Colloquium on power and the access to the power elite (Carl Schmitt)

Revista de Estudios Políticos Issue 78, November/December 1954

Are you happy?

We are powerful.

—LORD BYRON

Speakers at the colloquy:

• E. (Students of a course, asking questions).

• C. S. (Responding).

• The interlude can be done by a third person

  ---

E. Before you talk about power, I have a question to ask you.

C. S. Tell me, please, Mr. E.

E. Do you have any power yourself or do you have none at all?

C. S. This question is quite justified. Anyone who talks about power should start by saying in what position of power he finds himself.

E. Well, do you have power or do you have no power?

C. S. I have no power. I belong to those who have no power.

E. This is suspicious.

C. S. Why?

E. Because then you are probably biased against power. Disgust, bitterness and resentment are harmful sources of error.

C. S. What if I belonged to the powerful?

E. Then you are probably biased in favor of power. Also the interest in one's own power and its maintenance is, of course, a source of error.

C. S. Who is it, then, who can, strictly speaking, talk about power?

E. You would have to tell me that.

C. S. I would say that, perhaps, there is still another position: that of disinterested contemplation and description.

E. This would perhaps be the role of the third man or of the free-floating intelligence, wouldn't it?

C. S. And what about intelligence! Let's not start right away with such presumptions. Let us first try to focus accurately on a historical phenomenon, which we are all living and suffering through. The result will soon reveal itself to us…

1

E. That is to say, we are talking about the power exercised by men over other men. Where does the immense power which, say, Stalin or Roosevelt, or anyone else we could cite here, have exercised over millions of men, really come from?

C.S. In former times the answer would have been: power comes from nature or it comes from God.

E. I fear that nowadays power no longer seems natural to us.

C.S. I fear that too. Today we feel very superior to nature. We no longer fear it. When we find it annoying as a disease or a natural catastrophe, we hope to overcome it very soon. Man — by nature a weak, living being — has risen powerfully, with the help of technology, above everything around him. He has become the master of nature and of all living things on Earth. The barrier which, in former times, nature, with its cold and heat, its hunger and famine, its wild animals and all kinds of dangers, was once a significant obstacle to him, is now visibly beginning to fade way.

E. It is true. Today we no longer have to fear any wild animal.

C.S. The exploits of Hercules seem rather modest to us today, and if a lion or a wolf were to enter a large modern city today, the most it would do would be to cause a traffic jam and the children would hardly be frightened. In the face of nature, Man today feels so superior to nature that he allows himself the luxury of setting up botanical gardens.

E. And what about God?

C. S. As far as God is concerned, the Modern Man — I am referring to the typical inhabitant of the big city — also has the feeling that God is giving up or has withdrawn from us. When the name of God comes up today, the man of today's normal culture automatically quotes Nietzsche's statement: “God is dead.” Others, even better informed, quote the statement of the French socialist Proudhon, who predates Nietzsche's statement by forty years and who asserts: “Whoever says God, wants to deceive.”

E. If power comes neither from nature nor from God, where does it come from then?

C. S. Then there is only one thing left: the power that a man exercises over other men comes from Man himself.

E. Well, that's good for us! We are all men. Stalin, too, was a man; so was Roosevelt or any other man we could quote here.

C.S. Really reassuring words! If the power that a man exercises over others comes from nature, it is either the power of the progenitor over his offspring or the supremacy of fangs, horns, claws, hooves, poisonous bladders and other natural weapons. We can well dispense here with the power of the progenitor over his offspring. Then we are left with the power of the wolf over the lamb. A man who has power would be a wolf as opposed to a man who has no power. He who has no power feels like a lamb until he, for his part, reaches the status of the mighty and plays the role of the wolf. This is confirmed by the Latin adage: Homo homini lupus. Translated, it means: man is a wolf to man.

E. What if the power comes from God?

C.S. Then, the one who exercises it is the bearer of a divine property. He receives, with his power, something divine and it would be necessary to honor, if not himself, then a power of God which is inherent to him. This is confirmed by the Latin adage: Homo homini Deus. Translated it means: man is for man a God.

