By Joseph Stromberg
Ludwig von Mises Institue
July 13, 2000


On the relationship between war and heightened statism, let us
now look at things from the standpoint of Martin van Creveld's
The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). Van Creveld, a military historian who
teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, seeks to come
to grips with the inner logic of the European state system
over the last 500 years. He begins by setting out a contrast
between "governments" and "states."

GOVERNMENT VS. STATE

Van Creveld holds that the state is a purely modern phenomenon
which came into being around the end of the 15th century. It
is distinguished from mere government, which has existed since
about 3000 BC, by virtue of being an abstract, corporate,
legal person, which has an ongoing existence separate from
that of its personnel or even a titular "sovereign" such as
king or emperor (p. 1). Traditional governments did not enjoy
this exalted juristic and theoretical status.

Chiefdoms were the first form of government able to tax (p.
17). Their successors in the Ancient World, city-states,
empires, and other large territorial states were limited both
in their claims and in their ability to get things done. Most
importantly, perhaps, such governments were not conceptually
separate from the sovereign. Royal bureaucrats were the king's
servants; in republics, magistrates were servants of the citizenry.

The contrast between government and state, it might be noted,
can also be found in the writings of the sociologist Franz
Oppenheimer and the American libertarian literary figure
Albert Jay Nock. There is more than echo of it in the work of
British sociologist John A. Hall, who writes that pre-modern
governments were "capstone states" which sat lightly on top of
society and lacked the power to attempt grandiose social
reconstruction. One might wish to quarrel a bit with Van
Creveld here, but if we understand him to mean "states since
1500" whenever he uses the term "state," there is little room
for confusion. At this late date, a return to mere
"government" would be a decided improvement.

THE RISE AND FURTHER RISE OF EUROPEAN MONARCHIES

Van Creveld discusses the two-front struggle waged by late
medieval kings – from about 1300 – against the Church and the
Holy Roman Empire, both of which sought to limit kingly
authority (pp. 59-87). The Reformation afforded the monarchs a
chance to subordinate the clerics within their dominions, an
opportunity seized by Protestant and Catholic ruler alike (pp.
69-70, 73). To the extent that they succeeded, such kings
effectively turned their "national" churches into departments of state.

But of course the Church and the Empire were not the kings'
only opponents. To secure power at home, monarchs had to bring
to heel their over-mighty subjects, the nobility, and deal as
well with that "rising" new phenomenon, the merchants or
"bourgeoisie," who in Italy and northern Germany had revived
the city-state form of government on a basis of commercial
capitalism. For a time, leagues of these wealthy city-states
posed a serious threat to the consolidation of kingly power.

CONSOLIDATION AND MONARCHICAL TRIUMPH

Van Creveld devotes much space to the kings' triumph over the
nobility (pp. 87-103 and passim). One tactic, made possible by
the Reformation and perhaps perfected in England, was to win
over nobles with grants of confiscated church lands. French
monarchs gradually made good the claim that noble titles were
only valid as grants from the king. As for the towns, even
where kings played townsmen off against the nobles, they dealt
with the towns later. Town fortifications were destroyed. "The
population was disarmed and the 'bourgeois' and the 'warlike'
went their separate ways" (p. 117).

Everywhere, the struggle took many decades and the details
varied greatly. At the end, with the exception of the
Netherlands, kings stood triumphant, even if their rivals'
defeat was incomplete and the burghers' new economic
activities were allowed to flourish.

RISE OF THE PROPER STATE

Coeval (or perhaps "co-evil") with the kings' successes,
warfare became less personal and more bureaucratic. No longer
must the king command in person and risk death or injury. Now
he had to command from behind a desk. At the same time,
government was becoming "sedentary" and permanent (p. 120).
And to what end had the kings triumphed? Presumably to be
better able to fight neighboring states organized along the
same lines. Increasing, they thought of their people as sheep
to be managed and took over the symbols of Roman imperial
authority. One symptom was their promotion of "the ideology of
resignation and service...known as neostoicism" (p. 127) – a
sort of Western Confucianism!

