ABSTRACT
The civil rules are used to channel behavior into what a given society regards as acceptable paths, which will be fairly consistent in all societies; every society must ensure that the elemental processes necessary for its survival and that of the individuals who comprise it are carried out effectively. The rise of bureaucracies that gathered and analyzed information about the land, people, and their resources allowed nation-states to tighten their hold on society and to extract resources from it through taxation. The monopolization of violence at home, coupled with increasing urbanization and the crime it facilitated, eventually led states to create formal police forces. Centralized response strategies for internal and external threats were, and are, perfectly logical strategies for dealing with physically based activity. The Peace of Westphalia dismantled the Christian state and replaced it with a congeries of discrete, autonomous, self-governing units.
