First of all, let us be agreed as to what we wish to 
include in the term the State.

   There is, of course, the German school which enjoys
confusing _State_ with _Society_.  The best German
thinkers, and many among the French, are guilty of this
confusion because they cannot conceive of society
without a concentration of the State; and because of this
anarchists are usually accused of wanting to ``destroy
society'' and of advocating a return to ``the permanent
war of each against all.''

   Yet, to argue thus is to overlook altogether the
advances made in the domain of history during the last
thirty-odd years; it is to overlook the fact that humans
lived in Societies for thousands of years before the
State had been heard of; it is to forget that so far as
Europe is concerned the State is of recent origin---it
barely goes back to the sixteenth century; finally, it
is to ignore that the most glorious periods in history
are those in which civil liberties and communal life had
not yet been destroyed by the State, and in which large
numbers of people lived in communes and free
federations.

   The State is only one of the forms adopted by society
in the course of history.  Why then make no distinction
between what is permanent and what is accidental?

   Then again the _State_ has also been confused with
_Government_.  Since there can be no State without
government, it has been sometimes said that what one
must aim at is the absence of government and not the
abolition of the State.

   However, it seems to me that in State and government
we have two concepts of a different order.  The State
idea means something quite different from the idea of
government.  It not only includes the existence of a
power situated above society, but also of a _territorial
concentration_ as well as the _concentration of many
functions of the life of societies in the hands of a
few_.  It carries with it some new relationships between
members of society which did not exist before the
establishment of the State.  A whole mechanism of
legislation and of policing has to be developed in order
to subject some classes to the domination of others.

   This distinction, which at first sight might not be
obvious, emerges especially when one studies the origins
of the State.  

   Indeed, there is only one way of really
understanding the State, and that is to study its
historic development, and this is what we will try to
do.

		from:
		Peter Kropotkin
		_The State---Its Historic Role_ (1897)

		English translation copyright 
		Vernon Richards and Freedom Press 1969
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		84B Whitechapel High Street
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