From Warband to Empire

The origins of Feudalism

      THE dissident underground is rife with all sorts of romantic exaltation of the exploits of various pirates, brigands, nomadic steppe warriors, and other itinerant military brotherhoods or warbands of heroic ages. This freebooting and rootless life of adventure, rapine, pillage, and conquest is held up as how a man is meant to live by Nature, the highest expression and affirmation of life, while the settled and civilized life is declaimed against as a "longhouse society" in which women rule everything, and which saps from and suppresses masculine vitality or life-force in a most tragic and pathogenic way. We even see some enthusiasts going as far as abjuring bread and beer, on grounds that the settled and agrarian way of life is so radically antithetical to the true nature of man that the very fruits of the soil must necessarily be toxic to his body.  

      Romantic fantasies about the great deeds of heroic ages are perfectly natural, normal, and healthy in young men of fighting age, and moreover today comprise part of an almost physiological rebellion against the stifling dehumanization of a way of life exhaustively dominated by HR spinsters and the faceless bureaucratic machinery of the administrative State, which rigorously excludes, suppresses, and punishes all release of vitalic forces, all heroic exertions, all great shows of manly vigour and prowess, whilst striving to make women of men and bloodless automatons of both sexes. But romantic Vitalism is no sound basis for a serious critique of the dehumanizing effects of life under the modern administrative State, for it is seriously incomplete and moreover seriously wrongheaded in glorifying barbarism and decrying all settled and civilized life as a tragic negation of human nature and the life force. It befalls political science to make visible the complete picture and show that the settled and civilized way of life is on the contrary the very maturational destiny of the warrior and the warband. Haller gives us an enormous leg-up in this endeavour.

     Haller sees the barbarian warband as the gestational form of what he calls a military State or Empire. The relation between a warlord or military general and his men comprises a sovereign State inasmuch as the general is political independent, taking orders from no superior. However, this State is seriously incomplete until it acquires a territory of its own; unless and until it does, lacking resources of its own, its members are doomed to eke out a living through pillage and plunder. Hence the freebooting exploits that are the stuff of romance. But it would be absurd to hold up a life of killing people and taking their stuff as the supreme telos of the vital principle or Nietzschean will to power- not least of all because it must sooner or later result in the decisive negation of the brigand's life-force and power, to wit being killed or taken prisoner and reduced to slavery. The warband, the nascent military State, is destined by the nature of things to either be annihilated, break up, or reach maturity in acquiring and becoming settled in a territory of its own; and it will typically acquire this territory through a legitimate or illegitimate conquest, by means of which the general ascends to the status of an imperial King, and his soldiers, that of a Feudal aristocracy.    

     And conquest, contra various Nietzschean fantasies, is about much more than killing and oppressing, much more than pure domination. As paradoxical as it may seem to Nietzscheans, will to rule cannot possibly find its full realization until has ceased to be a principle of pure violence and been tempered by morality and benevolence. The barbarian must become civilized. And this softening and moralization of the martial temperament cannot be explained away as the product of some conspiracy of women and priests to reduce "Sovereigns" to "shepherds", as Nietzsche would have it. The exact opposite is true- since the nomadic pastoralists who typically make up the membership of a barbarian warband cannot possibly attain to their destiny as Sovereigns and lords of great empires until they lose their purely military and bellicose character. It is indeed given in the very terms, "will to power" or "will to rule". For you can't very well rule over subjects who are dead, have fled the land in order to escape your rapine and ravages, or might band together to depose you, or persuade a third party stronger still than you to do it. Whether they like it or not, then, the conquerors will have to learn to become not the oppressors, but the fathers, protectors, and benefactors of the conquered if they want to be able exact tribute and service from them, and enjoy all the other perks and privileges that come with being the firsts, the ruling class of a great Empire, on a stable and sustainable basis.

     Hence the true ultimate purpose or telos towards which the vitalic forces of the warrior strive is the formation of an order of social precedence. Violence is but the means by which the men of war found and preserve such an order, not an end in itself; and as we have seen, a life of nothing but brigandage would entail martial vitality turned against itself in an absolutely self-defeating way  

     When military power founded on force of arms is conjoined with patrimonial or territorial power based on property, a natural and inescapable shift away from purely military domination sets itself into motion. The general now has responsibilities he didn't have as a freewheeling warlord. He assumes responsibility for protecting the vanquished- his subjects- in spite of himself to the very extent that his interests are now bound up with theirs (e.g. if wants to exact tribute and service from them, he must be ready to defend them against rival warlords who have the same idea). As final authority of the land, he'll thus also find himself acting as final judge of their disputes, again whether he wants to or not. He finds himself busied with the myriad of business interests he acquires in the course of entering into contracts with the locals, and also with managing and improving his lands; in short, with the management of the Imperial household. Meanwhile, the brothers-in-arms leave behind the camaraderie and group life of the camp behind to individually settle down on their own estates and form households of their own, and likewise attend to their own proper interests and responsibilities on a smaller scale.

