State and Sovereignty Theory

[Corvid]

This is an admittedly more "abstract" subject but it's still one that interests me; how can we take from narratives of state legitimacy and see how they impact the material organization of the state? There are naturally a few historical theories and I think there is at least some value in analyzing the raison d'être in these institutions, supposing that a new "European Renaissance" happens and a revolutionary state needs to justify itself.

As Evola puts it in Revolt, the traditional model of state has the monarch serve as a bridge between the natural and supernatural law. Power is perhaps not justified in its own right but as an expression of the supernatural law, the king is not only a secular leader but a religious leader too through this relationship. Evola was a perennialist, which is dubious, but he draws from the Roman monarchy and its ritual continuation in rex sacrorum during the Republic, and from China the Mandate of Heaven. Other similar examples include the Japanese emperors being descended from Amaterasu, the Egyptian tradition of the pharaoh being an incarnation of a god, and so on. We see a watered down version in Christian Europe with the 'divine right of kings', but this was short lived as the English monarchy was soon to be disempowered and aristocrats/Parliamentarians have always asserted their rights in England. The implication is that the king's powers are limited by his adherence to supernatural law, and if the ritualistic-religious order of things is violated then the legitimacy of the state falters. In practice, disasters and crises would serve as an 'omen' that the king has lost favor with the heavens and ought to be replaced. Of course, accepting the traditional model requires a presupposed metaphysical order to adhere to. Its supernatural claims make the state's perception warped by ideas of a divine order, for better or for worse in terms of legitimacy but also of the practical application of government policy. I do not believe that it is feasible to make people believe in such a supernatural order in the present.

This brings us to the subsequent social contract theory that germinated in Hobbes and Rousseau during the 17th and 18th centuries. It proposes that a state of nature existed in which man was alone and sparsely distributed, with infinite rights. The eponymous 'social contract' was the agreement formed between infinitely free men to surrender a portion of their liberty and property to an organization which could amplify their common security through the sovereign. State legitimacy is drawn from the ability of the state to safeguard the liberty and property of its constituents, in each of the varying forms that states can take (traditionally presented as autocracy, aristocracy, democracy). It should be noted that this conception is anthropologically wrong. There is no 'state of nature' in which man was wholly alone; social groupings have always existed and the earliest authority and governance likely developed out of tribal bonds. Whether the validity of this premise in some way refutes the social compact is up for debate. Of course, the rights and property in question which are to be possessed by the citizen or surrendered to the state are also in question, and in theory an idealized state would have different property and liberty arrangements depending on the needs of the sovereign to carry out his duties in the contract. In practice, the state grows in complexity--perhaps as a result of an existential threat to its sovereignty but more likely as a natural tendency of state organizations to seek power for themselves just as any other organization would--and the common people do not usually assert their liberty once it has been surrendered to the state. The reason that this falls short in practice likely has to do with the early liberals placing too much faith in the free-thinking rationality of man. Despite the overall degeneration of state theory in the mass democratic era, a lot of the presumptions of social contract theory such as equality in nature and ideal rationality are key cornerstones of modern liberalism, and Marxism draws from Rousseau in his overly optimistic image of a stateless idealized free man prior to the formation of states and the division of labor.

To briefly touch upon the Italian Fascist theory of state, I tried to read Giovanni Gentile describe it but as far as I gathered it's just theorycel nonsense.

An 'organic' theory of state draws from the point that I made in the anthropological shortcomings of the social contract. It seems probable to me that states developed as family and tribal connections became more expansive into the realm of villages and pastoral groups. The divergence of humankind from its origins would lead migratory groups towards new climates and ecosystems at first, and that these groups would develop a continuum of human relations between these small groups and their connections to other groups in their vicinity. The extent to which a village or nomadic tribe could have connections very far beyond its immediate vicinity is obviously very limited. It is these small connections that ultimately produced the variations in human cultures throughout our early history. These groups were shaped by their environments, we can find the cultural developments of Africans to be naturally suitable for their development in the bush, Aryan cultural genesis happening on the Eurasian steppe, and so on. Agricultural developments in the neolithic would turn a select few of these tribal biological units in certain climates into propertied and settled "nations" with their own complex divisions of labor, and expanded their own biological stock (quantity at the cost of quality, as archaeological findings have demonstrated) in ways that are best explained by archaeogenetics and history. But I believe the principle of this development reveals a necessarily biological element to what the state is and how it developed that is completely ignored in light of certain egalitarian and rationalist presumptions about humanity. Thoughts?

