From Friedrich Julius Stahl, The Doctrine of State & the Principles of State Law (Aalten: WordBridge, 2009), pp. 1–16.

§. 1. Concept of the Ethical Kingdom

The doctrine of the state, as put forward in this book, is grounded in the concept of the ethical kingdom, which is: self-conscious, indivisible rule, in accordance with ethical-intellectual motives, over conscious, freely obedient beings, thereby also spiritually uniting them. Accordingly, it is rule of a personal character in every aspect, a kingdom of personality.

The idea of the ethical kingdom, upon which we found the doctrine of the state, is the supreme ethical concept. This idea runs through all relations, and exists under all circumstances of the human condition; it is the general and absolute purpose (τέλος) of that condition. Hence, it pertains equally to the religious, the moral, and the legal sphere. The kingdom of God, which the Christian religion promises to us in the beyond, is the completed realization of the ethical kingdom. In the kingdom of God, it is the supreme personality, God, who rules men, and He does so in accordance with His perfect holiness and wisdom, as well as in perfect freedom, that is, internally fulfilling them in the same way that He externally maintains them and keeps them in order, so that they may be one spirit and one will with Him, and therefore with each other (Book I [Philosophical Foundations], §. 27). Yet even on Earth, the moral world (the inner life and the free action of men) is an ethical kingdom, even when not visibly manifesting itself as such.

For the real power of God effectuates in us regard [Ansehen] for the moral commandment, and, to the degree that it is in any way obeyed, fulfillment of that commandment. This power brings about the specific ethical manner of viewing things in peoples and times; it brings about the natural consequences of sins and vice; it brings <2> about Nemesis, perceptible only as foreboding, in the life of men and in the history of the peoples. It is not so that people in absolute isolation, as if shut off in their innermost being, obey or infringe an impersonal ethical law, a dead rule. Rather, there is a bond over them to the common ruling power, which surrounds everything everywhere, but only in the beyond will be revealed. Ethics nowhere exists as a bare law and a fulfilling individual; it exists everywhere as conscious common demand and compliance, in accordance with a common purpose; it exists everywhere as a kingdom.

The civil order, then, likewise is an ethical kingdom. Here as well, there is rule established over men, rule of a personal character, i.e., conscious of itself and with control over its own actions, having a real power over men; only here, the rule of a real natural personality is replaced by the organized institution (the state organism); and the perfect, or at least ordered, natural condition, is for it to have its innermost center likewise in a natural personality (the monarchy). Here as well, it is rule of ethically understood purposes, and here as well, men are freely to obey, while the ethical rational order, which stands over them, is likewise their true essence and will, and only realizes itself through them and in them; they are to be united under it, through compliance with this order and its spirit. That an artificial institution erected by men, and not a higher personality (God), exercises rule, is certainly an entirely different kind, a much lower stage, of the ethical kingdom, for which reason the civil order is ruled in accordance with faulty human insight and mores [Sitte]; it is also a lower stage of the ethical kingdom, in that the ruling real power and the law are not inseparably one, but can be split apart, and, also, be-cause the inward filling of the subjects with the spirit of law and order, which is the requirement, in reality scarcely exists.

But the concept of the ethical kingdom, and those general characteristics of the ethical kingdom, are the same here as there. Its concept is our most general and inward perception, because it, everywhere, is the purpose established by God for the ethical world. Accordingly, we derive the norms of the civil order, not from the archetype of the future kingdom of God, nor from the moral world as it exists in the here and now, but from the essence of the ethical king- <3> dom, which in like manner appears both in the here and now and in the beyond, as something general. We do not build upon parallels and analogies from other ethical areas, but on the characteristics which each ethical area contains in itself, in accordance with the archetypal law of the ethical world.

This concept of the ethical kingdom provides the deeper (philosophical) foundation and guarantee both for the political order and for political freedom. For it counts among its characteristics the need for an authority elevated over men, that is, a claim to obedience and respect, obligatory (hence the principle of legitimacy, in contrast to popular sovereignty) not merely to the laws but to a real power outside of them, the ruling authority (state power). Likewise, it includes the need for an ethically reasonable content, which therefore also forms the restriction on this authority, that is, the need for laws of the state, which, being passed down through history, stand over prince and people and can only be changed in accordance with those laws’ own requirements (constitutional principle in the true sense). Finally, it contains the recognition of the nation (the subjects) as an ethical community, therefore as being independent and thus freely obeying, being subjected to the laws only as the expression and obligation of their own ethical essence (Book III [Private Law], §. 10), from which those laws originally arise through custom and tradition, and against which, in later ongoing development, by means of the consent of the representative body, those laws are assayed (representative principle in the true sense).

