ANATOMY
OF THE STATE
ANATOMY
OF THE STATE
MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
© 2009 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute
and published under the Creative
Commons Attribution License 3.0.
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Ludwig von Mises Institute
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ISBN: 978-1-933550-48-0
The greatest danger
to the State
is independent
intellectual criticism.
Murray N. Rothbard
CONTENTS
What the State Is Not . . . . . . . . . 9
What the State Is . . . . . . . . . . 13
How the State
Preserves Itself . . . . . . . . . . . 18
How the State
Transcends Its Limits . . . . . . . 30
What the State Fears . . . . . . . 44
How States Relate
to One Another . . . . . . . . . . 47
History as a Race
Between State Power and
Social Power . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
7
WHAT THE STATE IS NOT
he State is almost universally consid-
ered an institution of social service.
Some theorists venerate the State
as the apotheosis of society; oth-
ers regard it as an amiable, though
Toften inefficient, organization for
achieving social ends; but almost all regard it
as a necessary means for achieving the goals of
mankind, a means to be ranged against the pri-
vate sector and often winning in this compe-
tition of resources. With the rise of democracy,
the identification of the State with society has
been redoubled, until it is common to hear sen-
timents expressed which violate virtually every
tenet of reason and common sense such as, we
Originally published in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against
Nature and Other Essays by Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn,
Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55 88.
9
10 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
are the government. The useful collective term
we has enabled an ideological camouflage to
be thrown over the reality of political life. If we
are the government, then anything a govern-
ment does to an individual is not only just and
untyrannical but also voluntary on the part of
the individual concerned. If the government
has incurred a huge public debt which must
be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of
another, this reality of burden is obscured by
saying that we owe it to ourselves ; if the gov-
ernment conscripts a man, or throws him into
jail for dissident opinion, then he is doing it
to himself and, therefore, nothing untoward
has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews
murdered by the Nazi government were not
murdered; instead, they must have commit-
ted suicide, since they were the government
(which was democratically chosen), and, there-
fore, anything the government did to them was
voluntary on their part. One would not think
it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the
overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fal-
lacy to a greater or lesser degree.
We must, therefore, emphasize that we are
not the government; the government is not us.
The government does not in any accurate sense
represent the majority of the people.1 But, even
1
We cannot, in this chapter, develop the many problems and
fallacies of democracy. Suffice it to say here that an individual s
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 11
if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided
to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would
still be murder and would not be voluntary sui-
cide on the part of the slaughtered minority.2 No
organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that
we are all part of one another, must be permit-
ted to obscure this basic fact.
If, then, the State is not us, if it is not the
human family getting together to decide mutual
problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or coun-
try club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that orga-
nization in society which attempts to maintain a
monopoly of the use of force and violence in a
given territorial area; in particular, it is the only
organization in society that obtains its revenue
not by voluntary contribution or payment for
services rendered but by coercion. While other
individuals or institutions obtain their income
by production of goods and services and by
the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods
true agent or representative is always subject to that individu-
al s orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary
to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the represen-
tative in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions,
the only ones consonant with a libertarian society.
2
Social democrats often retort that democracy majority
choice of rulers logically implies that the majority must leave
certain freedoms to the minority, for the minority might one
day become the majority. Apart from other flaws, this argu-
ment obviously does not hold where the minority cannot
become the majority, for example, when the minority is of a
different racial or ethnic group from the majority.
12 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
and services to others, the State obtains its rev-
enue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the
use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayo-
net.3 Having used force and violence to obtain its
revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate
and dictate the other actions of its individual sub-
jects. One would think that simple observation
of all States through history and over the globe
would be proof enough of this assertion; but the
miasma of myth has lain so long over State activ-
ity that elaboration is necessary.
3
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democ-
racy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942), p. 198.
The friction or antagonism between the private and the
public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact
that . . . the State has been living on a revenue which was
being produced in the private sphere for private pur-
poses and had to be deflected from these purposes by
political force. The theory which construes taxes on the
analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the service of,
say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of
the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.
Also see Murray N. Rothbard, The Fallacy of the Public Sec-
tor, New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): 3ff.
WHAT THE STATE IS
an is born naked into the world,
and needing to use his mind to
learn how to take the resources
given him by nature, and to
transform them (for example,
Mby investment in capital ) into
shapes and forms and places where the resources
can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and
the advancement of his standard of living. The
only way by which man can do this is by the use
of his mind and energy to transform resources
( production ) and to exchange these products
for products created by others. Man has found
that, through the process of voluntary, mutual
exchange, the productivity and hence, the liv-
ing standards of all participants in exchange may
increase enormously. The only natural course
for man to survive and to attain wealth, there-
fore, is by using his mind and energy to engage in
the production-and-exchange process. He does
13
14 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
this, first, by finding natural resources, and then
by transforming them (by mixing his labor with
them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individ-
ual property, and then by exchanging this prop-
erty for the similarly obtained property of others.
The social path dictated by the requirements of
man s nature, therefore, is the path of property
rights and the free market of gift or exchange
of such rights. Through this path, men have
learned how to avoid the jungle methods of
fighting over scarce resources so that A can only
acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to
multiply those resources enormously in peaceful
and harmonious production and exchange.
The great German sociologist Franz Oppen-
heimer pointed out that there are two mutu-
ally exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the
above way of production and exchange, he called
the economic means. The other way is simpler
in that it does not require productivity; it is the
way of seizure of another s goods or services by
the use of force and violence. This is the method
of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the prop-
erty of others. This is the method which Oppen-
heimer termed the political means to wealth.
It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason
and energy in production is the natural path for
man: the means for his survival and prosperity on
this earth. It should be equally clear that the coer-
cive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law;
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 15
it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production,
it subtracts from it. The political means siphons
production off to a parasitic and destructive indi-
vidual or group; and this siphoning not only sub-
tracts from the number producing, but also low-
ers the producer s incentive to produce beyond
his own subsistence. In the long run, the robber
destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or elim-
inating the source of his own supply. But not only
that; even in the short-run, the predator is acting
contrary to his own true nature as a man.
We are now in a position to answer more fully
the question: what is the State? The State, in the
words of Oppenheimer, is the organization of the
political means ; it is the systematization of the
predatory process over a given territory.4 For crime,
at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is
4
Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press,
1926) pp. 24 27:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby
man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the
necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are
work and robbery, one s own labor and the forcible
appropriation of the labor of others. . . . I propose in
the following discussion to call one s own labor and the
equivalent exchange of one s own labor for the labor
of others, the economic means for the satisfaction of
need while the unrequited appropriation of the labor
of others will be called the political means. . . . The
State is an organization of the political means. No State,
therefore, can come into being until the economic
means has created a definite number of objects for the
satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away
or appropriated by warlike robbery.
