ABSTRACT
There is, as we have already had frequent occasion to observe in individual instances, a thread of profound conflict running right through the political thought of Western Man since the time of the Renaissance: namely, the conflict between the basic idea of a system of Natural Law governing all thought in general, on the one hand, and the inescapable facts of historical and political life, on the other. The system of Natural Law, created by the Stoa, absorbed and adapted to itself by Christianity, and then secularized once again by the Enlightenment, started out from the assumption that the Laws of Reason and the Laws of Nature were, in the last resort, in harmony with each other, and both proceeded from an all-embracing divine unity of the universe. 1 And moreover that human reason, implanted by God, was capable of comprehending this unity and harmony as a whole, and of determining the content of such laws as would have to be authoritative in human life. It is true that these norms—when faced with the task of governing and ennobling the activity of the baser impulses— were forced into making a number of concessions and compromises with reality; but, as regards their essential and ideal form, they were quite unaffected by this, and continued to remain eternal, unchangeable and homogeneous, as the supreme guiding-light over the whole of life. It was, however, the individual man who consciously had to bear and interpret this divine reason which shaped the soul of Nature; and the perfecting of the individual man was the whole aim and purpose of the precepts laid down by the Laws of Nature and of Reason. Then in the process it happened that the intellectual elements in Nature, in history and in the universe (on the basis of which these precepts had acquired the character of absolute validity) tended, in a naïve fashion, to be assessed exclusively in accordance with the requirements of the individual man; and hence these requirements were projected into the world 344and made absolute. World-reason was basically (although no one was clearly aware of the fact) individual reason and a means to the fulfilment and perfecting of the individual. Moreover (it was further assumed) this individual reason was identical in all men; it was for this very reason that it was possible to believe in the absolute validity of their utterances, and to feel that one had hold of something firm and certain. For this reason the intellectual content also of the supra-individual human associations was measured against the same yard-stick, which was not by any means one that had developed out of their own nature and been read off from them. States, corporations, etc., have subsequently therefore acquired the aim of making man, i.e. the individual, better or happier, and of keeping his baser impulses within bounds, to serve as a scourge of evil (as Luther called the State). It was for this purpose that men formed themselves into States, and this idea contains the roots of the doctrine that the State originated in a contract made between men. But political thought has the task of ascertaining which is the best form of the State. Since, here too, it is impossible to avoid making concessions to reality, so also the really existent conditions of State life (conditions which are nothing else but ideal) are on the whole capable of being borne by Christian sentiment as having been willed or permitted by God, as a punishment or a corrective.
