Note 634 — Chapter XI · THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY

Thus come about the much satirized forms of the “patrol-” or “barrack-state,” as opponents call it with an unintelligent scorn. Similar points of view appear also in Chinese and Greek constitutional theories (O. Franke, Studien zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen Dogmas (1920), pp. 211, et seq.; Pöhlmann, Geschichte der sozialen Frage und der Sozialismus in der antiken Welt (1912)). On the other hand, the political tastes of, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who as a Classicist opposed the individual to the State, belong, not to political history at all, but to literature. For what he looked at was, not the capacity of the State to thrive in the real State-world around it, but its private existence within itself, without regard to the fact that such an ideal could not endure for an instant in the face of a neglected outer situation. It is a basic error of the ideologues that, in concentrating on the private life and referring to it the whole inner structure of the State, they entirely ignore the latter’s position in point of outward power, though this in fact completely conditions its freedom for the inward development. The difference between the French and the German Revolutions, for example, consists in the fact that the one commanded the external situation and therewith the internal also, while the other commanded neither and was foredoomed to farce.