The Origins of the Total State

Abstract

THE TOTAL state is a very recent phenomenon. However, its origins go back to the early 18th century, and there were many various forces working together toward its formation. The essential feature of the total state is that it extends its control over the whole life of the citizen, and that it does not recognize any sphere of private life as excluded from the concern of the state or as beyond the concern of the state. As a matter of fact one could compare this feature with a somewhat similar condition at the very beginning of human history, when religious commands and rituals governed every move of human life. However, in those ancient times individual life had not as yet developed, and the role of the priests in the theocratic state consisted merely in watching over the observance of ancient traditions which worked automatically and habitually in the souls of the people. The very elaborate bureaucracies of the ancient oriental kings were merely concerned with ceremonial offices connected with the worship of the gods or the service of the divine kings, and even the role of the leaders of the Jewish people who forced the moral and ritual commands of the God of Israel upon their people did not have at their disposal the means of control that a modern state has. The secret police was a creation of the Greek tyrants, but its activity was confined within the limits of the actual safety of the regime. It had no official systematic character, and did not bear on the private life of the individual. The head of the family in Greece or Rome enjoyed a fairly unlimited power in his own home, and only custom, tradi~tion, and the ancestral deities reigned above him in the domestic sphere. In medieval times the power of the state was especially weak and continually contested, and even at the beginning of the modern period the activity of the state covered.only a very limited range. There was less for an administration to control. A good deal of today's control was not yet needed, as it was still exerted by the church and by tradition, and a good deal was left to automatic selfregulation. At the beginnings of the territorial and national states of modern Europe important offices, even in the field of jurisdiction, were sublet to private occupants, and the state consisted merely in military and diplomatic functions and the adminstration of royal resources and domains.