Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/475

Rh faire, of which anarchism is only the extreme application, he almost uniformly opposes. He is here, as in his ethics, the antipodes of a thinker like Max Stirner. It is true that he made no idol of the state and that one of Zarathustra's discourses appears to be directed against it, but if we observe carefully, we see that it is the state as contradistinguished from a people or flock that he has in mind—artificial formations such, I may say, as Austria-Hungary, or in less degree, the German Empire, or, for that matter, the British Empire, in opposition to the natural formations which arise wherever there is unity of blood or race or in the free following of a leader or idea. undefined And yet in peoples and flocks, as truly as in these artificial conglomerate states which only force holds together, there is order, law, authority as against individual license, in short a Rangordnung of rulers and ruled. Let one think of a Greek polis, or of a primitive Germanic tribe, or of a people arising, as Nietzsche dreams, out of the welter of modern Europe in obedience to a great longing and a great idea and under the leadership of a great man or set of men—in none of these was or will there be anarchy, in the sense of individuals following each his own way regardless of the social whole. Only to the few can it be given to follow their own way—and even so within limits. When Nietzsche said "as little state as possible," he meant, as the connection clearly shows, for himself and his kind; undefined he did not mean to say it broadly as Herbert Spencer did, or as our modern manufacturing and commercial classes say it, when they really only wish to be more free to follow policies of exploitation and greed. For these particular classes Nietzsche wished more state, rather than less. undefined Indeed, in most of the relations of life Nietzsche contemplates the supremacy of organized civil society—if he does not argue for it, it is that he takes it for granted. I may refer to his views of punishment (where the state has an indispensable function as over against private vengeance). He would allow some experimentation in marriage, but always under social sanction. undefined