E. This is too much!

C.S. But if power comes neither from nature nor from God, then everything that concerns power and its exercise occurs only between men. Then we are men among ourselves. The able stand against the powerless, the able against the powerless, simply man to man.

E. That is to say: man is for man a man.

C.S. This is confirmed by the Latin adage: Homo homini homo.

2

E. It is clear. Man is for man a man. It is only because men are found who obey another man that they give him power. If they cease to obey him, the power ends by itself.

C.S. Very true. But why do you obey? Obedience is far from arbitrary, but is motivated by something and to some extent. Why, then, do people give their consent to power? In some cases they do it out of trust, in others out of fear, sometimes out of hope, sometimes out of despair. But what they always need is protection, and this protection they seek in power. From man's point of view, there is no other explanation for power than the relationship between protection and obedience. He who does not have the power to protect someone does not have the right to demand obedience from him either. Conversely, he who seeks and accepts protection has no right to withhold obedience.

E. But what if the powerful person orders something unjust, should obedience not then be withheld?

C.S. Of course! But I am not talking about unjust orders in isolation, but about a situation as a whole, in which the powerful and those who are subject to them are coordinated in a political unity. The point here is that the one in power can create efficient, and by no means always immoral, motives for obedience without interruption: by granting protection and a secure existence, through education and solidarity interests towards others. In short: consensus determines power, it is true, but power also determines consensus and it is by no means, in all cases, an irrational or immoral consensus.

E. What do you mean by this?

C. S. By this I mean that power, even where it is exercised with the full consent of all those subject to it, still has a quite special significance and, so to speak, a surplus value. It is more than the sum of all the consensuses it contains, and even more than its product. Please reflect on how closely man, in this labour-ridden society, is bound up with the social structure! We saw earlier how nature’s barrier is receding, but now we see how the social barrier is advancing, and with what force and proximity. This is why the motivation for the consensus of power is also becoming stronger and stronger. A modern man in power has infinitely more means to promote the consensus of his power than Charlemagne or Barbarossa.

3

E. Does this mean that the powerful today can do whatever they want?

C.S. On the contrary. I only mean by this that power is its own, autonomous magnitude, even in relation to the consensus it has itself created, and now I would like to show you that it is also autonomous in relation to the powerful. Power is an objective magnitude, with its own laws, vis-à-vis the individual human being who, at any given moment, may have power in his hand.

E. What does it mean here to say that power is an objective magnitude with its own laws?

C.S. It means something very specific. You must clearly understand that even the most terrible power is subject to the limits of human nature, to the deficiency of the human brain and the weakness of the human soul. Even the most powerful man has to eat and drink as we all do. He too falls ill and grows old.

E. Modern science offers amazing means of overcoming the barriers of human nature.

C. S. Of course. He who has the power can be assisted by the most famous and Nobel Prize-winning doctors. He can take more injections than anyone else. In spite of everything, after a few hours of work or vice, he ends up getting tired and falling asleep. The terrible Caracalla and the mighty Genghis Khan lie thereafter like children and perhaps still snoring.

E. This is a picture that every mighty man should always bear in mind.

C. S. Very true, and philosophers and moralists, educationalists and rhetoricians have always imagined it that way. But let's not dwell on this point. I would just like to add that the even more modern philosopher of purely human power, the Englishman Thomas Hobbes, uses this weakness common to every human individual as the basis for his theory of the state. Hobbes constructs it in the following way: from weakness results danger, from danger: fear, from fear: the need for security, and from fear in turn the need for a protective apparatus with a more or less complicated organisation. But in spite of all the protective measures, Hobbes says, anyone can kill anyone at the right moment. A weak man may find himself in the position of being able to liquidate the strongest and most powerful man. At this point men are really equal, for they are all threatened and exposed to danger.

