Reflections on Political Taxonomy

The first observation to note when discussing political concepts or forms of governance is that this subject is dynamic, never static. Definitions have shifted or evolved over time and over geographic space. What a term/concept meant in ancient political parlance or usage may have an entirely different definition throughout time.

To the ancient Greeks, Philosophy (philo -love of, sophia -wisdom) was the ordering of the soul. Ancient political thought from Greece, in the writings and dialogs of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the study of the Polis (city-state) has been characterized as the Politics of Virtue, and the element of moderation was a central concept to be found in the good or harmonious regime. Political philosophy was the ordering of the soul of the Polis.

Later in the Machiavellian Revolution in political thought with The Prince and The Discourses, this shifted dramatically. Machiavelli still discussed “virtue” but it was now focused upon that of the private individual and not the regime. The central focus of political thought became the Politics of Power. With Hobbes’ Leviathan this seismic shift also was elucidated and has continued until today.

Elitism and the Myth of Pluralism (Amazon book list)

The concept of the State is the greatest criminal conspiracy ever perpetuated upon humanity. All States, regardless of label, originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, continue to exercise this monopoly of crime over their subject peoples through war, taxation, conscription of persons and resources, and indoctrination.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer in his book, The State, was a decisive influence upon a plethora of cogent scholars of the origin and practice of this criminal institution. He observed:

“The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is 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 the revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion has no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.”

This has been the case in every State throughout recorded history. From the primitive city-states of ancient Sumer located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Southern Mesopotamia, to the most sophisticated and powerful State-apparatus yet organized — that of the United States of America — recently engaged in an act of criminal conquest, occupation, and savage exploitation of those very lands and peoples in what is presently labeled Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, etc.

When it comes to the State, there is truly nothing new under the Sun.

To persons studying ancient history these documented facts are obvious and unchallenged. There is an unquestioned acceptance of the brutal and exploitative nature of imperial kingdoms of the past. These were regimes of criminal bands of warriors, slave traders, pirates and plunderers, who over the course of time, grew into dynastic ruling families and elite oligarchies, sanctified by ritual trappings and tradition.

But when we come to regard modern or contemporary affairs, there is a great disconnect or discontinuity among most persons. Why is this so?

Robert Nisbet and Murray N. Rothbard provided the answer in their seminal essays, “Cloaking the State’s Dagger“ and “The Anatomy of the State,” the single most important articles one can read to understand the nature of this predatory beast feeding upon its prey.

The answer lies with the pivotal role of “court intellectuals” in justifying and rationalizing the actions of the State. Whether by Homeric bards spinning poetic mythology of noble deeds; the Divine Right theology of a Jean Bodin, Richard Hooker, or Sir Robert Filmer; or spurious “Social Contract” theorizing ala Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or John Rawls; the result has had the same bamboozling effect.

These tall tales are then funneled into the State’s indoctrination centers, the public schools and universities, which teach the ideological passive acceptance of this criminal process. The State is further bolstered by their willing servitors in the complaisant and compliant mainstream news media.

As George Orwell noted in his famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language:”

“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Here are those crucial must-read essays discussed above:

Cloaking the State’s Dagger, by Robert Nisbet
The history of political thought is a history of one euphemism after another to disguise the naked power of the state.

“What we call political philosophy is so overladen in the West with euphemism, panegyric, and idealization that anyone might be forgiven for occasionally failing to remember just what this philosophy’s true subject is: the political state, unique among major institutions in its claim of absolute power over human lives. Euphemisms for the state drawn from kinship, religion, nature, reason, mechanics, biology, the people, and other essentially nonpolitical sources have been ascendant for so long in Western history that it is downright difficult to keep in mind that the state’s origin and essential function is, as philosopher David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, in and of force—above all, military force. What procreation is to kinship and propitiation of gods is to religion, monopolization of power is to the state.

“There is no political order known to us in history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary Israel, that has not originated in war, its claimed sovereignty but an extension and ramification of what the Romans called the imperium, absolute military command. War is the origin of the state and, in Randolph Bourne’s familiar phrasing, is the health of the state. Modern war, grounded as it usually is in the kinds of political and moral ideals, or claimed ideals, which can justify almost limitless expansion of the state at the expense of society, is very healthful indeed to any form of state.

“The essence of the state, then, is its unique possession of sovereignty—absolute and unconditional power over all individuals and their associations and possessions within a given area. And at the basis of the state’s sovereignty is the contingent power to use the military to compel obedience to its rule. This is as true of democratic as of despotic states.”

The Anatomy of the State, by Murray N. Rothbard

“The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the “private sector” and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and commonsense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.”

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