Nietzsche on the Origin of the State

Nietzsche (GM II 17, transl. H. B. Samuel):

I used the word “State”; my meaning is self-evident: namely, a herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its war-like organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the “State.”

We heard of these “blond beasts” in GM I 11:

It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blond beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea “Barbarian” on all the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated funeral oration, “Our audacity has forced a way over every land and sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for good and for evil”).

The “barbarians” that so endangered the Western Empire in its last days, the pressure of whose bearing down hastened the Empire’s collapse, were the same blond beasts that reached a cultural pinnacle in the Middle Ages and revived the Empire in December 800.

GM II 17 continues:

That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by “nature,” he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture—what has he to do with contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there as the lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different,” to be personally even hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are […].

This “instinctive creating and impressing” is utterly different from the laboured inauthenticity of the theatrical totalitarian state, discussed by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism” (NYRB, 6 Feb., 1975). This instinctiveness is the hallmark of the self-regarding master; but the camp staginess of twentieth-century fascism only reveals, with their deep and manifest ressentiment, its distance from the thinker whose memory it presumes to invoke.

GM II 17 continues:

[T]heir appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty which is live, in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to the whole.

Douglas Smith (Penguin, 1996) translates “scheme of sovereignty” as “structure of domination”: a sort of emblem of how Nietzsche’s readers have changed in these last decades—and how they in turn have changed Nietzsche.

Addendum, Jan. 2020: https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/2020/01/herrschafts-gebilde-schemes-of.html. On Herrschafts-Gebilde.

The impact of this line of thinking on the conservative revolution in Germany is discussed in Mohler’s book (transl. Devlin, Radix, 2018), pp. 179–81.