E. A cold comfort!

C. S. I didn't really want neither to comfort nor to frighten, but simply to draw an objective picture of human power. Physical danger is, in all this, only the crudest aspect, and not even the one we find every day. A further consequence of the narrow limits of each human individual is even more appropriate for us to show what is of interest here, i.e. the proper and objective normativity of each power vis-à-vis the individual who has the power and the unavoidable internal dialectic between power and non-power, in which every powerful human being is involved.

E. I have no use for dialectics here.

C. S. Let us see. The human individual, in whose hands for a moment the great political decisions lie, can only form his will under given assumptions and means. Even the most absolute prince depends on the opinions and reports of his advisers. A multitude of facts and warnings, proposals and suppositions come to him day by day and hour by hour. From this rough and endless sea of truth and lies, of realities and possibilities, even the most astute and powerful man can only draw a few drops.

E. In this we see the greatness and misery of the absolute prince.

C. S. One sees above all the inner dialectic of human power. Whoever succeeds in speaking before the one who has power already participates in power, and it does not matter whether he is a responsible minister, or whether he succeeds in reaching, by indirect means, the ear of the powerful. It is enough that he knows how to give impressions and motives to the human individual, in whose hands the decision rests for a moment. Thus all direct power is immediately subordinated to indirect influences. There have been powerful men who have sensed this dependence, so that they fell prey to anger and rage. And then they tried, instead of resorting to their usual adviser, to get information through other channels.

E. Considering the corruption in the courts, they would surely have been right.

C.S. True. But unfortunately they only fell into new and often grotesque dependencies. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid ended up disguised himself as a serf going around the taverns of Baghdad at night to learn the truth. I do not know what he found and drank from this dubious source. Frederick the Great was as an old man so distrustful that he only spoke frankly with his aid Fredersdorff. The aid thus became an influential man, even if he remained otherwise just as faithful and honest.

E. Other powerful people end up entrusting themselves to their chauffeur or their mistress.

C. S. In other words, in front of every area of direct power there is an antechamber of influences and indirect forces, an access to the ear, a passage to the soul of the powerful. There is no human power without this antechamber and without this corridor.

E. However, with prudent measures and constitutional determinations, many abuses can be avoided.

C.S. This can and must be done. But no institution, however wise, no organization, however convoluted, can entirely extirpate the antechamber itself. No fit of rage can eliminate, without a trace, the clique or the antechamber. The antechamber itself cannot be circumvented.

E. This seems to me more like a secret staircase.

C.S. Antechamber, secret staircase, back room, cellar; the issue itself is clear and the same for the dialectics of human power. In any case, it is in this antechamber of power that, in the course of world history, a colourful and mixed society has come together. This is where the influential people meet. Here we find ministers and ambassadors of the highest calibre, but also confessors and doctors, assistants and secretaries, valets and favourites. Here is old Fredersdorff, the valet of Frederick the Great, next to the noble Empress Augusta, Rasputin next to Cardinal Richelieu, a grey eminence next to a whore. Sometimes there are clever and wise men in this antechamber, sometimes fabulous organisers or honest stewards, sometimes upstart fools and cheats. Sometimes the antechamber really is the official chamber of state, where worthy gentlemen meet and converse until received. But often it is no more than a private cabinet.

E. Or even the room of a sick person, where a paralytic lies, next to whom a few friends sit and rule the world.

C.S. The more power is concentrated, as in a summit, in a certain place, in a certain man or in a group of men, the more the problem of the corridor and the question of access to the summit becomes acute. The battle between those who occupy the antechamber and those who control the corridor becomes all the more violent, bitter, and deafening. This combat in the fog of indirect influences is as inevitable as it is essential to all human power. In it, the inner dialectic of human power is realised.

E. But aren't these things merely aberrations of a personal regime?

C.S. No. The process of the formation of the corridor, of which we speak here, develops in minimal and infinitesimal principles at every step, in the large and in the small, everywhere where men exercise power over other men. In the same measure in which a sphere of power is summed up, an antechamber to this power is also immediately organised. Every increase in direct power also thickens and rarefies the atmosphere of indirect influences.

