, moreover, we make an exception of certain short periods of democracy
exercised with the vivid consciousness of popular sovereignty, as was
the case in a few Greek cities, especially at Athens, and in a few
Italian cities, and especially Florence (the former nevertheless were
composed of free men who were proprietors of slaves, and the latter of
privileged citizens who exploited foreigners and peasants) the society
organized into a state was always composed of a majority at the mercy of
the minority. And thus the majority of men has appeared in history as a
mass sustained, governed, guided, exploited and ill treated, or at least
as a variegated conglomeration of interests, which a few had to govern,
maintaining in equilibrium the divergences, either by pressure or by
compensation.

Thence the necessity of an art of government, and as it is this before
all else which strikes those who are studying collective life, it was
natural that politics should appear as the author of the social order
and as the sign of the continuity in the succession of historic forms.
To say politics is to say activity, which, up to a certain point, is
exercised in a desired direction, until the moment at least when
calculations dash themselves against unknown or unexpected obstacles. By
taking the state as an imperfect experience would suggest for the author
of society, and politics for the author of the social order, it resulted
that the narrators or philosophical historians were driven to place the
essence of history in a succession of forms, institutions and political
ideas.

Whence the state drew its origin, where the basis of its performance was
found, that mattered not, as that matters not in current reasoning. The
problems of the genetic order arose, as is known, rather late. The state
is and it finds its reason for existence in its present necessity; that
is so true that the imagination has not been able to adapt itself to the
idea that it has not always existed, and so it has prolonged its
conjectural existence back to the first origins of the human race. The
gods or demigods and heroes were its founders, in mythology at least,
just as in mediaeval theology the Pope is the first and therefore the
divine and perpetual source of all authority. Even in our time,
inexperienced travelers and imbecile missionaries find the state where
there is, as among savages and barbarians, nothing but the gens, or the
tribe of gentes, or the alliance of