Chapter XI: The State (1)

(B)

STATE AND HISTORY

I

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the _movement_ or _the thing moved_ that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, _status_, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system.

A movement _has_ form, and that which is moved is “_in form_,” or, to use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution, when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the self-evident, so outweigh everything else that--though theorists never see it--the description of a state or its constitutional archives cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history.[626] Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense--the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia--state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture--a historical people, that is--is called a Nation.[627] A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) _as an idea_. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort--and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection--but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge _with_ the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form.

A people is _as_ State, a kindred is _as_ family, “in form”--that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, _res publica_ and _res privata_. And both, moreover, are symbols of care.[628] The woman _is_ world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form” as marriage. The man, however, _makes_ history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition” is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were _one_ uniform being-stream, the words “people,” “state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful _variety_ of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. _A people is only really such in relation to other peoples_, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history--which gets it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative--and an outward history, which _consists_ in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They _are_ Destiny.

_Res publica_, the public life, the “sword side” of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called _customary ethic_ (_Sitte_) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and _law_ (_Recht_) when it is _deliberately stated_ and put forth for _acceptance_.

Law--irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (_Gesetz_)--is the _willed_ form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time-symbolism--Care in two modes, prevision and provision--but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition--the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a _duty_ for every member, but it is no proof of every member’s _power_. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the _making_ of laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof--and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To “have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the _moral distinction of right and wrong_, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies--but the fact-world of history knows only the _success_ which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous--then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent units--as the State or the estate so often is to families and calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children--a just law _between_ the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never, feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force--as is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between the _internal_ and the _external_ rights of historical life-units. In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be effective--although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history, even in those which call themselves “civil” or “_bürgerlich_,” for the very adjective indicates that _an estate_ has possessed the superior force to impose them on everyone.[629] Internal laws are the result of strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates this power annihilates also these laws--they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual--indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just--it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks _Life_, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity _itself_; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and _has to be made_ law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.” It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law-making--as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too--for a moment in France (institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German land-laws.[630]

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs, was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of the Twelve Tables in Rome;[631] but by then the Late period of the Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon, the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.[632] And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition by the _Tiers État_ (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in 1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict--original, and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war by other means,[633] the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the successful party.

II

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. _That_--if we try to understand the matter in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics--_is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events_. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind)--and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities--sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and claims of each--the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.[634]

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the _external_ position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples are always of _a political and not a social nature_. In domestic politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical actuality--and consequently cannot think in external politics at all--identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one or another Estate--the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the Third Estate _vis-à-vis_ the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the _Tiers_--that is, intellect and money--left its friend the Crown in the lurch and joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787). We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history,[635] between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.[636] But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. _World-history is, and always will be, State-history._ The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being “_in condition_” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulse-sense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps.

And here it becomes manifest that _the State and the first Estate_ are cognate down to the roots--akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State and every nobility is supported)--not merely in their relation to the soil, the clan-domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland), which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses everything else--but above all in high practice amidst all the facts of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse, diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and, lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common cause--as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome _vis-à-vis_ Carthage, in Tsin as against the _tao_-coloured state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class--or for that matter _any_ Estate--experiences the residue of the nation only with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major care. But a genuine old nobility _assimilates itself_ to the State, and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious; it feels it, indeed, an innate _privilege_, and regards service in the army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history--hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize _religious_ ideals, in Late periods both the _business_ ideal of the free economic life, and the _Utopian_ ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts--no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics--let him not try to _make_ politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have _grown_, and these are nothing but living peoples “in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a _being_, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions--in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, _but that of their inner authority_, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief--of friend _and_ foe--in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a _class_ forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes _subjects and objects_[637] in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity--so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s becoming the object of alien policy--and not seldom for ever.

For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation, and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully the _natural_ form of the body politic has built itself up, the more surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.[638] The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that class-States--that is, States in which particular classes rule--are the _only_ States. This must not be confused with the class-States to which the individual is merely _attached_ in view of belonging to an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority _within an Estate_ that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility--for example, the “gentry” which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the _nobiles_ at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque).[639] Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate--not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate--though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit--there are cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

That is the organization of _actual_ states in contradistinction to those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt on this basis.

III

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an _Estate_. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the _primus inter pares_, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the Pyramids--the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one _meaning_, the other _being_. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the _private-law_ (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility, honour, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry the Lion[640] is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein. Service to, and agency for, the ruler--originally personal and limited in time--very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated, _had_ to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was “No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in 1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.[641] From this booty-sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the famous exchequer-practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal agency;[642] they were _clerici_ or clerks, and not _ministeriales_ or ministers--“servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom.[643] The early Chinese official-State described in the _Tshou-li_ is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity of the book has been doubted,[644] but in spirit and tendency it corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery.[645] In the early Classical world it is markedly absent. “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in others Improvidence, the _autarkeia_ of the Stoics, was elevated into a principle. Even the best calculators were no exception--thus Eubulus in Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that extend to-day over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in the Norman counting-house of Robert the Devil (1028-35) that we have the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”[646] Here it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the Norman State of Sicily--for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed from the money-economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and perfected. From this centre the methodic and descriptive technique of finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism build-up and breakdown lie close together. When the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigour, the future nations, and with them the germ of the State-idea proper, were stirring into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions of nationhood--German-French even from Otto the Great’s times; German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself, where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into 60,251 fiefs, catalogued in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted even to-day upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals--made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower--which thenceforward became the support and champion of _national_ development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself--not merely in the West, but in any Culture--came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances--firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus;[647] secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is _tien-hia_, everything lying below the heavens;[648] and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian--that is, Magian--lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually _obtained_ feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal’s oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by means of representative institutions for their order.[649] The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was _ipso facto_ secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal--we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the _city_-state, the political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court-offices, the _archai_ and _timai_, the _prytaneis_, the Archons, and perhaps the original Prætor,[650] were all urban in nature; and the great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods--namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the _rex sacrorum_). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (_c._ 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga--the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.[651] The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.[652] In the _phiditiæ_[653] there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the _rex sacrorum_ of Rome, or the “kings” of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the _Interrex_, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary _between the feudal union and the class-State_. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property (“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.[654] With the Vth Dynasty (_c._ 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the short-lived VIth Dynasty the princes (_rpati_) and counts (_hetio_) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties[655] is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the fall of the House of Chóu and the decline of the Imperial name into an honourable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously with the Renaissance-style of the _condottieri_ and the complete decay of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull _Unam sanctam_ and had consequently been arrested by the representatives of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy, and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne.

IV

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was _something else_ besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint, but under a “public”-law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; _but_ the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a _task_. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167)--one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods--with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the “Dike” of the growing Polis.[656] Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

The State-idea in its sturdy youth is always--and self-evidently, with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself--bound up with the conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation--as every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates afresh.[657] Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are “in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great life-units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set back in favour of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these forms we practically always find _de facto_ an individual rulership, whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the _inherited will_, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection in principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are _modifications of this one principle_, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The ripening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples.[658] The _capital_ takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of _Sovereignty_.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds--nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations.[659] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the _hvareno_ of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him _pius, felix, invictus_ (the last-named, from Commodus’s reign, his official title).[660] In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking-down of Augustus’s civil-service state to build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne.”[661] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and Nation in one,[662] as Augustine described it in his _Civitas Dei_. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the _historical_ world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate--to God’s Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he _chose_ a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his _servant_ in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is _included_ in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;[663] and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more ancient still.[664] But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, _Wang_, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy--a notion quite alien to the early time--became a power to conjure with,[665] and extinction of lines, adoptions and _mésalliances_ led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.[666] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.[667] The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.