Defeat destroys small states but can regenerate large ones

Evidence

A lost war can ruin a small city-state, but regenerate a large state. The explanation is not so simple as it might seem: there is also the difference in the ratio of potential to actual energies. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3077

Categorization

• CANDY: A crisp counterintuitive one-liner about how political scale changes what a loss means.
• XREF: connects to: Italy’s military defeat at Caporetto triggered a new state welfare role — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 259; Economic rigidity and repression alone do not explain state collapse — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 106