[Leverkühn]

So just to summarize, what you've laid out (very well I might add) is three different Theories of State:
(I) Traditional Model/Divine Theory
(II) Enlightenment Social Contract Theory
(III) Organic State Theory
I'll start by giving my thoughts on each, hopefully all relating to the initial topic which is about how narratives of state legitimacy (justifications) impact the material organization of a state.

I. Such a state, because its powers are centralized in the hands of a single figure who is answerable only to the Divine, has the ability to make sweeping reforms that could be either beneficial or detrimental to a State, depending on his personal aptitude. On one hand you have great figures like Julius Caesar and his heir Augustus, but you can also get complete idiots. The people's rights are largely up to the whim of the Monarch. As a common-sense liberal and an individualist, I don't enjoy with how even a skillful, intelligent man is almost totally at the whims of an All-Powerful, quasi-divine political figure. But whatever a new right-wing revolutionary state might look like, I don’t believe it will take the form of this traditional model. I have religious leanings myself but the possibility of justifying power in  this way is in my view almost entirely dead. As you say, “accepting the traditional model requires a presupposed metaphysical order to adhere to,” and it seems to me that such a metaphysical background is what’s lacking among people on our right-wing faction. Even people who hold similar broad policy views come to these conclusions from different backgrounds: Trad Christians, Pagans, Atheists, and more. A metaphysical state of this sort would arguably lead to the strongest normative binding among citizens [Our State and Ruler have been Willed by God, we all work together to do His Will] but it alienates many people. We are in complete agreement that it is simply infeasible to make people believe in a system like this at present. 

II. Social Contract Theory is largely based off a State of Nature mythos. As you said, the mythos of the state of nature is anthropologically incorrect. “Social groupings have always existed and the earliest governance likely developed out of tribal bonds.” But Social Contract theory is in my mind nonetheless a powerful myth in that it casts the creation of the state as coming out of the free decision of individuals, based on mutual benefit. The systems that Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau construct differ in the power and rights granted to individuals once the State is formed, but all three are united in claiming that before the State comes into existence, the individual is the basic social unit. The importance placed on the individual meant that systems influenced by their thoughts emphasized complex systems of Human Rights belonging to all Men. Such systems are as you say the cornerstone of liberal communities, and even Mass Democratic/Marxist politicians will at times deploy these terms in what I see as a bastardized manner. While appeals to Human Rights  serve as the groundwork for progressive claims regarding asylum, free healthcare, access to higher education, they also serve as the legal basis for things like Freedom of Association, Free Enterprise, and Freedom of Speech. While these liberal systems did fail and lead to the situation we are in today, I would personally reject the idea that such a system must necessarily lead to this system of Mass Democracy.

III. While I haven’t read Gentile and can’t comment specifically on his theory of state, the theory as described sounds derivative (not using this in a bad sense) of the kind of thought that came to prominence immediately after the zenith of the ‘Enlightenment Era’ with the rising Romanticism movement, probably most thoroughly elucidated by Hegel. The State is to be viewed like an organism that arises in nature, and citizens make up the component parts of this totality. As you said, this Organic Theory corrects the fictions laid out by (II), but it does this at a great cost.  The individual is now no longer seen as the primary unit within society. The State never arose out of his explicit agreement to take part in it, it’s something that in a sense existed long before he has; the organic whole forever takes prominence over the Individual, whose claim to rights and freedoms depends upon what’s useful to the whole. This is the motivating idea behind members of the Progressive Movement in America, many of whom traveled abroad to Germany and studied political economy there. It’s telling that for those early progressives, it was common to refer to such professors as “Socialists of the Lectern” who were contrasted with the vulgar Marxist socialists: regardless, such an organic theory of state, especially in it’s naturalized form free from Hegelian theory-celling, was seen as a kind of socialism! Therein lies the small truth to the boomer claim that America is a socialist country: the most prominent American state-crafters were believers in this theory of state, and you can find quotes from Woodrow Wilson bemoaning the antiquated theory of inalienable human rights found in our constitution as a theory of a bygone era. Such state-crafters, upon dissolving the myth of the state of nature, reach the natural conclusion that Man really has NO natural rights, and thus it’s entirely justified for the State to do whatever it wants to him, so long as it serves the God of Utility, perhaps the only God such a person really believes in (but I doubt even this). An organic theory, whose concepts clearly take from burgeoning biological theories of its inception, could provide a kind of biological/racial justification for a State. But it seems to be throwing out too much in the process for a small gain.
 
