yunsi12

The lowest policeofficer of the civilized state has more "authority" than all the organsof gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince and thegreatest statesman or general of civilization might envy the humblestof the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accordedto him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the other isforced to pose as something outside and above it.As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check,but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it isnormally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class,which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and soacquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners forholding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of thenobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and themodern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-laborby capital. 

Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warringclasses are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparentmediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation toboth. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisieagainst one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First andparticularly of the Second French Empire, which played off theproletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against theproletariat. 

The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler andruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckiannation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against oneanother and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayedPrussian cabbage Junkers.Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens aregraded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that thestate is an organization for the protection of the possessing classagainst the non-possessing class. This is already the case in theAthenian and Roman property classes. Similarly in the medieval feudalstate, in which the extent of political power was determined by theextent of landownership. Similarly, also, in the electoralqualifications in modern parliamentary states.