The present state of international society is a product of its past states. But who was responsible for making the past of international society? It was a clique of cliques, a conspiracy of one small part of the governing classes of those national societies which used diplomacy and war as the continuation of crude politics by other means.

The externalising of their internal social power somehow managed to override the profound differences of their national social systems, their profoundly different forms and degrees of social development, so that absolutist monarchies and republican city-states, and all intervening social forms, could interact in a game in which they were also the masters of the rules of the game (the so-called law of nations). They even purported to recognise rules about war (the mass murder of human beings and the mass destruction of property).

Still more mysteriously, the game of externalised social power somehow managed to survive revolutionary transformations within some of the national societies, so that an international governmental absolutism continued, unabated and unabashed, while very new social theory and social practice transformed every other aspect of the holding and exercise of public power.