It has been often said that war is the health of the State – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the State is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the State... When risk becomes sharable, new possibilities emerge that were not possible before – the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most dramatic example.

Sadly, one of those possibilities – in all its horror, corruption, brutality and genocide – is war. In this essay, I will endeavour to show that, in its capacity to reduce the costs and risks of violence, the State is, in effect, the stock market of war...