The German Constitution

[p. 467]

|467| condition of laws rests, [so] that for a stolen cow it is not worth the trouble to gamble one’s head, nor to set oneself openly with one’s individuality against a tenfold and infinitely superior power (like that [of the] state), he did not know, but was completely and wholly in what was his. (To the French entier is “whole” and “wilful”.)

Out of this self-willed doing, which alone was called freedom, there formed circles of power over others according to chance and character, without regard to a universal and with little restriction from what is called public power; for this was, as against individuals, almost wholly non-existent.

Time, as it went on, fixed these circles of power. The parts of the universal state power became a manifoldness of exclusive property, independent of the state itself and distributed according to no rule or principle. This manifold property forms not a system of rights but a collection without principle, whose inconsistencies and confusion required the highest acuity in order, upon occurring collision, to rescue them as far as possible against their contradictions, or rather required need and superior force in order to come to terms with one another; but above all, with regard to the whole, required the most special divine providence in order to maintain it barely.¹²⁾

12) Deleted in the manuscript: German constitutional law is therefore a collection of private rights; every individual part of the state, every princely house, every estate, every city, guild etc., everything that has rights in relation to the state, has acquired these for itself; the state had at first no other function in this than to confirm that its power had been wrested from it.

The political powers and rights are not state offices calculated according to an organization of the whole, the services and duties of the individual are not determined according to the need of the whole, but every single member of the political hierarchy, every princely house, every

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