who recognise and declare that the revolution is necessary, and who initiate and guide the movement. Always, however, it is essential to adduce proof that the revolution is actually in conformity with the true interests of the people, that it represents a real progress in democratic evolution, and that it is indispensable.[1]
The modern right of initiative ascribes the leading role to the individual intelligence, emotions, and will. Side by side with the legally appointed and officially recognised leaders of humanity, (men need leaders in addition to thinkers), there arise in all domains persons who are assigned leadership or directly and deliberately seize it.
The right of initiative concurrently implies individual responsibility. He who talks of liberty, who talks of the right of initiative, talks also of personal responsibility. The ego, always the ego, is responsible, not the majority, not the plenum, this is the doctrine of modern progressive individualism, whereas the man of an earlier day took shelter behind the church, the state, the nation, the party, the majority, or even mankind as a whole.
The official conservative and reactionary jurists counterposed revolution by proclaiming legitimist right and by appealing to the so-called historic right. In actual fact, the formulas of historic right are fictions, invented to support the actual and historically extant relationships of power. The same remark applies to the attempt to formulate the special rights of reigning dynasts. Rulers appeal to ecclesiastico-religious sanction, to divine right, and Stahl was perfectly logical in referring historic right to the sanction of ecclesiastical Christianity.[2]
- ↑ Bluntschli already formulated a natural right of the state to develop. Cf. Allgemeines Staatsrecht, 5th edition, 1876, p. 29.
- ↑ The discussion will be clarified by an example of the way in which jurists have endeavoured to master the problem of revolution. The instance I select is that of Merkel, who writes on the elements of general jurisprudence in the fifth edition of Holtzendorff's Encyclopädie der Rechtswissenschaft, 1890 (p. 12). From the binding force of legal prescriptions Merkel deduces the view "that a forcibly established order does not become a legally and rightfully established order (or a part of such an order) until the moment arrives when the preponderance of the moral forces of the people inclines towards its side, and condones its existence, so that a voluntary respect for the established order becomes a decisive principle of action. . . . It follows that right or justice can issue from force and injustice. This happens because through the influence of habituation and other intermediating factors the forces of the popular consciousness become favourable to that which has been brought about by force