16 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may
be cut off at any time by the resistance of the vic-
tims. The State provides a legal, orderly, system-
atic channel for the predation of private property;
it renders certain, secure, and relatively peaceful
the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.5 Since
production must always precede predation, the
free market is anterior to the State. The State has
never been created by a social contract ; it has
always been born in conquest and exploitation.
The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe paus-
ing in its time-honored method of looting and mur-
dering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-
span of plunder would be longer and more secure,
and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered
tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the
conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting
a steady annual tribute.6 One method of the birth
5
Albert Jay Nock wrote vividly that
the State claims and exercises the monopoly of
crime. . . . It forbids private murder, but itself organizes
murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft,
but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants,
whether the property of citizen or of alien.
Nock, On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays (New York:
Harper and Bros., 1929), p. 143; quoted in Jack Schwartzman,
Albert Jay Nock A Superfluous Man, Faith and Freedom
(December, 1953): 11.
6
Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15:
What, then, is the State as a sociological concept?
The State, completely in its genesis . . . is a social
institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a
defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 17
of a State may be illustrated as follows: in the hills
of southern Ruritania, a bandit group manages to
obtain physical control over the territory, and finally
the bandit chieftain proclaims himself King of the
sovereign and independent government of South
Ruritania ; and, if he and his men have the force to
maintain this rule for a while, lo and behold! a new
State has joined the family of nations, and the for-
mer bandit leaders have been transformed into the
lawful nobility of the realm.
dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated
group, and securing itself against revolt from within
and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion
had no other purpose than the economic exploitation
of the vanquished by the victors.
And de Jouvenel has written: the State is in essence the result
of the successes achieved by a band of brigands who superim-
pose themselves on small, distinct societies. Bertrand de Jou-
venel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 100 01.
HOW THE STATE
PRESERVES ITSELF
nce a State has been established, the
problem of the ruling group or
caste is how to maintain their
rule.7 While force is their modus
operandi, their basic and long-
run problem is ideological. For
O
in order to continue in office, any government
(not simply a democratic government) must
have the support of the majority of its subjects.
This support, it must be noted, need not be active
enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as
if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in
the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be;
else the minority of State rulers would eventually
7
On the crucial distinction between caste, a group with priv-
ileges or burdens coercively granted or imposed by the State
and the Marxian concept of class in society, see Ludwig von
Mises, Theory and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1957), pp. 112ff.
18
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 19
be outweighed by the active resistance of the
majority of the public. Since predation must
be supported out of the surplus of production,
it is necessarily true that the class constituting
the State the full-time bureaucracy (and nobil-
ity) must be a rather small minority in the land,
although it may, of course, purchase allies among
important groups in the population. Therefore,
the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the
active or resigned acceptance of the majority of
the citizens.8, 9
Of course, one method of securing support is
through the creation of vested economic interests.
Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must
have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the pre-
requisites of rule, for example, the members of the
8
Such acceptance does not, of course, imply that the State
rule has become voluntary ; for even if the majority support
be active and eager, this support is not unanimous by every
individual.
9
That every government, no matter how dictatorial over
individuals, must secure such support has been demonstrated
by such acute political theorists as Étienne de la Boétie, David
Hume, and Ludwig von Mises. Thus, cf. David Hume, Of the
First Principles of Government, in Essays, Literary, Moral
and Political (London: Ward, Locke, and Taylor, n.d.), p. 23;
Étienne de la Boétie, Anti-Dictator (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1942), pp. 8 9; Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
(Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 188ff. For more on the
contribution to the analysis of the State by la Boétie, see Oscar
Jaszi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant (Glencoe, Ill.: The
Free Press, 1957), pp. 55 57.
20 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy
or the established nobility.10 But this still secures
only a minority of eager supporters, and even the
essential purchasing of support by subsidies and
other grants of privilege still does not obtain the
consent of the majority. For this essential accep-
tance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology
that their government is good, wise and, at least,
inevitable, and certainly better than other conceiv-
able alternatives. Promoting this ideology among
the people is the vital social task of the intellectu-
als. For the masses of men do not create their own
ideas, or indeed think through these ideas inde-
pendently; they follow passively the ideas adopted
and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The
intellectuals are, therefore, the opinion-molders
in society. And since it is precisely a molding of
opinion that the State most desperately needs, the
basis for age-old alliance between the State and the
intellectuals becomes clear.
It is evident that the State needs the intellec-
tuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need
the State. Put simply, we may state that the intel-
lectual s livelihood in the free market is never
too secure; for the intellectual must depend
10
La Boétie, Anti-Dictator, pp. 43 44.
Whenever a ruler makes himself dictator . . . all those
who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordi-
nary avarice, these gather around him and support him
in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute
themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 21
on the values and choices of the masses of his
fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of
the masses that they are generally uninterested
in intellectual matters. The State, on the other
hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure
and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and
thus a secure income and the panoply of pres-
tige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely
rewarded for the important function they per-
form for the State rulers, of which group they
now become a part.11
The alliance between the State and the intel-
lectuals was symbolized in the eager desire of
professors at the University of Berlin in the nine-
teenth century to form the intellectual body-
guard of the House of Hohenzollern. In the
present day, let us note the revealing comment of
an eminent Marxist scholar concerning Professor
Wittfogel s critical study of ancient Oriental des-
potism: The civilization which Professor Wittfo-
gel is so bitterly attacking was one which could
11
This by no means implies that all intellectuals ally themselves
with the State. On aspects of the alliance of intellectuals and the
State, cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Attitude of the Intellectuals
to the Market Society, The Owl (January, 1951): 19 27; idem,
The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals, in
F.A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 93 123; reprinted in George
B. de Huszar, The Intellectuals (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press,
1960), pp. 385 99; and Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social
Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1975), pp. 143 55.
22 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
make poets and scholars into officials. 12 Of innu-
merable examples, we may cite the recent devel-
opment of the science of strategy, in the ser-
vice of the government s main violence-wielding
arm, the military.13 A venerable institution, fur-
thermore, is the official or court historian, ded-
icated to purveying the rulers views of their own
and their predecessors actions.14
12
Joseph Needham, Review of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental
Despotism, Science and Society (1958): 65. Needham also
writes that the successive [Chinese] emperors were served
in all ages by a great company of profoundly humane and
disinterested scholars, p. 61. Wittfogel notes the Confucian
doctrine that the glory of the ruling class rested on its gentle-
man scholar-bureaucrat officials, destined to be professional
rulers dictating to the mass of the populace. Karl A. Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1957), pp. 320 21 and passim. For an attitude contrasting to
Needham s, cf. John Lukacs, Intellectual Class or Intellectual
Profession? in de Huszar, The Intellectuals, pp. 521 22.
