Our topic is the rise of the nation-state. The first problem we must confront is that
most of what is said about the nation-state is not true. The nation-states of the world
present themselves as republics today, or democracies, or even to cover all bases, as
is democratic republics, but they are neither democracies nor republics in any traditional sense of those terms.
Nor are most nation states really nations. Great Britain, for instance, is not a nation for the United Kingdom of at least four nations.
And many things called states are not really states.
Saudi Arabia, for example, I would say, is not a state, but a family oil business.
And further, many people are inclined to identify government with state.
And when it is said, quite rightly, that mankind cannot live without government,
we are inclined to read this to mean that mankind cannot exist without the state.
But there is no necessary connection at all between government and state.
Government and political order generally presupposes a relation of authority and subordination.
The family, for example, it could be said to be the primordial political unit
because it contains the relations of authority and subordination.
Indeed, any recognized social authority can be the source of government.
Throughout human history, except for the last three and a half centuries or so,
men have been governed by many sorts of things that were not modern states.
Tribal chiefs, religious leaders, powerful families, federations of powerful families,
aristocratic republics, town councils, principalities, and so on.
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.
There are many examples today, the United Postal Union, all these stamps just fly around the world, but there's no government enforcing that.
It's arrangement between governments, but no government rules it, yet it's government, it's a way of governing our behavior.
The airline regulations, international telegraph union, and on and on, are forms of people being governed without the coercion of the state.
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.
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.
It is just a distinct form of government.
It's very recent and how long it will last, we don't know.
But if we want to understand it, we can do no better than to study very carefully
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan published in 1651.
Here we have in bold and memorable language, it's a brilliant work of rhetoric,
An outline of the modern state at its very inception.
Marx was right when he said Hobbes is the father of us all.
Hobbes' theory of the state, of what he calls sovereign power, can be put briefly.
He imagines mankind in a state of nature without any law or morality except that of self-interest.
Everyone in such a condition would be insecure and in fear of a violent death.
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.
Now the contract is made among the people themselves and not between the people and the sovereign.
What they gain is an end to the war of all against all, and a peaceful pursuit of liberty,
now defined as that domain in which the laws of the sovereign are silent.
And his laws are absolute, for the people have conferred on him unlimited authority
for the sake of peace.
And so Hobbes says the sovereignty is indivisible, infallible, and irresistible.
The only check on the sovereign is that of prudence.
He knows that if he pushes the people too far, he may drive them back into a state of nature,
and hence rebellion.
But he has no moral or legal obligations to the people as such, for his will is law.
Now what Hobbes had theorized was not a bright idea he had figured out by himself, but the
The Idealization of a Mode of Political Association Already in the Process of Formation in Europe.
There are two features of the Hogsian account that are important for understanding the character
of a modern state.
If nothing else is remembered from this lecture, I'd like you to carry away these two features
to think about.
The first is that Hobbes says the state is vast in scale. He calls it Leviathan. He puts
no limits on its size. It can expand but it can't contract. And the second is the state
is, quote, an artificial man, end quote. Now both of these theses, that the state is big
and artificial, contradict classical political philosophy and indeed medieval philosophy,
which taught that political order, for the most part, should be small and that rule should
would be not by an artificial man but by men of merit. Aristotle says, quote, to the size
of states there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements,
But none of these retain their natural power, when they are too large or too small.
And then again he says, if citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according
to merit, then they must know each other's character.
And that requires a human scale.
Now on the point about political size, Aristotle seems to me to be basically right.
Human flourishing does not require vast scale modern states.
Athens, with around 50,000 people that hovered at that population, that includes slaves and
foreigners, in three generations produced a culture of such high level that we still
take much of it as our guide.
The great religions of the world were formed in tiny communities like Israel and Arabia.
Florence, with around 40,000 people, was a leading center of the Renaissance, producing
world-class architecture, painting, sculpture, science, philosophy, literature, opera was
invented there by Galileo's father.
And Florence was a pioneer in modern banking.
The founding fathers of America lived in a world where no city was over 30,000 people.
