The State: Its History and Development Viewed SociologicallyOppenheimer, Franz
History
The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically
Oppenheimer, Franz
State, The
The little history learned in our school-days suffices to prove this
generic doctrine. Everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men
breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling
down as nobility and founding its State. In Mesopotamia, wave follows
wave, state follows state--Babylonians, Amoritans, Assyrians, Arabs,
Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Mongols, Seldshuks, Tartars,
Turks; on the Nile, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
Turks; in Greece, the Doric States are typical examples; in Italy,
Romans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans; in Spain, Carthaginians,
Visigoths, Arabs; in Gaul, Romans, Franks, Burgundians, Normans; in
Britain, Saxons, Normans. In India wave upon wave of wild warlike
clans has flooded over the country even to the islands of the Indian
Ocean. So also is it with China. In the European colonies, we find
the selfsame type, wherever a settled element of the population has
been found, as for example, in South America and Mexico. Where that
element is lacking, where only roving huntsmen are found, who may be
exterminated but not subjugated, the conquerors resort to the device
of importing from afar masses of men to be exploited, to be subject
perpetually to forced labor, and thus the slave trade arises.
An apparent exception is found only in those European colonies in
which it is forbidden to replace the lack of a domiciled indigenous
population by the importation of slaves. One of these colonies, the
United States of America, is among the most powerful state-formations
in all history. The exception there found is to be explained by this,
that the mass of men to be exploited and worked without cessation
_imports itself_, by emigration in great hordes from primitive states
or from those in higher stages of development in which exploitation has
become unbearable, while liberty of movement has been attained. In this
case, one may speak of an infection from afar with “statehood” brought
in by the infected of foreign lands. Where, however, in such colonies,
immigration is very limited, either because of excessive distances
and the consequent high charges for moving from home, or because of
regulations limiting the immigration, we perceive an approximation
to the final end of the development of the State, which we nowadays
recognize as the necessary outcome and finale, but for which we have
not yet found a scientific terminology. Here again, in the dialectic
development, a change in the quantity is bound up with a change of
the quality. The old form is filled with new contents. We still find
a “State” in so far as it represents the tense regulation, secured by
external force, whereby is secured the social living together of large
bodies of men; but it is no longer the “State” in its older sense.
It is no longer the instrument of political domination and economic
exploitation of one social group by another; it is no longer a “State
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