13
Jeanne Ribs, The War Plotters, Liberation (August, 1961):
13, [s]trategists insist that their occupation deserves the dig-
nity of the academic counterpart of the military profession.
Also see Marcus Raskin, The Megadeath Intellectuals, New
York Review of Books (November 14, 1963): 6 7.
14
Thus the historian Conyers Read, in his presidential address,
advocated the suppression of historical fact in the service of
democratic and national values. Read proclaimed that total
war, whether it is hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon
everyone to play his part. The historian is not freer from this
obligation than the physicist. Read, The Social Responsi-
bilities of the Historian, American Historical Review (1951):
283ff. For a critique of Read and other aspects of court history,
see Howard K. Beale, The Professional Historian: His Theory
and Practice, The Pacific Historical Review (August, 1953):
227 55. Also cf. Herbert Butterfield, Official History: Its Pit-
falls and Criteria, History and Human Relations (New York:
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 23
Many and varied have been the arguments by
which the State and its intellectuals have induced
their subjects to support their rule. Basically, the
strands of argument may be summed up as fol-
lows: (a) the State rulers are great and wise men
(they rule by divine right, they are the aristoc-
racy of men, they are the scientific experts ),
much greater and wiser than the good but rather
simple subjects, and (b) rule by the extent gov-
ernment is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and
far better, than the indescribable evils that would
ensue upon its downfall. The union of Church
and State was one of the oldest and most suc-
cessful of these ideological devices. The ruler
was either anointed by God or, in the case of the
absolute rule of many Oriental despotisms, was
himself God; hence, any resistance to his rule
would be blasphemy. The States priestcraft per-
formed the basic intellectual function of obtain-
ing popular support and even worship for the
rulers.15
Another successful device was to instill fear of
any alternative systems of rule or nonrule. The
present rulers, it was maintained, supply to the
Macmillan, 1952), pp. 182 224; and Harry Elmer Barnes, The
Court Historians Versus Revisionism (n.d.), pp. 2ff.
15
Cf. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 87 100. On the con-
trasting roles of religion vis-Ä…-vis the State in ancient China and
Japan, see Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism
and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1958), pp. 161 94.
24 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
citizens an essential service for which they should
be most grateful: protection against sporadic
criminals and marauders. For the State, to pre-
serve its own monopoly of predation, did indeed
see to it that private and unsystematic crime
was kept to a minimum; the State has always
been jealous of its own preserve. Especially has
the State been successful in recent centuries in
instilling fear of other State rulers. Since the land
area of the globe has been parceled out among
particular States, one of the basic doctrines of
the State was to identify itself with the territory
it governed. Since most men tend to love their
homeland, the identification of that land and
its people with the State was a means of mak-
ing natural patriotism work to the State s advan-
tage. If Ruritania was being attacked by Wallda-
via, the first task of the State and its intellectuals
was to convince the people of Ruritania that the
attack was really upon them and not simply upon
the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers
was converted into a war between peoples, with
each people coming to the defense of its rul-
ers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were
defending them. This device of nationalism has
only been successful, in Western civilization, in
recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the
mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant bat-
tles between various sets of nobles.
Many and subtle are the ideological weapons
that the State has wielded through the centuries.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 25
One excellent weapon has been tradition. The
longer that the rule of a State has been able to
preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon;
for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the
seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind
it.16 Worship of one s ancestors, then, becomes
a none too subtle means of worship of one s
ancient rulers. The greatest danger to the State
is independent intellectual criticism; there is no
better way to stifle that criticism than to attack
any isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a
profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors.
Another potent ideological force is to deprecate
the individual and exalt the collectivity of society.
For since any given rule implies majority accep-
tance, any ideological danger to that rule can only
start from one or a few independently-thinking
individuals. The new idea, much less the new cri-
tical idea, must needs begin as a small minority
opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view
in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the
16
De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 22:
The essential reason for obedience is that it has become
a habit of the species. . . . Power is for us a fact of
nature. From the earliest days of recorded history it has
always presided over human destinies . . . the authori-
ties which ruled [societies] in former times did not dis-
appear without bequeathing to their successors their
privilege nor without leaving in men s minds imprints
which are cumulative in their effect. The succession of
governments which, in the course of centuries, rule the
same society may be looked on as one underlying gov-
ernment which takes on continuous accretions.
26 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
opinions of the mass. Listen only to your broth-
ers or adjust to society thus become ideologi-
cal weapons for crushing individual dissent.17 By
such measures, the masses will never learn of
the nonexistence of their Emperor s clothes.18 It
is also important for the State to make its rule
seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will
then be met with passive resignation, as witness
the familiar coupling of death and taxes. One
method is to induce historiographical determin-
ism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If
the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inex-
orable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or
the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces)
have so decreed and nothing any puny individu-
als may do can change this inevitable decree. It
is also important for the State to inculcate in its
subjects an aversion to any conspiracy theory of
history; for a search for conspiracies means a
17
On such uses of the religion of China, see Norman Jacobs,
passim.
18
H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf,
1949), p. 145:
All [government] can see in an original idea is poten-
tial change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives.
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the
man who is able to think things out for himself, with-
out regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the
government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change
it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very
apt to spread discontent among those who are.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 27
search for motives and an attribution of responsi-
bility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyr-
anny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggres-
sive war, was caused not by the State rulers but
by mysterious and arcane social forces, or by
the imperfect state of the world or, if in some
way, everyone was responsible ( We Are All Mur-
derers, proclaims one slogan), then there is no
point to the people becoming indignant or ris-
ing up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an
attack on conspiracy theories means that the
subjects will become more gullible in believing
the general welfare reasons that are always put
forth by the State for engaging in any of its des-
potic actions. A conspiracy theory can unsettle
the system by causing the public to doubt the
State s ideological propaganda.
Another tried and true method for bending
subjects to the State s will is inducing guilt. Any
increase in private well-being can be attacked
as unconscionable greed, materialism, or
excessive affluence, profit-making can be
attacked as exploitation and usury, mutu-
ally beneficial exchanges denounced as self-
ishness, and somehow with the conclusion
always being drawn that more resources should
be siphoned from the private to the public sec-
tor. The induced guilt makes the public more
ready to do just that. For while individual per-
sons tend to indulge in selfish greed, the fail-
ure of the State s rulers to engage in exchanges is
28 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
supposed to signify their devotion to higher and
nobler causes parasitic predation being appar-
ently morally and esthetically lofty as compared
to peaceful and productive work.