Deduction from the will of the people, be it individuals, be it the collective whole, be it their arbitrary or their rational will, does not attain to a simple elevated real authority, and therefore, in its innermost ground, is always revolutionary, whether harsher or milder, revealed or hidden. Deduction from the acquired rights of a ruler, or from the necessity of unified leadership, or from the divine establishment of rule (when one adheres to this alone), does not procure the independence and (independent) entitlement of the people. Only the perspective of the ethical kingdom yields the eternal order of the state, containing all its principles and elements in harmonious unity. When, in reality, this is difficult to bring about – be- <4> cause governments in actual power do not easily elevate the people to independence, and the people in actual power do not easily allow for the elevation of princely majesty; actually, given the untrust-worthiness of men, each staves off the yielding of something of their power as if it were a sort of state of emergency – nevertheless, the ethical kingdom unshakably remains the ethical-political archetype and standard of judgement and action.

In particular, this is the duty and purpose which accords with the Christian life-valuation, in that the idea of the ethical kingdom in all its stages suits the Christian world-view, and only it. The true Christian life-valuation corresponds neither to the revolutionary doctrine of the old Scottish Puritans and English Independents, nor to the doctrine of absolute power and unconditional obedience as represented by the adherents of the Stuarts (Filmer et al.), nor to the political indifference of older German Pietism. It can lack neither the regard of the given ruling authority, nor the development of political freedom and entitlement of the people under this regard, nor inward ethical-legal lawfulness and necessity.

Understandably, Kant’s and Fichte’s overarching ethical [ethischer] concept of the ethical [sittlichen] world-order is a different one from this concept of the ethical kingdom. For them it is a rule, a law, that the personalities are to follow, not a personality (or some other real power), who encompasses and unifies all of them. Such a power can at most (as Kant in fact postulates) only externally supervene in order to ensure the fulfillment of the laws and restore their violation – thus, fulfill the role of a judge; that power itself (God or the ruling authority, as the case may be) and its rule (its permeation in men and their union in it) are not the essence and fulfillment of all mores.

The matter is the same with the concept of the absolute, or rather objective, Spirit, which, in the philosophy of Hegel, takes the place of our concept of the ethical kingdom. Hegel’s concept differs, in that it is not a living union of many personalities with and in the one supreme personality (God – king – ruling authority), but the absorption of the same in the Substance (the concept, the idea, the <5> world spirit). Of course, this is not, as with Kant and Fichte, a bare rule (an ideal); it is instead to be a reality; nevertheless, even assuming this, it is in any case an impersonal functioning power, unconscious of itself and therefore acting, not out of awareness, but in accordance with a bare rule (dialectic). This is not the place to demonstrate that such a concept regarding the eternal relations of men leads to despair. In terms of politics, it leads only to the formal authorization (the dotting of the i) of that which is logically self-derived, with the personality of the prince allowed no material influence; therefore, despite all efforts to resist this on the part of well-meaning persons, it leads not to an original real authority (prince-legitimate republican government) as such, but only to the recognition of an impersonal Reason, the “power of the idea,” over the people.

In theory, such is certainly better than the (subjective rationalistic) doctrine of Rousseau, which allows only the will of individuals, or of the multitude, to be the ethical power on Earth. In practice, however, it has the same effect. For the idea as such is neither authentically made known in some way, nor does it have any power; in this case as well, therefore, it is human consciousness (the people) which itself constructs the idea, and, in accordance with that idea, establishes and commands its ruling authorities, rather than having the ruling authorities over it, allowing them to rule over it. Hegel’s monarchical or, much rather, governmental standpoint inevitably has sunk to the democratic standpoint of the newer school. For the monarchical power, and indeed the power of any ruling authority, as taught by Hegel, is itself only the result of laws of thought (dialectic), that is, a power that nowhere wills in a personal, self-conscious manner except in me (in the individual), over which, therefore, I (the individual) or, above all, the multitude of those in whom the Spirit has come to consciousness, the people, also have the supreme judgement and judicial authority. In the same manner in the area of morals, the followers of Hegel have substituted genius for the ethical law, which for Hegel had an objectivity. In this manner, all higher ethical order dissolves finally into so-called self-consciousness or free spirit, that is, in the thought and will of men, which then loses all content, <6> but in impudent capriciousness only destroys what it finds. One must, however, recognize that this conception of Hegel’s, in that it postulates both an objective power, and a subjective appropriation and fulfillment, as distinct and nevertheless unified aspects, scientifically prepared the way to establish a truer standpoint (that of the personal world cause), derived from the true understanding.