    While the military State or empire always retains the specifically military character that distinguishes it from other types of State from birth to death, we can see that the difference between the immature military State (warband based on pure military power) and the mature form (empire based on synthesis of military and patrimonial power) is that the erstwhile brigands have become fully-fledged patriarchs with property and households of their own. And in this respect the life of States recapitulates that of Man at a higher level; for States are nothing but aggregations of men. It is nothing more than an instance of the familiar, natural, and universal process where the footloose youth given to spending his time running wild on the town with the boys soon enough wins for himself a career, a woman, and a household, and so ascends from youth to his full manhood.

     It follows that romanticizing the rootless and lawless way of life of the brigand while declaiming against settled and civilized life as some tragic degeneration inimical to life itself makes about as much sense as saying that a grown and mature man is a tragically degenerated form of boy as opposed to the full end-point stage of development that biological growth, with its all its vigour and excess, leads to in the first place. But this is exactly what the vitalists actually believe- as the cult they make of the physical strength and beauty that can only be had in youth, and begins to fade around exactly the time a man comes into his own as a fully-fledged head of household, goes to show only all too clearly. Since this cult exalts youth over age, it necessarily inverts primordial social hierarchies and exalts bachelorhood over fatherhood, and so ironically reveals itself as the product of the very longhouse society it abhors; yet another Leftist rebellion against patriarchal authority, the stunted younger brother of Feminism, if you will. Vitalism is thus not only profoundly frivolous and unserious, but downright pernicious, and best forgotten.         

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(Source: Restoration of Political Science, or, Theory of the Natural Social State, against the Fiction of an Artificial Civil State, Fourth Volume: Of Military Empires. Paris: Emile Vaton, 1875. Editing and translation mine.)

     The independent general, or the head of a great military aggregation, even should he have no intention of appropriating to himself the land presently occupied by his troop, rules sovereign over his brothers-in-arms, and rightly must be counted among sovereign princes. He is the founder and the head of an empire that may, at least for a certain time, exist without territorial properties, and whose authority pertains directly to men. It is thus that in ancient history, as in modern history, we see numerous examples of nomadic States, wandering hordes, caravans and bands of insurgents which, without having any fixed settlement, obey a sole master taking orders from nobody.

     But there is, in the nature of such a purely military tie, something brutal, savage, and belligerent, that forces their heads in spite of themselves into rapines, acts of violence, or perpetual wars, and which in the interest of the troop itself cannot go on for long. With neither territory of its own nor fixed domicile, the troop will be forced to constantly live under the tent or camp out in open field; to do without all the amenities and all the peaceful pleasures of life. Provisions or money having run out, the wandering horde must live from rapine, something it can't always do with impunity. Soon enough there isn't anything left to take, since the men of war don't like to work and without the labour of man, the land doesn't produce enough for his subsistence. Finally, sooner or later vagabond gangs reach the shores of the sea, the limit of all migration. In any case, the military tie will unravel by itself; for, leaving aside that a warband, as numerous and valiant as it may be, sometimes finds itself mastered; leaving aside that it can undergo defeats, perish under the influence of contagious diseases, dissolve itself as a result of the death of its head, having been thrown into chaos and confusion; little by little the motive behind its unity loses its force and attraction. From the moment that dangers are overcome; that enemies are vanquished and a land where a peaceful life is possible has been taken; in short, from the moment the goal of the military union is attained and the need for communal protection is no longer felt, man, of whatever nationality, gets fed up with hardships become pointless and no longer aspires to anything but pleasures and rest, as the end-point of his efforts. At this point then, each seeks to detach himself from military service, to settle himself in a stable home, or at least live in a less direct relation with his former comrades. The head animated by the same desire, will consider himself most fortunate to be able to dismiss his brothers-in-arms, or to satisfy them and maintain their affection by offering them benefits of a different nature.  