In the present more secular age, the divine
right of the State has been supplemented by the
invocation of a new god, Science. State rule is
now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as con-
stituting planning by experts. But while reason
is invoked more than in previous centuries, this is
not the true reason of the individual and his exer-
cise of free will; it is still collectivist and determin-
ist, still implying holistic aggregates and coercive
manipulation of passive subjects by their rulers.
The increasing use of scientific jargon has per-
mitted the State s intellectuals to weave obscuran-
tist apologia for State rule that would have only
met with derision by the populace of a simpler
age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that
he really helped his victims, by his spending giving
a boost to retail trade, would find few converts;
but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equa-
tions and impressive references to the multiplier
effect, it unfortunately carries more conviction.
And so the assault on common sense proceeds,
each age performing the task in its own ways.
Thus, ideological support being vital to the
State, it must unceasingly try to impress the pub-
lic with its legitimacy, to distinguish its activities
from those of mere brigands. The unremitting
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 29
determination of its assaults on common sense is
no accident, for as Mencken vividly maintained:
The average man, whatever his errors otherwise,
at least sees clearly that government is some-
thing lying outside him and outside the general-
ity of his fellow men that it is a separate, inde-
pendent, and hostile power, only partly under his
control, and capable of doing him great harm. Is
it a fact of no significance that robbing the gov-
ernment is everywhere regarded as a crime of
less magnitude than robbing an individual, or
even a corporation? . . . What lies behind all this, I
believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antag-
onism between the government and the people
it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee
of citizens chosen to carry on the communal busi-
ness of the whole population, but as a separate
and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted
to exploiting the population for the benefit of
its own members. . . . When a private citizen is
robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits
of his industry and thrift; when the government
is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain
rogues and loafers have less money to play with
than they had before. The notion that they have
earned that money is never entertained; to most
sensible men it would seem ludicrous.19
19
Ibid., pp. 146 47.
HOW THE STATE
TRANSCENDS ITS LIMITS
s Bertrand de Jouvenel has sagely
pointed out, through the centu-
ries men have formed concepts
designed to check and limit the
exercise of State rule; and, one
Aafter another, the State, using
its intellectual allies, has been able to transform
these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps
of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees
and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the
concept of divine sovereignty held that the kings
may rule only according to divine law; the kings
turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine
approval for any of the kings actions. The con-
cept of parliamentary democracy began as a
popular check upon absolute monarchical rule;
it ended with parliament being the essential part
of the State and its every act totally sovereign. As
de Jouvenel concludes:
30
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 31
Many writers on theories of sovereignty have
worked out one . . . of these restrictive devices.
But in the end every single such theory has,
sooner or later, lost its original purpose, and
come to act merely as a springboard to Power, by
providing it with the powerful aid of an invisible
sovereign with whom it could in time success-
fully identify itself.20
Similarly with more specific doctrines: the
natural rights of the individual enshrined in
John Locke and the Bill of Rights, became a statist
right to a job ; utilitarianism turned from argu-
ments for liberty to arguments against resisting
the State s invasions of liberty, etc.
Certainly the most ambitious attempt to
impose limits on the State has been the Bill of
Rights and other restrictive parts of the Amer-
ican Constitution, in which written limits on
government became the fundamental law to
be interpreted by a judiciary supposedly inde-
pendent of the other branches of government.
All Americans are familiar with the process by
which the construction of limits in the Consti-
tution has been inexorably broadened over the
last century. But few have been as keen as Pro-
fessor Charles Black to see that the State has, in
the process, largely transformed judicial review
itself from a limiting device to yet another instru-
ment for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the
20
De Jouvenel, On Power, pp. 27ff.
32 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
government s actions. For if a judicial decree of
unconstitutional is a mighty check to govern-
ment power, an implicit or explicit verdict of
constitutional is a mighty weapon for foster-
ing public acceptance of ever-greater govern-
ment power.
Professor Black begins his analysis by point-
ing out the crucial necessity of legitimacy
for any government to endure, this legitima-
tion signifying basic majority acceptance of the
government and its actions.21 Acceptance of
legitimacy becomes a particular problem in a
country such as the United States, where sub-
stantive limitations are built into the theory on
which the government rests. What is needed,
adds Black, is a means by which the govern-
ment can assure the public that its increasing
powers are, indeed, constitutional. And this,
he concludes, has been the major historic func-
tion of judicial review.
Let Black illustrate the problem:
The supreme risk [to the government] is that of
disaffection and a feeling of outrage widely dis-
seminated throughout the population, and loss
of moral authority by the government as such,
however long it may be propped up by force or
inertia or the lack of an appealing and imme-
diately available alternative. Almost everybody
21
Charles L. Black. Jr., The People and the Court (New York:
Macmillan, 1960), pp. 35ff.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 33
living under a government of limited powers,
must sooner or later be subjected to some
governmental action which as a matter of pri-
vate opinion he regards as outside the power of
government or positively forbidden to govern-
ment. A man is drafted, though he finds noth-
ing in the Constitution about being drafted. . . .
A farmer is told how much wheat he can raise;
he believes, and he discovers that some respect-
able lawyers believe with him, that the govern-
ment has no more right to tell him how much
wheat he can grow than it has to tell his daughter
whom she can marry. A man goes to the federal
penitentiary for saying what he wants to, and he
paces his cell reciting . . . Congress shall make
no laws abridging the freedom of speech. . . . A
businessman is told what he can ask, and must
ask, for buttermilk.
The danger is real enough that each of these
people (and who is not of their number?) will
confront the concept of governmental limitation
with the reality (as he sees it) of the flagrant over-
stepping of actual limits, and draw the obvious
conclusion as to the status of his government
with respect to legitimacy.22
This danger is averted by the State s pro-
pounding the doctrine that one agency must have
the ultimate decision on constitutionality and that
this agency, in the last analysis, must be part of
22
Ibid., pp. 42 43.
34 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
the federal government.23 For while the seeming
independence of the federal judiciary has played
a vital part in making its actions virtual Holy Writ
for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true
that the judiciary is part and parcel of the govern-
ment apparatus and appointed by the executive
and legislative branches. Black admits that this
means that the State has set itself up as a judge in
its own cause, thus violating a basic juridical prin-
ciple for aiming at just decisions. He brusquely
denies the possibility of any alternative.24
23
Ibid., p. 52:
The prime and most necessary function of the
[Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that
of invalidation. What a government of limited powers
needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of
satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly
possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition
of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is
the condition of its life. And the Court, through its his-
tory, has acted as the legitimation of the government.
