 The term the state is a term that gets thrown around a lot with various meanings, even excluding the confusing American terminology in which the United States is composed of states. We're still left with many other meanings. For example, in the international relations literature, most independent countries are just simply called states. But of course, historically, lots of different governments and polities of all types have been referred to as states. Moreover, the audience here will certainly be familiar with the term in the context of opposing the state. In libertarian circles, we often hear, although perhaps not often enough, about the need to fight the state, smash the state, abolish the state, et cetera. Certainly one doesn't have to spend an enormous amount of time reading Murray Rothbard to be familiar with this position. But often when the smash the state position is invoked, especially among those familiar with the state as an institution or with those less familiar with the state as an institution, further investigation often reveals a dangerous lack of precision about what exactly the state is. In many cases, the state is wrongly understood as all forms of civil government or any institution that employs coercion, such as law courts or other legal institutions. The state can include everything from the highest level of the national security apparatus right on down to the local dog catcher in some ways of thinking. Or historically, it can mean everything from the local feudal lords to the grandest imperial despot. This vague and all inclusive notion of the state, however, exposes the anti-state position to a pretty convincing objection from others. That is, if the state is any and all types of government, then the state is as old as mankind and apparently endemic to the human condition. By this definition, no group of human beings has ever existed without a state because even the most primitive tribal elders have coerced members in some form or another. They have forced guilty parties to pay a retribution, for example, or in some extreme cases, they have imposed exile or enslavement on others in the community. No human association simply lets people do whatever they want, whenever they want, and still remain members of the group in good standing. And so coercion is used in a lot of organizations and this has always been the case. If this is true, then eliminating the state defined as any organization using coercion, this would strike many, if not most, reasonable people as utopian in the extreme. If the state has always existed and is found in every human society, then its elimination is about as likely or wise as eliminating the family. This objection can be addressed by being more precise and clear about what we mean by the state. By better understanding what the state is, we can perhaps also better see why it is an especially damaging and dangerous institution. And once we understand that, we can better see how to fight and unravel the state more effectively. So what I want to do here today is two things. I want to show how the state, which I will sometimes call the sovereign state or the modern state, is a very specific type of government and not at all eternal or necessary in ordering human affairs. Its abolition is by no means utopian. Secondly, I want to discuss what is the role of the liberal in this. That is the classical liberal or libertarian in advocating for the radical reigning in and ideally the elimination of the state altogether. And just as a side note, just for the rest of this talk, I agree with historian Ralph Raco, one of our late senior fellows here that the terms liberal, classical liberal and libertarian are all correctly used interchangeably that have all properly understood they're all part of the same ideological school of thought. So he used those terms interchangeably and I will too. So what is the state? First, we can briefly note what the state is not. Rothbard covers this well in his essay, The Anatomy of the State. So there's really no need to be labor the point here, but the gist of it is this. Rothbard uses the standard vaporian definition of the state for the most part. That is the state is an organization with a monopoly on the means of coercion within a specific territory. Lots of scholars use this definition. We don't have to necessarily agree with it in all its aspects to benefit from it as a general working framework. Now, as Rothbard points out, the fact that it is a specific organization means it is not us. So the state is not society overall. The old classical liberals certainly made this distinction. They invented the notion of using the word society to be something distinct from the state. Society is all those things that are not the state, families, churches, the marketplace, even perhaps local governments where powers more localized and specific rather than centralized and general. But society is certainly any voluntary institution built on voluntary relations. Now, this can be confusing for readers of some older writers. St. Augustine, for example, uses the term the state to mean something closer to society in general or more correctly, he uses a Latin term and other variants of that. Rem pubicum would be one term and those are generally translated as the state, obviously. Now, Augustine didn't write in English, but what Augustine means by this is better understood by the word polity. That is a community of human beings and all its