New York did not reach 100,000 until 1820.
London in 1830 was the first city to reach a million.
So the monster cities such as Mexico City with around 24 million, about a quarter of
of all Mexicans, or Sao Paulo with 19 million, Tokyo, Los Angeles and so on, are very, very
recent phenomena. These are themselves artifacts of the centralizing disposition of that artificial
man that Hobbes theorized to be the essence of the modern state. It's as if the artificial
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.
The modern state is not rooted in the social nature of man. It's a different kind of thing.
If we're looking at the Resilient Political Order, it tends to be small. Let's just assume that for the moment.
If that's true, large scale, we should expect that large political formations would usually be,
and I think this is true, the result of force and domination.
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.
And if that's right, there's a moral presumption on behalf of smaller political units.
The burden of proof, then, should be on one who says the state must be large.
Since humans are disposed to cantonize into smaller units, and since large political formations
are evidently not necessary for human flourishing, there is something strange and sinister about
and Hobbes' assumption that the state must be vast in scale.
Nor can this strangeness be eliminated
by considering the weakness of Aristotle's account,
namely that Aristotle did not have the experience
of universal forms of government such as Christianity
that operate on a global scale.
Dr. Reiko said something about that.
and the importance of an international society in the story of liberty in the West.
But Hobbes was aware, unlike Aristotle, of these universal forms of government.
For example, the papacy and that relaxed imperial federation known as the Holy Roman Empire.
But he rejects them as having no authority over the state.
Like Aristotle's polis, the Hobbesian Leviathan is confined to a definite territory, unless it conquers some more.
The difference is that for Aristotle, the political order is and must be within a human scale.
It can, he says, be taken in at a single view or walked across in a single day.
For Hobbes, it is cut off entirely from anything that could be called human scale.
Now, the term Leviathan comes from the book of Job in the Bible and refers to a great
sea monster. God tells Job that he cannot control Leviathan. He cannot get his hook
in him as he can with other fish. The Leviathan in the book of Job is a symbol of the forces
of nature with which man must contend and cannot control. So we may say that what Hobbes
What Hobbes is telling us is that the Leviathan is an artificial man, not a natural force,
beyond human scale, which cannot be controlled and must be endured.
His philosophy is an attempt to show that this is nonetheless a form of political association
demanded by our nature, the sorts of blokes we are.
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.
To better understand it, it is necessary to set aside political theory and to tell a story about its origins.
Hobbes describes, so I'm going to give an account, a very brief account of this artifact, called the Modern State.
Hobbes describes the sovereignty of the state as absolute command, there being no will, human or divine, superior to the state.
Europe would eventually become an order of such states, but that is not how Europe began, as Dr. Ray Covey has shown us.
Sovereignty in the Middle Ages was always divided, it was divided all over the place.
The church, a universal institution, had long since declared itself sovereign over spiritual
matters and over those temporal possessions and powers necessary to rule in spiritual
matters. It had vast holdings in property and its own law.
As far as secular matters went, Europe was composed of thousands of independent units
of Every Conceivable Kind, Tribal Societies, Kingdoms, Principalities, Dukedoms, Bishoprics,
Republics, City States.
In addition to these particularistic political units, there was the international order
of the Holy Roman Empire, and of course the papacy, as well as numerous leagues, republics
of free cities and the like.
Tax was a matter of negotiation, sometimes with force, between these independent social
authorities.
None of them even remotely resembled a modern state.
A medieval king was so hedged in by a greater array of independent social authorities that
it's hard to imagine today, each of which had sovereignty in its own sphere and titles
When Henry IV ran afoul of divine law and church policy, the church had the moral authority
to bring him quite literally to his knees in the snow. The barons did the same to King
John of England.
A medieval king, beyond his own property, had no steady source of income until after
The King had to constantly go begging for revenue and troops to powerful independent
social authorities who could say no.
Every king's ambition was to become free of this dependence.
To make a long and complicated story short, monarchs eventually, after centuries, gained
this independence, and in the process of doing so, they created, without exactly intending
to do so, the modern state.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the monarchs had defeated the church.