The newer school of thought [Bildung], as it confronts us in the great multitudes, and in the times in their totality, has appropriated essential aspects of the ethical kingdom (freedom, self-action of peoples and individuals, the law as the all-permeating necessity of public life, in contrast to arbitrary rule); but, in exchange, has forfeited the first and foremost of those aspects, the given higher real authority, the ruling authority, for and over the people, in which the people is to become politically unified. The newer school, therefore, everywhere revolves around two abstract concepts, freedom and law, and cannot entertain the possibility that not everything will have been exhausted therein; it has no clue that it lacks the most essential thing: the original ruler and the original collective purpose of rule, by which alone the multitude becomes a kingdom. Accordingly, it does not conceive of law as a given higher thing, as the law of the great institution which, as one and the same, passes through the ages, albeit understood in constant advancement; rather, for this school, the law is merely a self-made thing, the will of the then-living generation. Hence the truth and the error of public opinion.

On the other hand, those few who maintain this aspect of authority in living consciousness have the habit partly of maintaining it in such one-sidedness that they yield, or at any rate subordinate, that other principle, the more so because the general manner of the assertion of that principle scandalizes them in the highest degree, as it ought to. From this stems their aversion to all that is constitutional, their aversion to political freedom. The overarching concept of the ethical kingdom, in its full amplitude, is therefore the true proper middle way, that is, the articulated higher view, in which the <7> motives of the combating parties together find their genuine satisfaction.[1]

The concept of the ethical kingdom is distinguished from that of the ethical organism, in the same way that kingdom and organism are distinguished in all cases. The organism contains determinate, various members, each of which mutually supplements the other, of which none have an independent existence, of which all, in fact, are required for the organism to exist (head, rump, two arms, legs, etc.). The kingdom, on the other hand, contains an unlimited quantity of equal, independent, existing beings, which neither mutually presuppose each other, nor are required for this concept the way they are in the case of the organism; they are subject to a higher rule. It is in this sense that we speak of natural kingdoms. The plant kingdom is a plant kingdom, even when this or that specimen, in fact this or that kind or genus, is lacking, and the one plant does not require the other. But we also call the concrete manifestation of like natural things [Naturgebilde] a kingdom because a higher ruling spirit is perceived in all these existing beings, thereby ruling them; because all rule is the absorption of the thought and will of the ruler into the being of the ruled. We must consider the divine Spirit to be active in the moments of creation, in a manner such that His thoughts are incorporated in matter, in a systematically advancing, mutually <8> adapted way, such that matter is filled with those thoughts, in order truly to recognize that Nature comprises kingdoms and is itself a kingdom.

It is the same with ethical relations. For example, marriage is an ethical organism. The rule of the state, when it is not, as in despotisms, a mere personality, is an ethical organism, in that personality everywhere can only be substituted for by organism. Prince, estate, judiciary, the orders of officialdom, all supplement each other; state rule is not entire when one or the other is lacking, and, where they are not lacking, it is complete in itself.[2] On the other hand, the state itself, i.e., the mass of men in its ordered rule, is not an organism, but an ethical kingdom. Though millions be added to it, it does not require any of these particular individuals for it to be a state; all are ruled by the same power and order, and therefore are united in it, and the union of these collective individuals under this order is the purpose of the state. <9>

