The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically by Franz Oppenheimer

Author:Franz Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer, Franz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Social Science, Philosophy, Political, History & Theory, Sociology
ISBN: 9781776677153
Google: 8T6TDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: The Floating Press
Published: 2017-03-01T22:12:01+00:00

(d) ESSENCE AND ISSUE OF THE MARITIME STATES

All these are true “States” in the sociologic sense, whether they arose from the fortresses of sea-robbers, or from harbors of original land nomads as merchant colonies which obtained dominion or which amalgamated with the dominating group of the host people. For they are nothing but the organization of the political means, their form is domination, their content the economic exploitation of the subject by the master group.

So far as the principle is concerned, they are not to be differentiated from the States founded by land nomads; and yet they have taken a different form, both from internal and external reasons, and show a different psychology of classes.

One must not believe that class feeling was at all different in these and in the territorial states. Here as there the master class looks down with the same contempt on the subjects, on the “Rantuses,” on the “man with the blue fingernails,” as the German patrician in the Middle Ages looked on a being with whom, even when free born, no intermarriage or social intercourse was permitted. Little indeed does the class theory of the καλοκἀγαθοί (well-born) or of the patricians (children of ancestors) differ from that of the country squires. But other circumstances here bring about differences, consonant, naturally, with class interests. In any district ruled by merchants, highway robbery can not be tolerated, and therefore it is considered, e. g., among the maritime Greeks, a vulgar crime. The tale of Theseus would not in a territorial state have been pointed against the highwaymen. On the other hand, “piracy was regarded by them, in most remote times, as a trade nowise dishonorable ... of which ample proof may be found in the Homeric poems; while at a much later period Polycrates had organized a well developed robber state on the Island of Samos.” “In the Corpus Juris, mention is made of a law of Solon in which the association of pirates (ἐπὶ λείαν οἰχόμενοι) is recognized as a permissible company.”[101]

But quite apart from such details, mentioned only because they serve to cast a clear light on the growth of the “ideologic superstructure,”[102] the basic conditions of existence of maritime states, utterly different from those of territorial states, called into being two exceedingly important phenomena, which are of universal historical importance, viz., the growth of a democratic constitution, whereby the gigantic contest between the sultanism of the Orient and the civic freedom of the West was to be fought out (according to Mommsen the true content of universal history); and in the second place the development of capitalistic slave-work, which in the end was to annihilate all these states.

Let us first consider the inner or socio-psychological causes of this contrast between the territorial and the maritime state.

States are maintained by the same principle from which they arise. Conquest of land and populations is the ratio essendi of a territorial state; and by the repeated conquest of lands and populations it must grow, until its natural

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