its constitution, permeate all situations. A
constitution is not a thing just made; it is the work of centuries, the
idea and the consciousness of what is rational, in so far as it is
developed in a people. No constitution, therefore, is merely created by
the subjects of the State. The nation must feel that its constitution
embodies its right and its status, otherwise the constitution may exist
externally, but has no meaning or value. The need and the longing for a
better constitution may often indeed be present in individuals, but that
is quite different from the whole multitude being permeated with such an
idea--that comes much later. The principle of morality, the inwardness
of Socrates originated necessarily in his day, but it took time before
it could pass into general self-consciousness.

THE POWER OF THE PRINCE

Because sovereignty contains in ideal all special privileges, the common
misconception is quite natural, which takes it to be mere force, empty
caprice, and synonymous with despotism. But despotism means a state of
lawlessness, in which the particular will as such, whether that of
monarch or people (_ochlocracy_), is the law, or rather instead of the
law. Sovereignty, on the contrary, constitutes the element of ideality
of particular spheres and functions under lawful and constitutional
conditions.

The sovereignty of the people, conceived in opposition to the
sovereignty residing in the monarch, stands for the common view of
democracy, which has come to prevail in modern times. The idea of the
sovereignty of the people, taken in this opposition, belongs to a
confused idea of what is commonly and crudely understood by "the
people." The people without its monarch and without that whole
organization necessarily and directly connected with him is a formless
mass, which is no longer a State. In a people, not conceived in a
lawless and unorganized condition, but as a self-developed and truly
organic totality--in such a people sovereignty is the personality of the
whole, and this is represented in reality by the person of the monarch.

The State must be regarded as a great architectonic edifice, a
hieroglyph of reason, manifesting itself in reality. Everything
referring merely to utility, externality, and the like, must be excluded
from its philosophic treatment. That the State is the self-determining
and the completely sovereign will, the final decision being necessarily
referred to it--that is easy to