That is to say, its independence had been considerably weakened.
From then on the monarch would be engaged in a battle with the nobility and the towns,
a battle which Charles I, as far as nobility goes, would lose and pay for with his head
and one that Louis XIV would win.
The Thirty Years' War would reduce the Holy Roman Empire to a shadow, or a shadow of a
shade maybe, but thus removing the last international form of government from competition with the
by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, Europe had become
an order of modern centralized states under what was now called absolute monarchy.
Hume, in the middle of the 18th century, says that absolute monarchy is three generations
old.
That's how he thinks of it.
Over a period of 600 years, the kings of Europe had succeeded in centralizing unprecedented
Power and Resources, placed in between two powerful international bodies, the Papacy
and the Holy Roman Empire on the one hand and a host of local and regional sovereignies
on the other.
By carefully playing one of these factors against the other and in bewildering combinations,
the kings were able eventually to destroy the rich and complex system of divided sovereignty
that had characterized Europe in favor of a system of large states, each of which enjoyed
for Absolute Sovereignty Within Its Borders Now, within these borders, which have gotten larger and larger,
were conquered peoples of all sorts, speaking different languages, with different traditions,
and whose loyalties had formerly been given to other social authorities.
To rule this large aggregate, the monarchs developed an administrative system
through which a single will could flow down to millions of individuals.
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.
And when you find the founding fathers accusing each other in the constitutional debates of dragging us into monarchy,
They don't mean they'll be an hereditary prince or executive so much as they mean there's going to be this centralization.
So when people complain about monarchy, it's centralization.
The king's bureaucracy by its very nature had to operate according to strict procedures,
which could not be arbitrarily altered even by the king without destroying the utility of the system.
As the king, largely through conquest, centralized more power, the bureaucracy grew, acquiring a life of its own.
With each stage of its growth, it separated itself more and more from society, and eventually from the king himself.
So this artificial man he had created began to, like Frankenstein, get up and walk around.
The most powerful absolute monarch of the 17th century was Louis XIV.
Of his administrative system he boasted, l'état c'est moi, I am the state.
But he was wrong. By then the state was no longer the king's possession.
In fact, it belonged more to powerful ministers such as Richelieu and Mazarin than to the king.
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.
Now nothing shows more clearly how far the state had come in separating itself from society
and the French Revolution, which swept away all traditional forms of society.
The king, the nobility, church, provincial governments, an independent judiciary, and
even space and time as traditionally conceived were swept away as the calendar and the geography
of France were changed.
Everything was eliminated but one thing.
The State Administrative System And indeed it was the state system that was
doing the eliminating.
The machinery of the state was now being operated not by king, nobility and priests, but by
people calling themselves Republicans.
The Republicans, however, did not weaken its power, but increased it a thousand fold.
The first revolution not only demonstrated the immortality of Hobbes' artificial man,
it transformed the very meaning of the state, giving it its specious moral legitimacy it
has today.
Let's see how that works.
Centuries of monarchical rule had accustomed Europeans to think of the state as being above
society.
They called themselves subjects, and they were. I mean, they were subjects.
They thought of themselves as subjects, and the state was above society.
But the French Revolution declared that society must control the state.
Ah, now we're going to be citizens, not subjects.
So the state's not going to be above society.
Yet so strong was the force of habit, that it was still natural to think of the state as expressing a single will.
Instead of the single will, however, of the monarch, the revolution substituted the single will of the French, of something called the French nation.
I ponder that.
Hobbes' artificial man had been transformed from the person of the king to the person of the nation.
For the first time in history, a nation person would appear on the stage.
A thing called France would be declared a republic, one and, quote, one and indivisible.
It always has to be one and indivisible, even on our Pledge of Allegiance. One nation, indivisible. No divided sovereignty, please.
This thing called France would act, would make war, make peace, preserve our honor, and so forth.
The appearance of the nation person was not only a spectacular absurdity, logically, but a long-term moral atrocity.
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.
So to have this French nation, you've got to do a lot of wiping out.
