This is a great and fruitful thought, which
he has not absolutely invented; it has been glimpsed, expressed
in part, by many others besides him; but in any case to him
belongs the honor of having solidly established it and of having
enunciated it as the basis of his whole economic system. (1870;
ib. ii. p. xiii.)
[16] This title is not Bakunin's, but was invented by Cafiero
and Elisee Reclus, who edited it, not knowing that it was a
fragment of what was intended to he the second version of
``L'Empire Knouto-Germanique'' (see ib. ii. p 283).
The State is not society, it is only an historical form
of it, as brutal as it is abstract. It was born historically
in all countries of the marriage of violence, rapine, pillage,
in a word, war and conquest, with the gods successively
created by the theological fantasy of nations.
It has been from its origin, and it remains still at present,
the divine sanction of brutal force and triumphant
inequality.
The State is authority; it is force; it is the ostentation
and infatuation of force: it does not insinuate
itself; it does not seek to convert. . . . Even when
it commands what is good, it hinders and spoils it, just
because it commands it, and because every command provokes
and excites the legitimate revolts of liberty; and
because the good, from the moment that it is commanded,
becomes evil from the point of view of true morality, of
human morality (doubtless not of divine), from the point
of view of human respect and of liberty.
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