On this basis, we can recognize that empire and anarchy are not merely political constructs, or competing methods of ordering political power. Each is in fact a political ordering principle that draws its legitimacy, and therefore its strength, from its rootedness in the moral order. It is for this reason that men understand the political order in which they live and to which they are committed in terms of principle; and that the struggle between empire and anarchy is not only a war of opportunists and villains seeking the greatest power for themselves, but equally a confrontation between men of good will who disagree regarding the degree of moral legitimacy and sanction that can be ascribed to each of the respective political orders.

Thus our effort to identify the principles that underpin the respective political orders leads us to conclude the following: First, that the imperial state is always predicated on the principle of the unity of unfamiliar humanity. Even in an empire which is not yet universal in its extent or in its official self-understanding, the individual is nevertheless asked to sacrifice on the basis of an obligation he is presumed to have towards the great mass of unfamiliar men, who, though they be perfect strangers to him, are nonetheless men such as he is. According to this principle, each individual must give his utmost to the common order of mankind, whether or not he is presently the beneficiary of this order, for only in this fashion can the generality of mankind prosper. And it is this, the claim to bring order and even progress to mankind, which gives moral sanction to the laws and wars of the imperial state, even where these seem to have no apparent bearing on the well-being of the specific individual.

The difficulty with this principle of unity with the mass of unfamiliar men is that, being so abstract that it is always detached from the apparent interests of each concrete individual, it quickly becomes detached from the concrete interests of all of them—while at the same time leaving none with the standing to complain about the expropriation of his property and life, since these are carried out in the name of the generality of humanity, whose needs and interests the individual cannot reasonably presume to understand. This being the case, it is also true that wherever this principle is imbedded in the heart of the state, whether this state seems on its face to be vicious or benign, it logically gives birth to conquest and to the subjugation of neighboring peoples, depending only upon the measure of force that it is capable of bringing to bear.¹⁰

Second, we can see that an anarchical order is rooted in the principle of loyalty to the familiar individuals from whom one receives tangible assistance, and whose concerns and interests are to a large degree self-evidently one’s own. Under this ordering principle, nothing is done on the basis of distant abstractions such as right and justice, and even public needs such as the making and enforcement of laws and the waging of war are determined by the familiar individual. Thus wars are private wars, and law is privately made law, and each individual becomes a pawn in a perpetual test of strengths between one band and the next.¹¹

In this way, two of humanity’s most noble principles—the unity of purpose with unfamiliar mankind, and the loyalty to one’s familiar associates—are each made to exceed its rightful place and to attempt to determine man’s conduct in spheres in which they have nothing to offer and can only wreak destruction. And it requires no great insight to recognize that when either one of these ideals is accepted as the legitimate ordering principle of the political world, it quickly engenders not the freedom of peoples, but their enslavement. For just as empire tends to become the enslavement to the will of the one great ruler who, in his wisdom, is supposed to speak for the needs of vast sections of humanity, so too does anarchy mean enslavement to an endless strife among petty strongmen. And it is clear that when one stands helpless before the arbitrary power and violence of others, it matters little whether the tormentor be one will or many.

The dilemma of empire and anarchy is a product of man’s nature, and it has dogged his steps in all times and all places. One need only consider the first political images of the Bible—the Tower of Babel, which sought to bring all humanity together in a single, imperial community of purpose; and Noah’s Ark, a tiny, familiar community cast adrift from a violent and anarchic mankind¹²—to sense how deep was the impression these two evils made on our forefathers. The problem of empire and anarchy was, indeed, the central political question of the Hebrew Bible. And the recourse it proposed was a third type of political order: The distinctive institution of the national state, whose purpose was to transcend empire and anarchy by retaining the vital intuitions of each, while at the same time rendering obsolete that which makes each of them most dangerous.