Ultimately I believe that all such theories of state are built on myths in their own way: I don’t really believe in the State of Nature, but the consequences of such a myth lead to a number of principles that I do hold dear even if they are built on elaborate fiction. Do natural, inalienable rights really exist? Personally I don’t think so. But a theory of state that defends the primacy of the individual over the encroachment of the masses is imminently important to me. The erosion of my own nation can easily be tied back to this fiction losing power: No longer does one have a right to free association, no longer can you say and believe what you want, and the idea we have anything close to free enterprise is an utter joke. These are all principles which I personally think lead to the greatest success for a State, and also allow for a process by which the best people will rise to the top, and will hopefully not suffer from the masses holding them back. Fictions can be useful, and it might be worthwhile to re-employ a State of Nature fiction to justify such principles being defended, but of course any intelligent person will understand this as a fiction, so where does that lead us?

We need a Theory of State that gives primacy to the individual and his rights as a private citizen to freely associate, speak, and conduct business as he pleases. We have to reject the idea that the State is a kind of public, organic whole whose demands rise above that of freely consenting individuals and is thus justified in running roughshod over their perceived, established ‘rights.’ The only theory I can think of that would fit this is some kind of patrimonialism. Here is an excerpt from Carlsbad’s article on Haller which describes the relations of state as simply a further gradation of the relations that exist between Father and Children, or a Master and his servant. A State arises through natural, sociable relations, but this doesn't mean that the State is an organic unit that holds power over said private individuals. The Head of State simply is the wealthiest or most powerful person in a given area, and the State is his own private domain. He may subjugate people by force, or they could join him under some formal agreement by which what they see as their individual rights continue to be respected. If the Prince attempts to ride roughshod over these rights under the guise of the Common Good, he’s violating a contract between private individuals and the lesser factions are justified in rising against him to assert their rights.

The issue here is that, to the best of my knowledge, Patrimonialists (or at least Haller) believes in a system of natural rights (as a consequence of his Catholicism). As I’ve already admitted I think such a concept to be a fiction just like those involved in Social Contract Theory and Divine Command Theory. So as it stands I need to think up some way to keep the positives of patrimonalism without being reliant on such a system of natural rights, if possible. As it stands I will stop here, I've likely said way too much as it is.

[Corvid]

I would ultimately agree with you that the "organic state" "racial state" etc has concerningly anti-individualistic implications, but I don't think that they are contradictory with ideas about natural rights per se. The state of nature is a false presumption but I believe a lot of the conclusions drawn from it like natural law are still valid considering the individual even in a tribal or organic setting. I do believe that Hobbes draws out too many presumptions himself in his theory of natural law but the premise of laying out the ideal behavior of rationally self-interested beings is still a reasonable one, insofar as humanity is still somewhat rationalizing rather than fully rational. There are just some caveats come from living in a state, by political necessity.

[Leverkühn]

I would ultimately agree with you that the "organic state" "racial state" etc has concerningly anti-individualistic implications, but I don't think that they are contradictory with ideas about natural rights per se. The state of nature is a false presumption but I believe a lot of the conclusions drawn from it like natural law are still valid considering the individual even in a tribal or organic setting. I do believe that Hobbes draws out too many presumptions himself in his theory of natural law but the premise of laying out the ideal behavior of rationally self-interested beings is still a reasonable one, insofar as humanity is still somewhat rationalizing rather than fully rational. There are just some caveats come from living in a state, by political necessity.

Of course it's entirely possible that racial state could include some defense of natural rights within it. I should have also added that Social Contract theories and the governments that came about when this was the prevailing theory of the day often found ways to exercise a great amount of power over individuals living within their territories. There was the hey day of the so-called 'Absolute Monarchs' of course. This is because most of the Social Contract theorists understood that, while it was disadvantageous, the Man who predated Society (living in the state of nature) would have been totally free. The limiting of rights was necessary in order to prevent man's war of all against all, as Hobbes puts it. And when Man finally decided to leave this mythologized state of nature and enter into a civil society under control of a Leviathan, he gave up all rights whatsoever. Here's how Hobbes' envisioned the explicit formulation of the social pact: 

I surrender my right to rule myself to this man or to this assembly on condition that you make a like surrender of yours. In this way the multitude has become a single person which goes by the name of a city or a republic. Such is the origin of this Leviathan or terrestrial deity, to whom we owe all peace and all safety.

