ests
had arisen from the revolution of the conditions of existence and the
resulting change in social classification. These new wants and interests
were not only alien to the old gentile order, but thwarted it in every
way. The interests of the craftsmen created by division of labor, and
the special necessities of a town differing from those of the country,
required new organs. But every one of these groups was composed of
people from different gentes, phratries, and tribes; they included even
strangers. Hence the new organs necessarily had to form outside of the
gentile constitution. But by the side of it meant against it. And again,
in every gentile organization the conflict of interests made itself felt
and reached its climax by combining rich and poor, usurers and debtors,
in the same gens and tribe. There was furthermore the mass of
inhabitants who were strangers to the gentiles. These strangers could
become very powerful, as in Rome, and they were too numerous to be
gradually absorbed by the gentes and tribes. The gentiles confronted
these masses as a compact body of privileged individuals. What had once
been a natural democracy, had been transformed into an odious
aristocracy. The gentile constitution had grown out of a society that
did not know any internal contradictions, and it was only adapted to
such a society. It had no coercive power except public opinion. But now
a society had developed that by force of all its economic conditions of
existence divided humanity into freemen and slaves, and exploiting rich
and exploited poor. A society that not only could never reconcile these
contradictions, but drove them ever more to a climax. Such a society
could only exist by a continual open struggle of all classes against one
another, or under the supremacy of a third power that under a pretense
of standing above the struggling classes stifled their open conflict and
permitted a class struggle only on the economic field, in a so-called
"legal" form. Gentilism had ceased to live. It was crushed by the
division of labor and by its result, the division of society into
classes. It was replaced by the State.

* * * * *

In preceding chapters we have shown by three concrete examples the three
main forms in which the state was built up on the ruins of gentilism.
Athens represented the simplest, the classic type: the state grew
directly and mainly out of class divisions that developed within g