institutions, including governmental institutions. So when we read Augustine or Aquinas or some of these older writers and they mentioned the state, we should absolutely not assume, especially if they existed before the state, that that's what they mean. They usually mean something else and maybe investigate which language is even being translated in that case. So in our usage here, the state is not the same thing as a polity, a community or even a civil government. So we've declared what the state is not, but what is it? There are four main aspects of what the state is that I want to discuss here. One is that the state exists in people's minds. Martin Van Creveld, author of The Rise and Decline of the State who spoke here once, states that the state is an abstract entity which can be neither seen nor touched. And his observation takes us to Joseph Strayer, author of On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State who reiterates that the state exists in the minds of people. And the crucial step takes place when people start to believe that they need a state. Now, neither Van Creveld nor most other historians of the state would deny that the tools of the state are obviously real and tangible. We can touch and see the state's prisons, its armies, its execution chambers, its nuclear bombs, its bureaucrats and more. But non-state organizations, with the exception of nuclear weapons, only states have ever owned those, have controlled these other state amenities in history just because you have a prison doesn't make you a state. But the fact that these are all held together toward the pursuit of certain goals is evidence that there is a unifying idea in there in the minds of the people who use these tools and those who accept their usage in pursuit of maintaining a state. The second point is that a state is a impersonal and bureaucratic institution and permanent. It's not an ad hoc institution that we sometimes use to solve a problem. The pre-state princes of Europe were expected to provide an actual service and that he led soldiers in battle, say, or traveled around the country, maintaining law courts and adjudicating disputes. Charles Tilly, the historian of the state, paints an important picture here. He notes that the medieval king, before the age of states, was personally present a lot of the time wherever the state was, the state in its reduced and non-state-like origins. And he could be found on the field of battle or in the law courts. But the monarch after the rise of the states, say in the 16th century, he sat behind a desk and he headed an enormous, permanent and impersonal apparatus designed to impose his edicts across a large territory. He did paperwork, and this was different. Three, this takes us to the next crucial and more dangerous step. And it's these three and four are what really sets the state apart. It's when people believe, start to believe that the state is sovereign. Strayer says that, yes, people must believe in the state to exist in order for it to actually exist. But critical in creating the state is that people believe that it is sovereign. That is that the state gets the final say on everything within its borders and there is no peer within that state that can challenge the state itself. And so what we have in a state is that it stands above the rest of society. As we will see, sovereignty is a key issue here. It's one of two key differences that make the state what it is. And finally, number four, the final key step in understanding the state, along with sovereignty, is what truly makes the state different and modern and distinct from other types of civil government. This is the fact that morality does not apply to the state the way it applies to you and me. Van Kreveld has a key insight here. Hobbes deserves the credit for inventing the state, bound by no law of the sovereign except which the sovereign himself lays down and which of course the sovereign can change at any moment. Hobbes' sovereign was much more powerful than any Western ruler since late antiquity. That is, between the end of the Roman Empire and the rise of the state, European society did not, in theory, buy into the idea that the state could do whatever it wanted regardless of ordinary morality. Notions like there are no rules in war or the basic idea loved by politicians that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs is would have been found unacceptable prior to the age of the state. Certainly there were abuses. Certainly many princes acted at times like they could do whatever they wanted but it was not generally accepted on a theoretical level as it is today that it was a positive good that states and state agents be freed from the inconveniences of morality for the sake of statecraft. That came later with theorists like Machiavelli. So this gives us some basic clues as to identifying a state when we see one but it's these last two characteristics that I want to focus on here because they're the most dangerous. The sovereignty of the state and the state's detachment from ordinary morality. To set the stage a little bit, we can use a quote from Luigi Bassani and Carlo Lottieri and they explain why this moral issue is so important. Quote, one of the central axioms of libertarianism is the idea that the same morality applies to every person, whether acting on behalf of a public apparatus or in his individual capacity. If something is morally unacceptable, it should be so for everybody. In human action, Mises affirms that the most weighty revolt against reason can be found in the idea that there is no such thing as a universally valid logic. Mises calls this polylogism. Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of mind is different from the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind. The rise of the state brought about a different kind of polylogism whose paramount importance for the general theory escapes no one. The division between the mass of subjects and the elite of political rulers. So they're not like you and me. So that's the state in theory. Now, what does a non-state sort of institution look like? It's important to remember that we're not dealing with mere theory here. There are real institutions that exist in real history. These are real institutions. The state really came into its own in the 16th and 17th century with the rise of the so-called Westphalian state especially at the end of the 30 years war. Sometimes we call it the modern state but really the term modern is unnecessary because it's just modern. And especially with the rise of absolutism shortly thereafter. But understanding what came before the state in Western Europe remains difficult for people to understand largely because people have been so completely indoctrinated into the idea that there must always be a final sovereign authority within a specific territory. But prior to the state, this was not the case. Prior to the rise of the state and notions of patriotism and national identity, the medieval Europeans were much more pragmatic in their view of governmental power. The Prince Sir King existed to address problems and emergencies. Moreover, he and the many other lords, dukes and other members of the warrior class existed to be arbitrators of disputes and to exact retribution from wrongdoers. Naturally, this sort of work required violence and these groups used coercive means in their work. But these groups were not strong enough to claim sovereignty or a true monopoly on the means of coercion and each prince had to compete with other princes. Indeed, kings were in the words of historian Hendrick Spreut just a first among equal princes within their realms. Political units tended to be very small. Moreover, as described by Spreut, human beings were in the West subject to overlapping legal claims. People could be vassals of more than one prince. This meant an attempt to tax a city, a bishopric, an individual local lord, could encounter stiff resistance from their peer organizations, from the church, from a city council, from another prince. Spreut writes, quote, "'One could simultaneously be the vassal of the German emperor, the French king and various counts and bishops, none of whom necessarily had precedence over the other. A vassal might recognize different superiors under different circumstances," unquote. The effect of this meant that various competing powers sought consensus, negotiation, and other means of dispute resolution other than simply calling upon a sovereign to impose his will through the power of physical force. Obviously, this placed substantial limits on the power of political leaders. For example, historian Charles McElwain writes, quote, "'Property which a subject had of legal right in the integrity of his personal status and the employment of his lands and goods was normally beyond the reach and control of the king. At the opening of the 14th century, John of Paris, a Dominican philosopher, declared that neither pope nor king could take a subject's goods without his consent," unquote. Moreover, Bruno Leone concluded, quote, "'In early medieval version of the principle no taxation without representation was intended as no taxation without the consent of the individual taxed. And we are told in 1221, the Bishop of Winchester, summoned to consent to a scoutage tax, refused to pay after the council had made the grant on the ground that he dissented and the exchequer upheld his plea," unquote. Power was divided up among local princes, the Holy Roman emperor, the church, all competed with each other for power. And over time, this means that all of these groups made sure that their individual rights, the rights of monasteries, the rights of bishops, the rights of princes were all written into local documents and into agreements among these various competing rulers who would often turn to each other in a variety of circumstances. But it provided vassals and lesser lords with the opportunity to seek out solutions to problems that they might have with other lords, with other peer organizations. So it wasn't this hierarchical down to the top, well, the Supreme Court said this is the final say, so I guess that's it. This did not exist, really, as a dominant system of political organization. This didn't mean lawlessness, of course, just as there is not lawlessness today in today's anarchic world of international relations, there is international law. There are countless agreements among sovereign states. Similarly, in the pre-state world of non-sovereign governments, there was law, there was conflict resolution, there was enforcement of legal rulings and negotiations among semi-independent powers were commonplace. Yet there was not sovereign final power. Kings existed to settle disputes, to subdue violent aggressors. They often succeeded, but they often failed, just as in any age of mankind. These legal systems were often systems of restorative justice designed to offer