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| 1942 masterwork on political thought & crisis |
26. 76. Historians to-day know that all history consists of changes, and that all these changes involve ‘reversals of fortune’. But the historical idea of a revolution implies that normally the course of history flows, as if by the Newtonian First Law of Motion, uniformly in a straight line: then it waggles, and you are surprised. This is how people really did think about history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it is one of the many signs that they did not know very much history.
Weimar’s collapse owed much to the weakness of a liberal-democratic conservatism.
Among the intellectual-made Utopian myths, none was weaker than the liberal myth of self-organizing market society. (Sorel might have added a later liberal myth, the myth of the end of myths.)
They [Nazi collaborators] felt (after they no longer needed to fear God, their conscience cleared through the bureaucratic organization of their acts) only the responsibility toward their own families. The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs, to a “bourgeois” concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon.
Bismarck’s legacy was quite the opposite. Few statesmen have so altered the course of history. Before Bismarck took office, German unity was expected to occur through the kind of parliamentary, constitutional government which had been the thrust of the Revolution of 1848. Five years later, Bismarck was well on his way to solving the problem of German unification, which had confounded three generations of Germans, but he did so on the basis of the pre-eminence of Prussian power, not through a process of democratic constitutionalism. Bismarck’s solution had never been advocated by any significant constituency. Too democratic for conservatives, too authoritarian for liberals, too power-oriented for legitimists, the new Germany was tailored to a genius who proposed to direct the forces he had unleashed, both foreign and domestic, by manipulating their antagonisms—a task he mastered but which proved beyond the capacity of his successors.
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