The City-State, by reason of the relative smallness of its content,
allows us to see clearly the specific nature of the State-principle. On the one
hand, the word "state" implies that historic forces have reached a
condition of equilibrium, of fixedness. In this sense, it connotes the opposite
of historic movement: the State is a form of life stabilised, constituted,
static in fact. But this note of immobility, of definite, unchanging form,
conceals, as does all equilibrium, the dynamism which produced and upholds the
State. In a word, it makes us forget that the constituted State is merely the
result of a previous movement, of struggles and efforts which tended to its
making. The constituted state is preceded by the constituent state, and this is
a principle of movement. By this I
mean that the State is not a form of society which man finds ready-made- a gift,
but that it needs to be laboriously built up by him. It is not like the horde
or tribe or other societies based on consanguinity which Nature takes on itself
to form without the collaboration of human effort. On the contrary, the State
begins when man strives to escape from the natural society of which he has been
made a member by blood. And when we say blood, we might also say any other
natural principle: language, for example. In its origins, the State consists of
the mixture of races and of tongues. It is the superation of all natural
society. It is cross-bred and multi-lingual. Thus, the city springs from the reunion of diverse peoples. On
the heterogeneous basis of biology it imposes the abstract homogeneous structure
of jurisprudence.[4] Of course, this juridical unity is not the aspiration which urges on the
creative movement of the State. The impulse is more substantial than mere
legality; it is the project of vital enterprises greater than those possible to
tiny groups related by blood. In the genesis of every State we see or guess at
the figure of a great "company-promoter."
[4]A juridical
homogeneousness which does not necessarily imply centralisation.
