[WS:] What is that state? Can you elaborate?
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Remember it was called anarchy by Ronald Reagan. What it really amounted to was open ended participatory democracy. I wish I could remember the exact sequence of events. Unchecked memory is not reliable.
The formal state under Reagan could only move troops and cops around. But this kind of authority is meaningless. People go about their business and try to avoid them. Remember armies and police do no productive work. People creat their authority and then follow. If that mental equation evaporates, so does state authority. But that doesn't mean that there is no order to the social `body'. It still works.
I ordered Wolff's book which is theory, but I saw it in practice. Like I said, it amounts to direct rule by public consensus. Somehow a collective consciousness forms. It is usually dramatized as mob rule, but that isn't what really happened. I assume it was what happened to the French National Assembly, before the Committee for Public Safety took over.
I should study that history, but I never have. Marx must have seen something like it again in 1848. Accounts of the early phase of the Russian Revolution before the civil war broke out also read a little like what I saw in miniture or toy form. There must have been something like it when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember thinking about it while I was watching a group break into the main East German police HQ and dump their police files out in the street.
Wolff has his memoirs on line, but so far I haven't found the most important part, the events inside Columbia in 1968. A university is a social institution where this authority equation is carried around as a mental set of power, suboardinations, knowledge, and so forth. That equation can evaporate. What can happen is a reconstitution of the idea of what a university should form comes out, and something different forms.
Strauss must have seen this in some early part of Weimar. He got out of the army in Nov 1918 right in the middle of the revolution and went back to Marburg. But this was at the same time that the SPD and KPD were fighting it out over control of Bavaria. Obviously state authority had disappeared. I am pretty sure he wanted his life back the way he imagined it's future should be. That obviously didn't happen. Those brief years of a much more tangible freedom pushed in all sorts of directions, depending on who was effected. Arendt went left. Strauss went right.
Anyway Wolff had some experience with evaporation at Columbia.
The main point is that once authorities feel/see their power evaporate, they get out the gun. But what if the guns don't work? What if people are ready to organize another system and creat different rules?
CG