On the other hand, however, the concept of the ethical kingdom is also to be distinguished from the congregation [der Gemeinde].[3] In the congregation, the higher rule stems from the will of the united persons, while in the ethical kingdom it stems from a power and authority prior to and over them. Thus, the Christian congregation as such (even when considered as the collective congregation of all living Christians) recognizes no other law and regard than the will and the conviction of the collective members in their unity. By contrast, the kingdom of God derives its law and regard from God himself, and the Christian church, which also is an ethical kingdom and, as such, is to be distinguished from the collective congregation (even when comprising the same persons), derives a law and regard from God-established institutions, and from the constitution added to those institutions in history, with its authorities. The jurisdiction to forgive sins is granted, not to the congregation (not even the collective congregation), but only to the church in this sense; though the congregation elects its pastor, the pastor does not derive his authorization through the congregation (persons cannot grant such), but through the church, through the pre-existing ecclesiastical ruling authorities and offices, which the current generation did not give, thus through the institution, which stands over the congregation of collective living members. Even terminologically, the congregation is composed of persons, while the church, i.e., the house of the Lord (κυριακόν), is something institutional [Anstaltliches] standing over them. It is the same in the area of politics. The civil community rules itself (self-government); its constitution is therefore also republican, in accordance with its nature (self-elected ruling authorities, etc.). By contrast, the nation is to be a state, and thus an ethical kingdom. As a rule, therefore, the nation is to be governed by a given higher authority, by a king, while it itself – the nation – is only entitled to the free adoption of the laws.

Should one grant this concept of the ethical kingdom, in particular also the given real authority which is the primary aspect of it, <10> one must then also grant the entire political conception as carried out in the remainder of this work. Rousseau’s entire book is nothing more than the implementation of the concept of the “general (human) will” as the principle of public life. Mine is nothing other than the implementation of the concept of the ethical kingdom as an order and power over men, who nevertheless belong to it as free self-acting members.

§. 2. Dimensions of the State

The doctrine of the state comprises a spectrum of relations in which the entire task of the state is fulfilled only when they are taken together: to wit, the state in itself, the mutual relation between states, and the elements and smaller spheres under the state. Each of these relations has its characteristic concepts and providential purpose (τέλος), but they all finally flow into the one concept of the ethical kingdom.

By the state we understand firstly the closed association of a large number of persons under a supreme independent (sovereign) power. Its providential purpose is rule for the totality of human collective conditions and common purposes. For this rule, the human community is ordained an institution through which it exercises power over individuals as one will and acting subject, as a consciousness identical with itself. The state is therefore in its innermost essence a personification of human community. To this end, it is however also essential that this ruling will is to be rooted in a mental determinacy, an individuality (Book I [Philosophical Foundations], §. 9), in order for its rule to flow from an ethically rational, in itself unified view of life. This is why the state is the task of the people and not of mankind in its entirety. By virtue of the unity of its descent or its history, and by virtue of its organizational development and the connectedness of its activities, this unity of consciousness and appreciation of life, both in general terms and specifically with regard to the common condition, exists in the people. Only the people therefore has the energy of <11> common consciousness and the pervasion of its conditions that are needed to constitute a state capable of acting as true personality.

Collective mankind has no business ruling life as a subject, but it does have the task, as a community of peoples, of embracing and supporting as basis the rule exercised by the people (the state). This is the law of nations [Völkerrecht] and diplomacy. The providential purpose of the community of nations is the conservation of the peoples and states in their existence and their rights, and consequently the care for general interests which make up the shared basis of the condition of individual peoples, such as e.g. the freedom of the seas, world trade, and finally, in the case of higher development, even the maintenance to a certain degree of generally recognized political principles, which governments are to lay at the foundation of each state.

World history starts from the condition of the most extreme division and animosity among the peoples, the consequence of the confusion of human consciousness. First the Christian deliverance of humanity restored the possibility of a bond of inner conviction among the peoples. From there outward, there is an approximation in the community of nations to a “kingdom” (rule of a personal character) over the individual states in terms of form and content. In terms of form, in that instead of isolated negotiations between individual participating nations, a constitution-like, all-encompassing bond is more and more to be produced, by which the affairs of the peoples are being ordered as one undivided association of nations; in terms of content, in that more and more unity of political appreciation is to be generated among the states. Should this latter become complete – which on Earth will not occur – then humanity instead of the peoples would have the vocation to be a state. But that would mean the end of world history. The medieval emperorship was an anticipation of this situation, which is why it existed more in the idea than in reality. On the other hand, it is an undeniable truth that the collectivity of the peoples has the vocation to support the most basic foundations of ethical political order when they are lacking on the part of a specific people. This was the intention of the Holy Alliance. It would be one-sided to look for this foundation purely and simply <12> in monarchical power. An intervention establishing the monarch in his full power but which does not help the people against the dissolution of reaction or to secure truly founded rights and the restoration of a lawful condition cannot engender ethical veneration and satisfy the public consciousness. It therefore is only an ephemeral external restoration, without establishing the fundamental attitude which alone is capable of durably securing the restoration. When the powers of Europe, or Germany as the case may be, step in as a higher authority to protect the ruling authorities of a country against its subjects, they thereby assume the obligations of higher authority, to preserve law and justice and even quarter and pardon, and to facilitate a return of calm, while on the other hand the government which in this manner is supported by foreign help has to that degree forfeited its right to entire independence. Great difficulties at any rate accompany such maintenance of justice and order against the contemporary revolutionary movement, which is aimed not at certain individual rights but against the ruling authorities and the entire legal order. But that does not relieve the duty. Accordingly, nonintervention as a principle is erroneous; but intervention should only occur in rare cases. The actual, regular vocation of the community of nations is therefore only the ordering of international relations.