24
To Black, this solution, while paradoxical, is blithely self-
evident:
the final power of the State . . . must stop where the
law stops it. And who shall set the limit, and who shall
enforce the stopping, against the mightiest power?
Why, the State itself, of course, through its judges and
its laws. Who controls the temperate? Who teaches the
wise? (Ibid., pp. 32 33)
And:
Where the questions concern governmental power in a
sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire
who is outside government. Every national govern-
ment, so long as it is a government, must have the final
say on its own power. (Ibid., pp. 48 49)
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 35
Black adds:
The problem, then, is to devise such governmen-
tal means of deciding as will [hopefully] reduce
to a tolerable minimum the intensity of the objec-
tion that government is judge in its own cause.
Having done this, you can only hope that this
objection, though theoretically still tenable [ital-
ics mine], will practically lose enough of its force
that the legitimating work of the deciding institu-
tion can win acceptance.25
In the last analysis, Black finds the achieve-
ment of justice and legitimacy from the State s
perpetual judging of its own cause as something
of a miracle. 26
Applying his thesis to the famous conflict
between the Supreme Court and the New Deal,
Professor Black keenly chides his fellow pro-New
25
Ibid., p. 49.
26
This ascription of the miraculous to government is reminis-
cent of James Burnham s justification of government by mysti-
cism and irrationality:
In ancient times, before the illusions of science had cor-
rupted traditional wisdom, the founders of cities were
known to be gods or demigods. . . . Neither the source
nor the justification of government can be put in wholly
rational terms . . . why should I accept the hereditary or
democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why
should a principle justify the rule of that man over
me? . . . I accept the principle, well . . . because I do,
because that is the way it is and has been.
James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition
(Chicago: Regnery, 1959), pp. 3 8. But what if one does not
accept the principle? What will the way be then?
36 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
Deal colleagues for their shortsightedness in
denouncing judicial obstruction:
[t]he standard version of the story of the New
Deal and the Court, though accurate in its way,
displaces the emphasis. . . . It concentrates on the
difficulties; it almost forgets how the whole thing
turned out. The upshot of the matter was [and this
is what I like to emphasize] that after some twenty-
four months of balking . . . the Supreme Court,
without a single change in the law of its composi-
tion, or, indeed, in its actual manning, placed the
affirmative stamp of legitimacy on the New Deal,
and on the whole new conception of government
in America.27
In this way, the Supreme Court was able to
put the quietus on the large body of Americans
who had had strong constitutional objections to
the New Deal:
Of course, not everyone was satisfied. The Bon-
nie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded
laissez-faire still stirs the hearts of a few zealots in
the Highlands of choleric unreality. But there is no
longer any significant or dangerous public doubt
as to the constitutional power of Congress to deal
as it does with the national economy. . . .
We had no means, other than the Supreme
Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal.28
27
Black, The People and the Court, p. 64.
28
Ibid., p. 65.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 37
As Black recognizes, one major political theo-
rist who recognized and largely in advance
the glaring loophole in a constitutional limit
on government of placing the ultimate inter-
preting power in the Supreme Court was John
C. Calhoun. Calhoun was not content with the
miracle, but instead proceeded to a profound
analysis of the constitutional problem. In his Dis-
quisition, Calhoun demonstrated the inherent
tendency of the State to break through the limits
of such a constitution:
A written constitution certainly has many and con-
siderable advantages, but it is a great mistake to
suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to
restrict and limit the power of the government, with-
out investing those for whose protection they are
inserted with the means of enforcing their obser-
vance [my italics] will be sufficient to prevent the
major and dominant party from abusing its powers.
Being the party in possession of the government,
they will, from the same constitution of man which
makes government necessary to protect society, be
in favor of the powers granted by the constitution
and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit
them. . . . The minor or weaker party, on the con-
trary, would take the opposite direction and regard
them [the restrictions] as essential to their pro-
tection against the dominant party. . . . But where
there are no means by which they could compel
the major party to observe the restrictions, the
only resort left them would be a strict construc-
tion of the constitution. . . . To this the major party
would oppose a liberal construction. . . . It would
38 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
be construction against construction the one to
contract and the other to enlarge the powers of
the government to the utmost. But of what possi-
ble avail could the strict construction of the minor
party be, against the liberal construction of the
major, when the one would have all the power of
the government to carry its construction into effect
and the other be deprived of all means of enforc-
ing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the
result would not be doubtful. The party in favor
of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The
end of the contest would be the subversion of the
constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately
be annulled and the government be converted into
one of unlimited powers.29
One of the few political scientists who
appreciated Calhoun s analysis of the Constitu-
tion was Professor J. Allen Smith. Smith noted
that the Constitution was designed with checks
and balances to limit any one governmental
power and yet had then developed a Supreme
Court with the monopoly of ultimate interpret-
ing power. If the Federal Government was cre-
ated to check invasions of individual liberty by
the separate states, who was to check the Fed-
eral power? Smith maintained that implicit in
the check-and-balance idea of the Constitution
was the concomitant view that no one branch
29
John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New
York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 25 27. Also cf. Murray N.
Rothbard, Conservatism and Freedom: A Libertarian Com-
ment, Modern Age (Spring, 1961): 219.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 39
of government may be conceded the ultimate
power of interpretation: It was assumed by the
people that the new government could not be
permitted to determine the limits of its own
authority, since this would make it, and not the
30
Constitution, supreme.
The solution advanced by Calhoun (and sec-
onded, in this century, by such writers as Smith)
was, of course, the famous doctrine of the con-
current majority. If any substantial minority
interest in the country, specifically a state gov-
ernment, believed that the Federal Government
was exceeding its powers and encroaching on
that minority, the minority would have the right
to veto this exercise of power as unconstitu-
tional. Applied to state governments, this theory
implied the right of nullification of a Federal
law or ruling within a state s jurisdiction.
In theory, the ensuing constitutional system
would assure that the Federal Government check
30
J. Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Consti-
tutional Government (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), p. 88.
Smith added:
it was obvious that where a provision of the Constitu-
tion was designed to limit the powers of a governmen-
tal organ, it could be effectively nullified if its interpre-
tation and enforcement are left to the authorities as it
designed to restrain. Clearly, common sense required
that no organ of the government should be able to
determine its own powers.