Despite the King's effort at centralization, France was still a highly decentralized region
from its long European experience.
In 1789, for example, there were no less than 80 provinces, each with its own laws, its
own customs, its own political tradition, its own history of resistance.
These histories went back centuries and centuries. One sense of national identity, in so far
as one had one, was tied to these traditional political regions.
And as late as 1871, a study showed to the dismay of the centralizers that two-thirds
of the French public school children did not identify their nation as France, but instead
No more than 13 percent of the people could even speak the language the government designated
as French, and even fewer than that spoke the language on a regular basis, and no one
at all in the South spoke it.
To create the new artificial nation person, all of those independent social authorities
that David Hume said were shaped by the hand of nature, would have to be hollowed out and
flattened out.
Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on September the 7th, 1789, Emmanuel Cies urged this project
of Flattening Out of Great Vigor, quote.
France must not be an assemblage of small nations, each with its own democratic government.
She is not a collection of states.
She is a single whole made up of integral parts.
These parts must not have each a complete existence of its own, for they are not whole
The difference is a big one. Everything is lost once we consent to regard the established
municipalities, the districts, or the provinces as so many republics joined together only
for the purposes of defense and common protection. Now that's real republicanism, you see. So
In reaction to the French Revolution and the imperialism of Napoleon, other European monarchs
accelerated the process of centralization.
Everywhere the rich mosaic of independent social authorities that was Europe were ground
into powder to which Alexis de Tocqueville bore eloquent witness and I quote, the old
localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement and everywhere the
central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs. The whole of Germany, even the
The whole of Europe presents in this respect the same picture. Everywhere men are leaving
behind the liberty of the Middle Ages not to enter into a modern brand of liberty, but
to return to the ancient despotism for centralization is nothing else than an up-to-date version
of the Administration Seen in the Roman Empire."
Not as if people didn't know what was happening.
This process of centralization eventually swept away the monarchs themselves who had
started the process, oh dear.
And most of the states of Europe developed their own version of the French model of the
state as the nation-person.
That's why we see all those tricolors, where you see a little tricolor, Italy, and they
all are imitating this French nation person business.
Here we have an almost magical and mystical transformation in the understanding of the
state, of the nation person.
One that requires careful and in-depth study, which of course can't be carried out here,
but I'd just like to make a few comments.
First, the monarch had created the state merely for the convenience of commanding a large territory.
Everyone knew the state was above society, though all hoped that His Majesty's government would benefit them somehow.
With the collapse of monarchy, the state and the question of its legitimacy became a pressing problem.
Because with the collapse of monarchy, why have this state at all?
They knew the monarchs had created it.
The solution, who's going to give up such a power though?
The solution was to claim that the state was now embedded in society, i.e. the nation,
and was the expression of the nation's will.
In giving the state a social character, namely the nation, which it had not had under the
monarchs, it gained moral legitimacy.
Something Hobbes never even pretended to give it.
But this was a spectacular absurdity.
As we saw in the case of France, there simply was no genuine French nation in existence
prior to the state.
It was the monarchy that had crushed together the quite distinct national characters that
had occupied the vast territory known as the realm of France.
It was not the French nation that expressed its will through the state and the revolution,
but the state that created or thought to create a French nation.
So the French nation itself is an artifact of that artificial man.
Now for this task, it was necessary to use violence and terror, and not even the guillotine
in Napoleon could actually accomplish it. As we saw as late as 1871, French school children
still hadn't gotten the point. And the same would be true of other would-be nation states
in Europe. If you look at them, they're mostly ragtag affairs. You know, there's Italian
and People, Metternich was more right when he said that Italy is a geographical expression,
not a nation, same with Germany and so on.
But they've had great influence, I mean an absurdity can still be very powerful, incoherence
can be just as powerful as coherence.
But like all absurdities in political philosophy, the theory of the nation-state is the warp
This can be seen perhaps in the widespread use of Rousseau as the philosopher of the
nation-state.
Rousseau's famous theory of the general will of the social contract captures an important
truth about the social nature of man.