From 1648-1789, monarchs built up bureaucracies separate from
the older "king's household" and capable of surviving the end
of personal sovereignty. In other words, the managerial
apparatus shaped by the triumphant kings was already emerging
as their potential replacement. The abstract modern state was
being born. There is plenty of blame to go around, with
differing countries pioneering various aspects of bureaucratic
statism. In England, wealthy nobles and gentry controlled a
rather minimal bureaucracy but gave us the Bank of England,
the successful model of central banking (i.e., the
"state-financial revolution"). In Prussia and Russia, rather
poor nobilities were attached to the monarchy as bureaucrats.

CENSUSES, MAPPING, INTERNAL POLICE

Everywhere, the emerging states needed information about
boundaries, population, resources, and much more. They wished
to know everything which might be useful for maintaining
internal control and for preparing wars against their
neighbors. States needed "information" and they couldn't get
it off the Internet (Al Gore's birth being far in the future).
Getting the information required to maintain order and prepare
for war, and those two tasks themselves, required more money
(taxes) and personnel, getting more money (taxes) required
more personnel, who had to be paid, which required more money
(taxes), and so on. Hence, an upward spiral which will at
least seem familiar.

The increased fiscal demands of states set off a series of
reactions – Fronde, Puritan Revolution, War of Dutch
Independence, etc. – which, taken together, constitute the
General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Some states came
out of it all with new paper limits on their power – to be overcome later.

WHEELS IN THE HEAD AND REVOLUTIONARY MISFIRE

Having gotten through the 17th century, the major states were
soon fighting one another all over the globe for
imperial/commercial advantage. The short version involves the
decline of Spain and the edging aside of France by Britain.
Sweden had already yielded regional power to Russia.
Van Creveld does not neglect the realm of ideas in all this,
however. His insights here are very interesting indeed. He
argues that Thomas Hobbes "invented" – or first theorized –
the true (modern) state, precisely as the abstract, immortal,
corporate Leviathan we have come to know and love.

Unfortunately, later writers like John Locke accepted the
essentials of this model and sought only to justify or limit
such states. This may have been a real mistake.
The new intellectual climate emptied discussions of war and
peace of older, personalistic notions attached to medieval
just war theory. War was now a "public" activity of the state,
which could potentially demand the sacrifice of anyone and
anything within its territorial limits to achieve victory. It
was the French Revolution, undertaken in the name of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, which helped states overcome their
practical and ideological limits. The new French "liberty" was
in fact the freedom of the French state, free of its royalist
backwardness and inhibitions, to demand that everyone show up
to get himself killed in far-off campaigns that few monarchs
would have ever undertaken.

TOTAL WAR ON THE HORIZON

The French "success" with mass conscription and new tactics
forced other powers to keep up. While this had the happy
effect of ending serfdom in Prussia and even, finally, in
Russia – since serfs aren't "free men" subject to conscription
– the downside was larger armies, higher stakes in future
wars, greater destruction, and over time the elimination of
evolved rules which had made wars at least bearable. The 19th
century witnessed the beginnings of Total War with its
ideological passions and apparently endless demands on civil
society. Have I mentioned Mr. Lincoln?

The 20th century consummated the process. What is striking
about Van Creveld's analysis of the bloody 20th century is
precisely his ability to reach to the institutional,
structural basis of the problem. Whatever the exact
distribution of evil or merit between the coalitions which
fought the two World Wars and the Cold War, both sides fought
them as states and in a state-like fashion. Unprecedented
destruction and mass murder were the logical outcome. The
logic of Total War, as developed by Van Creveld for the 20th
century, seems so important to me that I intend to devote
another column to it.
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Joseph Stomberg is historian-in-residence at the Ludwig von
Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.