gentes.

Two things were necessary that these prejudices of the judgment should
be overcome. In the first place, it was necessary to recognize that the
functions of the state arise, increase, diminish, alter and follow each
other with the variations of certain social conditions. In the second
place, it was necessary to arrive at a comprehension of the fact that
the state exists and maintains itself in that it is organized for the
defense of certain definite interests, of one part of society against
all the rest of society itself, which must be made in such a way, in its
entirety, that the resistance of the subjects, of the ill treated and
the exploited, either is lost in multiple frictions, or is tempered by
the partial advantages, wretched though they be, to the oppressed
themselves. Politics, that art so miraculous and so admired, thus brings
us back to a very simple formula; to apply a force or a system of forces
to the total of resistances.

The first step, and the most difficult, is taken when the state has been
reduced to the social conditions whence it draws its origin. But these
social conditions themselves have been subsequently defined by the
theory of classes, the genesis of which is in the manner of the
different occupations, granted the distribution of labor, that is to
say, granted the relations which co-ordinate and bind men together in a
definite form of production.

Thenceforth the concept of the state has ceased to represent the direct
cause of the historic movement as the presumed author of society,
because it has been seen that in each of its forms and its variations
there is nothing else than the positive and forced organization of a
definite class rule, or of a definite compact between different classes.
And then by an ulterior consequence from these premises, it is finally
to be recognized that politics, as the art of acting in a desired
direction, is a comparatively small part of the general movement of
history, and that it is but a feeble part of the formation and the
development of the state itself, in which many things, that is to say,
many relations, arise and develop by a necessary compact, by a tacit
consent, or by violence endured and tolerated. The reign of the
unconscious, if by that we mean what is not decreed by free choice and
forethought, but what is determined and accomplished by a succession of
habits, customs, compacts, etc., has become very considerable in the
domain of the d