The ascension of the State in the stampede of war
by Dan Sanchez, April 08, 2015
Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State.” This has long been the byword for anti-war, anti-state libertarians, and rightly so. But Bourne did not mean exactly what most libertarians take this phrase to mean. To understand the maxim’s original meaning, as Bourne used it in his great unfinished essay “The State,” one must understand his distinctions among three concepts that are often conflated: Country, State, and Government.
For Bourne, a Country (or Nation) is a group of individuals bound together by cultural affinity. A State is a Country/Nation collectively mobilized for attack or protection. As he distinguished between the two:
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“Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects.”
And Government, according to Bourne, “is the machinery by which the Nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions” and “a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.”
What libertarians commonly refer to as “the State,” Bourne termed “the Government” instead. So, the way libertarians often interpret his famous aphorism is what Bourne would have expressed if he had written, “War is the health of the Government.” This also happens to be true, but it is not what he meant.
For Bourne, the State is not a distinct ruling body subsisting extractively on the ruled, i.e., a “gang of thieves writ large,” as the great Murray Rothbard incisively conceived it. Rather, he saw it as a certain orientation of a whole people: a spiritual phenomenon pervading an entire populace that animates and empowers such a ruling body. As Bourne expressed it:
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“Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.”
In peacetime, Bourne explained, the State is largely relegated to the background; individuals are then more concerned with their own affairs and purposes. But during the build-up to war, and especially following its breakout, the foreign enemy looms large in the public imagination. Hence, the Country is overtaken by war fever and develops what Garet Garett called a “complex of vaunting and fear.” This hybrid mania of boastful belligerence and timorous terror (“fight-or-flight”) causes the populace to regress from a civilization to a herd. The people seek safety in numbers: in a multitude unified for a single purpose (a “great end”) and directed by a single agency. The varied dance of individuals gives way to the uniform huddle and stampede of the unitary drove, with the Government as drover. ...... more
http://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Sanchez/2015/04/07/the-herd-mind/