It is true - the historical perspective shows that the creation of states or fundamental changes rarely occurred without violence. Even those regimes or political formations that we today consider progressive, democratic or "useful" often have a violent foundation at their origins.
Here are some key aspects of why this happens:
The state's monopoly on violence: The sociologist Max Weber argued that the state defines itself precisely through the "legitimate monopoly of physical violence." In order to create order, the old system was usually destroyed by force.
The paradox of revolutions: The French Revolution or the American War of Independence laid the foundations for modern human rights, but the processes themselves were accompanied by the guillotine, terror or bloody battles.
Territorial formation: Almost every modern state was formed through war, colonization, or forced assimilation, even if it later became a model of peace and prosperity.
The cost of stability: Historians note that great periods of "Pax" (peace) (e.g., Pax Romana or Pax Britannica) were usually achieved after brutal conquests that united divided regions.
This raises an ethical question: does every positive end result justify the violent means used to achieve it? This dilemma remains one of the central ones in the philosophy of history.
“This Land Is Your Land
By Beverly Gage
Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $30
The French historian Ernest Renan identified the tension between a nation-state's need for a legitimizing narrative and the often ugly truths of its actual past. "Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation," Renan declared in 1882. Hence, "progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial."
Renan's insight haunts this year's 250th anniversary of the United States -- a political formation that has blessed the world in innumerable ways but whose legitimacy has come under challenge from progressive journalists and academics focused on slavery, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, periodic civil-liberties violations and other ills. The right is pushing back by means fair and foul -- think of scholarly efforts to explain virtues of America's founding, on one side, and of the Trump administration's purge of "negative" material from historical sites, on the other.
In the middle of this struggle arrives Beverly Gage's "This Land Is Your Land," a travelogue of her recent journeys to memorials, monuments, national parks and other points of interest across the country. Ms. Gage, who teaches American history at Yale, presents the book as an attempt, timed for the semiquincentennial, to improve the contemporary "national historical dialogue, which tends to emphasize veneration or damnation over real understanding."
She writes that she hit the road believing two things: there's no better place than in situ to learn history; and "it's possible to hold both sets of ideas -- to know your history and still love your country. Americans can be patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once."
Ms. Gage -- whose nuanced 2022 biography of J. Edgar Hoover balanced the FBI director's excesses against his achievements -- is an accomplished historian and a capable writer. "This Land Is Your Land" touches impressionistically on a huge cast of characters, from Frederick Douglass to Henry Ford, and some 300 sites, from Mount Vernon to Disneyland. Her book will give history enthusiasts ideas for future vacations.
Especially engaging is her tour of western New York's Burned-Over District, named for its repeated firestorms of religious innovation and political radicalism in the early 19th century. Ms. Gage rightly contends that this region deserves more renown than it often gets. In its heyday, western New York was home to William H. Seward, John Brown, Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Gerrit Smith -- the last a wealthy abolitionist landowner who financed Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry: after which, Ms. Gage writes, "he checked into an insane asylum, terrified he would be held responsible for Brown's deeds."
The Burned-Over District was also where, in 1848, the Rev. John Humphrey Noyes established a cult-like spiritual community at Oneida, though all that's left today, Ms. Gage reports, is a "ramshackle" complex of brick buildings where you can stay overnight, take a yoga class or, in a small museum, learn about Noyes's bizarre fixation with preventing male orgasms.
Still, the book doesn't quite deliver on its promise; this "warts-and-all" look at the American past dwells, a bit predictably, on the warts. Visits to Mount Vernon and Monticello are treated mainly as occasions to remind us, as if any reader of this book will need reminding, that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were deeply implicated in slavery. Wasn't World War II a proud moment for the country? Ms. Gage deals with it by visiting the remnants of a Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, Calif., and the research facility in Los Alamos, N.M., where U.S. government scientists built the atomic bomb.
If Ms. Gage wanted some celebratory leaven, she could have visited Dayton, Ohio's many sites devoted to the Wright Brothers and their world-changing invention. She might have mentioned Hollywood or Broadway, two wellsprings of U.S. cultural soft power. None of these destinations made her itinerary. Innovators and entrepreneurs such as Ford and George Pullman, discussed on visits to Detroit and Chicago, respectively, figure mainly as exploiters of the working class.
Visiting Nashville, Tenn., Ms. Gage considers Andrew Jackson critically as the ruthless bane of indigenous people that he was, but she misses an opportunity to explore his Scots-Irish identity. That heritage gave both him and the backcountry settlers he epitomized their combative sense of equality and dignity -- rooted in the history of British impositions on their ancestral lands in Ulster. What angered Scots-Irish Americans most was elite condescension, which aroused the populist uprising that put Jackson in the White House.
A similar dynamic was at work in the rise of Donald Trump, unlikely tribune of the 21st-century working class.
In Renan's view, nationhood was not determined by race, religion, language or geography. Rather, he wrote, "a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle," made up of "a rich legacy of memories" combined with "present-day consent, the desire to live together." Continued existence, he wrote, requires "a daily plebiscite." His words apply well to the U.S., a creedal nation defined by the lofty sentiments set out on July 4, 1776. This country has violated its professed principles many times. What matters is that it has some.
Ms. Gage acknowledges this, quoting President Lyndon B. Johnson's description of American history as "the excitement of becoming." Yet a few paragraphs later she describes the country with three adjectives, "big, cruel, and transcendent," none of which is unambiguously positive, and urges readers to "make of it what we can." In the daily plebiscite on America, this Ivy League historian votes "Yes, but."
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Mr. Lane, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "The Day Freedom Died" and "Freedom's Detective."” [1]
1. The Nation, Warts and All. Lane, Charles. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Apr 2026: A13.
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