Clearly, common sense and miracles dictate very
different views of government. (p. 87)
40 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
any state invasion of individual rights, while the
states would check excessive Federal power over
the individual. And yet, while limitations would
undoubtedly be more effective than at present,
there are many difficulties and problems in the
Calhoun solution. If, indeed, a subordinate inter-
est should rightfully have a veto over matters con-
cerning it, then why stop with the states? Why not
place veto power in counties, cities, wards? Fur-
thermore, interests are not only sectional, they
are also occupational, social, etc. What of bakers
or taxi drivers or any other occupation? Should
they not be permitted a veto power over their
own lives? This brings us to the important point
that the nullification theory confines its checks
to agencies of government itself. Let us not for-
get that federal and state governments, and
their respective branches, are still states, are still
guided by their own state interests rather than
by the interests of the private citizens. What is
to prevent the Calhoun system from working in
reverse, with states tyrannizing over their citizens
and only vetoing the federal government when
it tries to intervene to stop that state tyranny? Or
for states to acquiesce in federal tyranny? What
is to prevent federal and state governments from
forming mutually profitable alliances for the joint
exploitation of the citizenry? And even if the pri-
vate occupational groupings were to be given
some form of functional representation in gov-
ernment, what is to prevent them from using the
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 41
State to gain subsidies and other special privi-
leges for themselves or from imposing compul-
sory cartels on their own members?
In short, Calhoun does not push his path-
breaking theory on concurrence far enough: he
does not push it down to the individual him-
self. If the individual, after all, is the one whose
rights are to be protected, then a consistent
theory of concurrence would imply veto power
by every individual; that is, some form of una-
nimity principle. When Calhoun wrote that it
should be impossible to put or to keep it [the
government] in action without the concurrent
consent of all, he was, perhaps unwittingly,
implying just such a conclusion.31 But such
speculation begins to take us away from our
subject, for down this path lie political systems
which could hardly be called States at all.32 For
one thing, just as the right of nullification for a
state logically implies its right of secession, so
31
Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, pp. 20 21.
32
In recent years, the unanimity principle has experienced a
highly diluted revival, particularly in the writings of Professor
James Buchanan. Injecting unanimity into the present situa-
tion, however, and applying it only to changes in the status quo
and not to existing laws, can only result in another transforma-
tion of a limiting concept into a rubber stamp for the State. If
the unanimity principle is to be applied only to changes in laws
and edicts, the nature of the initial point of origin then makes
all the difference. Cf. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock,
The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1962), passim.
42 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
a right of individual nullification would imply
the right of any individual to secede from the
State under which he lives.33
Thus, the State has invariably shown a strik-
ing talent for the expansion of its powers beyond
any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since
the State necessarily lives by the compulsory
confiscation of private capital, and since its
expansion necessarily involves ever-greater
incursions on private individuals and private
enterprise, we must assert that the State is pro-
foundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense,
our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum
that the State is the executive committee of
the ruling class in the present day, supposedly
the capitalists. Instead, the State the organiza-
tion of the political means constitutes, and is
the source of, the ruling class (rather, ruling
caste), and is in permanent opposition to genu-
inely private capital. We may, therefore, say with
de Jouvenel:
Only those who know nothing of any time but
their own, who are completely in the dark as to
the manner of Power s behaving through thou-
sands of years, would regard these proceedings
[nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit
of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the
normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at
33
Cf. Herbert Spencer, The Right to Ignore the State, in
Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 229 39.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 43
all in their nature from Henry VIII s confiscation
of the monasteries. The same principle is at work;
the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources;
and in all of these operations the same character-
istics are present, including the rapid elevation of
the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is Socialist
or whether it is not, Power must always be at war
with the capitalist authorities and despoil the cap-
italists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it
obeys the law of its nature.34
34
De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 171.
WHAT THE STATE FEARS
hat the State fears above all,
of course, is any fundamental
threat to its own power and its
own existence. The death of
a State can come about in two
W
major ways: (a) through con-
quest by another State, or (b) through revolu-
tionary overthrow by its own subjects in short,
by war or revolution. War and revolution, as the
two basic threats, invariably arouse in the State
rulers their maximum efforts and maximum pro-
paganda among the people. As stated above, any
way must always be used to mobilize the people to
come to the State s defense in the belief that they
are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea
becomes evident when conscription is wielded
against those who refuse to defend themselves
and are, therefore, forced into joining the State s
military band: needless to add, no defense is per-
mitted them against this act of their own State.
44
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 45
In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate,
and, under the slogans of defense and emer-
gency, it can impose a tyranny upon the public
such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.
War thus provides many benefits to a State, and
indeed every modern war has brought to the
warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased
State burdens upon society. War, moreover, pro-
vides to a State tempting opportunities for con-
quest of land areas over which it may exercise
its monopoly of force. Randolph Bourne was
certainly correct when he wrote that war is the
health of the State, but to any particular State a
war may spell either health or grave injury.35
We may test the hypothesis that the State
is largely interested in protecting itself rather
than its subjects by asking: which category of
crimes does the State pursue and punish most
intensely those against private citizens or those
against itself ? The gravest crimes in the State s
lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of pri-
vate person or property, but dangers to its own
35
We have seen that essential to the State is support by the
intellectuals, and this includes support against their two acute
threats. Thus, on the role of American intellectuals in Ameri-
ca s entry into World War I, see Randolph Bourne, The War
and the Intellectuals, in The History of a Literary Radical
and Other Papers (New York: S.A. Russell, 1956), pp. 205 22.
As Bourne states, a common device of intellectuals in winning
support for State actions, is to channel any discussion within
the limits of basic State policy and to discourage any funda-
mental or total critique of this basic framework.
46 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
contentment, for example, treason, desertion
of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for
the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy,
assassination of rulers and such economic crimes
against the State as counterfeiting its money or
evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree
of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults
a policeman, with the attention that the State pays
to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously,
the State s openly assigned priority to its own
defense against the public strikes few people as
inconsistent with its presumed raison d etre.36
36
As Mencken puts it in his inimitable fashion:
This gang ( the exploiters constituting the govern-
ment ) is well nigh immune to punishment. Its worst
extortions, even when they are baldly for private profit,
carry no certain penalties under our laws. Since the first
days of the Republic, less than a few dozen of its mem-
bers have been impeached, and only a few obscure
understrappers have ever been put into prison. The
number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for
revolting against the extortions of the government is
always ten times as great as the number of government
officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to
their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy,
pp. 147 48)
For a vivid and entertaining description of the lack of pro-
tection for the individual against incursion of his liberty by
his protectors, see H.L. Mencken, The Nature of Liberty,
in Prejudices: A Selection (New York: Vintage Books, 1958),
pp. 138 43.
