s community of
interests.

Less precise in its limits, more diffuse and less compact than the caste
or the sect, the class represents today the veritable crowd in a dynamic
state, which can in a moment's time descend from that place and become
statically a crowd. And it is from the sociological standpoint the most
terrible kind of crowd; it is that which today has taken a bellicose
attitude, and which by its attitude and precepts prepares the brutal
blows of mobs.

We speak of the "conflict of the classes," and from the theoretical
point of view and in the normal and peaceful life that signifies only a
contest of ideas by legal means. Always depending upon the occasion, the
audacity of one or many men, the character of the situation, the
conflict of the classes is transformed into something more material and
more violent--into revolt or into revolution.

Finally we arrive at the state (nation). Tocqueville said that the
classes which compose society form so many distinct nations. They are
the greatest collectivities before coming to the nation, the state.

This is the most perfect type of organization of the crowd, and the
final and supreme type, if there is not another collectivity superior in
number and extension, the collectivity formed by race.

The bond which unites all the citizens of a state is language and
nationality. Above the state there are only the crowds determined by
race, which comprise many states. And these are, like the states and
like the classes, human aggregates which in a moment could be
transformed into violent crowds. But then, and justly, because their
evolution and their organization are more developed, their mobs are
called armies, and their violences are called wars, and they have the
seal of legitimacy unknown in other crowds. In this order of ideas war
could be defined as the supreme form of collective crimes.

4. _Esprit de Corps_, Morale, and Collective Representations of Social
Groups[93]

War is no doubt the least human of human relationships. It can begin
only when persuasion ends, when arguments fitted to move minds are
replaced by the blasting-powder fitted to move rocks and hills. It means
that one at least of the national wills concerned has deliberately set
aside its human quality--as only a human will can do--and has made of
itself just such a material obstruction or menace. Hence war seems, and
is often called, a contest of brute forces. Certainly it is the
extremest