There is something like a general will that spontaneously occurs when men form social
orders of various kinds, like a market price that spontaneously forms.
But as Rousseau makes very clear, these social orders have to be small for that to happen
and allow face-to-face knowledge, a teaching we've touched on in Aristotle.
Rousseau's theory of the general will applies only to very small republics, so small that
Rousseau will not even allow representatives, but requires that the sovereign people themselves
actually show up to do the business of enacting the laws.
Once you have representative democracy, it's downhill as far as Rousseau goes.
The artificial man begins to grow and appear.
He doesn't want any artificial men.
So the government has to be, the state has to be small.
Here's what he says, quote from Rousseau, size and nations and large extent of states,
These are the principal cause of human misfortunes, and above all of the countless disasters which
undermine and destroy civilized peoples. Nearly all small states, republics and monarchies
alike flourish by reason of being small." Rousseau's theory of the social contract
and the General Will is designed for a small scale, political order,
and therefore it makes no sense and is corrupt to map it on to a scale as large as France,
much less China.
In Mao Zedong's China, Rousseau was the only Western philosopher,
aside from the Marxists, to merit a special celebration.
The General Will and all, and Mao Tse-Tung thought, sounds good to him, map it under China.
But the same thing was done in France.
And even Montesquieu will talk about republics,
about France possibly being a republic or European size republics,
as if you could do that on the scale of European countries.
And Rousseau does this too.
I mean, he says they have to be small, but he slips up once in a while.
But the French revolutionaries did that.
Although the modern state has been the greatest destroyer of genuine nations and social authorities
and communities ever devised, it corruptly presents itself in various social guises as
the will of the nation, it destroys nations and then it is the nation, as government of
The Destroyer of Genuine Social Orders and Communities
It with a straight face calls itself socialism or communism.
See these terms, nation, socialism, communism, even fascism are pandering to a deep human need.
Humans need communities, they need society.
And the state having wiped it away, they need it.
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.
Fascism means to bind together. Well, they were bound together before they got torn up.
So we see a pattern here that the modern state destroys, creates a problem, and then presents itself as the solution.
Follows policies that weaken families, destroy families, weaken them, then wonders why there are so many broken homes, etc.
The monarch used, second thing, the monarch used democracy to increase the power of the state apparatus.
That's an important point.
The monarch used democracy to increase the power of the state apparatus.
Let's see how that works.
Centralization is not necessarily at the expense of the people considered as an aggregate or a mass.
Centralization doesn't harm mass society.
Mass society is a bunch of ruthless people and centralization is something they look toward.
But what it operates at the expense of are independent social authorities and smaller political units
of Independence, whose partial sovereignty cannot be tolerated by the modern state.
Now Hobbes saw all this and he called these independent social authorities, quote, worms
in the commonwealth, end quote, you know, as if you had worms eating away at your liver
and your pancreas and so on, and so a state with these independent social authorities
has worms and has to be dewormed of them.
Consequently, a modern state will resist devolution of power. It always will.
And it can never tolerate secession. It is the enemy of all centrifugal tendencies.
But it may set itself up as the friend of the people in the aggregate.
Those who are not incorporated into any kind of social authority.
It sets us up as the friend.
Some of whom may be genuinely oppressed by this or that social authority.
and the people can be used by the central government to do them in, do these authorities in.
So independent social authorities are not necessarily good guys, you know, they can oppress people
and then when they do there's a market for the center to come in and isolate that independent
social authority, wipe it out, get the support of other social authorities and the masses
to do it and they can do it one after the other. And since it's immortal it just waits them out,
Monarchs made this use of the people in the mass in their battle with the church, nobility
in the towns.
The king, for example, staffed his bureaucracy with men of low estate who had nothing and
owed everything to their office and to the king.
As Lord Acton put it in the case of France, the rise of democracy with the help of absolute
monarchy is the one constant theme of French history.
When the kings of Europe were overthrown, their state bureaucracy remained.
