About the Author and Book

THE MAN (1864—):

Franz Oppenheimer, one of a fairly large number of British, French and German physicians who abandoned their medical pursuits and rose to fame as political economists, was born in Berlin. He studied and practiced medicine, became private Lecturer of Economics at the Berlin University in 1909, and Professor of Sociology at the Frankfort University in 1919. His libertarian views made him, for many years, the target of academic persecutions, until the growing fame of his masterpiece, The State, effectively silenced his detractors.

THE BOOK (1908):

The organic history of the State is a long and exciting adventure, usually rendered dull in learned accounts. Not so in Oppenheimer’s The State which extracts that history, in a highly stimulating manner, from the sharp necessities and homicidal conflicts of all sorts and conditions of men, from the Stone Age to the Age of Henry Ford. The easy flow of important information derivable from this German volume has rendered it highly acceptable to American readers.