 
The leader on whom this power is conferred (by mandate of individual people) has an unlimited collective right to act as he sees fit. Hobbes continues:

The sovereign, whatever he does, does no wrong to any of his subjects, and can never be accused of injustice by any of them. For, acting as he does only on a mandate, what right could those who have given him this mandate have to complain of him?

To my knowledge, Locke was the only social contract theorist who dared to say that in entering the social contract, the individuals retain some amount of rights to themselves and are in some limited way not accountable to the government set up. This is something Rousseau ridicules him for. But of course, nothing follows theory perfectly, and it would take some centuries before any Monarch could be send to hold an unlimited right to act, and even these supposed Absolute Monarchs were held in check by forces within the territories they governed. The English and French Kings would have had their power held in check by both the Church (whose power dwindles with the Reformation) and the local aristocracy, whose power dwindles with ever greater centralization of the government. Despite Hobbes' wishes the idea of natural law lived on and was expounded by jurists like Richard Cumberland and Samuel von Pufendorf. There was a tension between the Social Contract Theorists and these legal philosophers who argued from the Roman and Christian traditions, and the power of the monarchs was never totally absolute.

The advantage of the Social Contract theories, and what they took over from earlier theories of sovereignty and law (especially from the Romans) is that they still viewed Man as an individual predating civil society. As de Jouvenel puts in his book On Power, they still held on to a nominalist conception of society:

Before the nineteenth century it never occurred to any Western thinker to suppose that there was, in any collection of men subject to a common political direction, anything with a real existence except individuals. That had been the point of view of the Romans. They looked on the Roman people as an assemblage of human beings...They never imagined that this assemblage could be the parent of a "person" who was distinct from the persons making it up.

Thus, following the nominalist conception, society is and always had been an association of individuals. An association that could, theoretically, disassociate into different competing groups or body politics. It is always in the minds of theorists of the time that, ultimately speaking, Men are the reality of any given civil society, and the society itself (and the governing body) are mere conventions that have been consented to by said men. What the Organic Theory of State really dispenses with is this nominalist notion of society that believes Individuals came together to form society. If, as the Organic Theory puts it, society is always with man, there never was a consented choice to associate, and thus a disassociation is in some sense impossible. The body politic and the governing body is as "real" as the individuals who compose it. Furthermore, the collective being is more important than any one individual, or group of individuals. Previously, the monarch was to govern in the interest of individuals. The Monarch used his unlimited power in order that these individual subjects can freely go about obtaining their own ends, while ensuring they don't violate the free pursuit of ends of other individuals. The danger of such conflicts is why individuals entered into civil society in the first place.

But the point of the Organic State is to center itself above the individual in the defense of some Collective Being that is both real and transcends the needs of individuals. The good of society becomes the end of government in itself. Of course, the common good might well involve the defense of certain individual rights (few utilitarians, for instance, are wholly against civil liberties), but these rights only find justification in that they are good for society. One loses the metaphysical or historical basis for such rights existing to man. There is no set of "inalienable rights endowed by the Creator" to be found in such a theory. I'll end this post with another quote from de Jouvenel on this transition from theories of divine right and popular sovereignty to the organic theory of state, and its consequences:

This novel conception of society had momentous consequences. The idea of the common good now gets a completely different content from its former one. It is no longer a question of simply helping each individual to realize his own private good, but of achieving a social good of a much less definite character...All is changed when the rights that belong to individuals, their subjective rights, give place to an ever more exalted morality which must needs be realized in society. By reason of this end, there is no extension of itself which Power, as the agent of this realization, cannot justify. From that time on, then, as we can easily see, place is made for theories of the final cause of Power which Power finds exceedingly advantageous to itself. It has only, for example, to make the vague concept of social justice its end...There is now a collective being, which is of far greater importance than individuals: clearly, then, the right transcendent of sovereignty belongs to none other.

