Benedetto Croce's "History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century"

Dear Hiveans,

this is a (very long) compilation of quotes from the book "History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century" written in 1933 by Benedetto Croce (link_goodreads, wiki), with some short remarks of mine.

source

On the other hand, in the doctrinal and publicistic spheres there began to make itself felt a tendency to illustrate and inculcate a more practical and more political concept of liberty. Some dreamed of institutions resembling the English, half-way between the modern and the mediaeval, with local autonomies and feudal privileges and representation of states and classes-that is, they wished to oblige Germany in the 19th century to go through the development of English institutions at the very time when in England this development was reaching a crisis of rationalization. Others, instead, preferred French examples, but even here not without a retardatory process, recalling the constitution of 1791 and not seeing or not accompanying with full sympathy the fruitful constitutional struggle in France in their own times. The Rhenish populations and those of South Germany, who had experienced the reforms and known the administration of the French, did not conceal their love of France and her manner of life, and often dared to invoke the "conquest of neo-Latin rights," to the scandal and horror of the Teutonists, and professed themselves quite as "liberal" as the Prussians were "feudal" and (such was the consequence of having split the national movement from the liberal one) shrank from German unity out of aversion to Austria or Prussia, who were differently but equally illiberal.
[...]
At this time the writings of Madame de Stael, of various French emigres, and of other intermediaries won a reputation in every part of Europe for the philosophy and the historiography and the aesthetics of Germany, and for the literature and the poetry of the same people, equally pregnant with philosophical problems and philosophical ideas. Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, and Johann Müller and Niebuhr and Savigny, were translated and variously interpreted, condensed, and commentated; the tragedies of Schiller were read and became popular, and attempts were made to master the difficulties of Faust; and at the same time the cult of Shakespeare was first introduced into the neo-Latin countries, and that knowledge of the poets of all peoples and of all times heralded as Weltliteratur was transplanted to France and elsewhere. This was truly the great European age of Germanism, far better and far greater than that other of the barbaric invasions, when, no matter what idle fancies may have been repeated later, the Germans were unable to offer any valuable contributions and had to let the.mselves be instructed and civilized in the school of Byzantium and Rome. This German thought gathered up the heredity of the Reformation and humanism and went back through Rome to Hellas and then from Hellas to the Indo-Europeans and the oldest East of all, whence it came down, with widened gaze, to the knowledge of the modern world. It provided, as has been observed, the solid speculative and historical basis of liberty, even if several of its national authors and devotees set up on this basis old and poorly restored political or governmental idols, and, above all, that of conservatism; the greater part set up nothing at all, considering it complete in itself, the end of their efforts, inert doctrine and contemplation.

• This is an interesting context of why Plessner later called Germany "the delayed nation"

Words like these which Cousin pronounced in his lectures, carrying his audience of young Frenchmen away, and which are more or less the same as Hegel's: "History, in its beginning as in its end, is the spectacle of liberty, the protest of the human race against anyone who would lay shackles on it, the affranchisement of the spirit, the reign of the soul, and the day when liberty ceased in the world, would be that in which history would stop"-such words sounded and had their effect quite differently in France from the way they did in Germany. So that Heine jested about the "providential ignorance" of Cousin, so useful to the French, who (he explained), if they had truly known and understood German philosophy, would never have staged their July Revolution.

As this opposition was still in the embryonic stages, it was not against it but rather against the three others that liberalism, during these years, directed its principles, its particular concepts, its institutions. This, together with the disintegration of monarchical absolutism, was the most important factor of these active and creative fifteen years, out of which liberalism issued not only victorious but strengthened in a complex of doctrines and corresponding modes and practices on which it thrived for a long time and on which it may be said to be still living today. It is self-evident that a similar theoretical development could not take place in Germany and in Italy; but it did not take place even in England, who already had this system at work, opposed by nobody, and therefore had little need to spend much intellectual activity over it or to provide doctrinal justifications, contenting herself with deducing the last consequences. For the other questions in which she was particularly involved, industrial growth, taxation, tariffs, England preferred to cultivate the science most useful to her, political economy, which at this time produced its Malthus and its Ricardo. English philosophy, represented by Bentham and thinkers of the same turn of mind, worked, however, with the concepts of the interest of the individual and the interest of the whole and of their harmony, and held liberalism, in theory, back to much of the abstract utilitarianism that derived from 17th-century rationalism, and so did not allow it to observe the dialectical and historical currents demanded by the new century.

