:52:07.800 --> 00:52:12.640 is something that spontaneously comes out of this behavior, 502 00:52:12.640 --> 00:52:15.640 this artificial man, this corporation, 503 00:52:18.560 --> 00:52:20.620 this bureaucracy of the state. 504 00:52:20.620 --> 00:52:22.660 Hobbes justified the state by arguing 505 00:52:22.660 --> 00:52:52.660 I think that it was the only alternative to anarchy, and ever since this has been a background control belief of modern political theory whether it's actually asserted, sometimes it is, but even when it's not asserted, it's a control belief, it's deeply ingrained, go read Rawls or any of these other people, the modern political philosophers for the most part assume this, but can anyone viewing the world wars and totalitarian atrocities of the 20th century carried out by the state really believe that? 506 00:52:52.660 --> 00:53:00.660 Would Europe be worse off under anarchy from 1914 to 1945? 507 00:53:00.660 --> 00:53:08.660 It's not clear that anything could be worse than what actually happened. 508 00:53:08.660 --> 00:53:12.660 Throughout most of history, men have lived without the state. 509 00:53:12.660 --> 00:53:16.660 Not that they've had a good time of it, it's been pretty nasty. 510 00:53:16.660 --> 00:53:23.660 If left to themselves, men spontaneously form small political societies and international societies, 511 00:53:23.660 --> 00:53:26.660 none of which require the coercive power of the state. 512 00:53:26.660 --> 00:53:30.660 During viewing the monstrosity of iathans of his own day, 513 00:53:30.660 --> 00:53:37.660 Friedrich Hayek suggested that liberty in the future may best be secured in small states. 514 00:53:37.660 --> 00:53:39.660 Interesting point. 515 00:53:39.660 --> 00:53:44.660 In this, he was returning to the wisdom of Aristotle, perhaps even of Rousseau. 516 00:53:44.660 --> 00:53:49.940 There is a limit to the size of everything in nature, including states. 517 00:53:49.940 --> 00:53:58.380 But small states cannot emerge today without the acknowledged right of secession from Leviathan. 518 00:53:58.380 --> 00:54:01.700 There's no wilderness to go to to start a colony. 519 00:54:01.700 --> 00:54:06.600 Something the modern state has protected itself from, namely secession, with its self-imposed 520 00:54:06.600 --> 00:54:12.120 and self-serving doctrine first proclaimed by Baudin and Hobbes that the sovereignty 521 00:54:12.120 --> 00:54:18.120 The integrity of the state is indivisible and is internal to territory. 522 00:54:18.120 --> 00:54:23.120 Every time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you say indivisible. 523 00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:26.120 The artificial man can't be divided. 524 00:54:26.120 --> 00:54:36.120 Here, therefore, the indivisibility of sovereignty, however, was an attribute belonging only to God. 525 00:54:36.120 --> 00:54:53.120 In an act of hubris, modern man stole this attribute from heaven and sought to endow the state and its territory with it, failing to realize that everything made by mortal man is divisible. 526 00:54:53.120 --> 00:54:58.120 That includes that artificial man Hobbes called Leviathan. 527 00:54:58.120 --> 00:54:59.120 Thanks. 528 00:55:11.120 --> 00:55:15.120 I'm afraid I went too far, but we can talk about some things in the discussion. 529 00:55:28.120 --> 00:55:40.120 Well, I think the short answer would be that if you set up procedures and allow the central government to manage them, then they never come to anything. 530 00:55:40.120 --> 00:55:50.120 The only kind of resistance is from something. For example, in the United States, the state of California could resist the central government. 531 00:55:50.120 --> 00:55:55.120 Individuals can't. The political parties can't. Because you just have individuals with a mask. 532 00:55:55.120 --> 00:56:00.120 But an actual society, a political society, could resist. 