Today I want to talk about state, war, and imperialism. I want to begin by reminding you that fighting and war, conquest, and plunder are part of human history, despite the advantages of the division of labor, about which I have talked extensively. And if we look for reasons for this deviationist behavior, we will find three factors. One is a lack of intelligence, and closely correlated with that is a very high time preference.

The subject of this lecture is “From Monarchy to Democracy.” This is obviously one of the main subjects that I cover in my book Democracy: The God That Failed. I have talked about monarchs already in the previous two lectures, about the role of monarchs in feudal societies, which we can refer to as prestate societies. And then, in the last lecture, about the position of monarchs as heads of state and the transition from the feudal stage to the monarchical state.

My subject today is parasitism and the origin of the state. So far, one important element has been missing in my reconstruction of the present world. We’ve seen what the nature of man is, we’ve talked about property, the division of labor based on property, the development of money, capital accumulation, production of law and order, and the natural order resulting from all of this. Now we have to come to the disturbing elements that developed in history, those events that somehow took the natural tendencies off this path and made history deviate from its natural course.