The lecture which I am to give at your request will necessarily disappoint you in various ways. You are bound to expect a talk on the profession of politics to take a stand on the topical questions of the day. Yet that will only happen at the end of my lecture in a purely formal way and in response to particular questions concerning the significance of political action within our conduct of life as a whole. What must be completely excluded from today's lecture, on the other hand, are all questions concerning the brand of politics one ought to practise, which is to say the content one ought to give to one's political activity. For this has nothing to do with the general question of what the profession of politics is and what it can mean. Let us get straight down to things.

What do we understand by politics (Politik)? The term is an extraordinarily broad one, embracing every kind of independent leadership (leitende) activity. We talk about the banks' policies on foreign exchange, the bank-rate policy of the Reichsbank, the policy of a union during a strike, one can speak of the educational policy of the community in a town or village, of the policies of the management committee leading a club, and finally we even talk about the policies of an astute wife in her efforts to guide her husband. Naturally, our reflections this evening are not based on a concept as broad as this.

The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach's) is that the concrete thing, the real, the perceptible is considered to an be object or [datum of] perception only and not to be perceptible human activity, or praxis, i.e. it is not considered subjectively. That is why this active aspect or side has been developed abstractly, in opposition to materialism, by idealism, which of course ignores real sensible activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensible objects that are really distinct from thought objects; but he does not grasp the fact that human activity itself is objective activity. Hence in The Essence of Christianity he considers only theoretic activity to be truly human, while practical activity is conceived only in its grubby Jewish form of expression and is equated with that. Thus he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’ activity, of ‘practical-critical’ activity.

The question of whether human thinking attains objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question. It is in practice that man must prove the truth, the actuality and power, the subjective aspect and validity [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking. Argument about the actuality or non-actuality of thinking, where thinking is taken in isolation from practice, is a purely scholastic question.

The materialist doctrine regarding changes [in man] brought about by circumstances and by education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated.

The worst of all states is the popular state.

Thus Cinna justifies himself to Augustus. But Maximus also maintains that the worst of all states is the monarchical state. Bayle, having more than once in his Dictionary argued for and against this, paints in his article on Pericles a quite hideous picture of democracy, particularly of the one in Athens.

A great republican enthusiast for democracy, one of our askers of questions, sends us his refutation of Bayle and his defence of Athens. We shall make his arguments public. It is the privilege of every writer to judge the living and the dead; but one is judged oneself by others, who are judged in their turn, and from one century to the next the judgements passed are revised.

So Bayle, after a few banalities, says specifically: ‘That you would look in vain in the history of Macedonia for as much tyranny as there is in the history of Athens.’

Perhaps Bayle was unhappy with Holland when he wrote like that, and probably my republican, who refutes what he says, is pleased with his little democratic city at the moment.

It is difficult to weigh accurately in the scales the iniquities of the Athenian Republic against those of the Macedonian court. We still reproach the Athenians today with the banishment of Cimon, Aristides, Themistocles, Alcibiades, the death sentences pronounced on Phocion and Socrates, judgements similar to those passed by a few of our own cruel, absurd courts.

Towards a political critique of officialdom and the party system

Preface

This political treatise is a reworked and extended version of articles which appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in the summer of 1917. It has nothing new to say to the constitutional expert, nor does it take cover behind the authority of a science, for the ultimate positions adopted by the will cannot be decided by scientific means. Anyone for whom the historical tasks of the German nation do not take precedence, as a matter of principle, over all questions of the form the state should assume, or anyone with a fundamentally different perception of these tasks, will not be open to the arguments advanced here. For in this respect they proceed from certain assumptions, on the basis of which they attack those people who still consider that this is an appropriate juncture to discredit the popularly elected parliament (Volksvertretung) in particular, while favouring other political powers. Unfortunately, this has been going on for the past forty years, including the war years, especially in fairly wide academic and academically educated circles of littérateurs, very often in the most arrogant and intemperate manner, with dismissive animosity and without the least sign of any goodwill even to try to understand the vital conditions required by parliaments if they are to be effective.