HOW STATES RELATE
TO ONE ANOTHER
ince the territorial area of the earth is
divided among different States, inter-
State relations must occupy much of a
State s time and energy. The natural ten-
dency of a State is to expand its power, and
externally such expansion takes place by
S
conquest of a territorial area. Unless a territory
is stateless or uninhabited, any such expan-
sion involves an inherent conflict of interest
between one set of State rulers and another.
Only one set of rulers can obtain a monopoly
of coercion over any given territorial area at any
one time: complete power over a territory by
State X can only be obtained by the expulsion
of State Y. War, while risky, will be an ever-pres-
ent tendency of States, punctuated by periods
of peace and by shifting alliances and coalitions
between States.
47
48 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
We have seen that the internal or domes-
tic attempt to limit the State, in the seven-
teenth through nineteenth centuries, reached
its most notable form in constitutionalism. Its
external, or foreign affairs, counterpart was
the development of international law, espe-
cially such forms as the laws of war and neu-
trals rights. 37 Parts of international law were
originally purely private, growing out of the
need of merchants and traders everywhere
to protect their property and adjudicate dis-
putes. Examples are admiralty law and the law
merchant. But even the governmental rules
emerged voluntarily and were not imposed by
any international super-State. The object of the
laws of war was to limit inter-State destruc-
tion to the State apparatus itself, thereby pre-
serving the innocent civilian public from the
slaughter and devastation of war. The object of
the development of neutrals rights was to pre-
serve private civilian international commerce,
even with enemy countries, from seizure by
one of the warring parties. The overriding aim,
then, was to limit the extent of any war, and,
particularly to limit its destructive impact on
the private citizens of the neutral and even the
warring countries.
37
This is to be distinguished from modern international law,
with its stress on maximizing the extent of war through such
concepts as collective security.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 49
The jurist F.J.P. Veale charmingly describes
such civilized warfare as it briefly flourished in
fifteenth-century Italy:
the rich burghers and merchants of medieval
Italy were too busy making money and enjoy-
ing life to undertake the hardships and dangers
of soldiering themselves. So they adopted the
practice of hiring mercenaries to do their fight-
ing for them, and, being thrifty, businesslike
folk, they dismissed their mercenaries imme-
diately after their services could be dispensed
with. Wars were, therefore, fought by armies
hired for each campaign. . . . For the first time,
soldiering became a reasonable and compara-
tively harmless profession. The generals of that
period maneuvered against each other, often
with consummate skill, but when one had won
the advantage, his opponent generally either
retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized
rule that a town could only be sacked if it offered
resistance: immunity could always be purchased
by paying a ransom. . . . As one natural conse-
quence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious
that a government too weak to defend its citi-
zens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had
little to fear from the dangers of war which were
the concern only of professional soldiers.38
38
F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Appleton, Wis.: C.C. Nel-
son, 1953), p. 63. Similarly, Professor Nef writes of the War of
Don Carlos waged in Italy between France, Spain, and Sardinia
against Austria, in the eighteenth century:
at the siege of Milan by the allies and several weeks
later at Parma . . . the rival armies met in a fierce battle
outside the town. In neither place were the sympathies
50 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
The well-nigh absolute separation of the pri-
vate civilian from the State s wars in eighteenth-
century Europe is highlighted by Nef:
Even postal communications were not success-
fully restricted for long in wartime. Letters circu-
lated without censorship, with a freedom that
astonishes the twentieth-century mind. . . . The
subjects of two warring nations talked to each
other if they met, and when they could not meet,
corresponded, not as enemies but as friends. The
modern notion hardly existed that . . . subjects of
any enemy country are partly accountable for the
belligerent acts of their rulers. Nor had the war-
ring rulers any firm disposition to stop communi-
cations with subjects of the enemy. The old inquis-
itorial practices of espionage in connection with
religious worship and belief were disappearing,
and no comparable inquisition in connection with
political or economic communications was even
contemplated. Passports were originally created to
provide safe conduct in time of war. During most
of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to
Europeans to abandon their travels in a foreign
country which their own was fighting.39
of the inhabitants seriously moved by one side or the
other. Their only fear as that the troops of either army
should get within the gates and pillage. The fear proved
groundless. At Parma the citizens ran to the town walls
to watch the battle in the open country beyond. (John
U. Nef, War and Human Progress [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1950], p. 158)
Also cf. Hoffman Nickerson, Can We Limit War? (New York:
Frederick A. Stoke, 1934).
39
Nef, War and Human Progress, p. 162.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 51
And trade being increasingly recognized as
beneficial to both parties; eighteenth-century
warfare also counterbalances a considerable
amount of trading with the enemy. 40
How far States have transcended rules of civi-
lized warfare in this century needs no elaboration
here. In the modern era of total war, combined
with the technology of total destruction, the very
idea of keeping war limited to the State apparati
seems even more quaint and obsolete than the
original Constitution of the United States.
When States are not at war, agreements are
often necessary to keep frictions at a minimum.
One doctrine that has gained curiously wide
acceptance is the alleged sanctity of treaties.
This concept is treated as the counterpart of the
sanctity of contract. But a treaty and a genuine
contract have nothing in common. A contract
transfers, in a precise manner, titles to private
property. Since a government does not, in any
proper sense, own its territorial area, any agree-
ments that it concludes do not confer titles to
property. If, for example, Mr. Jones sells or gives
his land to Mr. Smith, Jones s heir cannot legiti-
mately descend upon Smith s heir and claim the
land as rightfully his. The property title has already
40
Ibid., p. 161. On advocacy of trading with the enemy by
leaders of the American Revolution, see Joseph Dorfman, The
Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking
Press, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 210 11.
52 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
been transferred. Old Jones s contract is automat-
ically binding upon young Jones, because the for-
mer had already transferred the property; young
Jones, therefore, has no property claim. Young
Jones can only claim that which he has inherited
from old Jones, and old Jones can only bequeath
property which he still owns. But if, at a certain
date, the government of, say, Ruritania is coerced
or even bribed by the government of Waldavia
into giving up some of its territory, it is absurd to
claim that the governments or inhabitants of the
two countries are forever barred from a claim to
reunification of Ruritania on the grounds of the
sanctity of a treaty. Neither the people nor the
land of northwest Ruritania are owned by either
of the two governments. As a corollary, one gov-
ernment can certainly not bind, by the dead hand
of the past, a later government through treaty. A
revolutionary government which overthrew the
king of Ruritania could, similarly, hardly be called
to account for the king s actions or debts, for a
government is not, as is a child, a true heir to its
predecessor s property.