[Leverkühn]

I feel like I should expand on this for the sake of clarity. So let me go back to the original point this thread was wanting to analyze: how can we take from narratives of state legitimacy and see how they impact the material organization of the state? As I tried to make clear in the beginning of my last post, regardless of the form of government or the narrative used to legitimate it, all states tend towards greater usage of power. This point shouldn't be new to anyone here: any institution will seek to sustain itself. In order to sustain itself, it will also wish to extend its power projection. This is as true of institutions within a State (eg a Department of Education) as for the state itself. A state apparatus justified via supernatural laws will seek absolute power just as much as one founded on and justified via a social contract theory or one founded on any number of organic theories, whether those be democratic or racial in nature. But one area these theories do differ in is where they find the source of their legitimacy.

The Organic Theory, which finds its earliest elucidations in Hegel and then in the work of Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, is a materialist doctrine. It dispenses with the 'state of nature' myth and what I described as the nominalist view of society: the view that society is made up of individuals first and foremost. Thus, the organic state doesn't find its source of legitimacy or power in an argument to uphold the Order of God or the rights and privileges of individuals. The state, as a collective organism over and above any individual constituent, finds its source of legitimacy in the maintaining of the collective organism: it is its own legitimizing force. The individual has been totally absorbed by the state as simply a constituent part. The rights due to an individual are up to the will of society, and are modifiable at will. There are no rights which must necessarily be upheld, as the protection of such rights was never an agreed upon matter before the 'state' was set up. 

In contrast, a social contract theory states exactly that: individuals gave up their total, primitive freedom in unison so that some number of subjective rights be upheld (eg freedom from wonton harm by another member of the community). This is true under a Hobbesian system, which is often seen as the most authoritarian among the social contract theorists. Insofar as the Sovereign in such a society isn't upholding these subjective rights, he's failing at his duty. He's violating an agreed upon contract. However mythologized such a contract is, along with the movement of a state of nature into civil society, what it allows for is a vantage point from which to criticize the state's use of power as illegitimate. Envision, if you will, a Mass Democratic state justified on the organic theory, one that runs purely on laws democratically passed, with no constitution. In such a state, there's no real way in which a citizen who lives there could argue their 'rights' are being violated by a law that's democratically passed. You think you have a right to pass on your money to your kids? Well, the People just outlawed inheritance. Want to make a profit on that apartment complex you bought a few years back? The People just named housing a 'human right' and have instituted price floors so you have to sell at a loss now. What vantage point do you have to say you're being violated in any way? What the People say goes. From my point of view, constitutions are a leftover from a time when social contract theory was still popular. They explicitly lay out some kind of inalienable rights that the government has to uphold, even if the masses want to violate them. Hence it's no surprise that progressive governments want nothing more than to distort or outright nullify elements of constitutions everywhere so as to extend their power of citizens. They're a mediating force against the tyranny of the state, at least in theory. 

That leaves us with states who find their legitimacy in some form of supernatural laws. I've used the term divine law theory. Such theories are normally viewed as the ultimate way to justify absolute, totalitarian power. But is this really the case? Historically, few states founded on such a divine law theory have had as much control over the lives of their citizens as modern democratic states do. The reach of their power, as well as the centralization of their bureaucracies, pales in comparison to the states of the 18th and 19th centuries. In truth, such states cannot simply do whatever they want.  Much like states operating under a social contract narrative, states operating under the narrative of divine inheritance find the source of their legitimacy outside themselves. Of course, the Monarch in question has been given their power by God, but the Monarch has to operate within the guidelines of the given religion, as the power still ultimately comes from God. Again, here there is an objective basis by which a Monarch can be seen to be acting illegitimately. A Monarch who is a sinner, or passes sinful laws, is abusing the power given to him by God. He's an illegitimate ruler! Furthermore, most religions outline, rather objectively, certain rights or freedoms allowed to man, to individuals. Within the Bible for instance, we find passages that provide a clear defense of an individuals right to property, and to not have his possessions taken away by force. These aren't rights guaranteed to an individual by an organic state that can be taken away at will, nor are they something agreed to among individuals who enter into a covenant. They are eternal, static freedoms given by God Himself. Any violation of them is a violation of the natural order. Religion serves as a mediating force on the power of a monarch, rather than giving him the right to do whatever he wants. This is why medieval monarchs had to deal with interference from the Church in Rome, as well as with local religious clerics. They were not allowed to tax Church properties, for instance.

