The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically

by Franz Oppenheimer

Here, according to the statement of experts, no definite information is to be had, and it seems that the system of money exchanges appears as a matured institution only in Greek times. Until that time, the tribute of the peasants was paid in kind;[136] and yet we find, shortly after the expulsion of the Shepherd Kings, during the New Empire (circa sixteenth century B. C.), that the absolutism of the kings was fully developed: “The military power is upheld by foreign mercenaries, the administration is carried on by a centralized body of officials dependent on the royal favor, while the feudal aristocracy has disappeared.”[137]

It may seem that this exception proves the rule. Egypt is a country of exceptional geographic conformation. Jammed into a narrow compass, between mountains and the desert, a natural highway, the River Nile, traverses its entire length, and permits the transportation of bulky freight with much greater facility than the finest road. And this highway made it easy for the Pharaoh to assemble the taxes of all his districts in his own storehouses, the so-called “houses”[138] and from them to supply his garrisons and civil employees with the products themselves in natura. For that reason Egypt, after it has once become unified into an empire, stays centralized, until foreign powers extinguish its life as a “state.” “This circumstance is the source of the enormous and plenary power exercised by the Pharaoh where payments are still made in kind; the exclusive and immediate control of the objects of daily consumption are in his hand. The ruler distributes to his employees only such quantities of the entire mass of goods as appears to him good and proper; and since the articles of luxury are nearly all exclusively in his hands, he enjoys on this account also an extraordinary plenitude of power.”[139]

With this one exception, where a mighty force executes the task, the power of circulating money seems in all cases to have dissolved the feudal state.

The cost of the revolution fell on peasants and cities. When peace is made, the crown and the petty nobles mutually sacrifice the peasantry, dividing them, so to say, into two ideal halves; the crown grants to the nobility the major part of the peasants’ common lands, and the greatest part of their working powers that are not yet expropriated; the nobility concedes to the crown the right of recruiting and of taxing both peasantry and cities. The peasant, who had grown wealthy in freedom, sinks back into poverty and therefore into social inferiority. The former feudal powers now unite as allies to subjugate the cities, except where, as in Upper Italy, these become feudal central powers themselves. (And even in that case they for the most part all fall into the power of captains of mercenaries, condottieri.) The power of attack of the adversaries has become stronger, the power of the cities has diminished. For with the decay of the peasantry, their purchase power diminishes and with it the prosperity of the cities, based thereon. The small cities in the country stagnate and become poorer, and being now incapable of defense, fall a prey to the absolutist rule of the territorial princes; the larger cities, where the demand for the luxuries of the nobles has brought into being a strong trading element, split up into social groups and thus fritter away their political strength. The immigration now pouring into their walls is composed of discharged and broken mercenaries, dispossessed peasants, pauperized mechanics from the smaller towns; it is in other words a proletarian immigration. For the first time there appears, in the terminology of Karl Marx, the “free laborer,” in masses, competing with his own class in the labor markets of the cities. And again, the “law of agglomeration” enters to form effective class and property distinctions, and thus to tear apart the civic population. Wild fights take place in the cities between the classes; through which the territorial prince, in nearly every instance, again succeeds in gaining control. The only cities that can permanently escape the deadly embrace of the prince’s power are the few genuine “maritime states,” or “city states.”

As in the case of the maritime states, the pivot of the state’s life has again shifted over to another place. Instead of circling about wealth vested in landed estates, it now turns about capitalized wealth, because in the meantime property in real estate has itself become “capital.” Why is it that the development does not, as in the case of the maritime states, open out into the capitalistic expropriation of slave labor?

There are two controlling reasons, one internal, the other external. The external reason is to be found in this, that slave hunting on a profitable scale is scarcely possible at this time in any part of the world, since nearly all countries within reach are also organized as strong states. Wherever it is possible, as for instance, in the American colonies of the West European powers, it develops at once.

The external reason may be found in the circumstance that the peasant of the interior countries, in contrast to the conditions prevailing in the maritime states, is subject, not to one master, but to at least two[V] persons entitled to his service, his prince and his landlord. Both resist any attempt to diminish their peasants’ capacity for service, since this is essential to their interests. Especially strong princes did much for their peasants, e. g., those of Brandenburg-Prussia. For this reason, the peasants, although exploited miserably, yet retained their personal liberty and their standing as subjects endowed with personal rights in all states where the feudal system had been fully developed when the system of payments in money replaced that of payments in kind.

[V] In mediæval Germany the peasants pay tribute in many cases not only to the landlord and to the territorial prince, but also to the provost and to the bailiff.

The evidence that this explanation is correct may be found in the relations of those states which were gripped by the system of exchange in money, before the feudal system had become worked out.

This applies especially to those districts of Germany formerly occupied by Slavs, but particularly to Poland. In these districts, the feudal system had not yet been worked out as thoroughly as in the regions where the demand for grain products in the great western industrial centers had changed the nobles, the subjects of public law, into the owners of a Rittergut,[W] the subjects of private economic interests. In these districts, the peasants were subject to the duty of rendering service only to one master, who was both their liege lord and landlord; and because of that, there came into being the republics of nobles mentioned above, which, as far as the pressure of their more progressed neighbors would permit, tended to approach the capitalistic system of exploiting of slave labor.[140]