Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

A nation-state, Lange suggests, is a paradox that sells itself as the cure for chaos while quietly operating like chaos with a flag. His move is to strip the state of its moral costume and describe it as a creature of appetite: it "claims sovereignty" not as a legal technicality but as a license for boundless growth. The phrase "unlimited development of power" is the tell. It frames state authority as an expansionary instinct, checked only when it collides with another force strong enough to hurt it.

Calling the state "by nature anarchistic" is deliberate provocation. Lange flips the usual script in which anarchy is what the state prevents. He’s pointing to an international arena where no higher referee exists, so every government reserves the option to break norms when convenient. Anarchy here isn’t street disorder; it’s the structural condition of world politics: states treat agreements as tools, not shackles, and law as something that binds others until it doesn’t.

The subtext is a warning about romantic nationalism and the complacency of citizens who mistake internal order for external virtue. Lange, writing in the shadow of great-power rivalry and the rising faith in arbitration and international law, is pressing on the weak seam in that optimism: if sovereignty is absolute, then restraint must be chosen, not assumed. The line reads like an argument for institutions that dilute sovereignty - courts, leagues, treaties with teeth - because without them, self-interest doesn’t merely corrupt the state; it defines it.