“Germany and France with regard to the question of centralisa- 
tion” with the sign— —. 

“Whether state power should issue from a single point or whether each province, 
each locality, should administer itself, and the céntral government, only acting as 
the power of the whole, should rule also the individual parts of the state when the 


state has to be represented externally —this is a question on which views are still 
very much divided.” 


The fate which a question of the time has in common with every 
question justified by its content, and therefore rational, is that the 
question and not the answer constitutes the main difficulty. True 
criticism, therefore, analyses the questions and not the answers. 
Just as the solution of an algebraic equation is given once the 
problem has been put in its simplest and sharpest form, so every 
question is answered as soon as it has become a real question. 
World history itself has no other method than that of answering 
and disposing of old questions by putting new ones. The riddles of 
each period are therefore easy to discover. They are questions of 
the time, and although the intention and insight of a single 
individual may play an important role in the answers, and a 
practised eye is needed to separate what belongs to the individual 
from what belongs to the time, the questions, on the other hand, 
are the frank, uncompromising voices of the time embracing all 
individuals; they are its mottoes, they are the supremely practical 
utterances proclaiming the state of its soul. In each period, 
therefore, reactionaries are as sure indicators of its spiritual con- 
dition as dogs are of the weather. To the public, it looks as if the 
reactionaries make the questions. Hence the public believes that if 
some obscurantist or other does not combat a modern trend, if he 


Question of Centralisation 183 


does not subject something to question, then the question does not 
exist. The public itself, therefore, regards the reactionaries as the 
true men of progress. 

‘Whether state power should issue from a single point”, ie., 
whether a single point should rule, or whether each province, etc., 
should administer itself and the central government act only 
externally as the power of the whole “in relation to the exte- 
rior” —the question of centralisation cannot be formulated in this 
way. The author? assures us that 


“this question, considered from a higher standpoint, falls away of itself as being 
futile”, for “if man is really what he should be by his essence, individual freedom is 
not separate from general freedom”. “If, therefore, one assumes a nation to be 
made up of righteous people, the question under consideration cannot arise at all.” 
“The central power would live in all members, etc., etc.” “But just as in general 
every external law, every positive institution, etc., would be superfluous, so would 
any central state power, etc. Such a society would be not a state, but the ideal of 
mankind.” “One can make it astonishingly easy to solve the most difficult state 
problems if one looks at our social life from a high philosophical standpoint. And 
theoretically, such a solution of the problems is quite correct, indeed the only correct 
one. But it is a question here not of a theoretical, etc., but of a practical, naturally 
merely empirical and relative, answer to the question of centralisation, etc.” 


The author of the article begins with a self-criticism of his 
question. Seen from a higher standpoint, it does not exist, but at 
the same time we are told that, seen from this high standpoint, all 
laws, positive institutions, the central state power and finally the 
state itself, disappear. The author rightly praises the “astonishing 
ease” with which this standpoint is able to orient itself, but he is 
not right in calling such a solution of the problems “quite correct, 
indeed the only correct one”, he is not right in calling this 
standpoint a “philosophical” one. Philosophy must seriously pro- 
test at being confused with imagination. The fiction of a nation of 
“righteous” people is as alien to philosophy as the fiction of “praying 
hyenas” is to nature. The author substitutes “his abstractions” for 
philosophy.”