Not only from a variety of political processes, but from the ever-growing state itself, did many nineteenth-century thinkers fear a distinctive menace to person and personality. The lie of the identification of “state” and “people,” of “state” and “nation” moved Nietzsche to write these famous lines:
Thus spake Zarathustra:
State, what is that? Well then, now open your ears; now I will tell you my tale about the death of nations.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It lies coldly and this lie crawls out from its mouth: “I, the State, I am the People!”
Where there is still a real people it does not understand the State and hates it as the evil eye, as sin against morals and rights . . .