The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically

Franz Oppenheimer's The State, in John M. Gitterman's authorized English translation, studies its subject sociologically, which for Oppenheimer means philosophy of history joined to economic theory, with juristic doctrine set aside. He follows one institution from conquest through the feudal estate to the modern constitutional state, then forecasts where that development leads. A readable transcription of the 1928 printing is on Project Gutenberg, and a scan of the 1926 Vanguard Press printing preserves the original pages. The cover shows the 1926 title page, while our download is a separate file: a complete 328-page scan of the Vanguard Press second printing of February 1928 (PDF) of the same authorized translation.

The book earns its place by explaining political power through the question of how its holders obtain their income. Its strength lies in mechanism: Oppenheimer shows how a change in costs, time horizons, or outside options alters the terms between rulers and ruled. Its weaker parts are the reach of its historical generalization and a forecast whose evidence lies mostly in other volumes.

Everything rests on one distinction. Oppenheimer calls a person's own labor, and its equivalent exchange for the labor of others, the economic means; the unrequited appropriation of others' labor is the political means. Both pursue the same end, goods for consumption, so violence aimed at economic gain still belongs on the political side. His definition of the state is deliberately narrow: an organization by which one class dominates the others, created through conquest. He grants that every group needs some authority to settle conflicts and lead in emergencies, and he declines to call that authority the state. The habit this trains is to ask how an income was obtained and which class receives the product, whatever name the institution carries.

The second chapter explains how plunder becomes revenue. Herdsmen who repeatedly raid peasant villages come to see that a dead peasant cannot plow and a felled tree bears no fruit, so they begin taking only the surplus and leave house, tools, and food until the next harvest. Custom fixes the amount and becomes, for Oppenheimer, the first germ of public law. Because the subjects' future output is now the rulers' asset, rulers acquire reasons to spare the unresisting, hear grievances, and take on protective obligations. He presents this protection as a real service that coexists with continuing tribute, so order emerges from conquest without any original contract.

Markets follow the same logic. Conquerors hold booty, slaves above all, in quantities beyond their own use, so they need trade to convert it into metals, cloth, and arms, and they collect tolls from the merchants they guard. When estates grow large and scattered, direct supervision would require a costly and politically risky staff of overseers. Lords shift to fixed dues, and the peasant keeps what he produces beyond the fixed charge. Oppenheimer reads this change in claims as the step that abolishes slavery and makes laborers holders of rights. Early markets also carried slave exchange and tribute, so in his account commercial growth alone does not secure liberty.

The constitutional state adds an officialdom charged with the common interest, yet a ruling class still takes more of the product than it contributes. He traces capitalist surplus value to a lasting oversupply of free laborers, and that oversupply to large landed estates, which began in conquest and which he calls the first creation and last stronghold of the political means. In his account, freedom of movement, emigration, overseas farm competition, and rising wages press ground rent toward zero. Once the estates dissolve, he predicts, employers will compete for workers, who can then form capital themselves. His endpoint, a freemen's citizenship, keeps the constitutional form, an administering bureaucracy, and self-government. He explicitly rejects the anarchist view that government and exploitation are inseparable, and he agrees with Gumplowicz that no large community can live without some coercive force vested in government.

The book's claim that every state began in conquest depends on his narrow definition and on the comparative ethnology of his era, drawn from writers such as Ratzel and Gumplowicz, whose racial categories belong to that period; it is a thesis argued from selected sources. The forecast is his contested theory, and he notes that the detailed economic evidence appears in other books he cannot repeat here (p. 282).

It suits readers who want an account of how predation becomes administration and who will test a land-centered explanation of wage labor against their own. It helps answer how rule founded on conquest came to supply protection, markets, and law while still moving income from producers to a ruling class.