What had been nothing more than an instrument of convenience for ruling a vast territory
came now to be seen as a democratic instrument through which the voice of a single will could
Arm with this moral authority, the State could invade and exploit areas of society undreamed
of by the absolute monarchs.
The State would learn to mortgage future revenues and monetize a permanent debt.
It would in time gain control of money.
Indeed, it would do more than that. It would redefine the meaning of money as paper issued
in its own name. It would build a centralizing infrastructure. See, Hobbes, Hobbes' sovereign
didn't even know how to fix the borders. He couldn't exactly have the technology to define
the borders. You know, I mean, people were in the country, and Hobbes' sovereign lives
off an excise tax. Hobbes doesn't even imagine the kind of state that comes later.
So, some big changes. The state creates this infrastructure, census, all the rest of it.
It would as much as possible disarm the people. I mean, the British resisted taking the census
right on up, just fought it every step of the way. The government should not know how
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.
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.
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.
Kojev, one of Hegel's commentators and the teacher of Marx, he believed this and concluded
that moral and political philosophy had actually come to an end. This is the end of philosophy
business. And that the only thing left for a philosopher to do was to become a bureaucrat
in the French state, which he did. What a good life.
In principle, no, but I mean to imagine the hubris thinking that philosophy has come to
In principle, no area of society was free from intrusion by the modern state.
Constitutions and legalistic doctrines of individual rights were mere paper barriers
because it was a center that always would interpret them.
The only effective barriers were those remaining independent social authorities and traditions
that had the moral strength to resist.
So as Hume said, authority is based on nothing but opinion, not based on force, it's based
on the opinion of right, and if people have the moral strength, there will be resistance.
They need communities and a larger scale of the individual to do that.
Where these communities were strong and traditions were strong, as in Britain and the United
States, centralized power was to some degree checked.
Where they were weak, as in Russia and Germany after World War I, nearly every aspect of
social life came under central control.
But it must be said, and that will happen here if they ever get sufficiently weak, but
it must be said that totalitarianism is intimated in every modern state as only a matter of degree.
This can perhaps be best brought out by considering the state's ability to exploit society for
the purposes of war.
War. So I want to turn to that now. The Battle of Roquois in 1643, which made France the
dominant power in Europe, numbered around 48,000 in total. That's 1643. Big battle there.
Three decades later, the largest battle in Europe was fought at Malpeque in 1709 with
The total of 200,000.
So you can see what centralization has probably done.
Though they were said to be absolute,
European monarchs were really limited
in the resources their state apparatus could take from society.
They did not have the luxury of an income tax, for example,
or the ability to order universal conscription.
But all that changed when the state could present itself
as the will of the nation.
That's where the democracy comes in.
The French Republic was the first to order universal conscription, August 25th, 1792.
The decree called the Leveille en Masse mobilized all men and old men, all women and even children
for war.
Not that they'd all fight, but the children had to pick lint out of things and so on.
But everybody was mobilized.
The state, however, did not have the infrastructure sufficient to implement it.
It was a very warming thing and they wanted it read twice to them because it sounded so
good.
It simply did.
Except for males between 18 and 25 who were unmarried, the others weren't mobilized.
The males were and some of these had to be dragged and changed.
The size of armies the monarchs could afford had not changed much since the time of Louis
XIV. Louis XVI had around 200,000 troops, Frederick the Great a slightly smaller number.
In 1795-96, however, the French nation-state raised an army of 800,000 for this draft.
By the time Napoleon had been brought to bay, the French had raised an army of around three
Napoleon, the largest ever assembled in the history of the world.
And war was more vicious, whereas monarchs had to be frugal with the use of troops and
use elaborate tactics to maneuver to gain victory with minimum loss, Napoleon developed
aggressive tactics of mass assault which used troops as cannon fodder knowing that
he could order another conscription.
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.
Now, the huge destruction of modern wars is often chalked up as a tendency to always want to say these things are natural.
Well, you know, all this destruction is because of modern technology, so that means you can't do anything about it.
It's just the result of something like that.
But here we see very clearly that it's not the result of technology.
Technology can make it worse.