533 00:56:00.120 --> 00:56:07.120 That's why the Republicans, who are always the party of small government and getting government off your back, 534 00:56:07.120 --> 00:56:15.120 when they get in office, when the presidents get in office, you look and you see that government has grown even more than under the Democrats. 535 00:56:15.120 --> 00:56:20.120 So if you really wanted limited government, you should have voted for Mondale, Carter and all the rest of them. 536 00:56:20.120 --> 00:56:24.120 I mean, you understand, because actually, there was less growth. 537 00:56:24.120 --> 00:56:31.120 I was going to ask you what your definition of a nation is. 538 00:56:31.120 --> 00:56:34.120 In relation to Scott, I'm curious. 539 00:56:34.120 --> 00:56:39.120 And also, I've heard two words for ethnos, people related by blood, 540 00:56:39.120 --> 00:56:42.120 and I've also heard people who are just citizens of a government. 541 00:56:42.120 --> 00:56:45.120 What would be the both? 542 00:56:45.120 --> 00:56:49.120 Oh dear, well, I don't like definitions. 543 00:56:49.120 --> 00:56:54.640 I'll give you the wisdom of Satchmo, who was asked by a news commentator, 544 00:56:54.640 --> 00:56:56.240 would you define jazz for us? 545 00:56:56.240 --> 00:57:00.760 And he thought, he said, if you don't know what it is, I can't define it for you. 546 00:57:00.760 --> 00:57:03.920 So what I'm going to do is kind of talk around it. 547 00:57:03.920 --> 00:57:09.560 A nation, well, it comes from nativity, the place you're born. 548 00:57:09.560 --> 00:57:17.440 National affection is an affection for the hills and valleys, the food, the language, the style, the people that you grew up with 549 00:57:17.440 --> 00:57:21.040 and have some sort of bond on a large scale. 550 00:57:21.040 --> 00:57:25.240 They're costumes, there's music, and it's an idiom. 551 00:57:25.240 --> 00:57:27.940 It's like the English, define the English language. 552 00:57:27.940 --> 00:57:29.740 Define it for me. 553 00:57:29.740 --> 00:57:31.240 You can't define the English language. 554 00:57:31.240 --> 00:57:32.340 You speak it. 555 00:57:32.340 --> 00:57:33.240 You don't define it. 556 00:57:33.240 --> 00:57:35.040 You speak it. 557 00:57:35.040 --> 00:57:38.740 So that's what a nation is. 558 00:57:38.740 --> 00:57:45.440 So the trouble with the nation person in France, for example, is there was no language. 559 00:57:45.440 --> 00:58:15.440 understand only 13 percent roughly spoke the so-called official language everything's artificial there's no tradition there's no sense of community etc etc it's all made up the German nation was made up the British nation's made up the American nation's made up and so we know what it's not that there's the Sioux nation perhaps you know that there's an Irish nation 560 00:58:15.440 --> 00:58:35.440 I think the story of the European Union is not over with, we don't know what's going to happen, it seems to me I look at it sometimes and I say, you know, I see the centralization beyond belief. 561 00:58:35.440 --> 00:58:38.440 The European Union is not over with. We don't know what's going to happen. 562 00:58:38.440 --> 00:58:46.440 It seems to me I look at it sometimes and I say, you know, I see the centralization beyond belief. 563 00:58:46.440 --> 00:58:53.440 Some of these regulations defeat the satirist, including euro condoms. 564 00:58:53.440 --> 00:58:56.440 You've got to worry about the size of them and so on. 565 00:58:56.440 --> 00:59:02.440 So, you know, there is a problem about the size of euro condoms and that got to be, you know, 566 00:59:02.440 --> 00:59:04.440 you get into the micro-physics of that, it's very interesting. 567 00:59:04.440 --> 00:59:07.940 Anyway, they defeat the satirists. 