E. This can even be a good thing when the powerful do not do it well. I still don't see what is better, direct power or indirect power.

C.S. I see indirect power here only as a stage in the inevitable dialectical development of human power. The one who has power will be all the more isolated the more direct power is concentrated in his individual person. The corridor takes him off the ground and puts him as it were into a stratosphere, where he reaches only those who rule him indirectly, while all other men over whom he exercises power are no longer reached, and they no longer reach him either. In extreme cases this becomes grotesquely palpable. This is also the external consequence of the isolation of the powerful through the inevitable apparatus of power. The same internal logic is realised in countless principles of everyday life in the constant interplay of direct power and indirect influence. No human power escapes this dialectic of self-affirmation and self-defeat.

INTERLUDE: BISMARCK & MARQUIS DE POSA

The struggle for the corridor, for access to the summit of power, is a particularly intense struggle for power, through which the inner dialectic between human power and non-power is realised. This matter of fact we have to look at it, first of all, in its true reality, without rhetoric or sentimentality, but also without cynicism or nihilism. That is why I would like to highlight the problem with just two examples.

The first example is a document that belongs to constitutional history: it is Bismarck's resignation in March 1890. It was published in the third volume of Bismarck's Pensées et Mémoires and is extensively commented on. It has been in everything (in its structure, in the manner of expounding thought and in its tone, in that it expresses as much as in what it keep quiet) the well-thought-out work of a great master of the art of politics. It was Bismarck's last official act, and was later sketched and carefully stylized as a document for posterity. The old and experienced Reich Chancellor, the creator of the empire, was arguing with the inexperienced heir, the young King and Kaiser Wilhelm II. There were many objective oppositions and differences of opinion, on domestic and foreign policy issues, between the two. But the core of the resignation, the high point, was purely formal: the dispute over the question of how the Chancellor should be informed and how the King and Kaiser should be informed. Bismarck demands complete freedom to choose his representatives and guests in his house. The King and Kaiser, on the other hand, is denied the right to hear a minister unless he himself, Bismarck, President of the Council of Ministers, is present. Thus the problem of an immediate audience with the king became the central issue in Bismarck's resignation. The tragedy of the Second Reich began with his resignation. The problem of the audience with the king is ultimately the problem of every monarchy, because it is the problem of access to the top. Even Baron vom Stein exhausted himself in the struggle against the secret cabinet advisers. Bismarck, too, had to succumb to the old and eternal problem of access to the top.

The second example is taken from Schiller's play Don Carlos. Here a great dramatist tries to capture the essence of power. The action of the drama revolves around the question: Who has immediate access to the king, the absolute monarch Philip II? Whoever has this immediate access to the king shares in his power. Until now, the confessor and the general Duke of Alba occupied the anteroom of power and blocked access to the king. Now, a third man, the Marquis of Posa, shows up, and the other two immediately recognize the danger. At the end of the third act the drama reaches the climax of its tension: the knight — i.e. the Marquis de Posa — will henceforth be received without needing to be announced. This has an enormous dramatic effect, not only on the spectator, but also on all those involved in the drama itself. “This really is too much,” says Don Carlos, when he knows it, “too much, really too much;” and the confessor Domingo says tremulously to the Duke of Alba: “Our times have passed.” After this climax, the great drama takes a sudden tragic turn. In return for gaining immediate access to the powerful, the Marquis of Posa is shot dead. We do not know what he, for his part, would have done with the confessor and the general, had he been able to keep his position with the king.

4

C.S. However interesting these examples may be, do not forget, dear Mr. E., in relation to what we deal with all this; it is precisely a moment of the inner dialectics of human power. There are still a number of other questions which we can explain in the same way, for example, the abysmal problem of succession to power, whether dynastic, democratic or charismatic. But it should be quite clear by now what we mean by this dialectic.

E. I always see only the splendour and misery of man; you always speak of internal dialectics. That is why I would like to ask you a very simple question: if power, exercised by men, does not come from God or from nature, but is an internal human structure, is it then good or bad, or what is it?