Nothing had changed much in the technology of war since the early 18th century.
At the beginning of the 18th century, you could shoot at a man all day at 100 yards and probably not hit him.
At the end of the 18th century, you could still shoot at him all day and not hit him.
And the fastest you could go is what a horse could do.
So nothing had changed.
Technology.
What had changed, the vast scale of warfare that now could be carried out
was due entirely to a change in the nature of political authority.
The artificial man was able to do what the ordinary man couldn't do, or the kings couldn't do.
The new nation-state could now plunder resources of society that powerful independent social
authorities had closed off to the monarchs.
And all of this could be done not in the name of the egoism of a king, but in the name of
the nation and its ideals of the rights of man.
And now liberty itself is a justification for this.
The liberty has a lot to answer for, you know, what crimes are done in thy name.
Napoleon claimed to be the voice of the people.
When you say that you're expressing the voice of the French nation, how do you know, how do you know you are?
Certainly, as Rousseau said, you certainly don't take a vote.
I mean, you can take a vote, but that's just a rough, empirical thing.
So you're always going to have the central government having some agency, the Supreme Court of the United States,
or some agency saying what the will of the people.
Well, here's what the French came up with, or here's what Napoleon came up with.
Napoleon claimed to be its voice, listen to this, quote,
the revolution is closed, its principles are fixed in my person,
the government and being is the representative of the sovereign people,
there can be no opposition to the sovereign, end quote.
You know, you can't resist the people.
To check Napoleon, other states would have to imitate the worst features of the French
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.
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.
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.
Now, in World War I, there were about 10 million battle deaths, historians tell us.
This was more than all the battle deaths in the previous two centuries of warfare in Europe.
An equal number probably died of battle-related ailments, not to mention those mutilated.
It shattered the social fabric of Europe.
World War II resulted in 40 to 60 million deaths, military and civilian, but that was
not even the worst, if we're to believe R.J. Rommel's work in his book Death by Government,
Rommel, R-U-M-M-E-L, R.J. Rommel.
In Death by Government, he argues that nearly four times as many people have been killed
by Modern States in Pursuit of Totalitarian Ideologies and Other Projects Against Their
Own People, that in all the wars, domestic and foreign, fought around the globe from
1900 until 1994, when his book was published.
He's done studies on a lot of other things, too.
One of his things is try to understand just the magnitude of people killed by governments.
Now if this order of magnitude that he gives us, nearly four times as many people killed
by governments as by war, if it's anywhere near correct, it shows that the greatest threat
to human life in the 20th century has not been war as such, bad as they've been.
I mean, the Soviet Union killed more of its own people than the Germans did.
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.
No human being should have such power, but there's a sense in which no human being does.
The bureaucracy has it.
And when Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil, having met Eichmann, you know that, she got that from the Ospreys,
It's dawned on, in writing this, it dawned on me that there's nothing special.
All she was pointing out was that Eichmann was a mild-mannered, decent-looking fellow and all.
He was a bureaucrat running the machinery of state.
But the banality of evil she saw in Eichmann is to be seen in McNamara,
who's running the machinery of state against Vietnam, in Vietnam.
is to be seen in liberal states.
The banality of evil is to be seen
when Americans bomb civilians at high altitude
and won't fight them on the ground.
And then, you know, the banality of evil
is something that spontaneously comes out of this behavior,
this artificial man, this corporation,
this bureaucracy of the state.
Hobbes justified the state by arguing
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?
Would Europe be worse off under anarchy from 1914 to 1945?
It's not clear that anything could be worse than what actually happened.
Throughout most of history, men have lived without the state.
Not that they've had a good time of it, it's been pretty nasty.
If left to themselves, men spontaneously form small political societies and international societies,
none of which require the coercive power of the state.
During viewing the monstrosity of iathans of his own day,
Friedrich Hayek suggested that liberty in the future may best be secured in small states.
Interesting point.
In this, he was returning to the wisdom of Aristotle, perhaps even of Rousseau.
There is a limit to the size of everything in nature, including states.
