The State as God

"The state, whenever it expresses itself, makes law. There are no longer any norms to regulate the activity of the state; it has eliminated the moral rules that judged it and absorbed the legal rules that guided it. The state is a law unto itself and recognizes no rules but its own will. When, in this way, technique breaks off the indispensable dialogue between the law and the state, it makes the state a god in the most theologically accurate sense of the term: a power which obeys nothing but its own will and submits to no judgment from without."

                                          —Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
                                                  (London: Jonathan Cape, [1954] 1965,
                                                              trans. John Wilkinson), p. 299.