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Problematic Feelings about Parties: Excerpts from the Staats-Lexikon: "Parties" (1845-1848)


The democratic party constitutes the directing principle in political struggles, it is what assigns the other parties their positions toward each other and itself, and the other parties orient themselves toward it. —

So long as the democratic party slumbers, the other parties struggle for supremacy, i.e. each one seeks to turn the privileges it represents into the dominant ones. Thus, initially, political absolutism and the church fought with each other for domination, and the democratic party forced them to make peace and forge an alliance, for the parties of privileges never fight each other on principle because they represent a common principle, whereas the principle of the democratic party is fundamentally opposed to theirs. Thus, in France, the representatives of capital fought against political absolutism, and the democratic party, or rather its principle, led both opponents into each others' arms and brought about a joint rule, the domination of the bourgeoisie. Political developments in Switzerland since the overthrow of the patricians until recent times offers the most persuasive evidence of how the democratic party, little by little, brings about a reconciliation between representatives of privileges originally fighting each other and later merging into one party.

It is also the democratic party that, as the one principally opposing the others, brings its own principle into consciousness and pushes them toward its [logical] conclusions.

Thus, in the clerical field, it was the democratic party that more or less forced the principle of Catholicism out of the Catholic church the principle of Catholicism and compelled it to be embodied in Jesuitism. For Jesuitism was called forth by Protestantism and is nothing more than consistent Catholicism, the representative of the principle of the Catholic church, as it underlies its entire effectiveness and positive statutes. And in the broadest meaning of the word, indeed, Jesuitism represents the emergent consciousness of the principle of subordinating human interests to special interests, which instinctively underlies the parties of privileges, i.e. everyone is a Jesuit who deliberately, and conscious of the misanthropic nature of his interests, applies the proper means for his aims, i.e. the maintenance of his privileges. The diplomat who implements the system of bondage with Satanic refinement is just as much of a Jesuit as the representative of the Catholic church who deliberately pursues the stultification of the people, or the selfish bourgeois who turns the maintenance of his privileges into the guiding idea for his effectiveness as statesman and human being.

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