![]() ![]() ![]() What made the system of government that emerged in Europe after the end of the Thirty Years War different was the fact that it was an corporation. They had existed at least since the Old Egyptian Kingdom they could be found in many places around the world, starting with the Mediterranean littoral and proceeding through Mesopotamia and China all the way to Central and Southern America. And peace and quiet, more than anything else, was what people wanted and what history seemed to demand.Ĭommunities subject to absolute government by a single king or emperor were, of course, nothing new. ![]() As figures such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes argued, the only way to bring about peace and quiet was absolute government invested in a single person. The endless wars between the various principalities, some of them Christian and others Moslem, that took place in the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth century the English Wars of the Roses the French guerres de religion and the Thirty Years War which devastated much of Germany and Central Europe-all these resulted in so much death and destruction that, to end them, people were even prepared to have their appetites controlled. The background of the state as we know it today is formed by civil war, although at that time, of course, it was not yet called civil. This is an excerpt from the keynote lecture given at the Mises Institute conference on the themes in Professor van Creveld's talk. ![]()
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