Under these conditions, the other problem, that of German unity, since it could not be solved by means of a country rendered politically homogeneous and with its national will expressed in its assemblies, had no other road than that of conquest and assimilation on the part of one of the states. Now of the two stronger states, Austria represented the opposite of the principle of nationality, so all that remained was to look to Prussia, and to the revival that she had encouraged, in this regard, of the tradition of her Frederick II. But this tradition was antiromantic no less than that of the bureaucratic state, and the King shrank back from it with a shudder of horror, because he revered in Austria the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire and beheld her once more at the head of a Christian-German state, in which the King of Prussia would assume the place and figure of the great and foremost vassal, famous for his fidelity and his valour. In this state of mind, although he was a Protestant, he was filled with an undiminished tenderness and reverence for the Catholic Church, a shadow, no less than Austria, of the vanished European unity of the Middle Ages, and here he encountered fancies like those which had flourished in South Germany among the "Alemannen." Just as these political ideas concerning the national unity were uncertain and inert, so the feeling of independence, that is, of hatred of France, was ready to burst forth. At one time France had trampled on Germany, she still possessed ancient lands of the Empire, and now she seemed to he longing for the left bank of the Rhine. This hatred exploded in a formidable fashion in 1840, because of the suspicion aroused by Thiers's policy, and was voiced in songs that were Germany's only truly political songs, the "Marseillaise" of a people that never had the other, the true one, against tyrants and for the oppressed. And since there was no foreign domination in Germany, this feeling of independence, only in part justified as a defence against possible menaces, would have remained void if it had not contained not a properly patriotic, but a nationalistic and imperialistic motive. This was made manifest not only by the idealized image of the Holy Roman Empire, but also by the fact that those German patriots did not dream of the rights of independence of the other nations, and in their plans included, together with Austria, the continuation of her dominion over the lands of Italy and over those of the other nationalities comprised within her state. These intentions were seen as early as 1848, and in the Frankfort Parliament. In fact, the Ottos (lofty memory!) had attempted to descend as far as Southern Italy, and the Swabians had held this as well as Sicily.

• I wonder how "Germany" would have developped if it had been "united" by the Austrian Hapsburgs instead of the Prussians. My guess would be: less autocrat, less martial, more laissez-faire, less bureaucratically efficient.

Russia was unable to escape the force of the national idea, which, shorn of its liberal content, had modelled itself on the pan-Germanism of the mediaevalizing German romantics and other similar reactionary political writers and utopists, turning into Pan-Slavism and imperialism.

But there was always the Church of Rome, firm in these dogmas, ready to intervene and remind everyone that the enemy of Catholicism had once been catharism and evangelism and now was liberalism. [...]
And both the Catholics who were obedient to the Church and the Church unremitting against liberalism, the former as political as the latter, satisfied the demands of conscience and those of authority by the customary expedient of casuistry and compromise, distinguishing between "dogmatic intolerance," to be rigidly preserved, and "civil tolerance," to be permitted, and between the "principle of liberty," which the Church and every good Catholic must condemn and abhor, and the "practical and limited liberties" established by the constitutions, which might be approved.
At the same time might he noted the first signs of the approach (judged to be inevitable by Cavour) of ultramontanism toward socialism, among the social-democratic Catholics (Ozanam, Buchez), who had passed from Saint-Simonism to Catholicism. This occurred at the very time when Kingsley of the Anglican Church was coining the phrase "Christian socialism." As in liberalizing clericalism, here too substantially conflicting conceptions were reconciled, which at first covered their heterogeneous nature with mediaeval trappings of revived guilds and corporations, and later passed frankly to less anachronistic projects. The "popular party" that was formed in Italy in our day, and the others with the same or a different name but with a similar character in other countries, take their remote origin from the effect exerted on these clericals by the July Revolution, the defeat of absolutism, and the rise of new social conflicts. For in these years indeed were laid the capital bases of the political struggle that is still going on. Communism, which then for the first time seized minds and imaginations and shook them and overturned them, was foreseen as triumphant in the near future, greeted with a blaze of joy, repelled with horror. It also formed at this time its system and its methods, and conceived its full thought, so that nothing essential was added or changed later. Its material was furnished by the revolution, fulfilled or in process of execution, in industry and commerce, thanks to the use of machines and means of rapid transportation. This revolution, which greatly accelerated productive processes, upset the stability of the economic classes, crowded great masses of workmen into the cities, lowered wages because of the unemployed, made use of the work of women and children at low wages and for long hours, enriched rapidly and to an exaggerated degree contractors and capitalists and, correspondingly, landowners, gave rise to the predominance of financiers and bankers (represented by the world-famous Rothschild) and, with all this, let loose a competitive battle with ensuing crises and bankruptcies and misery; not to mention the tumults and the working-men's riots that occurred not infrequently, and the dangers to the social order from them. These facts and these conditions did not of themselves produce, as some like to mythologize, communism or any other political system by determinism, or in the form, as it were, of an immediate result of the workmen's sufferings, but they set before thinkers (and these and not the working-men were the authors of communism, as of every other political system) economic and moral problems, the need for a better organization of production, for justice and humanity and civilization, and for the exhortation and. education of new social classes towards political feelings and desires. These problems are doubtless substantially the same as those which have always woven the web of life of human societies and through which the thread of their history runs, but because of the conditions to which they were referred they now appeared with a new perspective and a new physiognomy. To solve them was the political task of the present, but to solve them in relation to the present, to the intellectual and ethical forces now at play, to the ways that were open or that might be opened, and, therefore, with the consciousness that, with the ulterior change in things and as an effect of these very solutions themselves, the problems would from time to time appear again in other ways and with other possibilities of action. For to have wished to solve them all radically and forever would have been the same as to have wished to set up a goal for human life and an end to history. However, if this aim did not exist, if it did not always rise anew in men's minds, we should not have what is called a Utopia, which is precisely the idea of such an integral and definitive solution, and the dilation of particular and circumstantial problems, which alone are actual and solvable, to a total non-existent problem, one called, for instance, the social question, a question "qui n'existe pas," as a French politician once exclaimed. And he was right, and it would be more obvious how right he was if the formula "social question" were translated into the other synonymous one "historical question," or question of human history"-which is clearly a question that does not exist.

