In my first lecture, I portrayed the sweep of a thousand years
that we are concerned
with as beginning with a period in 976 when we had no state at all.
All power was
private power. But we also had no individuals, that is, no isolated
individuals. All we
had were individuals so deeply embedded in local
self-sufficient
communities that the power relationships within which they
functioned
were in their
Day-to-day activities and the controls of their behavior were
almost totally
internalized in their neurological and hormone systems. So they
obeyed
what seemed to them to be their inner compulsions while they
fulfilled their
functions in this interwoven community structure, which changed so
slowly that
even in a long life of sixty or seventy years -- and, of course,
most people in those
days did not live long lives -- almost no changes would be noticed
by anyone in the
patterns embedded inside themselves.
And at the end of the
thousand year period, in the year 1976, we no
longer have communities, except shattered, broken, crippled,
isolated
ones. Instead, we have states of monstrous power and frustrated,
isolated
individuals; and the state and the individuals are working together
from
opposite sides to destroy what we have left of communities --
local, family,
or whatever they might be.
Over this long period of a thousand years, the growth of the
state, which is our
subject, began with the appearance of a state apparatus of a very
primitive kind,
made up of a king and his assistants, who eventually became a
monarch and a
bureaucracy. Around this core, there gradually accumulated
sufficient activities to
make what we would regard as a public authority and, ultimately, a
state. The mark
of what that process can be most clearly indicated, I think, by the
development of
what we call sovereignty.
Without sovereignty, I do not think we could say that a
state is much of a state, although we might call it one. There has
been a great deal
of talk about sovereignty in books -- not very much, unfortunately,
in history books
-- but no one has ever bothered to define it. From my study of the
growth of the
state, I have been able, it seems to me, to put together what
sovereignty consists
of, historically, in the tradition of our Western Civilization. To
me, sovereignty
seems to have eight functions or aspects, and I will define them
for you in
the approximate order in which they appeared.
All human needs require that
a person live and co-operate with other people for satisfaction.
None of us can satisfy human needs by acting alone in a state of
nature. The two fundamental needs men had from the beginning are,
first, that a group within which a community is functioning and
satisfying the needs of its members must be defended from outside
attack.
So the first aspect of sovereignty is defense. Secondly,
disputes and conflicts within the group must be settled, so that
insiders cooperate rather than fight with one another and open
themselves to enemy attack. Thus defense against outsiders is
first; settling disputes among others is second...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14819541/Prof-Carroll-Quigley-The-Oscar-Iden-LecturesLecture-2-The-State-of-Estates