Preface

Men have until now always generated false notions about themselves, about what they are or should be. They have organised their relationships according to their notions about God, about the normal man, and so forth. The inventions of their minds have come to dominate them. They, the creators, have bowed down to their creations. Deliver us from the phantoms, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under whose yoke they languish. Let us revolt against the domination of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these illusions for thoughts that conform to the nature of man; let us teach them, says another, to take a critical attitude towards them; teach them to chase them from their heads, says the third, and – existing actuality will crumble.

These innocent and puerile fantasies constitute the core of recent Young Hegelian philosophy, which the public in Germany receives with terror and awe, and to which, moreover, the philosophical heroes themselves, solemnly convinced that they threaten the world with ruin, attribute an implacable and criminal character. The first volume of this publication has as its aim to unmask these sheep who take themselves, and are taken, to be wolves; and also to show that their philosophic bleatings are simply echoes of the opinions of the German bourgeois, that the braggings of these philosophic exegetes simply reflect the miserable situation in Germany.

In politics as in philosophy, Voltaire was no system-builder. He had a deep suspicion of ‘systems’, and his political writings do not combine readily to reflect a systematically argued world-view. ‘I write to act’, he once informed Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Best. D13221), and as a political thinker he tended to respond to events rather than metaphysical abstractions. He was remarkably well-informed, however, and his reading was wide. He knew the work of Grotius, Pufendorf, Hume, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, d'Argenson, Mably, Saint-Pierre, Quesnay, Le Mercier, Melon, Hobbes, Mandeville, Buffon, Beccaria, Rousseau and Locke although, astonishingly, evidence suggests he knew little of the latter's Two treatises on government (see Perkins 1965, Appendix 2, Crocker 1983, Thielemann 1959, Kotta 1966).

He drew constantly on this rich hinterland, but his allusions are deceptively casual, and often expressed in an ironic, tangential way. As he puts it in ABC, ‘we take what we like from Aristotle to Locke, and don't give a damn for the rest’. Only with Montesquieu, and to a lesser extent Rousseau, does he offer anything like a prolonged commentary on another theorist, even when we are led to expect one, as in the case of Beccaria. Voltaire's technique is to entertain, to provoke and to inform by means of satirical anecdote, outrageous vulgarisation and lively dialogue. Among his many gifts as a persuasive polemicist is his unrivalled ability to breathe life and a sense of human reality into the driest issue.

Most of the texts in this collection were revised frequently by Voltaire, and numerous editions of each were issued, with or without his permission, during his lifetime. Text added to the original in the interests of clarity has been placed within square brackets. Substantial variants, as in the case of PA, have been included, as have Voltaire's own notes, with the exception of minor references. In the case of Voltaire, first editions do not often offer the most appropriate base text for modern editorial and scholarly purposes. However, important areas of text in the first edition of PA, ABC, DP and QE, subsequently suppressed by Voltaire, have been identified and restored. In the case of DP, articles having their provenance in the 1764, 1765, 1767 or 1769 editions, but which underwent further change and expansion in QE, have been listed under DP. Only articles appearing for the first time in QE have been listed under QE. In the case of both alphabetical works, the French title of articles precedes the English title so that the correct sequence can be maintained.

The unity and brotherhood of nations is a phrase much used today by all parties, as, for example, the middle class advocates of free trade. To be sure, there exists a certain form of brotherhood among the bourgeois classes of all nations. It is the brotherhood of the oppressors against the oppressed, of the exploiters against the exploited. As the bourgeois class of a given country is united and bound by ties of brotherhood against the proletarians of that country, despite competition and the struggle among the members of the bourgeoisie themselves, so also are the bourgeois of all countries bound and united against the proletarians of all countries, despite their mutual antagonism and competition in the world market. Peoples can actually unite only if they have a common interest. They can have a common interest only if present property relations are done away with, for present property relations are the determining cause of the exploitation going on among peoples: To do away with present property relations is the interest of the working class alone. Moreover, only it has the means to this goal. The victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, therefore, is at the same time the victory over the national and industrial conflicts which today place the various peoples in opposition to one another. For that reason, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is simultaneously the signal of liberation for all oppressed nations.