Anatomy of the State

Excerpts

With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government."
The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life.
Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part.
Briefly, the State is that organization in a society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in a society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth.”
The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systemization of the predatory process over a given territory.
The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.

While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological.
For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public.
Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests.
For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals.
The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.
... it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters.