At 09:04 PM 11/12/95 -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote:

There were no nation states or cops prior to 1600. It is perfectly possible that there will be no nation states or cops at some point in the future.

To be strictly correct, there were no cops in the english speaking world from the time of the saxon invasions to the nineteenth century. There were however the functional equivalent of cops at some places, and some times -- mostly in societies that collapsed or sank into utter tyranny. One can reasonably argue that the persians and scythians etc were nation states, and that sometimes nation states existed during the dark ages and medieval period, but until fairly recently, most of what we now call western civilization regarded what we would now call a nation state as a rare, curious, and pathological aberration. I expect that we will soon once again regard them as pathological, and I hope that we will be able to regard them as rare. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com