the expression of a minority, for the nature of a State is not determined by its form alone.
In essence, democracy is opposed to every kind of anarchism or political indifference, no matter whether anarchism springs from “advanced” views or from mere antipathy towards political organization. The anarchism of many honest folk, like that of Tolstoy, is really a child of the absolutism that estranged men from the State and from political life. In its opposition to democracy, anarchism invokes liberty, the fundamental idea of democracy itself. Some anarchists seek to prove that the State is a transient institution which has arisen within the known period of human history and will again disappear. Marx and Engels worked out this view in detail, and the Communists now make use of it against the Social Democrats. Other anarchists repudiate any sort of State, claiming that it is in itself unnatural, violent and incompatible with freedom. To this category of anarchists belong the exaggerated individualists, the Titans, who think the State a hindrance to them, an unworthy stumbling-block. There is, besides, an ethical and religious anarchism—that of Chelčický and of Tolstoy. In our own case the fact that, having no State of our own, we organized ourselves racially and set ourselves, as a people, above the Austrian State, engendered a certain inclination to be anarchical. Even Kollár reflects Herder’s view that the State is an artificial and the race a natural institution. This may be true in so far as the State is narrower than the race and cannot comprehend its whole life, despite the State’s constant endeavour to secure centralizing control over it.
Against all forms of anarchism I, for my part, consistently uphold Democracy and the democratic State. Everybody feels a natural yearning for freedom, a yearning which the State must respect; but the study of history has taught me that society has always been organized in some form of State, that social life and cooperation have likewise been organized, and that individuals have ever been bound to each other, more or less consciously, in a community. This organization has been either set up by force or by reciprocal understanding on the basis of social need, fellow-feeling and reason; and though the early forms of society were largely fashioned by the despotic force of strong and capable leaders, so that States took on a military character and relied on the army, it is none the less true that even primitive States arose for moral reasons and through understanding. Save perhaps in germ, there was at first no such thing as Rousseau’s “Social Contract.”