• The relationship between Catholicism and Socialism is quite interesting.
• And, it wasn't the workingmen who were the authors of communism but so-called thinkers.

As may be seen, all that flowed together into Marx's social system existed before him, scattered here and there, and even in part gathered together: historical materialism, thought and art and religion as the phenomenology of economics, antiliberalism, class warfare, the succession of historical epochs with the proletarian end, surplus labour and surplus value, the criticism of the disorder in capitalist production and of its crises, and so on. But Marx lent singular vigour to all these concepts and these budding concepts, and he re-elaborated them and synthetized them with the dialectic of the Hegelian school. This dialectic, which had been universal, formal, and hermeneutic by nature in the teacher and still more so in his pupils, had been mingled with empiricism and imagination, and had led to strange ethical and social concoctions, notably in the so-called left of the school, to which Marx belonged, and in Germany it had reached the desperate egolatry and anarchy of Stirner. When a few of its rays spread to Proudhon in France, they suggested to him the criticism of economic contradictions, with thesis and antithesis, and the synthesis that also in him, in his fashion, was anarchical. Marx, developing the contradictions of the capitalist or bourgeois age that had followed that of feudalism, and which generated, gave birth to, and educated the proletarians as its grave-diggers and successors, derived from it the communistic synthesis that would be accomplished by these executors of historical necessity. On this dialectical scheme he set up and formulated, towards the end of 1847, his Communist Manifesto. In this lies his originality, not as a philosopher or an economist (for in that respect, only a few fragments of his thought are still useful), but as a creator of political ideologies or myths. For he gave to the communist movement, if not a basis, at least a robe of philosophy and history, and provided it with a book, Das Kapital, of great prestige over minds not gifted with the power of criticism, over the imaginations and the passions and the hopes, a prestige that even amid the decay suffered by all the concepts with which that book was interwoven, still lasts and operates. At the same time, he made an end of moralism and sentimentalism, and turned to more elementary and facile motives. If Weitling had given to his "Federation of Tastes" the motto, All men are brothers, he gave the other, Proletarians of all the world, unite--unite in hatred and in destructive warfare. But with the dialectics introduced by him, although it seemed as though the rational certainty of the future was obtained, he profoundly modified the method of actuation. And he not only did away with that of the first communists, whom he defined as "utopists," but with that of insurrection and coups de main as well, both of them equally puerile in the eyes of the philosophical and dialectical method, which demanded that the objective historical process be accompanied by thought and action, and that its consecutive phases be truly lived, and which wanted violence to intervene only at the right moment, to pluck the fruit when it had reached maturity. The end was communistic and materialistic, but the method, on the contrary, aimed at being historical.

• Great wording: "For he [Marx] gave to the communist movement, if not a basis, at least a robe of philosophy and history, and provided it with a book, Das Kapital, of great prestige over minds not gifted with the power of criticism".

By this means in France, to the old formula of republicanism, which had had its representative in Carrel and still found followers, was added that which was represented by men like Ledru-Rollin, who wished to arrive at universal suffrage, and from there to go on to all social reforms. Social democracy was the resting-place of Lamennais, who [...] after the failure of his attempt to fuse Church and liberalism, was unable to remain either Catholic or liberal, but impetuously turned himself into a democrat and a socialist. The terms had changed. It was no longer a struggle between liberalism and absolutism, but one between liberalism and democracy, from its moderate to its extreme and socialist form. This struggle, which was the truly present and progressive struggle of the 19th century, was developed, as we have observed, in the countries that enjoyed liberty.

• Croce is very early in hypothesizing a connection between democracy and socialism.

