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Quotation from Reflections on War and Death by Sigmund Freud
“the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco”
Reflections on War and Death, Part I, 'The Disappointments of War', trans. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (1918)
Freud describes what the individual citizen discovers in wartime about the state that had posed as guardian of morality; the comparison is to the Austrian state monopolies on salt and tobacco.
Citation: "the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco" — Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, Part I, 'The Disappointments of War', trans. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (1918). (id freud-reflections-on-war-and-death-q1)
