States Are Voluntary Associations 197 



epoch. Men have come into a certain region, 

 and have commenced to adapt the soil to their 

 needs; in other words, to produce wealth. As a 

 result they have been forced to establish immedi- 

 ately some kind of organization, because without 

 organization, community life would have been 

 impossible. War has not played any more of a 

 role in this ancient process of organization than 

 in the modern process. 



The State is the region within a certain peri- 

 meter, within which association dominates over 

 dissociation, or in other words, where juridical 

 relations, established between the citizens, exclude 

 anarchistic relations. The frontiers of a State 

 are marked exactly by the line at which war 

 ceases. Within this line, citizens are not author- 

 ized to combat each other by means of homicide 

 and robbery. Beyond this line, the people are 

 authorized to combat with these means. It is as 

 a result of this characteristic that the States are 

 "sovereign." According to our present ideas, a 

 State is not sovereign, and is therefore not a State 

 in the complete meaning of the term, if its foreign 

 policy is not completely independent, if it has not 

 absolute liberty to wage war upon its neighbours 

 whenever it seems desirable to do so. The funda- 

 mental difference between the relations of the citi- 

 zens within the State and the relations of the States 

 within humanity, consists in this: the first are ju- 

 ridical; the second anarchistic. Between citizens, 

 war is an accident : the normal condition is the com- 



