[p. 454]
|454| infinitely more humane, happier and cleverer, so childish and silly would it be to long back to such a condition – as if it alone were nature – and not to know how to esteem the condition in which laws rule as necessary – and as a condition of freedom. – The firm subsistence which those possessions gradually obtained brought forth a multitude of rights which, without unity, without principle, could form more a collection than a system, and whose inconsistencies and confused manifoldness required the highest acuity to rescue them as far as possible against their contradictions and here and there to bring unity into them.
Thus an edifice of the state has arisen, whose individual parts, every princely house, every estate, every city, every guild, everything that possesses rights with regard to the state, have acquired these for themselves, have received nothing from the universal, from the state as a whole.
The state always had merely to confirm what was wrested from its power; the political power and right of the individual, as state official and citizen of the state, is not a share calculated according to an organization of the whole; the duties of the individual or of his office are likewise not demanded in relation to it; rather, in Germany the individual member of the body politic owes his power in the state, as well as his rights and duties, personally to his family, his estate or his guild; and the estate, guild etc. has them from the accident of former times. The principles of the system of German public law are therefore not [to be derived] from the unity of a concept of constitutional law, such as the concept of a monarchy, aristocracy, democracy etc. is, but are narratives of actualities, for possession was earlier than law, and it did not spring from laws, but what had been won by oneself was made into legal right. According to its original ground of right, German constitutional law is therefore
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