Pedant corner

From: Roger McCarthy <rogermccarthy_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 20:01:32 GMT


Martin Laurie

>Did Lenin not say that war is the engine of state?

Not IIRC - you may be thinking of:

Heraclitus: 'War is the father of all things' (sometimes attributed to Nietzsche who quotes Heraclitus a number of times)

Rudolf Rocker (early C20 Anarchist and Pacifist) 'War is the health of the state'

Hegel also says something similar in his Philosophy of Right (Don't have it in front of me right now) which IIRC Lenin heavily annotated in his copy which was lovingly preserved and reproduced in one of the duller volumes of Lenin's collected works

Given that Marx and Engels were both originally Hegelians no doubt it crops up in their collected works somewhere too...

Heraclitus (sometimes probably apocryphally called The Unbearable) certainly strikes me as very Dara Happan given that he also believed that 'All is Fire' and that men had dryer souls than women thus justifying their inferior position - he was also the main influence on Stoicism.

There's a number of good books on the pre-socratics that will tell you more.

ROGER



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