society, and then, in the second
place, it happens that organs and functions, created first for the
advantage of all, end by no longer serving any interest but those of
groups, and permit abuses of power on the part of coteries and camorras.
Thence arise aristocracies and hierarchies born from the use of the
public power, thence arise dynasties; in the light of simple logic these
formations appear wholly irrational.

From the first beginnings of written history the state has increased or
diminished its powers, but it has never disappeared, because ever since
there have been, in the society of men unequal in consequence of
economic differentiation, reasons for maintaining and for defending,
through force or conquest, slavery, monopolies, or the predominance of
one form of production, with the domination of man over man. The state
has become, as it were, the field of an endless civil war, which is
developing always, even if it does not always show itself under the
startling form of Marius and Sylla, days of June and wars of Secession.
Within the state, the corruption of man by man has always flourished,
because, if there is no form of domination which does not meet
resistance, there are no forms of resistance which, in consequence of
the pressing needs of life, may not degenerate into a passive compact.

For these reasons, historic events, seen on the surface of the ordinary
monotonous narrative, appear like the repetition of the same type, with
few variations, like a series of kaleidoscopic pictures. We need not be
astonished if the idealistic Herbart and the caustic or pessimistic
Schopenhauer arrived at this conclusion, that there is no history, in
the sense of any actual _processus_, which is to say in common language;
history is a tiresome song.

When political history is once reduced to its quintessence, the state
remains illuminated in all its prose. Thenceforth there is no more trace
either of theological divination, nor of metaphysical
transubstantiation, so much in vogue among certain German
philosophers,--for whom the state is the Idea, the State Idea which is
realized in history, the state is the full realization of the
personality, and other stupidities of the same sort. The state is a real
organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a mode of
association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production,
or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state
assumes, either a s