What I've attempted to make clear here is that, as we move from "Narrative I-III" (as I numbered them in my original post), we see a decrease in mediating institutions by which a government finds its source of legitimacy. A Divine State is answerable to God and to the natural rights of individuals. A Social Contract State is answerable to some semblance of natural, subjective rights of individuals who make up the state. An Organic State is answerable only to itself; there is no mediation of its powers or outside vantage point from which its actions could be judged as legitimate or illegitimate. So, in terms of material organization, greater freedom is granted to Organic States than to any other. Depending on what someone wants, this could be good or bad, of course. A libertarian wary of state force probably doesn't want to live in a state that doesn't recognize any form of natural rights belonging to individuals. But a White nationalist might want to endorse such a theory, as it provides an easy argument for Total Nigger Death: the health and prosperity of the White race demands it! Niggers don't have the right to live, no individual has any rights; so long as violent acts profits the race, there's no moral quandary to be found here. An organic state can justify a centralized eugenics program that directly controls who does and doesn't have the privilege of breeding in ways that a Divine Christian state clearly cannot (at least in my view). From there it's simply a question of what one wants to achieve, and what an ideal state would look like for us.

[Verl]

One should read up on the correlation between the growth in population of a polity/association and the growth in tyranny and oppression. if a settlement never exceeds Dunbar's number, and as such never reaches a point where a man can never know less people than the entirety of his community, would that not imply tyranny never takes root? Because, at least to my understanding, tyranny (and I mean true tyranny, not the globohomo definition), is caused by the apathetic view by the powerful on a segment of the population. When one will never have the capacity to truly get to know his whole realm, how can he effectively feel remorse if he hurts them?
This, the great variance in opinion based on relations, can be seen clearly in the differing in opinions of interracial marriage. When white Americans are surveyed with the question "do you support interracial marriage?", they get an overwhelmingly positive response, sometimes in the excess of >90%. However, when you alter the question to "do you support a close family member entering into an interracial marriage?", suddenly those who support such an act are in the minority!
Would not this be the same for the benevolence of that who rules? For someone with a normal moral outlook, excluding narcissists and sociopaths (who are by the way, far more effectively rooted out from smaller communities than their larger counterparts to begin with), if you ruled how could you imagine hurting a large swath of the population for your personal gain, if you had a personal connection to them all?
I know this does not exactly with the thread's theme, but I'd still like to point out my idea.

[Leverkühn]

One should read up on the correlation between the growth in population of a polity/association and the growth in tyranny and oppression. if a settlement never exceeds Dunbar's number, and as such never reaches a point where a man can never know less people than the entirety of his community, would that not imply tyranny never takes root? Because, at least to my understanding, tyranny (and I mean true tyranny, not the globohomo definition), is caused by the apathetic view by the powerful on a segment of the population.

This is going to hinge on one's ideology, because obviously you have certain leftists who will argue that even a father's dominion over his children is a form of tyranny. You don't even have to go to the communists or anarchists to find people saying stuff like this, it's something expressed by bluecheck libs who have written at The Atlantic. In case that tweet ever gets deleted, I'll post it in full:

parents are tyrants. "parent" is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people. [T]here are things you can do to try to minimize the abuse that's endemic to the parent/child relationship, but it's always there.

Sadly the number of people who hold such views are likely increasing in numbers. As you said this is just the 'globohomo' definition of the term, but globohomo does rule the day [until Q changes that. Trust the Plan]. But with that being said, I think you do raise a good point: it is worth investigating the relationship between the size of a polity and how oppressive or tyrannical it is. In a smaller social grouping (the extended family, for instance), even when you have a patriarch, it's likely that before making a decision he will call other members for consultation before making a decision that would effect them all. In smaller societies, the leader usually doesn't have the same power balance he has over his subjects like he comes to have in more centralized societies.

Would not this be the same for the benevolence of that who rules? For someone with a normal moral outlook, excluding narcissists and sociopaths (who are by the way, far more effectively rooted out from smaller communities than their larger counterparts to begin with), if you ruled how could you imagine hurting a large swath of the population for your personal gain, if you had a personal connection to them all?

