Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

The “sovereign state” is supposed to be the grown-up invention that ends chaos: borders, laws, legitimacy. Lange flips that comfort into a warning. In his framing, sovereignty isn’t just a legal principle; it’s an alibi. Once a state can claim supreme authority over life and death within its territory, modern technology turns that authority into a machine for scalable ruin.

The line is doing two things at once. First, it punctures the romantic story that civilization naturally advances alongside technical progress. Lange treats innovation as an accelerant: it doesn’t civilize power, it amplifies it. Second, it implies that the old Westphalian bargain - let states be sovereign and they’ll keep order - has expired. The phrase “in our times” matters: he’s locating a historical break where industrialized warfare, mass mobilization, and bureaucratic capacity have made violence both more efficient and more impersonal.

“Infinite number and variety” is deliberate overstatement with a strategic purpose. He’s not forecasting a single apocalypse; he’s arguing that the menu of coercion keeps expanding, outpacing any ethical or diplomatic restraint that sovereignty is supposed to respect. Coming from a politician of the interwar era, the subtext is unmistakably post-World War I: the state has learned to organize whole societies for conflict, and new tools (from mechanized killing to propaganda and surveillance) make the old checks feel quaint.

The intent isn’t anti-government so much as anti-absolutism. Lange is pressing for an upgraded political architecture - international law, collective security, constraints that treat human civilization, not the nation-state, as the ultimate stakeholder.