ABSTRACT
Frederick the Great was the founder of the modern will to power in Prusso-Germany. He was not a typical Prussian, but through his personality he endowed the Prussian national character with a special feature. His rule was absolutism mitigated by the principle ‘Everything for the People’. Emmanuel Kant rendered this practice of the state and its ruler attractive by relating this type of rule to the ‘pure republic’. Enlightened absolutism differs from pure absolutism inasmuch as the idea of the people has no place in the formula of the latter. Enlightened absolutism demands an equal share in the ethical content of the democratic formula, although its own ethical content lies in the manipulation of the state power in the hands of the sovereign, but never in the actions of the people; the behaviour of the latter is strictly limited to a passive acceptance of acts of charity.