I tend to agree with this as well. It's more of a psychological point but yes I definitely agree that a smaller community will be more tight-knit, and it's less likely that a ruler would be as cold and calculating with his subjects in such a society than he would be if ruling over a vast empire or even a moderately large kingdom. There's also the fact that, as a State grows to a larger and larger size, you have hired administrators and bureaucrats carrying out the the will of the ruler. Oftentimes these bureaucrats will be sent from the Kingdom's capital to execute laws in far-away regions they have no connection to. Of course such a person is going to be more cold and exacting in how they carry out their orders than someone who is ingratiated to the community. But of course, that's exactly why a King would hire such a person to do his bidding: it's like Stalin finding the most brutal, sociopathic people to run his gulags. Kindness and leniency are often the enemy of efficiency.

[Frenjamin]

I would like to propose another “theory of the origins of states” to what extent this is true or whether it applies to all states is debatable. It may even be wholly untrue. I propose a variation on social contract theory which does not include all men or all people but a select group of men freely associating to create war bands and mannerbunds which eventually become states. E.g romulus and remus’s wolf pack. Some or maybe all states originate in these 2 ways A) A hunter gatherer tribe who remained nomadic and eventually decided to rule lesser men. B) men without tribes form a mannerbund/war band these men either left their tribe together, left their tribe alone and met as freemen or where kicked out of their tribe. You could argue A)has its origins in B.
I believe this theory to be useful to us because A) It is analogous to any state WE form. I doubt any of us live in a really religious society, we don’t live in an area where everyone is a stateless freeman, I doubt any of us here are part of a formal tribe. Our path is meeting up and forming secret mafias and other such organisations whether they be parallel and replace the state or subvert the leviathan remains to be seen. We will be free spirited men/trouble makers who formed pacts.
B)
I believe this negates the problems and conclusions came to by theory 2. Excludes communists keeps that free men saw it in their interest to create the state, this also gives the idea to the few free spirited men that the state has this ethos of freedom for those who want it but also tells them that it as an institution is in the self interest of men like them.

Relating to divine rule and the question of domain it implies that the men looked past their next meal and beyond the people around him is the origin of this state. This means that the grand projects of the state are set and fulfilled by men who care about such things and those who want mere life get it.

Relating the the 3rd theory this one proposes that it can be true in certain case but also that their can be layers above tribe and the communitay.

I believe this theory encourages fraternity, entrepreneurship, colonialism and rejects subservience to the whims of the many or an entrenched priesthood.

TLDR this theory may to varying extents be anthropologically correct and will most likely be true for our state.

I may expand on this. I encourage reply’s expanding on this, rewording parts. I hope you give it thoughtful consideration.

[Leverkühn]

I would like to propose another “theory of the origins of states” to what extent this is true or whether it applies to all states is debatable. It may even be wholly untrue. I propose a variation on social contract theory which does not include all men or all people but a select group of men freely associating to create war bands and mannerbunds which eventually become states. E.g romulus and remus’s wolf pack. Some or maybe all states originate in these 2 ways A) A hunter gatherer tribe who remained nomadic and eventually decided to rule lesser men. B) men without tribes form a mannerbund/war band these men either left their tribe together, left their tribe alone and met as freemen or where kicked out of their tribe. You could argue A)has its origins in B.

I think there's definitely truth in the idea that early states or societies were made up of freely associating groups than then came to be groups. It's a good naturalistic explanation and it does seem that many societies begin to 'lift off' originally when numerous families (in an extended sense) come together either for means of war against a common enemy. The men who gain status within these early societies are often those who are capable of achieving greater resources for the tribe, which is why you so often see the unity of War Chief and Administrative Leader in early societies: the man who commands respect in a warlike time is the man best at winning wars. No surprise here. If the respect for the tribes is kept, I think this leads to a kind of aristocratic state, wherein a single chief is respected as a 'leader,' but he's moreso a first among equals. His power and influence isn't so great as to tower over the combined force of other 'mannerbund chiefs.' When the Head Chief wants to go to war, he gains the arms of his fellow mannerbund chiefs because they respect and trust him, not because he actually has the power to command them at threat of death. An example of this happening even in a more advanced society would be the early parts of the Odyssey when the Greeks are preparing for war, specifically the 'Catalogue of Ships:' independent city-states headed by families willingly provide arms and men to the High King, Agamemnon. Such a system is of interest because its aristocratic nature gives a great amount of freedom the individual chiefs or kings in how they head their tribe, and the centralized nature of the system serves as a check on the High King, or whoever might be the most powerful king among other kings.