ata which form the object of the historic sciences; and
politics, which has been taken as an explanation, has itself become
something to explain.

We know now in a positive way the reasons in consequence of which
history had necessarily to appear under a purely political form.

But this does not mean that we ought to believe that the state is a
simple excrescence, a mere accessory of the social body, or of free
association, as so many Utopians and so many ultra-liberal thinkers of
anarchist tendencies have imagined. If society has thus far culminated
in the state, it is because it has had need of this complement of force
and authority, because it is at first composed of units which are
unequal by reason of economic differentiations. The state is something
very real, a system of forces which maintain equilibrium and impose it
through violence and repression. And to exist as a system of forces it
has been compelled to develop and to establish an economic power,
whether this latter rests upon robbery, the result of war, or whether it
consists in direct property in the domain, or whether it is constituted
little by little, thanks to the modern method of public taxes, which
takes on the constitutional appearance of a self-imposed system of
taxation. It is in this economic power, so considerable in modern times,
that its capacity for acting is founded. It results, that by reason of a
new division of labor, the functions of state give rise to special
orders and conditions, that is to say, to very particular classes,
without including the class of parasites.

The state, which is and which must be an economic power that in its
defense of the ruling classes it may be furnished with means to repress,
to govern, to administer and to make war, creates in a direct or an
indirect manner an aggregation of new and particular interests, which
necessarily react upon society. Thus the state, by the fact that it has
arisen and that it maintains itself as a guaranty of the social
antitheses, which are a consequence of economic differentiations,
creates around itself a circle of persons interested directly in its
existence.

Two consequences follow therefrom. As society is not a homogeneous
whole, but a body of specialized articulations, or, rather, a multiform
complexus of objects and interests, it happens that sometimes the
directors of the state seek to isolate themselves, and by this isolation
they oppose themselves to the whole of