Outside of the community for the totality of life purposes, which is the state, the people also develops communities for particular purposes, firstly local communities (municipalities), then vocational communities (estates). As their purpose in the final analysis is merely a component of that total purpose, so are the elements and members of the state, but in accordance with their specific nature and their own interests they are separate from the state; they are not mere appendages of the state, but are their own institutions with an independent position in the state. As such, they must also have a rule of personal character, to be constituted as a single, conscious acting subject – this is the municipality and the vocational community (corporation), or when, in the case of landownership, relations of superiority and dependency exist and are legally exercised – manorialism. These smaller communities, to the degree that they serve the mutual satisfaction of needs and not the purpose of collective rule in accordance <13> with higher concepts, comprise the sphere of “society” in distinction to the state in the strict sense or the sphere of politics.

Accordingly, the ethical kingdom which men are to construct has its center and final fulfillment in the state, that is, the individual cohesive association, but it derives its full subject matter and content from the life and work of the smaller spheres, municipalities and estates, and it is supported and borne, and for certain of its highest tasks even supplemented, by the mutual security and reciprocality of the peoples.

Correspondingly, the doctrine of society and of the community of states is essential to the doctrine of state. It encompasses the strictly political, the social, and the international spheres, while only all three together in inseparable unity are the state in accordance with its entire full significance.

The sphere of the state in this extent is juridically expressed as the sphere of public law according to its secular side, thus in exclusion of the church. For these are the two great institutions for the rule and education of the human race, the one according to the earthly, the other to the eternal purpose, state and church, which we include under the concept of public law as opposed to private law as the sphere of the fulfillment of individual existence (Book II [Principles of Law], §. 45). The state exhausts the sphere of secular public law; municipality and estate are elements of the state; the law of nations is a relation among states.

§. 3. The State as Personality

From the discussion thus far we may therefore derive the legal type of the state, or, what is the same thing, the type of public law, both in itself and in distinction to that of private law, and valid for the church as well to the degree that it exists as an external, legally-ordered institution.

Public law comprises all human communities, all human rulerships for the fulfillment of human common existence; private law comprises all relations for the satisfaction and fulfillment of individ- <14> ual existence. Public law rests on the concept of the ethical kingdom, in the same way that private law rests on the concept of personality, and in all its institutions it has a double principle of development, just as does the latter (Book III [Private Law], §. 1), namely first the providential purpose (τέλος) of the concerned institution, that is, the material and spiritual tasks of common life, and second the personal character of rule, as we have discussed it. The ethical kingdom is the general type of public law, just as the personal character of life is that of private law.

The characteristics of public law thus are:

1. Power (imperium), to which the members are subordinated; this is not a power of the ruled which is transferred by them, as is associational power [Gesellschaftsgewalt], nor is it a power for the personal satisfaction of the ruled, as is domestic power (potestas), but rather power inhering in the institution itself and serving to fulfill its requirements. This concrete factual foundation and meaning of power distinguishes public law from private law. Should one conceive the power exercised in public legal institutions, namely in the state, as mere associational power or as patrimonial power, in either case the concept of public law is eliminated, leaving only private law.
2. The ordered coherence of men according to specific positions, and therefore the arrangement within the institution, which is the subject of rule – the constitution.
3. The range of necessary purposes and ordered tasks to achieve those purposes – the administration. This legal necessity of purposes and tasks likewise distinguishes public legal institutions from private ones, and the true public principle from the patrimonial.