As with each of the other orders, we may begin our discussion of the national state by asking to whom the individual owes his allegiance. If under empire the allegiance of the individual is directed towards an undifferentiated humanity, and if under anarchy it belongs to the familiar individual, we find that allegiance in the order of independent states is directed towards an entity that sits precisely at the conceptual mid—point between the others: The nation. The nation, we know, is a great community of men with a continuous existence in history, such as permits them to understand themselves as being intrinsically distinct from other such great communities—qualities that allow its members, despite the vast size of their community, to have a common interest and will, and at times also to pursue common ends. As such, the nation is an impersonal abstraction, in the same sense that humanity is an abstraction; but at the same time, it is also a concrete and familiar being, in the same sense that the individual who affords us protection under anarchy is a familiar person.

I will not enter here into a disputation with those who believe that the nation is essentially a fiction or an invention, or that it can be made to disappear from history by means of a change in education or political order. It is of course true that the nation does not possess a clear and distinct existence in the same way that an individual does, because an individual is physically distinguishable from all other individuals; nor in the same way that humanity does, because humanity is physicallydistinguishable from the various species of animals. Nevertheless, the nation is neither a fiction, nor can it be made to disappear from history. In this it resembles numerous other social institutions such as the family, clan, school, city, fief, guild, and army:¹³ All of these are in an important sense natural institutions, because their existence derives from unchanging aspects of our nature that cause variants of each to appear time and again under different conditions; yet at the same time, their persistence and specific character in any time or place are sufficiently dependent on circumstance so that they must frequently be discovered or developed anew. The nation shares with these other institutions two traits that are so fundamental that we may rightly include them in our definition of it: First, despite their lack of clear distinguishing characteristics of a physical nature, one can nevertheless readily distinguish their particular instances one from another (as one can distinguish the Rothschild family from the Hirsch family, or Harvard from Yale); and second, they are so constituted that, like individual persons, they are purposive institutions, having collective histories, needs, desires, and intentions on an ongoing basis.¹⁴

In addition, there is another important trait that the nation shares to one extent or another with the other social institutions I have mentioned: The fact that the distinctiveness of each nation from others of its type is intrinsic to the definition of a nation. By this I mean that the existence of the nation, like that of a family, city, or guild, requires as a necessary condition that there be other instances of its type from which it can be distinguished. The Rothschild family, for example, cannot be extended to include the rest of mankind, because in the process of extension it would lose its identity as the Rothschild family, and would become something else; indeed, the very idea of the family is premised on the existence of many families, of which the Rothschilds are only one. The same is true for the city of New York, which could not merge with all other cities and still be New York, any more than the lawyers’ guild could absorb all other professions and remain the lawyers’ guild. Each is by its nature limited, and would quickly be destroyed by more than a certain degree of extension.

But this quality of intrinsic distinctiveness is not inherent in all human institutions. Although we can, with hindsight, distinguish Rome from other imperial states, or Christianity from other religions, there is nothing intrinsic about the fact of their distinctiveness from their neighbors of the same type. These are social institutions that never suffered from any internal constraint to their extension, and could, as far as we know, have embraced all mankind without ceasing to exist or changing their essential nature.

It is from an understanding of this quality that we come to recognize the special character of the nation. The nation is by far the largest purposive institution that is in principle limited only to one portion of mankind. “Blessed is God, who distinguishes Israel from the nations”—this blessing has been recited by Jews once each week at least since Roman times. And while many have quarreled over whether a benediction of this kind is not a reflection of Jewish exclusiveness and arrogance, seldom has it been asked whether the sentiments that bring about this sharp limitation in the political horizon of a nation are not in fact the only possible basis for political humility, and therefore for a political order based on the limitation of empire. It is my contention that the idea of the national state, not only in antiquity, but no less in our day, is precisely this. It offers a natural and powerful instrument for limitation of the desire for indefinite political expansion—a limitation no artifice will be able to impose on regimes that are sympathetic to the ideal of an undifferentiated humanity, but which may well be attainable if one is capable of distinguishing his own people from the nations.