     Hence history teaches us that military empires are never long-lived, at least if the general doesn't acquire full proprietorship of a territory vast enough to establish himself with his following in a stable manner. [T]he lure of preserving [...] conquests and establishing himself in a stable manner in the conquered land is, by the reparative aims of Providence, the simple and infallible means of tempering purely military domination and changing its very nature. This desire inspires peaceful sentiments in bellicose hordes, heals the wounds of the original act of violence and replaces the tie of force with ties of affection. For sedentary and stable domicile in a conquered land, henceforth seen as one's property, infallibly softens manners and habits; new relations form and produce new interests; the victors come together with the vanquished and contract all sorts of ties with them. Their children are born and grow up among the natives of the land; all mutually help one another and the old enmity little by little turns into reciprocal friendship. The head of the army, having become territorial proprietor and sovereign, will naturally seek to win the confidence of his new subjects, if only in order to enjoy the fruits of his conquest in peace and preserve it with the least trouble. Meanwhile, his lieutenants and his other brothers-in-arms increasingly free themselves from the military tie, since they feel its necessity less; they establish themselves on estates separated by great distances; they thus contract new ties and form particular interests, which often even find themselves in conflict with those of the head. It is thus that they imperceptibly become the protectors of the people whose enemies they were. They even take wives from among the daughters of the vanquished, who, in their turn, often marry the daughters of the conquerors. In the wise designs of Providence, these reciprocal marriages serve as new means of forming amicable ties between different nations; of extinguishing the old hatred and little by little melding victors and vanquished into a single people. An intermixing this complete takes a lot of time, and at the beginning doesn't always seem politic.   

     Now, the independent general, become territorial lord through the acquisition of vast domains, will enjoy in this capacity the same rights and will be subject to the same duties as patrimonial prices; his power has the same reach and the same limits, since he has come into possession of the domains and hence the rights of the former master; and if the conquest is carried out in a just war, he will even have been able, by title of conqueror, to acquire more.     

     However, it should be noted that the prior and military tie with the conquering people isn't entirely ruptured by the simple conjunction of a territorial lordship to the primordial generalate. The captain, who with his troop occupies a land and makes it his property, always preserves his standing as general or head of the army. Now, from this union of two types of authority and simultaneous existence, from these two absolute different relations of rights, remarkable modifications necessarily result; modifications that incessantly distinguish military States from purely patrimonial States.

     In a purely patrimonial State, there exists only one type of relation between the prince and his various servants and subjects, founded on reciprocal utility; all essentially enjoy an equal liberty.

     A territorial prince has subjugated nobody; he has in no way used violence in order to reduce any of his subjects to being under his orders; all by contrast have voluntarily committed themselves to his service, or rather they depend indirectly on him by the nature of things and for their own interest. The power is useful and even necessary to all; none can do without it except to their own detriment, all of the subjects so to speak its children. But in a kingdom founded militarily and that became territorial only subsequently, one must always distinguish two absolutely different legal relations: on the one hand the military tie between the general and his army, on the other the territorial tie between this same general and the inhabitants of the land in which he has become master or proprietor.

     The first of these ties, for being maintained and reinforced by a severe discipline, is no less coloured by affection, founded as it is on confidence, on voluntary commitments and the memory of reciprocal services. The second, formed by compulsion, is more relaxed, but also less intimate; a certain disaffection always reigns in it. Distrust on the one hand, grievance on the other, and a vestige of old hostile dispositions. The former is the primordial and closest relation; the latter, the secondary and more or less distant relation. The King's heart is sooner carried towards his brothers-in-arms, towards friends that he knew, that he so-to-speak created, than towards the inhabitants of the land he didn't know at all and were his enemies. It is always the case that the members of the conquering army are the victors, the strongest, the favoured class, while the natives of the land are the vanquished, the weakest, the class that is abandoned or relegated to second place. The former have only their natural lord, to whose service they voluntarily committed themselves; the latter, deprived of their former father, receive a foreign master in spite of themselves; and to the inconveniences of any such change, are additionally joined with the costs of a numerous court, whose exclusive pretensions to favour and power offend the self-regard of the vanquished and take from them all sorts of benefits they could have found under their old master. It is inevitable that these two relations, at least if they don't end up melding into one, provoke profound jealousies and constant indignation, of which the history of military empires offers examples of with each page. We will however show that ever-benevolent nature, to the extent that her healing course isn't hampered, mollifies and corrects this social state in a thousand different ways; that she works incessantly to efface the memory of the foreign origin, to extinguish the old hate, to turn enemies into friends and into protectors, to meld the two peoples into one, and finishes by replacing purely military domination with a paternal and patrimonial authority.

     Nonetheless, the first natural consequence of a militarily-founded empire, is that in it one always encounters, in the relation with the old inhabitants of the land, certain traces of right over the vanquished; right which will manifest itself first and foremost by more or less onerous personal tributes and obligations of service.