"It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society"
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War is the State’s growth hack, and Rothbard’s line lands because it refuses to treat that as a regrettable side effect. “Really comes into its own” is the tell: he’s not describing emergency governance, he’s describing fulfillment. The sentence swells the way the institution does, stacking “power,” “number,” “pride,” and finally the clincher, “absolute dominion,” a phrase chosen to puncture the polite fiction that wartime control is temporary, technical, or reluctant.
Rothbard, writing from a hard-edged libertarian tradition, aims at a bipartisan habit: treating war as a moral crusade that ennobles public authority. His intent is to flip the moral valence. If war is the moment the State becomes most itself, then the grandeur we attach to wartime unity starts to look like complicity in an expansion project. The subtext is a suspicion of incentives: bureaucracies, contractors, and politicians don’t merely respond to war; they benefit from it. “In number” signals the staffing and institutional sprawl that follows mobilization. “Over the economy and the society” widens the indictment beyond taxes and budgets into conscription, surveillance, propaganda, and the social disciplining that accompanies “national purpose.”
The context is a 20th-century America where world wars, the Cold War, and national security bureaucracy normalized exceptional powers as the baseline. Rothbard is arguing that the emergency is the system. By making the State’s wartime appetite sound almost biological - swelling, prideful, dominion-seeking - he frames militarism as less a policy choice than a reliable mechanism of political consolidation.
Rothbard, writing from a hard-edged libertarian tradition, aims at a bipartisan habit: treating war as a moral crusade that ennobles public authority. His intent is to flip the moral valence. If war is the moment the State becomes most itself, then the grandeur we attach to wartime unity starts to look like complicity in an expansion project. The subtext is a suspicion of incentives: bureaucracies, contractors, and politicians don’t merely respond to war; they benefit from it. “In number” signals the staffing and institutional sprawl that follows mobilization. “Over the economy and the society” widens the indictment beyond taxes and budgets into conscription, surveillance, propaganda, and the social disciplining that accompanies “national purpose.”
The context is a 20th-century America where world wars, the Cold War, and national security bureaucracy normalized exceptional powers as the baseline. Rothbard is arguing that the emergency is the system. By making the State’s wartime appetite sound almost biological - swelling, prideful, dominion-seeking - he frames militarism as less a policy choice than a reliable mechanism of political consolidation.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Murray N. Rothbard, "The Anatomy of the State" (essay). Includes passage on war swelling the State's power, numbers, pride and dominion; see the section on war and state expansion. |
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