568 00:59:07.940 --> 00:59:11.940 So it looks like the Europeans are creating a super state on the American model. 569 00:59:11.940 --> 00:59:17.440 By the way, if there wasn't a huge United States, there probably wouldn't be a European Union of that kind. 570 00:59:17.440 --> 00:59:20.440 In other words, you have one big colossal power. 571 00:59:20.440 --> 00:59:23.440 Somebody else is going to try to counter it. 572 00:59:23.440 --> 00:59:30.440 So, well, just let me, just a moment. 573 00:59:30.440 --> 00:59:42.240 But the other thing is, the centralization in the creation of international agreements in societies is bringing about devolution, that's true. 574 00:59:42.240 --> 00:59:45.240 And that's a good thing, that's a good thing. 575 00:59:45.240 --> 00:59:54.740 So if the devolution thing keeps going and there's some moral virtue there, then there'll be centers of resistance to decentralization. 576 00:59:54.740 --> 01:00:01.240 On the other hand, if the center is strong enough, all they're doing is dividing and conquering. 577 01:00:01.240 --> 01:00:04.400 And then the flattening out will start. It's already starting. 578 01:00:04.400 --> 01:00:07.840 So Europe is an interesting thing. It's going both ways at once. 579 01:00:07.840 --> 01:00:10.840 It's centralizing and devolving at the same time. 580 01:00:10.840 --> 01:00:12.540 And I just don't know what's going to happen. 581 01:00:12.540 --> 01:00:15.400 Now, as far as Ireland goes, that's a good question. 582 01:00:15.400 --> 01:00:19.640 I've thought about that, actually, because my wife is Irish background. 583 01:00:19.640 --> 01:00:24.100 We've been there about three or four times. 584 01:00:24.100 --> 01:00:29.460 A few years ago, I started going to Ireland, and you go into a town and you see a big sign. 585 01:00:29.460 --> 01:00:36.100 Two-thirds of the funding for the water system of this little town is provided by the EU. 586 01:00:36.100 --> 01:00:37.580 The big EU thing. 587 01:00:37.580 --> 01:00:44.140 Going to another town, two-thirds of the sanitation system, EU. 588 01:00:44.140 --> 01:00:46.780 Money just flowing into Ireland. 589 01:00:46.780 --> 01:00:49.380 And with it goes regulations. 590 01:00:49.380 --> 01:01:01.380 And so Irish, you know, Ireland's changing. But my wife said, no problem. She said, when the time comes, when they squeeze the Irish, they'll just say no. 591 01:01:01.380 --> 01:01:08.380 They're getting the money. They're good at that. They're getting the money, and then they'll resist. I don't know. 592 01:01:08.380 --> 01:01:12.380 The English complain that the Greeks and Italians don't pay any attention to the regulations. 593 01:01:12.380 --> 01:01:18.380 Only the stupid English and the Germans obey the rules. And that's a good thing if that happens. 594 01:01:18.380 --> 01:01:26.380 So, Ireland vetoed recently this attempt to bring in. So, she told me that. She said, see, I told you. 595 01:01:26.380 --> 01:01:36.380 Do they? Yeah. Good. Yes, sir. 596 01:01:36.380 --> 01:01:39.380 Yes, sir. 597 01:02:06.380 --> 01:02:18.380 and talk about the rise of government here as a influence by those Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, etc. 598 01:02:18.380 --> 01:02:22.380 And another question, if you were living in... 599 01:02:22.380 --> 01:02:25.380 Laziness, sheer laziness. 600 01:02:25.380 --> 01:02:30.380 And if you were living in the 1860s, you sure would have been against Lincoln. 601 01:02:30.380 --> 01:02:32.380 Because he didn't want centralizing. 602 01:02:32.380 --> 01:02:33.380 Centralized, yeah. 603 01:02:33.380 --> 01:02:35.380 He wanted the South to rise. 604 01:02:35.380 --> 01:02:42.380 Well, let me ask you this about Locke. We are over time, aren't we? We need to stop. Maybe we can just talk afterwards. 605 01:02:42.380 --> 01:02:47.380 I want to know what you mean by Locke's. Okay, thank you very much.