Development of the State

71:1.1The state is a ter­ri­to­rial so­cial reg­u­la­tive or­ga­ni­za­tion, and the strong­est, most ef­fi­cient, and en­dur­ing state is com­posed of a sin­gle na­tion whose peo­ple have a com­mon lan­guage, mores, and in­sti­tu­tions.

71:1.2The early states were small and were all the re­sult of con­quest. They did not orig­i­nate in vol­un­tary as­so­ci­a­tions. Many were founded by con­quer­ing no­mads, who would swoop down on peace­ful herders or set­tled agri­cul­tur­ists to over­power and en­slave them. Such states, re­sult­ing from con­quest, were, per­force, strat­i­fied; classes were in­ev­i­ta­ble, and class strug­gles have ever been se­lec­tive.

71:1.3The north­ern tribes of the Amer­i­can red men never at­tained real state­hood. They never pro­gressed be­yond a loose con­fed­er­a­tion of tribes, a very prim­i­tive form of state. Their near­est ap­proach was the Iro­quois fed­er­a­tion, but this group of six na­tions never quite func­tioned as a state and failed to sur­vive be­cause of the ab­sence of cer­tain es­sen­tials to mod­ern na­tional life, such as:

71:1.41. Ac­quire­ment and in­her­i­tance of pri­vate prop­erty.

71:1.52. Cities plus agri­cul­ture and in­dus­try.

71:1.63. Help­ful do­mes­tic an­i­mals.

71:1.74. Prac­ti­cal fam­ily or­ga­ni­za­tion. These red men clung to the mother-fam­ily and nephew in­her­i­tance.

71:1.85. Def­i­nite ter­ri­tory.

71:1.96. A strong ex­ec­u­tive head.

71:1.107. En­slave­ment of cap­tives—they ei­ther adopted or mas­sa­cred them.

71:1.118. De­ci­sive con­quests.

71:1.12The red men were too demo­cratic; they had a good gov­ern­ment, but it failed. Even­tu­ally they would have evolved a state had they not pre­ma­turely en­coun­tered the more ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion of the white man, who was pur­su­ing the gov­ern­men­tal meth­ods of the Greeks and the Ro­mans.

71:1.13The suc­cess­ful Ro­man state was based on:

71:1.141. The fa­ther-fam­ily.

71:1.152. Agri­cul­ture and the do­mes­ti­ca­tion of an­i­mals.

71:1.163. Con­den­sa­tion of pop­u­la­tion—cities.

71:1.174. Pri­vate prop­erty and land.

71:1.185. Slav­ery—classes of cit­i­zen­ship.

71:1.196. Con­quest and re­or­ga­ni­za­tion of weak and back­ward peo­ples.

71:1.207. Def­i­nite ter­ri­tory with roads.

71:1.218. Per­sonal and strong rulers.

71:1.22The great weak­ness in Ro­man civ­i­liza­tion, and a fac­tor in the ul­ti­mate col­lapse of the em­pire, was the sup­posed lib­eral and ad­vanced pro­vi­sion for the eman­ci­pa­tion of the boy at twenty-one and the un­con­di­tional re­lease of the girl so that she was at lib­erty to marry a man of her own choos­ing or to go abroad in the land to be­come im­moral. The harm to so­ci­ety con­sisted not in these re­forms them­selves but rather in the sud­den and ex­ten­sive man­ner of their adop­tion. The col­lapse of Rome in­di­cates what may be ex­pected when a state un­der­goes too rapid ex­ten­sion as­so­ci­ated with in­ter­nal de­gen­er­a­tion.

71:1.23The em­bry­onic state was made pos­si­ble by the de­cline of the blood bond in fa­vor of the ter­ri­to­rial, and such tribal fed­er­a­tions were usu­ally firmly ce­mented by con­quest. While a sov­er­eignty that tran­scends all mi­nor strug­gles and group dif­fer­ences is the char­ac­ter­is­tic of the true state, still, many classes and castes per­sist in the later state or­ga­ni­za­tions as rem­nants of the clans and tribes of for­mer days. The later and larger ter­ri­to­rial states had a long and bit­ter strug­gle with these smaller con­san­guineous clan groups, the tribal gov­ern­ment prov­ing a valu­able tran­si­tion from fam­ily to state au­thor­ity. Dur­ing later times many clans grew out of trades and other in­dus­trial as­so­ci­a­tions.

71:1.24Fail­ure of state in­te­gra­tion re­sults in ret­ro­gres­sion to pre­state con­di­tions of gov­ern­men­tal tech­niques, such as the feu­dal­ism of the Eu­ro­pean Mid­dle Ages. Dur­ing these dark ages the ter­ri­to­rial state col­lapsed, and there was a re­ver­sion to the small cas­tle groups, the reap­pear­ance of the clan and tribal stages of de­vel­op­ment. Sim­i­lar semi­states even now ex­ist in Asia and Africa, but not all of them are evo­lu­tion­ary re­ver­sions; many are the em­bry­onic nu­cle­uses of states of the fu­ture.