Franz Oppenheimer’s The State Is Superb

Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943) wrote one of the classic books in the libertarian library, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically (1908).  In reading The State I felt an unusual, for me, emotional response as well as intellectual response. This is My Oppenheimer Problem.

Oppenheimer puts human existence into stark binary relief. There are two general ways to obtain material needs and luxuries (i.e., wealth), through political means or economic means. The political means immediately or ultimately are based on violence and include all government actors and their subsequent crony capitalists and zombies.  As described succinctly in a Mises Daily, the development of the state following Oppenheimer goes through six stages: looting, truce, tribute, occupation, monopoly, and then the state. Thus, the state=looting. Also, he has described an economic transformation that would have a profound effect on the future. “The creators of the economic means controlling this advance are the cities and their system of the money economy, which gradually supersedes the system of natural economy, and thereby dislocates the axis about which the whole life of the state swings; in place of the landed property, mobile capital gradually becomes preponderant.”

As a libertarian, I have intellectually understood the concept of economic and political means for many years, in fact because I have often read other authors who had cited Oppenheimer. But reading The State myself, with its relentless series of historical anecdotes from all times and all places, brought on the emotional response I referred to; a depressive pessimism. According to Oppenheimer, the oppression of some over others is always and everywhere the way it was and the way it is. A key passage for me states that “When the will speaks reason has to be silent,’ says Schopenhauer, or as Ludwig Gumplowicz states the same idea, ‘Man’s will being strictly ‘determined,’ he must act according to the pressure which the surrounding world experts; and the same law is valid for every community of men: groups, classes, and the state itself. They ‘flow from the plane of higher economic and social pressure to that of lower pressure, along the line of least resistance.’” Thus, this process that has continued in some form or another for millennia, the political and economic means, is predetermined for human beings, it seems there is no way out; there is no free will.  And the class conflict will continue as “Every class attempts to obtain as large a share as possible of the national production; and since all strive for identically the same object, the class contest results. This contest of classes is the content of all history of states, except in so far as the interest of the state as a whole produces common actions.”

As I continued to read, my more natural optimism impelled me to look beyond my first impression of Oppenheimer’s discourse. I found that he also says that “the history of primitive peoples shows that the desire to trade and barter is a universal human characteristic.” Optimistically I believe the sociopaths who employ the political means are vastly outnumbered by those that employ the economic means.  In our technological society, with an extreme distribution of labor brings on a new set of pressures, the “invisible hand” that induces people to cooperate with one another.  An argument can be made that peaceful creation has become more powerful than violent destruction; a profound difference from the long history that Oppenheimer describes where physical strength and cunning overcame intellectual acumen and a desire for peaceful coexistence.

And what is the future according to Oppenheimer? The final chapter of his book that describes a resolution to the class conflict that is odd.

And since the state will, by this, come to be without either classes or class interests, the bureaucracy of the future will truly have attained that ideal of the impartial guardian of the common interests, which nowadays it laboriously attempts to reach. The “state” of the future will be “society” guided by self-government.

While this sounds like a workers’ utopia he was not a Marxist. But he was not a capitalist either.

The same conclusion is found by either the historical-philosophical view, which took into account the tendency of the development of the state, or the study of political economy which regards the tendency of economic development; viz, that the economic means wins along the whole line, while the political means disappears from the life of society, in that one of its creations, which is most ancient and most tenacious of life; capitalism decays with large landed estates and ground rentals.  [emphasis by Oppenheimer]

He introduces something new and confusing to me, the Freeman’s Citizenship to end the book.

This has been the path of suffering and of salvation of humanity, its Golgotha and its resurrection into an eternal kingdom—from war to peace, from the hostile splitting up of the hordes to the peaceful unity of mankind, from brutality to humanity, from the exploiting State of robbery to the Freeman’s Citizenship.

Thus, The State is an important book for a libertarian to read, but perhaps is not the best source for a vision of the future.

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