a means of obtaining payment from those who committed offenses. It wasn't perfect, but it would be hard to argue that the age that this period was any worse than the age of absolutism in the 17th century or the age of total war in the 20th century. Nor were regular people on their own and at the mercy of grand organizations. Human beings and households were affiliated with many organizations, city governments, guilds, churches, family clans and more. These all provided shelter and a place to obtain collective security of a sort at the very local level. The atomistic individual did not exist really in society in any way. They were part of a family, of a clan, of some sort of professional guild. This of course was the world that Machiavelli and other modern thinkers wanted to do away with and they succeeded, but they got instead what was the state, absolutism and sovereignty. In the pre-state world, no politician could be confident that he would not be challenged by an equal. In the state system, every sovereign, whether a king, president or parliament, exercises final and total authority within his jurisdiction. Just as important is the fact that most other states, most of the time, recognize the sovereignty of all other states, which helps prop up the system of sovereign states overall. So not surprisingly, absolutism followed soon after the establishment of the state and this is described what the absolute state looks like, properly understood as described by Jean Baudin, a 16th century Frenchman. Quote, the sovereign furthermore must be unitary and individual, the locus of command and society, we see the principle point of sovereign majesty and absolute power to consist in giving laws to subjects in general without their consent. And this was the key phrase in absolutism in some place where in the state differed significantly. This was about imposing laws and ordinances without the consent, without any sort of consensus model, without an appeal to any other outside force. So in both theory and practice, consent is of no importance in the mind of the absolutist. So to this, of course, Machiavelli would give a knowing nod. So it is not surprising that during this period we see a multiplication of efforts to assign divine right to monarchs. This is often attributed to the Middle Ages, but only a monarch in the age of absolutism could credibly claim such a grandiose title. It was also during this period when absolutists made other outlandish claims such as the notion that, quote, God ordains all magistrates, unquote, or that to disobey the king is to disobey God. We can contrast this with the ideas of, say, Aquinas, who in the middle of ages would have said that he who kills a tyrant to free his country is praised and rewarded, or Augustine, of course, who declared that an unjust law is no law at all. Obviously incompatible with the idea that God puts your king there and you can't ever disobey him. But it wasn't just in the stylings and claims of the ruling class that communicated the growing power of those who ruled in this period. Absolutism manifested itself in many ways. Mercantilism being an especially important one, and mercantilism was really just the policy manifestation of absolutism, because we had this new system where the state could take property when it wanted, hand it out to other places, and this naturally led then to the mercantilist system. And Rothbard describes it this way. Mercantilism, which reached its height in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, was a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state. This is the natural outcome of having a state. When there is no real true protections on property, the state is just simply gonna move it around in ways that help build up the state itself. And this is where the liberals come in. In many ways, liberalism is a reaction against the rise of the state and absolutism. Rothbard writes that the levelers of the 17th century were likely the first conscious and true libertarian movement. They explicitly opposed both the mercantilist system of favors and the absolute power of the monarch. They explained the impoverishment imposed on ordinary people by trade restrictions. They advocated for decentralizing the armed forces into militias. In the Americas, the anti-federalists carried on this tradition to an even greater extent. They often nurtured a deep distrust of centralized power and opposed the idea of federal sovereignty altogether in many cases. In practice, even the state legislatures in America lacked sovereignty, especially since the means of coercion was so diffuse and in the hands of so many and in local militias as well, not even just state legislative militias. Decentralization, of course, was a key issue here. So by the 19th century, liberalism gained ground in France and England and in Italy. These placed obstacles in the path of the state and in efforts to reduce abuses into more greatly decentralized power. The Jacksonians and Cleveland Democrats in America carried on this tradition as well, well into the very late 19th century. But in many cases, this failed to address the two most dangerous aspects of the state, sovereignty and moral polylogism. Now, there were some thinkers who zeroed in on the problem of the state itself. Gustav de Molinari, for instance, and he had systematic opposition in his thinking to the very idea of state sovereignty, specifically explicitly opposed the very idea of