C. S. This question is more dangerous than you may suspect. For most men will answer most naturally: Power is good if I have it, and it is bad if my enemy has it.

E. Let us rather put it like this: Power in itself is neither good nor bad. It is in itself neutral. It is what Man makes of it. In the hands of a good man, it is good, and in the hands of a bad man, it is bad.

C. S. And who decides in a given case whether a man is good or bad? The powerful or someone else? The fact that someone has power means, first of all, that he himself decides about it. This is what belongs to his power. If it is someone else who decides, then it follows that this someone else is the one who has the power or at least claims it.

E. Then it seems that, in effect, power is in itself neutral.

C. S. Whoever believes in an all-powerful and all-loving God cannot claim that power is evil or even neutral. The Apostle of Christianity, St. Paul, famously says in the Epistle to the Romans: “There is no power but of God.” Pope St. Gregory the Great, the archetype of the papal shepherd of the peoples, expresses himself on this with the greatest clarity and decisiveness. Listen to what he says: God is the highest power and the highest being. All power is His and is and remains in its essence divine and good. If the devil had power, even this power, as power, would be divine and good. Only the will of the devil is evil. But even in spite of this always evil, demonic will, the power remains in itself divine and good. Thus speaks St. Gregory. He says: “Only the will to power is evil, but power itself is always good.”

E. This is surprisingly incredible. In such a case I am rather convinced by Jacob Burckhardt, who, as is well known, has said, “Power is in itself evil.”

C. S. Let us consider Burckhardt's famous phrase somewhat more closely. The decisive passage in his Considerations on Universal History goes like this: And now we are shown - think in this connection of Louis XIV, Napoleon and the popular revolutionary governments — that power is in itself evil (Schlosser), that without respect for any religion the right of egoism, which is denied to the individual, is attributed to the State. The name Schlosser has been added in brackets by the editor of the Considerations on Universal History, Burckhardt's nephew Jacob Oeri, either as a quotation or as an authority on the matter.

E. Schlosser… isn't he Goethe's brother-in-law?

C.S. Goethe's brother-in-law was Johann Georg Schlosser. Here he refers to Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, the author of a humanitarian world history, whom Jacob Burckhardt liked to quote in his courses. But both, and even the three of them, Jacob Burckhardt and the two Schlossers, fall far short of St. Gregory the Great.

E. But, after all, we no longer live in the high Middle Ages. I am sure that most people today are more convinced by Burckhardt than by St. Gregory the Great.

C. S. Obviously something essential has had to change since the time of St. Gregory the Great with regard to power. For even in the time of St. Gregory the Great there were wars and terrors of all kinds. On the other hand, the powerful, in whom, according to Burckhardt, we are shown above all the evil of power. Louis XIV, Napoleon and the French revolutionary governments, are powerful and quite modern.

E. But they didn’t even have engines! And they didn't even suspect anything like atomic and hydrogen bombs.

C.S. Schlosser and Burckhardt are not exactly saints, but they are pious men, who did not make such a statement lightly.

E. How is it possible, then, that a pious man of the 7th century should regard power as good, while pious men of the 19th and 20th centuries regard it as evil? Something essential has had to change in this.

C. S. I think that in the last century the essence of human sin has been discovered in a very peculiar way. Because it is indeed strange that the thesis of evil power spread precisely from the 19th century onwards. We had thought that the problem of power had been solved, or at least softened, if power does not come from God or from nature, but is something that men agree among themselves. What should man fear if God is dead and the wolf no longer even frightens a child? But it is precisely since the time when this humanization of power seems to have taken place — since the French Revolution — that the conviction that power is evil in itself has been spreading uncontrollably. The affirmation God is dead and the other affirmation Power is in itself evil come from the same period and the same situation. Basically, both statements confirm the same thing.

