The Idealistic Method.
Any one who has read a goodly number of idealistic works treating of public economy (the state, law etc.) cannot have failed to be struck by the enormous differences, and even contradictions, as to what theorizers have considered desirable and [pg 107] necessary. There is scarcely an important point which the highest authorities may not be cited for or against. We must not close our eyes to this fact. “The giddiness that comes from contemplating the depths of knowledge is the beginning of philosophy, as the god Thaumas was, according to the fable, the father of Iris.” (Plato.) In a precisely similar manner, the student of public economy (politics, the philosophy of law etc.) must familiarize himself with the variations that have taken place in what men, at different periods of history, have required of the state and public economy, until he is lost in wonder at the contemplation.
Section XXIII.
The Idealistic Method. (Continued.)
It is impossible to fail to notice at once that those ideal descriptions which have enjoyed great fame and exerted great influence, depart very little from the real conditions of the public economy (of the state, law etc.) surrounding their authors.[170] This is not mere chance. The power of great theorizers, as, indeed, of all great men, lies, as a rule, in this, that they satisfy the want of their own time to an unusual extent; and it is the peculiar task of theorizers to give expression to this want with scientific clearness, and to justify it with scientific depth. But the real wants of a people will, in the long run, be satisfied in life,[171] so far as this is possible to the moral imperfection [pg 108] of man. We should at least be on our guard when we hear it said that whole nations have been forced into an “unnatural” course by priests, tyrants and cavilers. For, to leave human freedom and divine Providence out of consideration entirely, how is such a thing possible? The supposed tyrants are generally part and parcel of the people themselves; all their resources are derived from the people. They must have been new Archimedeses standing outside of their own world. (Compare, however, infra, § 263.)
It is true, that if the result of the growth of generations be to gradually produce a different people, these different men may require different institutions. Then a struggle arises between the old and those of the younger generation; the former wish to retain what has been tested by time, the latter to seek for the satisfaction of their new wants by new means. As the sea always oscillates between the flowing and ebbing of the tides, so the life of nations, between periods of repose and of crisis: periods of repose, when existing forms answer to the real substance of things, and of crisis, when the changed substance or contents seeks to build up a new form for itself. Such crises are called reforms when they are effected in a peaceful way, and in accordance with positive law. When accomplished in violation of law, they are called revolutions.[172]
That every revolution, it matters not how great the need of the change produced by it, is as such an enormous evil, a serious, [pg 109] and sometimes, fatal disease of the body politic, is self-evident. The injury to morals which the spectacle of victorious wrong almost always produces can be healed, as a rule, only in the following generation. Where law has been once trampled on, the “right of the stronger” will prevail; and the stronger is, to some extent, the most unscrupulous and reckless in the choice of the means to be employed. Hence, the well-known fact, that in revolutionary times the worst so frequently remain the victors. The counter-revolution which is wont to follow on the heels of revolution, and with a corresponding violence, is a compensation only to the most shortsighted. It allows the disease, the familiarizing of the people with the infringement of law, to continue, until the hitherto sound parts are attacked. Hence, a people should, if they would have it go well with them, in the changes in the form of things which they make, take as their model Time, whose reforms are the surest and most irresistible, but, at the same time, as Bacon says, so gradual that they cannot be seen or observed at any one moment. It is true, that, as all that is great is difficult, so also is the carrying out of uninterrupted reform. Its carrying out, indeed, supposes two things: a constitution so wisely planned as to keep the doors open both to the disappearing institutions of the past and to the coming institutions of the future; and, among all classes of the people, a moral control of themselves, so absolute that, no matter what the inconvenience, or how great the sacrifice, legal ways shall alone be used. In this manner, two of the greatest and apparently most contradictory wants of every legal or moral person, the want of uninterrupted continuity and that of free development, may be satisfied.