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The State by Franz Oppenheimer - Text (pdf)
Fundamental Concepts
Acquisition of income and wealth
There are two and only two ways by which men can acquire income and wealth: One is through production and voluntary exchange, what Oppenheimer calls “the economic means” to wealth, the means consonant with human nature and with the prosperity of mankind, the means which benefits all parties to the market and exchange process. The other means is robbery, the coercive looting and expropriation of someone else’s production. This is the parasitic means, which not only violates the nature of man, but imposes a crippling burden on the victims and on production and economic growth. This path to wealth Oppenheimer called “the political means.” Oppenheimer then goes on to define the State, on the basis of his historical research, as the organization, the regularization, of the political means.
Origins of the State: "social contract theory” vs "conquest theory".
The State may be defined as an organization of one class dominating over the other classes. Such a class organization can come about in one way only, namely, through conquest and the subjection of ethnic groups by the dominating group.
For centuries, the State and its intellectual apologists have propagated the myth that the State is a voluntary instrument of society. Essential to that myth is the idea that the State arose on a voluntary, or at least on a natural, basis, arising organically out of the needs of society. For if the State arose naturally or voluntarily, then it probably follows that it fulfilled and still fulfills a vital societal function. A fundamental component of the myth of voluntary State origins is the idea that the State arose out of a “social contract” entered into by all members of society.
The late-nineteenth century Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz pointed out that, in fact, states were born of conquest and coercion of one ethnic or “racial” group over another. Inspired by Gumplowicz’ research, Oppenheimer systemized his mentor’s work and pointed out that all states have arisen through conquest.
Oppenheimer’s paradigmatic history of the State began with nomadic tribes conquering the non-state peasant societies. The peasant is always lacking in mobility. He is as attached to the ground as the plants he cultivates. What purpose, moreover, would a looting expedition effect in a country, which throughout its extent is occupied only by grubbing peasants? The peasant can carry off from the peasant nothing which he does not already own.
For all these reasons, primitive peasants are totally lacking in that warlike desire to take the offensive which is the distinguishing mark of hunters and herdsmen: war can not better their condition.
To sum up: within the economic and social conditions of the peasant districts, one finds no differentiation working for the higher forms of integration. There exists neither the impulse nor the possibility for the warlike subjection of neighbors. No “State” can therefore arise; and, as a matter of fact, none ever has arisen from such social conditions. Had there been no impulse from without, from groups of men nourished in a different manner, the primitive grubber would never have discovered the State.
Herdsmen, on the contrary, even though isolated, have developed a whole series of the elements of statehood; and in the tribes which have progressed further, they have developed this in its totality, with the single exception of the last point of identification which completes the state in its modern sense, that is to say, with exception only of the definitive occupation of a circumscribed territory.
At first, the conquerors usually looted and murdered their victims and then went on to find others. After centuries, however, the conquering tribes decided to settle down among their victims; instead of killing them, they regularized and rendered the loot permanent, settling down to rule their victims on a long-range basis. The annual tribute became “taxes,” and the land of the peasants was parceled out among the warlords to become subject of annual feudal rent. In this way, a state and a ruling class emerged from previously stateless societies. Thus, Oppenheimer analyzes the State as a “social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, the dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.
The conquerors, Oppenheimer explained, limit their short-term plunder only for the sake of their long-term-plunder, and not for the sake of the plundered. “…it begins to dawn on the consciousness of the wild herdsman that a murdered peasant can no longer plow, and that a fruit tree hacked down will no longer bear. In his own interest, then, wherever it is possible, he lets the peasant live and the tree stand.”
The conqueror in the first stage is like the bear, who for the purpose of robbing the beehive, destroys it. In the second stage he is like the beekeeper, who leaves the bees enough honey to carry them through the winter.
The moment when first the conqueror spared his victim in order permanently to exploit him in productive work, was of incomparable historical importance. It gave birth to nation and state, to right and the higher economics, with all the developments and ramifications which have grown and which will hereafter grow out of them. The root of everything human reaches down into the dark soil of the animal—love and art, no less than state, justice and economics.
The conquerors may also protect the plundered from rival plunderers (whether foreign or domestic), but this too is done by the conquerors for the sake of maximizing their own plunder. Ultimately a shepherd protects his sheep from wolves, not for the sake of the sheep, but for the sake of his own supply of wool and mutton. But the plunderer will find it useful to mislead the plundered to think otherwise. A victim will be more docile and cooperative if he thinks his victimization is for his own good.
A far stronger bond of psychical community between high and low, more potent than any success against foreign invasion, is woven by legal protection against the aggression of the mighty. “Justitia fundamentum regnorum.” When, pursuant to their own ideals of justice, the aristocrats as a social group execute one of their own class for murder or robbery, for having exceeded the bounds of permitted exploitation, the thanks and the joy of the subjects are even more heartfelt than after victory over alien foes.
This is how plunder evolves into tribute and taxes, slavery evolves into “the duties of the citizen,” and plunderers evolve into potentates, princes, and politicians.
The two groups, separated, to begin with, and then united on one territory, are at first merely laid alongside one another, then are scattered through one another like a mechanical mixture, as the term is used in chemistry, until gradually they become more and more of a “chemical combination.” They intermingle, unite, amalgamate to unity, in customs and habits, in speech and worship. Soon the bonds of relationship unite the upper and the lower strata.
In nearly all cases the master class picks the handsomest virgins from the subject races for its concubines. A race of bastards thus develops, sometimes taken into the ruling class, sometimes rejected, and then because of the blood of the masters in their veins, becoming the born leaders of the subject race. In form and in content the primitive state is completed.
Thus, according to this origin story, the state is not a protector-turned-plunderer, but the opposite. The state does not tax so it can protect, it protects (selectively, grandiosely, and ineptly) so it can tax. The state is a wolf in sheep dog’s clothing. Manifest tyranny is not the state corrupted, but the state unmasked. And legal plunder is not a bug, but the main feature: not a perversion of the state but its raison d'etre.
Future development of the state
The tendency of state development unmistakably leads to one point: seen in its essentials the state will cease to be the “developed political means” and will become “a freemen’s citizenship.” In other words, its outer shell will remain in essentials the form which was developed in the constitutional state, under which the administration will be carried on by an officialdom. But the content of the states heretofore known will have changed its vital element by the disappearance of the economic exploitation of one class by another. And since the state will, by this, come to be without either classes or class interests, the bureaucracy of the future will truly have attained that ideal of the impartial guardian of the common interests, which nowadays it laboriously attempts to reach. The “state” of the future will be “society” guided by self-government.
The “state” is the fully developed political means, society the fully developed economic means. Heretofore state and society were indissolubly intertwined: in the “freemen’s citizenship,” there will be no “state” but only “society.”
Further discussion
Murray N. Rothbard review of "The State"
Dan Sanchez "Locke vs. Oppenheimer"
Study Questions
What is the difference between the “economic means” and the “the political means” of acquiring income and wealth?
How does the "social contract" theory of state evolution conflict with Franz Oppenheimer’s "conquest" theory of state evolution?
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