The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National AdvantageAngell, Norman
History
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Angell, Norman
Commercial policy; Disarmament; Imperialism; War; War, Cost of
The State is the only complete form in which human society
exists, and there are a multitude of phenomena which will be
found only as manifestations of human life in the form of a
society united by the political bond into a State. The products
of such society are law, literature, art, and science, and it
has yet to be shown that apart from that form of society known
as the State, the family or education or development of
character is possible. The State, in short, is an organism or
living thing which can be wounded and can be killed, and like
every other living thing requires protection against wounding
and destruction.... Conscience and morals are products of
social and not of individual life, and to say that the sole
purpose of the State is to make possible a decent livelihood is
as though a man should say that the sole object of human life
is to satisfy the interests of existence. A man cannot live any
kind of life without food, clothing, and shelter, but that
condition does not abolish or diminish the value of the life
industrial, the life intellectual, or the life artistic. The
State is the condition of all these lives, and its purpose is
to sustain them. That is why the State must defend itself. In
the ideal, the State represents and embodies the whole people's
conception of what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what
is right, and it is the sublime quality of human nature that
every great nation has produced citizens ready to sacrifice
themselves rather than submit to an external force attempting
to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is
right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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