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Second Chapter: The known world considered as one great unitary commercial state
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Second Chapter The known world considered as one great unitary commercial state The peoples of the ancient world were very rigidly separated from one another by a multitude of circumstances. For them, the foreigner was an enemy or a barbarian. The peoples of modern Christian Europe, in contrast, may be considered as [93] one nation. Already united by the same descent and same customs [Gebräuche] and notions indigenous to the forests of Germania, they also came to be bound together, after their dispersal throughout the provinces of the Western Roman Empire, by a single common religion and the same submissiveness to its visible head. The peoples of different descent who later joined them acquired, along with the new religion, the same basic system of Germanic customs and notions. Were one to apply our concepts of state, authority, and subject to these individual settlements of half‑barbarians, one would be led completely astray. For indeed they lived in the state of nature. Only for the sake of war were they united by their king who, following the custom of the German forests was, properly speaking, just the leader of armies. Otherwise, being in most respects without political alliances, they were their own judge and defender. It is only through the relation of the serfs to their masters and the vassals to the feudal lord that these crowds of people were connected to one another. The few judicial actions that took place—and these were, properly speaking, only acts of arbitration—were merely a consequence of these relations. They were far from being an end in itself, {451} with the laws the true and proper means of binding together the nation. Even the bond of the feudal system bound them so loosely that the same man could be vassal of one king and freeholder in the lands of another, so that, in the case of a war between the two kings, he would be required to fight in person for the very king against whom, as a freeholder, he had sent his man. These tribes were united by everything, and were not separated from one another by what usually separates men—namely, a state constitution— since they didn’t even have one. No wonder that they considered and 139 140 Second Book conducted themselves as one nation, interbreeding, traveling throughout one another’s lands, trading and trafficking, and enlisting in one another’s service, with everyone always still feeling at home even when he arrived at another’s domain. It is only later that proper political concepts and institutions came into circulation. This took place through the introduction of Roman law [Recht] and the application of the Roman concepts of emperors [Imperatoren] to the modern kings and the modern Kaiser, who was originally only thought of as the military leader of Christianity, and was supposed to be for the entire Church what the church bailiffs were for individual bishoprics or cloisters. The relation of serfs and vassals to their lords gradually changed into the relation of subjects to their authority and judge. So, for example, there arose, first of all in France, [94] a monarchy in the old style. Now for the first time the tribes were separated from one another through state constitu‑ tions. This separation was made even easier by the fact that the Reformation had destroyed the clerical power that previously held the Christian church together as a whole. In this way the modern states were formed: not as the doctrine of Right is wont to describe the emergence of a state—through the collection and unification of unattached individuals under the unity of the law—but rather through separating and dividing into pieces a large, unitary, though only weakly bound, mass of men. {452} The individual states of Europe are just such pieces torn away from a former whole, with the extension of their boundaries for the most part determined by chance. It is no wonder that this process of separation, having begun not long ago, is not yet finished, with still‑noticeable traces of the former circumstances remaining, and that a good part of our notions and institutions still seem to presuppose the continuing existence of this state of affairs, even though it has been abolished. During that period of the unity of Christian Europe there was also formed, among other things, the system of trade that, at least in its basic features, continues to the present time. Every part of the great whole—every individual...