Msida, Malta

Small State Studies

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
University website: www.um.edu.mt/
State
State may refer to:
State
The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave… A gang of robbers, which because of the comparative weakness of its forces has no prospect of successfully resisting for any length of time the forces of another organization, is not entitled to be called a state... The pogrom gangs in imperial Russia were not a state because they could kill and plunder only thanks to the connivance of the government.
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Auburn: Alabama, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010, p. 46, (first published by Yale 1944)
State
War is the health of the State.  It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.  The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties.  …  [I]n general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war.  Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
Randolph Bourne, ¶11 of §I of "The State" (1918).  Published under "War and the Herd," The State (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 9.
State
In the mean time, what is the point of repeating the old tale as to what the state is becoming? Once the sour critical analysis of sometime ago (Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man), the dark negative utopias (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell) and the protest cries (May 68) are forgotten, and with a near lack of the slightest sense of resistance in civil society, the cobweb of power spins peacefully over our heads, all over the place. Even the dressing room.
Joxe Azurmendi, Demokratak eta biolentoak, (1997), p. 101.
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