sovereignty even to the extent of opposing a monopoly over military power and security services. But at the foundation of Molinari's opposition to monopoly was his rejection of the idea that the state could apply its own version of morality. He writes, quote, it offends reason to believe that a well-established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and always or be invalid, unquote. Just as natural law, that is basic moral laws, dictated people were free to choose providers of shoes or food, the same was true for security services. This position would have appeared quite reasonable to many pre-state Europeans today, however many consider it to be outlandish. Unfortunately, few liberals since Molinari go this far. Some Rothbardians, of course, go this far, but most assume the state as a given. Even the most seemingly radical theorists either miss the key problem, state sovereignty and moral exceptionalism or simply unwilling to address it. So what is to be done? Well, if we accept the idea that the state does not exist on its own moral plane or that the state should be ultimately sovereign above all other possible challenges, what is the right course of action? The first course of action, the first step is always to just stop believing in the grift and it's a scam. If the state relies on the perpetuation of the idea of the state, we need to at least stop believing the idea ourselves. But most important is to reject the idea that the state gets to function on its own moral plane. We hear this all the time from regime supporters, of course, we shouldn't complain too much, we're told because politicians, quote, make the hard decisions and we can't hold state actors at the same standards as mere ordinary people whose only function should be apparently to pay all of the bills. This is poisonous thinking and should be treated with the contempt that it deserves. Moreover, we might fight the historical myths that back the state, such as the regime narrative that the state is a progressive force for humanity and human rights. The state has been immensely successful in writing its own history in which it is both inevitable and highly beneficial. Both of these must be rejected. The second step is to support secession and radical decentralization wherever we can find it. It's very hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea of competing sovereignties and this is an obstacle to winning them over in the fight against state sovereignty. But one thing people do understand is the right of self-determination, self-government and local autonomy. They don't wanna be ruled by a culturally alien force imposing the will of the majority from far away. The answer to this problem, of course, lies in secession and in making government powers more polycentric, more dispersed, more decentralized. This by itself brings us closer to the pre-state model even without requiring a direct attack on the idea of sovereignty. Moreover, secession does act as a de facto indirect attack on sovereignty in two ways. First of all, because a regime that fails to impose perpetual unity on its subjects is in fact a weakened regime. And secondly, because secession creates smaller states and secession-prone small states are less able to exercise sovereignty. The smallness of the state and the relative ease with which people may leave this state is more constrained in its ability to raise taxes and impose regulations and to abuse the population in general. And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, because it's the right thing to do in all circumstances is to build up non-state institutions. What are these institutions? They're the institutions that predate the state, the family, the church, the market, even local governments in some cases. As Van Kreveld has explained, the rise of the state required the triumph over all of these institutions. It has been the decline of these institutions encouraged by the state itself that has paved the way for state dominance of society in so many cases. And it's easy to understand why. Society naturally organizes itself around kinship, around religious groups, around economic ties, professional associations, towns, and even neighborhoods. The work of the state for centuries has been to destroy and impoverish these natural institutions, replacing them with the artifice of the state, claiming the whole time that the state can better provide what these institutions once provided. But all the while creating a more fragile society. The project of the state and its intellectuals has been to run down, especially families and churches and local allegiances, because these groups have been so fundamental in creating parallel institutions that have competed with the state for loyalty and for resources. Ultimately, it's not enough to just oppose the state and call it a day, because society has to organize itself around some sort of institution and it should be institutions other than the state. If these alternative institutions don't exist, people will simply have to turn to the state and the state will only be strengthened. Most importantly, these other institutions of the marketplace and private society are nothing like the state. They aren't above morality, they aren't sovereign handing down immutable edicts to the rest of us to obey. In fact, these non-state institutions help to illustrate just how different and how dangerous the state is. It's a lesson we must not forget. Thank you.