Chapter Five HE STATE AS REVOLUTION The argument of this book is that the single most decisive influence upon Westem social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial State. There is every reason to regard the State in history as, to use a phrase von Gierke applied to Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will, ‘a process of permanent revolution.’ The conflict between the central power of the political State and the whole set of func- tions and authorities contained in church, family, gild, and local community has been, I believe, the main source of those dis- locations of social structure and uprootings of status which lie behind the problem of community in our age. To refer categorically to the State is to risk a degree of abstraction and empirical unreality that leaves in view none of the concrete manifestations of political behavior in modern history. Such abstraction leads too often to personifications of 98the State, to visions of objective will, and to a false sense of the exteriority of the State to human aspirations and conduct. On the other hand, not to deal with the State categorically is to risk losing, in the varied sequences of diplomatic, military, and political events, the essential unity of the State as an idea system in the modern West and, more important, the powerful and cohesive nature of the State as an institution, as a system of human allegiances and motivations. In the next two chapters we shall be concerned with some of the more concrete aspects of the State and its historical relation to social organization. Here it is important to call attention in more general terms to the qualities that have made the Western State so revolutionary an idea system. Like the family, or like capitalism, the State is a complex of ideas, symbols, and relationships. Unlike either kinship or capitalism, the State has become, in the contemporary world, the supreme allegiance of men and, in most recent times, the greatest refuge from the insecurities and frustrations of other spheres of life. Where capitalism has become enveloped throughout the Western world, and the East as well, in a thickening cloud of distrust and renunciation, and where kin- ship, like religion, has become increasingly devoid of institu- tional significance and symbolic appeal, the State has risen as the dominant institutional force in our society and the most evocative symbol of cultural unity and purpose. If we are to understand the historical importance of the State in the Western world, we must be clear in our appre- ciation of certain general characteristics of the State as an historical entity. In the first place, State and society must be sharply dis- tinguished. Despite the considerable number of writers who make State and society synonymous, there is actually no more warrant for making the State a generic term to include all types of association than there is for so making religion or kinship. Historically, the State presents as distinctive a pattern of power and rights as cither religion or the family. The usual reason 99advanced for disregarding the differences and making the State and society one is that the State is basically a system of author- ity and, since some kind of authority exists in every human association, all manifestations of society may legitimately be described as aspects of the State. But this is a piece of semantic juggling that cannot be tolerated unless we close our eyes to the historical record. The fact that almost no sphere of life in the contemporary world is removed from the processes of polit- ical behavior is no more of a justification for the historical blurring of distinction between State and society than is the fact that, in the medieval world, no sphere of life was wholly removed from the authority of the Church. From the point of view of any useful historical examination, the State must be regarded as but one form of relationship, existing, in varying degrees of prominence, among many other forms. In the second place, and following closely from the first, the State is not the direct outgrowth of family, tribe, or local community. The belief in the kinship origin of the State has been among the most deeply rooted manifestations of the Western faith in developmental continuity. The popularity of the belief owes much to Aristotle’s celebrated triadic scheme of evolution—from family to community to State—and has been nourished in modern times by frequent appeals to irrelevant and historically unconnected ethnographic materials. As is true in so many other alleged instances of developmental continuity, the fact of logical continuity has been converted into the sup- position of historical continuity within a specific area or chron- ology. But, if we look not to imaginary beginnings in the never- never-land of ethnological reconstruction but to historically connected sequences of change in such specific areas as ancient Athens, Rome, or modern England and France, we discover that the rise and aggrandizement of political States took place in circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities. If there is any single origin of the institutional State, it is in the circumstances and relationships of war. The connection 100 es Mies