The class is superior to the caste in extent. If the psychological bond of the sect is community of faith, and that of the caste community of profession, the psychological bond of the class is community of interests.
Less precise in its limits, more diffuse and less compact than the caste or the sect, the class represents today the veritable crowd in a dynamic state, which can in a moment's time descend from that place and become statically a crowd. And it is from the sociological standpoint the most terrible kind of crowd; it is that which today has taken a bellicose attitude, and which by its attitude and precepts prepares the brutal blows of mobs.
We speak of the "conflict of the classes," and from the theoretical point of view and in the normal and peaceful life that signifies only a contest of ideas by legal means. Always depending upon the occasion, the audacity of one or many men, the character of the situation, the conflict of the classes is transformed into something more material and more violent—into revolt or into revolution.
Finally we arrive at the state (nation). Tocqueville said that the classes which compose society form so many distinct nations. They are the greatest collectivities before coming to the nation, the state.
This is the most perfect type of organization of the crowd, and the final and supreme type, if there is not another collectivity superior in number and extension, the collectivity formed by race.
The bond which unites all the citizens of a state is language and nationality. Above the state there are only the crowds determined by race, which comprise many states. And these are, like the states and like the classes, human aggregates which in a moment could be transformed into violent crowds. But then, and justly, because their evolution and their organization are more developed, their mobs are called armies, and their violences are called wars, and they have the seal of legitimacy unknown in other crowds. In this order of ideas war could be defined as the supreme form of collective crimes.
4. Esprit de Corps, Morale, and Collective Representations of Social Groups[93]
War is no doubt the least human of human relationships. It can begin only when persuasion ends, when arguments fitted to move minds are replaced by the blasting-powder fitted to move rocks and hills. It means that one at least of the national wills concerned has deliberately set aside its human quality—as only a human will can do—and has made of itself just such a material obstruction or menace. Hence war seems, and is often called, a contest of brute forces. Certainly it is the extremest physical effort men make, every resource of vast populations bent to increase the sum of power at the front, where the two lines writhe like wrestlers laboring for the final fall.
Yet it is seldom physical force that decides a long war. For war summons skill against skill, head against head, staying-power against staying-power, as well as numbers and machines against machines and numbers. When an engine "exerts itself" it spends more power, eats more fuel, but uses no nerve; when a man exerts himself, he must bend his will to it. The extremer the physical effort, the greater the strain on the inner or moral powers. Hence the paradox of war: just because it calls for the maximum material performance, it calls out a maximum of moral resource. As long as guns and bayonets have men behind them, the quality of the men, the quality of their minds and wills, must be counted with the power of the weapons.
And as long as men fight in nations and armies, that subtle but mighty influence that passes from man to man, the temper and spirit of the group, must be counted with the quality of the individual citizen and soldier. But how much does this intangible, psychological factor count? Napoleon in his day reckoned it high: "In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one."