They had not only to overcome the reluctance or the hostility of the minor princes and of Prussia herself, but also to decide whether Austria was to enter the future unitary order-either with all her pluri-national sovereignties or only with such as were German--or whether she was to remain outside, allowing the other states to group themselves around Prussia. The first was called the "big-German" solution, the second the "little-German." In the end the latter prevailed, with the additional declaration that a treaty of union would he concluded between the two empires, the German and the Austrian. And so they went on to the final deliberation by which the imperial German dignity was offered to the King of Prussia. But Frederick William, who received the deputation of the parliament in Berlin on April 3, 1849, refused a crown that had been presented to him by a popular assembly and therefore seemed to him to be soiled with blood and mud, reeking with revolution. He would never allow his divine right to be submerged and rebaptized in the will of the nation and to lose its "Borussism," its Prussianism, in Germanism, as was the tendency of the national-liberal movement.

The Czar had said that the revolutionary tide would die down at the frontier of his states; and so it did. Vigilance within the country was rigid and extremely sensitive; books that had already been censored were censored again; the circulating libraries were purged and repurged; the chair of European public law was removed from the universities, philosophical instruction was restricted to logic, philosophy, and psychology and entrusted to professors of theology, and classical instruction was almost entirely abolished. Under this enforced tranquillity, a generation of extreme rebels was being prepared, because the lack of every liberty, which hinders the formation of a culture that implies discernment and criticism, turned the minds of students either to turbid day-dreams, mystical in origin, or to abstract and simplifying rationalism, or to a mixture and jumble of the two things; it caused men to confuse the ill-understood, universal explanations of philosophy with practical programmes, and created the mania, as was said then, for applying them. In addition, if in Alexander I's day those who later became the Decembrists used to read the works of Constant, Destutt de Tracy, Bentham, the new generation fed secretly on the doctrines of the materialists and the French and Gennan sociologists and utopists. Russia's great question, which was the agrarian question, seemed to stress communism there in preference to economic freedom and political liberalism, which were exceeded before they were born; and the idea began to he formulated that Russia, unlike the countries of Western Europe, would shorten the path of history, joining the communistic future because of her ancient agrarian communities, and thus skipping the bourgeois and liberal era.
But unfortunately she had also skipped the long religious and philosophical travail of Europe and the centuries of training in logically correct and rigorous thought and in criticism and caution, and all the cognate and complex experience, rich in humanity. Her intelligentsia, as it was called, her cultured class, did not even suspect the finesse and the complexity of European intelligence. Legal sentiment in Russia was weak or absent, even in the class of big landed proprietors, the only one of any importance alongside the immense number of peasants still tied to the soil. This made Herzen (who is responsible for the theory mentioned above concerning the future of the agrarian communities) say that no country was so well fitted as Russia for an integral revolution and for a radical "social regeneration," since all that was needed was a coup de force. […]
In the midst of the general hatred of his tyranny and harshness, the fervid religious faith, the finn political conviction, the straightforwardness, the loyalty, and the disinterestedness of Czar Nicholas-this last intransigent champion of the absolutist cause left among the princes of the world-were often recognized even by his adversaries. None the less, the reactionary efficacy of Russia in Europe had diminished from 1815 to 1830 and from 1830 to 1848, although publicists were still concerned, even afraid, lest this vast empire turn loose millions of armed men on the West in an Attila-like invasion. But before much time was to pass, this menacing military power too was to reveal the limits of its strength, and that efficacy was to vanish altogether.

• Russia indeed skipped the bourgeois and liberal era - until today. What a pity.

Marx knew perfectly well that the insurrections like that of June, which were not preceded by any social preparation or by a ripening of economic institutions, did not provide the means for setting up communism, and he had already laughed at the ingenuous utopists and rejected the theories of the Saint-Simonians (who abandoned themselves with Enfantin, as has been said above, to the Second Empire, declaring that "authority alone was capable of actuating human and individual happiness"); and the events of 1848 strengthened him in his convictions. The articles and pamphlets that he composed at this time on the history of these revolutions and reactions, clairvoyant as they were even in the narrowness of their visual angle and in their total lack of historical and human sympathy, in their universal satire did not spare the proletarians and their leaders. This lack of sympathy, this "greater element of anger than of love in his heart" that Mazzini noted in him together with "dominating temper,'' this lack of human kindness, and the sarcasm against his own followers, and the admiration that he felt only for the "aristocrats," his rivals and his models--according to the impression that Marx made upon the democrat Techow-prevented him from approaching not only the democracy at which he mocked but any liberal form whatsoever.

