I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Joseph Sobran 345
any—belong to Caesar; his ambiguous words are far from a command to give Caesar
whatever he claims. And it’s notable that Christ never told his disciples either to establish
a state or to engage in politics. They were to preach the Gospel and, if rejected, to move
on. He seems never to have imagined the state as something they could or should enlist on
their side.
At first sight, St. Paul seems to be more positive in affirming the authority of the state.
But he himself, like the other martyrs, died for defying the state, and we honor him for it;
to which we may add that he was on one occasion a jailbreaker as well. Evidently the passage
in Romans has been misread. It was probably written during the reign of Nero, not
the most edifying of rulers; but then Paul also counseled slaves to obey their masters, and
nobody construes this as an endorsement of slavery. He may have meant that the state and
slavery were here for the foreseeable future, and that Christians must abide them for the
sake of peace. Never does he say that either is here forever.
St. Augustine took a dim view of the state, as a punishment for sin. He said that a state
without justice is nothing but a gang of robbers writ large, while leaving doubt that any
state could ever be otherwise. St. Thomas Aquinas took a more benign view, arguing that
the state would be necessary even if man had never fallen from grace; but he agreed with
Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all, a doctrine that would severely diminish any
known state.
The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman; in words
I quote incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as “that which turns a person into a thing—either
corpse or slave.” It may sometimes be a necessary evil, in self-defense or defense of the innocent,
but nobody can have by right what the state claims: an exclusive privilege of using it.
It’s entirely possible that states—organized force—will always rule this world, and that
we will have at best a choice among evils. And some states are worse than others in important
ways: anyone in his right mind would prefer living in the United States to life under a
Stalin. But to say a thing is inevitable, or less onerous than something else, is not to say it
is good.
For most people, “anarchy” is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism—things
they hope the state can control or prevent. The term “state,” despite its
bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means
the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate
in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state,
with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what “legitimacy” means. Anarchists
obviously need a more seductive label.
“But what would you replace the state with?” The question reveals an inability to
imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can
take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”
Christians, and especially Americans, have long been misled about all this by their
good fortune. Since the conversion of Rome, most Western rulers have been more or less
inhibited by Christian morality (though, often enough, not so’s you’d notice), and even
warfare became somewhat civilized for centuries; this has bred the assumption that the
state isn’t necessarily an evil at all. But as that morality loses its cultural grip, as it is rapidly