That peculiar character which is the principle of development of public law (§. 2.), that of the personality of rule, is realized through these characteristics. It therefore permeates all the institutions of public law. The state, the municipality and corporation (even the church as external institution) have as one of their essential traits, that with regard to rule they are personalities. This trait is not to be confused with the concept of the legal person. Much rather, one may characterize it as the concept of the political person in contrast to the <15> legal person. The legal person is a figure of private law and only entails the capacity to be a bearer of assets [Vermögenssubjekt], while the political person is public and entails the capacity to be the subject of action and rule. The state, for example, in that it adjudicates, rules, etc., is not a legal person but has a personality in a much higher sense, such as is lacking in e.g. a foundation.

The question at issue, as to whether the state is to be considered a moral person, whether the monarchical state is a person separate from the prince and is the actual subject of power, is to be decided accordingly. The state is in no way a moral person in the usual legal sense; only the fisc is that. The latter is most certainly separate from the prince; the prince can in this respect turn around and form a moral person from his income (Civil List), distinguished from himself as well as from the treasury. By contrast, the state is a person in the sense given here; as such, it is to be distinguished from the prince, in that yet other organs outside of the prince together constitute this artificial person; but it is never to be separated from the prince and recognized as an independent subject apart from him, because its personality has its center in the prince and hence could not exist without him. When, for example, the prince issues a legal sentence or, in a constitution with estates, passes a law without the approval of the estates, this would be no act of state but merely of the prince (actually, only of the person who is the prince); this manifests the distinction between state and prince and the justification that it be asserted. However, the estates cannot do anything without the prince, nor can the judge enforce anything in the face of his obstruction; the state therefore can factually and legally execute no act without the prince, and is nowhere a personality apart from the prince.[4]

In consequence of these considerations, the essence of the state and all institutions of public law consists not in substance (im- <16> personal necessity) acting through it as a higher power over personalities, as in Hegel’s conception, but quite the opposite, in the community itself becoming a personality. The former conception does nothing less than contradict the character of the state. It would only answer to a condition in which no concentrated acting power (imperium) existed, but in which collective persons of themselves followed a higher rule. In actuality, the entire shape of the ethical world confirms the personality perspective and refutes the pantheistic perspective (Book I [Philosophical Foundations], §§. 6 and 7).

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[1] When I, here and in the following, combat the standpoints of the parties, I in no way deny that which the writers of these parties, apart from this, have achieved, which is true and good in certain results. Even less do I find myself in opposition to those who, apart from any ethical-philosophical standpoint – simply the general sense of the good and right in the background – exclusively apply the perspective of external result, experience, and history as standard. This treatment will of course always have its great shortcoming, while such a standpoint, like the rudder of the investigation, cannot be lacking, and therefore always will include such philosophical grounds for determination, only less investigated and conscious. On the other hand, however, it has the advantage of an impartiality in the treatment of results, which someone of general scientific viewpoints, be they proper and clear as you like, does not entirely preserve. Both methods of treatment are therefore necessary and suitable, mutually to purify each other.

[2] That state rule is an organism in no way leads to the conception that it must have the same or analogous organs as the human body, in like manner as the parallels drawn by Bluntschli in his book Psychological Studies on State and Church. The many unacceptable results contained therein need not be held to be a refutation of a great scientific conception; but what is certainly scientifically certain (a priori) is that such a parallel cannot exist; for when the state has this in common with the human body, that both organisms are instrumental facilities, it is still obvious that the instrumental facility serving the purposes of an individual life (facilities for breathing, eating, procreation) must be something other than the facility for the rule of a number of independent personalities (facilities to maintain justice, to develop a joint power, to promote common mores, etc.). Even if, therefore, the doctrine of that adventurous philosophy of the sixteen basic organs of the human body were more than a simple game, even then, it does not follow that the state must have the corresponding organs – on the contrary, it follows that it cannot have them. As untenable as this new doctrine of state is, to that degree it is rich in detail in instructions and apt results; yet this is not the consequence of those notions, but of the personal insight of this capable writer and statesman. It is similar to how, in earlier times, superior and mentally excellent men for a time attempted with an adept to obtain, and actually also obtained, some real gold in that adept’s wonderful laboratory, but only that which one had provided in the first place, not that which the charlatan prepared.

[3] [Gemeinde in German signifies both congregation and local community or municipality. It thus denotes “bottom-up” government.]

[4] Maurenbrecher’s book The German Princes and Sovereignty throughout confuses the legal personality and the political personality of the state, and confuses the distinction between the state and the prince with its separation from the prince.