If it were possible in political history to speak of masterpieces as we do in dealing with works of art, the process of Italy's independence, liberty, and unity would deserve to be called the masterpiece of the liberal-national movements of the 19th century: so admirably does it exhibit the combination of its various elements, respect for what is old and profound innovation, the wise prudence of the statesmen and the impetus of the revolutionaries and the volunteers, ardour and moderation; so flexible and coherent is the logical thread by which it developed and reached its goal. It was called the Risorgimento, just as men had spoken of a rebirth of Greece, recalling the glorious history that the same soil had witnessed; but it was in reality a birth, a sorgimento, and for the first time in the ages there was born an Italian state with all and
with only its own people, and moulded by an ideal. Victor Emmanuel II was right when he said, in his speech from the throne on April 2, 1860, that Italy was no longer the Italy of the Romans or of the Middle Ages, but "the Italy of the Italians."

• Reminder to myself: read about the risorgimento. I am doubtful that the Italian "unification" was a good idea, as the different regions were and are too diverse to be ruled centrally.

And since the rival that had risen beside France on the Continent was Germany, elevated to new splendour by the Prussian victory of 1866 over Austria, and since it was Germany that French public spirit was watching with suspicion and jealousy, it was there that Louis Napoleon too was obliged to look, spurred on in spite of himself to seek for a field of action there from which to bring back the glory that the French people thirsted for and which was necessary to the empire. And, reciprocally, Germany was aware of this hostility and of the hindrance that it was raising or would raise to her political development, and she lived through in memory all the past of this rivalry, all the damage that the "hereditary enemy" had inflicted upon her, and she too dreamed of her glory in a victory that would be both revenge and the definitive termination of this damage and this menace. There was, therefore, the obscure danger of another war in preparation. But the war that broke out before long was fraught, because of the way in which it was conducted and closed, with grave consequences to the whole of Europe, and contributed to determine in her a state of mind very different from that which had been in the desires and the hopes of the generation that had accomplished its work from 1848 to 1870.

The formation of the German Empire and that of the kingdom of Italy are generally placed side by side as two parallel cases of the general national movement, which with these two new states was supposed to have reached its principal aim and to have rested there. This common judgment is due to the consideration of certain generic and extrinsic resemblances and to the prevalence of the chronological vision of contemporaneity over the truly historical vision, which on the contrary discerns what is peculiar and characteristic in the two events, and leads us to consider them as two distinct forms or ideal epochs, the one closing, the other opening. Certainly, as has been noted, a more intimate affinity between the two peoples and between their ideals was suggested in 1848 and outlined itself in the so-called new era about 1860; and that explains why Italian patriots were stirred by a feeling of brotherhood for what the Germans were demanding and seeking, and why they did not look too closely at the imperialistic tone of the Frankfort Parliament itself. But the affinity was submerged in the process that actually developed from 1862 to 1870 and which, diversely from the Italian, was not a movement for liberty nor for independence from foreign rule, and not even one for compact national unification. On the contrary, it consisted in driving out of the union of German states the state that throughout a long and venerable historical tradition had represented the entire Germanic nation before the world, and in regrouping the others under one of them of more recent origin and importance, thus constituting the German Empire. It was, therefore, rightly speaking, the formation of a power, or, which comes to the same thing, the potentiation of powers scattered and feebly joined together thanks to a unitary process of soldering, and the acquisition in this way of the capacity to exert a political efficacy or preponderance in Europe by means of one great state placed at the centre of this union. […]
If the Italian Risorgimento had been the masterpiece of the European liberal spirit, this rebirth of Germany was the master-piece of political art in union with the military virtues: two masterpieces as different from one another, in general appearance, as a fine poem is from a powerful machine. And the Bismarckian creation, which was and wanted to be nothing but a demonstration of power, needed no other justification, and could not even gain anything from the legal fiction of a plebiscite, a symbol that might interpret the spirit of liberalism but was void of significance, even as a symbol, where the whole work had been carried out, and was meant to be continued, solely by the authority of princes and of the prince of princes, the King of Prussia, now German Emperor.

• Interesting differentiation between these 2 kinds of nation-building.

The liberal age 1871-1814

During the period that followed 1870 Europe beheld no more revivals of old absolute monarchies or explosions of new Caesarisms. There were not many attempts at such things and not even many who dreamed of them, and a few threatening clouds that appeared were scattered, leaving the skies clearer than before. The country that, in common opinion and judged by the facts of its last eighty years of history, was held to be that of extreme happenings and incapable of the orderly life of liberty, France, established and confirmed her republic, born from military disasters, with firm resolution and supreme shrewdness. From these eighty years, during which she had experienced the most varying and opposed regimes and had vainly sought for the point of equilibrium, France derived not the final perdition that many feared and that her enemies hoped, but the experience that placed her on the right path, upon which she entered as though by force of events-another sign that it was the right path.

• In my opinion, France is indeed the most stable power of continental Europe having evolved through turbulent times.