HISTORY AS A RACE
BETWEEN STATE POWER
AND SOCIAL POWER
ust as the two basic and mutually exclusive
interrelations between men are peace-
ful cooperation or coercive exploitation,
production or predation, so the history
of mankind, particularly its economic his-
J
tory, may be considered as a contest be-
tween these two principles. On the one hand, there
is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and coop-
eration; on the other, coercive dictation and preda-
tion over those social relations. Albert Jay Nock hap-
pily termed these contesting forces: social power
and State power. 41 Social power is man s power over
41
On the concepts of State power and social power, see Albert
J. Nock, Our Enemy the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Print-
ers, 1946). Also see Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
(New York: Harpers, 1943), and Frank Chodorov, The Rise and
Fall of Society (New York: Devin-Adair, 1959).
53
54 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
nature, his cooperative transformation of nature s
resources and insight into nature s laws, for the ben-
efit of all participating individuals. Social power is the
power over nature, the living standards achieved by
men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have
seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this pro-
duction a draining of the fruits of society for the
benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive)
rulers. While social power is over nature, State power
is power over man. Through history, man s produc-
tive and creative forces have, time and again, carved
out new ways of transforming nature for man s bene-
fit. These have been the times when social power has
spurted ahead of State power, and when the degree
of State encroachment over society has considerably
lessened. But always, after a greater or smaller time
lag, the State has moved into these new areas, to crip-
ple and confiscate social power once more.42 If the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were,
in many countries of the West, times of accelerating
social power, and a corollary increase in freedom,
peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century
42
Amidst the flux of expansion or contraction, the State always
makes sure that it seizes and retains certain crucial command
posts of the economy and society. Among these command
posts are a monopoly of violence, monopoly of the ultimate
judicial power, the channels of communication and transpor-
tation (post office, roads, rivers, air routes), irrigated water in
Oriental despotisms, and education to mold the opinions of
its future citizens. In the modern economy, money is the criti-
cal command post.
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 55
has been primarily an age in which State power has
been catching up with a consequent reversion to
slavery, war, and destruction.43
In this century, the human race faces, once
again, the virulent reign of the State of the State
now armed with the fruits of man s creative pow-
ers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims.
The last few centuries were times when men tried
to place constitutional and other limits on the
State, only to find that such limits, as with all other
attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms
that governments have taken over the centuries,
of all the concepts and institutions that have been
tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in
check. The problem of the State is evidently as far
from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry
must be explored, if the successful, final solution of
the State question is ever to be attained.44
43
This parasitic process of catching up has been almost
openly proclaimed by Karl Marx, who conceded that social-
ism must be established through seizure of capital previously
accumulated under capitalism.
44
Certainly, one indispensable ingredient of such a solution
must be the sundering of the alliance of intellectual and State,
through the creation of centers of intellectual inquiry and
education, which will be independent of State power. Chris-
topher Dawson notes that the great intellectual movements
of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were achieved by
working outside of, and sometimes against, the entrenched
universities. These academia of the new ideas were established
by independent patrons. See Christopher Dawson, The Crisis
of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961).
INDEX
American Constitution, 31 Exchange, 13 15, 53 54
American Historical
Review, 22
Faith and Freedom
(Schwarvtzman), 16
Anticapitalist, 42
Federal government, 33, 40
Federal law, 39
Barnes, Harry Elmer, 23
Beale, Howard K., 22
Government
Bill of Rights, 31
anticapitalist, 42
Black, Charles, 31
coercion, 11, 47
Boétie, Étienne de la, 19 20
conscription, 44
Bourne, Randolph, 45
fallacy, 10, 44
Buchanan, James, 41
fear of conquest and revolu-
Burnham, James, 35
tionary overthrow, 44
method of control
Calhoun, John C., 37 41
appear inevitable, 18
Chodorov, Frank, 53
appear legitimate,
Collective security as maxi-
30 36
mizing extent of war, 48
church, 23
conspiracy, 26, 27
Dawson, Christopher, 55
court historians, 23
Disquisition (Calhoun), 37,
depreciate individual
38, 41
and critical
Dorfman, Joseph, 51 thinking, 25
56
ANATOMY OF THE STATE 57
education, 54 55 Material productive forces, 26
fear of alternative
Mencken, H.L., 26, 29, 46
systems, 20
Mises, Ludwig von, 4, 9,
ideology, 20
18 19
passive resignation,
18, 26 Modern Age, 38
Hayek, F.A., 21
Nazi, 10
Henry VIII, 42
Needham, Joseph, 22
Holy Writ, 34
Nef, John U., 49 51
House of Hohenzollern, 21
New Individualist Review, 12
Hume, 19
New York Times Sunday
Huszar, George B. de, 21
Review of Books, 22
Nickerson, Hoffman, 50
Inducing guilt, 27
Nock, Albert J., 16, 53
Intellectual rewards, 20
International law
civilized war vs. total war, 49
Oppenheimer, Franz, 14 16
limited inter-state
Owl, The, 21
destruction, 48
preserve private citizens
of neutral and warring
Pacific Historical Review, 22
countries, 48
Power
at war with capitalist
Jacobs, Norman, 23, 26
authorities, 43
Jaszi, Oscar, 19
race between man and
Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 17, 21,
nature, 53
25, 30 31, 42 43
Property, 14, 45, 48, 51
Judicial branch, 31, 32, 34,
35, 54
Raskin, Marcus, 22
Keynesian equations, 28
Read, Conyers, 22
Lewis, 19
Ribs, Jeanne, 22
Lewis, John D., 19
Liberation, 22 Rothbard, Murray N., 12, 38
58 ANATOMY OF THE STATE
Schumpeter, Joseph A., 12, 21 Tullock, Gordon, 41
Schwartzman, Jack, 16 Ultrascientific planning by
experts, 28
Smith, J. Allen, 38 39
Spencer, Herbert, 41
Veale, F.J.P, 49 50
Supreme Court
Vested economic interests
something of a
miracle, 35 classic paradigm, 16
changed constitutional myth, 12
power of congress over
permanent opposition
national economy, 36
to genuinely private
imparts legitimacy to state, capital, 42
36
predatory, 15
monopoly of ultimate
self-preservation, 18
interpreting power, 38
transcends limits
part of government, 34
transform concepts, 30
violates basic juridical
principle, 34
Wealth
economic means, 14
Territorial identification, 11,
47, 51 political means, 14
Theft as economics, 14, 28 Wittfogel, Karl A., 21 23
Treaties, sanctity of, 51 World War I, 45
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