life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm.[1] Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant's shrewdness in obtaining small advantages — both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at one glance. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic thought that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.
All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself.[2] It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless,[3] producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental and contemptible. To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed an acquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object — as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world — an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings would agree with a town population for a market-peace of a fortnight, after which weapons were drawn and booty-making started.
Politics and trade in developed form — the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority — are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business