The industrial power and wealth that Europe attained, with dizzy crescendo, during this period notably after 1890), the technical discoveries made about this time and their applications, the variety in production, the extension of markets, the ever quicker means of transportation, are things well known and present in every one's memory, and may be taken for granted and passed over in this narrative, which takes for its field the intellectual, moral, and political life that offered the conditions for this marvellous activity and productivity and in its turn derived its strength and resources from it. Let us state as a symbol that the population of Europe, which had been a hundred and eighty millions at the beginning of the century, had grown to four hundred and fifty at the end, besides the millions of her sons sent to the Americas and other new countries, by which the United States of America alone rose from five million inhabitants in 1800 to seventy-seven millions in 1900.

• The 19th century belonged to Europe, the 20th century saw a decline of Europe. What will the 21st century look like for Europe? A further decline?

In rival Germany, the abolition or restriction of liberty was borne in mind by the very creatur of the empire, Bismarck, who did not regard as definitive the constitution that he had given her with a national parliament and universal suffrage. These were political expedients to which he had resorted and not things in sympathy with his ideal, which was still monarchical absolutism, with the addition of his own omnipotence as chancellor.
[…] the old Prussia had not been merged in a liberal Germany, but on the contrary a more or less liberal Germany had been aggregated to Prussia, who preserved intact the character she had received in the reaction after 1848 of a monarchy that had merely granted a few constitutional concessions and of a parliament elected by the class system. This was the opposite process to what had happened in Italy, where a liberal Piedmont annexed an Italy that turned liberal and was fused with her. The base of the German Empire always remained Prussia, and as late as 1898 one of Bismarck's successors, Chancellor von Hohenlohe, wrote in his diary that when he sat among the "Prussian Excellencies" he clearly discerned the contrast between South German liberalism and the feudalism of North Germany. The former was incapable of holding its own with the latter, "too numerous, too powerful, and having on its side the King, the army, and also the Catholic centre." In vain, and only by way of rhetorical vagueness, did some speak emotionally of the idyllic marriage or the friendly disagreement between the "two souls" of the Empire, that of Prussia and that of Germany, that of Potsdam and that of Weimar, whereas in fact only one soul was supreme, that of Prussia and Potsdam; and the statements of Bismarck, during the first years of the empire, that it was necessary not to "Prussianize" Germany but to "Germanize" Prussia, were simply fleeting fancies or expedients of the moment.

• Make Germany small again! (Kleinstaaterei_wiki)

Since the form of liberal government, which had now become proper to the society of Europe, was considered a sign and condition of civilization, it was natural that the desire should be felt to see it put into force everywhere. And in the countries where it did not yet exist, the need for it was voiced; if it was not expressed spontaneously, it was imported or prompted by the example and political writings of Western and Central Europe. The great lacuna was still in Eastern Europe, in autocratic Russia and in oppressed Poland; and so European liberalism abhorred Czarism and did not cease to urge eagerly its fall or its reformation. Alexander II, as we have seen, had interrupted his labour of reform because of the Polish insurrection and also because of the political immaturity of the Russian people. This immaturity was manifested even in the behaviour of the Russian revolutionaries, who were imbued with the most extreme Occidental doctrines, which they carried to the delirium of universal destruction. They disdained and sneered at the few among their number who were not simply rationalizing but reasonable, and so they grew ever keener on the idea of leaping over the liberal or bourgeois era, as they called it, and carrying out in Russia either full communism or the paradise of anarchism. [...]
Alexander III at once laid aside all idea of reform, reasserted rigid autocracy and Russophilism against all contamination of Western ideas, protected the Orthodox Church, opposing the others and persecuting the Jews, distrusted the universities and limited the number of students that might he admitted to them, purged the lists of jurors, and suffocated all life of the intellect, although he devoted great care to the economy of the country, which was replenished with loans obtained in Europe and especially in France, promoted commerce, which then began to flourish, and constructed the great Siberian Railway.

