n a word: you cannot abolish philosophy without putting it into
practice. The same error, only with the factors reversed, is
committed by the theoretical party, the political party which founds
on philosophy.

The latter perceives in the present struggle only the critical
struggle of philosophy with the German world; it does not suspect that
all previous philosophy has itself been a part of this world, and is
its complement, if an ideal one. While critical towards its opposing
party, it behaves uncritically towards itself. It starts from the
assumptions of philosophy, but either refuses to carry further the
results yielded by philosophy, or claims as the direct outcome of
philosophy results and demands which have been culled from another
sphere.

We reserve to ourselves a more detailed examination of this party.

Its fundamental defect may be reduced to this: it believes it can
enforce philosophy without abolishing it. The criticism of German
juridical and political philosophy, which has received through Hegel
its most consistent, most ample and most recent shape, is at once both
the critical analysis of the modern State and of the actuality which
is connected therewith, and in addition the decisive repudiation of
the entire previous mode of the German political and juridical
consciousness, whose principal and most universal expression, elevated
to the level of a science, is speculative jurisprudence itself.

While, on the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and
exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only in
Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern State,
making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in so
far as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only
satisfies the whole of man in an imaginary manner.

Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done. Germany
was _their_ theoretical conscience. The abstraction and arrogance of
her thought always kept an even pace with the one-sidedness and
stunted growth of her actuality. If, therefore, the _status quo_ of
the German civic community expresses the completion of the _ancien
regime_, the completion of the pile driven into the flesh of the
modern State, the _status quo_ of German political science expresses
the inadequacy of the modern State, the decay that is set up in its
flesh.

As a decisive counterpart of the previous mode of German political
consciousn