Structured edition
The State
by Franz Oppenheimer
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Overview
Franz Oppenheimer's The State asks what a state is and where it came from, and answers by looking at how states actually arose in history.
Two Means of Gaining a Living
His starting point is a distinction between two ways people obtain what they need. One is labor and the exchange of its products, which he calls the economic means. The other is the appropriation of what others have produced, which he calls the political means.
For Oppenheimer the state is the organization of the political means. It is not a free agreement among equals, and it did not grow out of peaceful association. He argues that it comes out of conquest and domination.
The state, for Oppenheimer, is the political means organized.
The Stakes
If Oppenheimer is right, the state's origin shapes everything that follows: how classes arise, how its constitution develops, and how it may eventually give way. He presents this as a sociological account of the state's real beginnings, offered in place of the accounts earlier writers gave.
The path ahead takes up three questions in his terms. What are the two means, and what is the state in light of them? How did conquest make states? And how does the state develop through its stages, take on a constitution, and, as he sees it, wither?
What is inside
Two Means and the Idea of the State
- 01Oppenheimer's Case Against the Contract TheoriesFor Oppenheimer, the social contract is a fairy tale: no primitive state originated by agreement.Free, in full
- 02The Economic and the Political MeansFor Oppenheimer, there are only two means to satisfy needs: the economic means of labor and exchange, and the political means of appropriating others' labor.
Conquest and the Making of States
- 03Herdsmen, Warfare and Servile LaborFor Oppenheimer, the herdsman's whole mode of life impels him toward the political means and the exploitation of men as servile labor.
- 04The Primitive Feudal StateFor Oppenheimer, the state's form is dominion of a warlike minority over a bounded territory and its cultivators.
- 05The Maritime State and Commercial CapitalThe maritime state is shaped by commercial capital, as the territorial state is shaped by landed property, he holds.
Development, Constitution and Withering of the State
- 06Landed Property and the Developed Feudal StateFor Oppenheimer, the ownership of landed property decides the fate of the territorial state.
- 07The Rise of the Plebs and the Fall of the FreemanThe plebs' rise and the freeman's fall flow from one source: land gathering in ever fewer hands, he holds.
- 08The Constitutional State and Class RuleThe modern constitutional state, he holds, is still domination in form and exploitation of the economic means in content.
- 09Oppenheimer's Forecast: The Free CitizenryFor Oppenheimer, the state will cease to be the developed political means and become a freemen's citizenship.
Concept 01 of 9
Oppenheimer's Case Against the Contract Theories
Rousseau's social contract, Oppenheimer holds, is a fairy tale: no state arose by agreement, and every theory built on that tale serves someone's interest.
A Fairy Tale With a Purpose
Oppenheimer dismisses all received doctrines of public law. Even a cursory look, he says, shows they explain neither the genesis, the essence nor the purpose of the State.
- Rousseau derives the State from a social contract.
- Carey ascribes its origin to a band of robbers.
- Plato and the followers of Karl Marx make the State absolute lord over the citizen in political and economic matters.
- The Manchester school would let the State exercise only needful police functions, which logically ends in a scientific anarchism that must utterly exterminate the State.
His diagnosis is that none of the conventional theories treats the State from the sociological viewpoint, which he understands as a philosophy of history and a theory of economics. Its essential nature, he says, only a broad study of universal history can make plain.
What He Puts in Its Place
He then asks what the State is as a sociological concept.
For Oppenheimer the State, in its genesis and almost wholly in its first stages, is an institution forced by a victorious group on a defeated one. Its sole purpose is to regulate the victors' dominion and secure them against revolt and attack. Its aim, he adds, was economic exploitation of the vanquished.
No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner.
Where tradition reports otherwise, he says, it describes two developed primitive states merging, or it is the fable of the sheep that made a bear their king against the wolf. Even then the State became a wolf state.
| Theory | Oppenheimer's verdict |
|---|---|
| Origin by social contract (Rousseau) | A "fairy tale," or a class theory used to justify the privileges of the upper classes |
| Original accumulation of property | Totally erroneous, as a simple problem in elementary arithmetic shows |
| Origin by conquest | Supported in ample manner by well-known historical facts |
He offers two proofs. History shows the class-state did not originate in this fashion. Economics shows deductively, with testimony absolute, mathematical and binding, that it could not have.
- The State
- A social institution forced by a victorious group on a defeated group, to regulate the victors' dominion over the vanquished and secure itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad.
- Freemen's Citizenship
- The end-stage, no longer the instrument of political domination and economic exploitation of one group by another, and no longer a "State of Classes."
The Burden of Proof
Oppenheimer concedes that most modern historians reject his view. They hold that each of the two groups had already formed a State of its own. Since the beginnings of human history are unknown, he admits that historical proof either way is unavailable, and the verdict would stand at "not proven."
He escapes that verdict deductively. The State as history shows it, the class-state, could not have come about except through warlike subjugation, and his simple calculation excludes any other result.
| Case | How he explains it |
|---|---|
| The United States and similar colonies | The mass to be exploited imports itself by emigration, an infection from afar with statehood |
| Colonies with little immigration | They approach the final stage, where the old form is filled with new contents |
| Australian Colonies, New Zealand | Approaching or almost attaining freemen's citizenship; Queensland still exploits half-enslaved Kanakas |
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