Singular in this respect was the condition of the German people, perhaps the best educated and the most orderly and hard-working in all Europe, which profited by the new unity and power Germany had risen to in order to give a marvellous development to her industry, commerce, science, technique, doctrine, and culture of every kind. And yet, although it was able to produce from its midst a class of capable and upright administrators and bureaucrats and another of exceedingly valorous soldiers (according to the Prussian tradition of bureaucracy and militarism), it was unable to form a real political class. The scarcity of political sense in the Germans was noted at this time by Germans themselves, who wondered at this curious lack amid the excellence of all the rest. But only later was the gravity of this want understood or any attempt made to submit it to adequate analysis and aetiology. There were no end of savants and professors, with that peculiar air of limitation and ingenuousness and often of credulity and puerility in judging practical and public things which is the characteristic of their intellect and of their mode of life; they were delighted with the strong words and gestures of Bismarck, and the "Oderint dum metuant," the "We Germans fear God and naught else in the world" of the men of blood" who had, according to them, tempered Germany; they contributed to cultivate on the lips of the German Philistine the so-called Sedanlächeln, the smile of Sedan, the sentiment of superiority over other peoples, the contempt for the decadent or decayed Latin races, for their moral corruption, for their miserable parliamentary battles, even for England, land of spurious Germanism, nation of shopkeepers and not of warriors. … Bismarck's persecution of German Catholics has been connected with the danger that he scented in them as the survivors of the Austrian and anti-Prussian party in Germany, with the awkwardness that they could create or cause to be created for him by means of the Catholic clergy in Posen, with their relations with the Guelph or Hanoverian party, and with their obedience to the extra-national power of the Papacy, which led them, sooner even than the French legitimists, to put pressure on the new empire in favour of military intervention with a view to restoring the temporal power in Rome. […] Bismarck then said that the question of principle remained unsolved and that "the hoary question between priests and king had not yet reached its final conclusion in Germany''; for he was unable to conceive it in any other terms than in those antiquated terms of royal authority and ecclesiastical authority. But he had allowed the complaisant Prussian professors to decorate it, on the other hand, with the name of Kulturkampf or "fight for civilization," a denomination that the Catholics sarcastically turned into the other of "fight against civilization." And they were not altogether wrong, because to fight conscience with violence is not civilization; nor, on the other hand, in Germany, a country with many religions, in which the Catholics are more than a third of the population, and a country of flourishing culture where the authority of science and criticism is great, was there any necessity for waging a special and harsh warfare in favour of civilization.

• The Germans' "sentiment of superiority over other peoples" is something I can still observe today (though it's rather concealed), and I don't like it.

On socialism

What does it matter if Marx (who in 1867 published the first volume of his laborious Capital) proposed an incorrect theory of surplus value and a still more incorrect law concerning the falling trend in the rate of profit, and an extravagant interpretation of human history? [...]
Quite negligible was the influence of Marxism in England, although it was there Marx elaborated his doctrine and from there he directed the International; the Marxian Social Democratic Federation, founded by Hyndman about 1884, found few followers. On the other hand, Henry George's ideas concerning the nationalization of land created great interest, as might have been expected in a country where a third of the soil belonged to the aristocracy, and was kept in great part as pasture-land, parks, hunting-grounds, and playing fields. No attempt was ever made in England to persecute or to suppress socialism, nor were grave efforts and much trouble needed to gather it into liberalism, because from the very beginning the problems pertaining to labour were spontaneously incorporated into the framework of English society and politics, and liberals and conservatives busied themselves about them, and left little field to specific socialist activity.

• Felix Britannia!

The Utopia of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, or of absolute free trade as the panacea of social evils, had been denied by facts;

• Free trade is not the panacea, but government intervention (against free trade) worsens the economic situation.

About 1890 there came into this sleepy European world of thought and into its discoloured and inanimate political literature the socialistic and Marxian doctrine of history and the state. It boasted of being the daughter of German classical philosophy, and so it was, although an illegitimate one, and it preserved certain of its virtues in the positing of questions and in its dialectico-historical method. Beyond a doubt it conferred not a little benefit in that people were called upon to think over the very principles of human society and history, and to formulate again the corresponding ethical and logical problems; and on the other hand, in that an ideal, no matter how deduced and conceived, once more lighted up the intellectual field and again attracted people to activity and apostleship. But, as might have been expected, these Marxian doctrines were not able to maintain their positions, and had to retreat in the economic field as regards theories of surplus labour and surplus value, and in the philosophical field as regards the metaphysics and dialectics of materialism. Yet all the criticism that soon followed on the reception of this doctrine, and which occupied a full decade, did not result in an enlivened consciousness of human spirituality and of history as the history of liberty. Indeed, one effect that remained from this long familiarity with Marxism and with historical materialism (which Mazzini had loathed because of its lack of humanity and kindliness) was the habit and the mental inclination to think of the active forces of history as "economic classes," feudalism, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, agrarians, industrials, bankers, working-men, peasants, modified proletariat and ragged proletariat, and so forth, and to treat political problems as a calculation of the interests and forces of the various classes at odds, and a search for the economic class on which to lean. This meant closing one's mind to a true understanding of history and of human life, and losing the unity of the spirit that rules the whole and which is beyond all these empirical schemes of abstract economics and these calculations of shrewd people.

When today we re-read what was printed in German books, pamphlets, and newspapers between 1912 and 1914, we have the impression of being in the atmosphere of war. In 1913 General Bernhardi published his book Deutschland und der nächste Krieg, and his voice was echoed by other military writers and by many clubs and associations that had risen to promote land and sea armaments and which favoured education for and instigation to war. What amounted to an ultimatum was issued to England: she must give up world-supremacy, she must allow Germany a free hand on the Continent in such a way that she could become the centre of a union of all Central Europe, beat France and take away her colonies, annex Belgium and Holland, divide the French possessions in North Africa with Italy, and carry out without hindrance the economic penetration of the Near East.

