Selected Essays | Page 5

modern State and of the actuality which is
connected therewith, and in addition the decisive repudiation of the
entire previous mode of the German political and juridical
consciousness, whose principal and most universal expression, elevated

to the level of a science, is speculative jurisprudence itself.
While, on the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and
exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only in
Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern
State, making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in
so far as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only
satisfies the whole of man in an imaginary manner.
Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done.
Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and
arrogance of her thought always kept an even pace with the
one-sidedness and stunted growth of her actuality. If, therefore, the
status quo of the German civic community expresses the completion of
the ancien régime, the completion of the pile driven into the flesh of the
modern State, the status quo of German political science expresses the
inadequacy of the modern State, the decay that is set up in its flesh.
As a decisive counterpart of the previous mode of German political
consciousness, the criticism of speculative jurisprudence does not run
back upon itself, but assumes the shape of problems for whose solution
there is only one means: practice.
The question arises: can Germany attain to a practice à la hauteur de
principes,[5] that is, to a revolution which will not only raise her to the
level of modern nations, but to the human level which will be the
immediate future of these nations?
The weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of
weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but
theory too becomes a material force as soon as it grasps weapons.
Theory is capable of grasping weapons as soon as its argument
becomes ad hommine, and its argument becomes ad hominem as soon
as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the matter by its root.
Now the root for mankind is man himself. The evident proof of the
radicalism of German theory, and therefore of its practical energy, is its
outcome from the decisive and positive abolition of religion.

The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme
being for mankind, and therefore with the categorical imperative to
overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, servile, neglected,
contemptible being, conditions which cannot be better described than
by the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a projected dog
tax: "Poor dogs; they want to treat you like men!"
Even historically, theoretical emancipation has a specifically practical
significance for Germany. Germany's revolutionary past is particularly
theoretical, it is the Reformation. Then it was the monk, and now it is
the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins.
Luther vanquished servility based upon devotion, because he replaced
it by servility based upon conviction. He shattered faith in authority,
because he restored the authority of faith. He transformed parsons into
laymen, because he transformed laymen into parsons. He liberated men
from outward religiosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair
of the heart. He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid
chains upon the heart.
But if Protestantism is not the true solution, it was the true formulation
of the problem. The question was no longer a struggle between the
layman and the parson external to him; it was a struggle with his own
inner parson, his parsonic nature. And if the protestant transformation
of German laymen into parsons emancipated the lay popes, the princes,
together with their clergy, the privileged and the philistines, the
philosophic transformation of the parsonic Germans into men will
emancipate the people. But little as emancipation stops short of the
princes, just as little will the secularization of property stop short of
church robbery, which was chiefly set on foot by the hypocritical
Prussians. Then the Peasants' War, the most radical fact of German
history, came to grief on the reef of theology. To-day, when theology
itself has come to grief, the most servile fact of German history, our
status quo, will be shivered on the rock of philosophy.
The day before the Reformation, official Germany was the most abject
vassal of Rome. The day before its revolution, it is the abject vassal of
less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country squires and

philistines.
Meanwhile there seems to be an important obstacle to a radical German
revolution.
Revolutions in fact require a passive element, a material foundation.
Theory becomes realized among a people only in so far as it represents
the realization of that people's needs. Will the immense cleavage
between the