But small states cannot emerge today without the acknowledged right of secession from Leviathan.
There's no wilderness to go to to start a colony.
Something the modern state has protected itself from, namely secession, with its self-imposed
and self-serving doctrine first proclaimed by Baudin and Hobbes that the sovereignty
The integrity of the state is indivisible and is internal to territory.
Every time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you say indivisible.
The artificial man can't be divided.
Here, therefore, the indivisibility of sovereignty, however, was an attribute belonging only to God.
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.
That includes that artificial man Hobbes called Leviathan.
Thanks.
I'm afraid I went too far, but we can talk about some things in the discussion.
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.
The only kind of resistance is from something. For example, in the United States, the state of California could resist the central government.
Individuals can't. The political parties can't. Because you just have individuals with a mask.
But an actual society, a political society, could resist.
That's why the Republicans, who are always the party of small government and getting government off your back,
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.
So if you really wanted limited government, you should have voted for Mondale, Carter and all the rest of them.
I mean, you understand, because actually, there was less growth.
I was going to ask you what your definition of a nation is.
In relation to Scott, I'm curious.
And also, I've heard two words for ethnos, people related by blood,
and I've also heard people who are just citizens of a government.
What would be the both?
Oh dear, well, I don't like definitions.
I'll give you the wisdom of Satchmo, who was asked by a news commentator,
would you define jazz for us?
And he thought, he said, if you don't know what it is, I can't define it for you.
So what I'm going to do is kind of talk around it.
A nation, well, it comes from nativity, the place you're born.
National affection is an affection for the hills and valleys, the food, the language, the style, the people that you grew up with
and have some sort of bond on a large scale.
They're costumes, there's music, and it's an idiom.
It's like the English, define the English language.
Define it for me.
You can't define the English language.
You speak it.
You don't define it.
You speak it.
So that's what a nation is.
So the trouble with the nation person in France, for example, is there was no language.
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
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.
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.
Some of these regulations defeat the satirist, including euro condoms.
You've got to worry about the size of them and so on.
So, you know, there is a problem about the size of euro condoms and that got to be, you know,
you get into the micro-physics of that, it's very interesting.
Anyway, they defeat the satirists.
So it looks like the Europeans are creating a super state on the American model.
By the way, if there wasn't a huge United States, there probably wouldn't be a European Union of that kind.
In other words, you have one big colossal power.
Somebody else is going to try to counter it.
So, well, just let me, just a moment.
But the other thing is, the centralization in the creation of international agreements in societies is bringing about devolution, that's true.
And that's a good thing, that's a good thing.
So if the devolution thing keeps going and there's some moral virtue there, then there'll be centers of resistance to decentralization.
On the other hand, if the center is strong enough, all they're doing is dividing and conquering.
And then the flattening out will start. It's already starting.
So Europe is an interesting thing. It's going both ways at once.
It's centralizing and devolving at the same time.
And I just don't know what's going to happen.
Now, as far as Ireland goes, that's a good question.
I've thought about that, actually, because my wife is Irish background.
We've been there about three or four times.
A few years ago, I started going to Ireland, and you go into a town and you see a big sign.
Two-thirds of the funding for the water system of this little town is provided by the EU.
The big EU thing.
Going to another town, two-thirds of the sanitation system, EU.
Money just flowing into Ireland.
And with it goes regulations.
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.
They're getting the money. They're good at that. They're getting the money, and then they'll resist. I don't know.
The English complain that the Greeks and Italians don't pay any attention to the regulations.
Only the stupid English and the Germans obey the rules. And that's a good thing if that happens.
So, Ireland vetoed recently this attempt to bring in. So, she told me that. She said, see, I told you.
Do they? Yeah. Good. Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
and talk about the rise of government here as a influence by those Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, etc.
And another question, if you were living in...
Laziness, sheer laziness.
And if you were living in the 1860s, you sure would have been against Lincoln.
Because he didn't want centralizing.
Centralized, yeah.
He wanted the South to rise.
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.
I want to know what you mean by Locke's. Okay, thank you very much.