• Crazy. Reads like Putin today 🤦‍♂️

In the ferocity of the long war, all respect for truth was banished from the mind, the tone of all the belligerents became inhuman, selfish, rapacious; other statesmen succeeded to those of the beginning or they themselves suffered a change of spirit and gave themselves over to the current of hatred and unbridled greed. And if German statesmen, in the partial victories won by their enemies, imposed the burdensome treaties of Brest Litovsk and Bucharest, when the war was won, those of the Entente instead of rising to a loftier sphere copied them with the Congress and Treaty of Versailles, where the conscience of humanity was grievously offended by the spectacle of the victors who were dragging to their tribunal the heroic adversary, dripping with the blood of a hundred battles, sitting over him as judges of morality and executors of justice, and obliging him to admit his guilt, when they too were guilty in their turn - if of guilt we must speak, and not rather, as it seems to us, of a common error that demanded a common expiation. The war, which had been announced to the peoples with the promise of a general catharsis, in its course and its end was completely untrue to this promise.

WHOEVER compares the political geography of before and after the World War, and sees the German Republic in the place of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns, the Austrian Empire disintegrated and in its place the new or enlarged national states with German Austria and Magyar Hungary restricted to narrow frontiers, and France with her provinces lost in 1870 restored to her, and Italy, who has gathered in her irredente lands and stretches out her frontiers to the Brenner, and Poland reconstructed, and Russia no longer Czarist but Soviet, and the United States of America risen to be one of the greatest factors in European politics, and so on through all the other great changes worked in territories and relationships of power; and whoever, on the other hand, remembers the orderly, rich Europe of other days, flourishing in commerce, full of comfort, with her agreeable life, bold and sure of herself, and considers her now, impoverished, troubled, mournful, all divided by customs barriers, the gay international society that used to gather in her capitals dispersed, each nation busied with its own cares and with the fear of worse, and therefore distracted from spiritual things, and the common life of thought, and art, and civilization extinguished - he is induced to see a profound difference between the two Europes and to mark the separation with the line, or rather with the abyss, of the war of 1914-18. But he who instead passes from what is external and secondary to what is intrinsic, and seeks for the passions and acts of the European soul, at once mentally sets up the continuity and homogeneity between the two Europes so diverse in appearance, and if he looks closely, without letting himself be put off by these superficial impressions, he finds in the two aspects the same features, even if after the war and what has followed it they are somewhat sharpened.
Activism is developing with the same impulsiveness, and even with greater vehemence. The nationalist and imperialist outbursts inflame the victorious nations because they are victorious and the vanquished nations because they are vanquished. The new states that have arisen add new nationalisms and new imperialisms. The impatience for liberal institutions has given rise to open or masked dictatorships, and to the desire for dictatorships everywhere.

• As this book was written in 1933, how much worse would this paragraph sound if written in 1945?

Communism

Communism, of which it is usually said that it has entered the reality of facts and been effectuated in Russia, has by no means been effectuated qua communism, but in the manner indicated by its critics and permitted by its internal contradiction, that is, as a form of autocracy, which has deprived the Russian people of what little mental movement and liberty it enjoyed or obtained under the preceding Czarist autocracy. The abolition of the state, "the passage from the realm of necessity to that of liberty," over which Marx theorized not only has not taken place and communism has not abolished (and could not, nor will anyone ever he able to, abolish) the state, but by the irony of things, it has modelled the heaviest of states that it is possible to conceive.

Meanwhile, in all parts of Europe we are watching the growth of a new consciousness, of a new nationality (because, as we have already remarked, nations are not natural data, but historical states of consciousness and historical formations). And just as, 70 years ago, a Neapolitan of the old kingdom or a Piedmontese of the subalpine kingdom became an Italian without becoming false to his earlier quality but raising it and resolving it into this new quality, so the French and the Germans and the Italians and all the others will raise themselves into Europeans and their thoughts will he directed towards Europe and their hearts will beat for her as they once did for their smaller countries, not forgotten now but loved all the better.
This process of European union, which is directly opposed to nationalist competition and has already set itself up against it and one day will be able to liberate Europe from it altogether, tends at the same time to liberate her from the whole psychology that clings to this nationalism and supports it and generates kindred manners, habits, and actions. And if this thing happens, or when it happens, the liberal ideal will be fully restored in men's minds and will resume its rule.

• 😍 This vision of a European union sounds great (small u in union, not EU).

This was a very interesting read. I was surprised by some notions or interpretations by Croce, and I found some parallels to today's world. As the book is not very entertaining I can only recommend it to history-aficionados.

Have a great evening,
zuerich