5

E. This would certainly need some explanation.

C. S. In order to understand the essence of human power, as it manifests itself to us in our present situation, it would be best to use a relation found by the aforementioned English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the even more modern thinker of purely human power. He has enunciated and established this relationship with great precision, and we will call it, in his honor, the “Hobbesian danger-relation.” Hobbes says: “Man is to other men, from whom he believes himself threatened, more dangerous than any animal, and in the same degree that man's weapons are more dangerous than those of the animal.” This is a clear and fixed relationship.

E. Oswald Spengler has already said that man is a wild animal.

C. S. Apologies. The relation of dangerousness, enunciated by Thomas Hobbes, has nothing to do with Oswald Spengler's thesis. Hobbes, on the contrary, assumes that man is not an animal, but something quite different, partly less and partly much more. Man is able to compensate, even overcompensate, immensely, for his biological weaknesses and deficiencies by technical inventions.

Now pay attention. By 1650, when Hobbes enunciated this relationship, man's weapons — arrow and bow, axe and dagger, guns and cannon — were already far superior and sufficiently dangerous compared to the paws of a lion or the fangs of a wolf. Today, however, the danger of technical means has grown to infinity. Consequently, the danger of man to other men has also grown in the same proportion. Thus the difference between power and powerlessness is growing in such a limitless way that the concept of man himself is being dragged into a new predicament.

E. I don't understand why.

C. S. Then listen. Who here is ultimately a man? The one who produces these modern means of annihilation and applies them, or the one against whom they are directed? We would still be going in circles if we were to say: Power is in itself, like technology, neither good nor bad, but neutral; it is therefore what man makes of it. We would only be evading the real difficulty that arises from the question of who decides what is good and what is bad. The power of modern means of annihilation exceeds the strength of the human individuals who invent and apply them, in the same proportion as the possibilities of modern machines and procedures exceed the strength of human muscles and brains. In this stratosphere, in this realm of ultra-sound, not even human will, good or bad, is involved any more. The human arm that holds the atom bomb, the human brain that enervates the muscles of this human arm, are not, at the decisive moment, a member of the individual human being, but a prosthesis, a part of the technical and social structure that produces the atom bomb and utilizes it. The power of the powerful individual is here nothing more than the flow of a situation resulting from a system of an incalculably excessive division of labor.

E. Isn't it great that today we penetrate the stratosphere, or the ultra-sound field, or outer space, and that we have machines which calculate faster and better than any human brain?

C S. In this “us” lies the real question. It is no longer man as man, but a chain reaction triggered by him that produces everything. By transcending the limits of human nature, it also transcends all inter-human measures of any possible power of men over men. It also runs over the relationship between protection and obedience. Even more than technology, power has slipped out of the hands of men, and men who exercise power over others with the help of such technical means are no more masters of themselves than those who are exposed to their power.

E. But those who invent and manufacture the modern means of annihilation are also no more than men.

C.S. Even in their eyes, the power produced by them is nothing more than an objective and autonomous magnitude, which infinitely exceeds the physical, intellectual and mental capacity of the individual human inventor. In inventing these means of annihilation, the inventors are unconsciously working towards the creation of a new Leviathan. Already the thoroughly organized modern European state of the 16th and 17th centuries was a technical product of craftsmanship, a super-man created by men, composed of men, confronted with a super-power, from the image of the Leviathan as the big man, the μακροϛ ἅνθρωποϛ, to the little man who produced him, the private individual, the μικροϛ ἅνθρωποϛ. In this sense, the modern, well-functioning European state was the first modern machine and at the same time the concrete premise of all subsequent technical machines. It was the machine of machines, the machina machinarum, a superman composed of men, which comes into being by human consensus, and which, however, the moment it exists, exceeds all human consensus. It is precisely because this is a power organised by men that Burckhardt finds it bad in itself. That is why he does not refer his famous statement to Nero or Genghis Khan, but to the typically modern and European rulers: Louis XIV, Napoleon and the popular revolutionary governments.

E. Perhaps new scientific inventions can change all this and put it in order.

C.S. That would be nice. But how are you going to change the fact that power and non-power are no longer at odds, staring at each other, and that they no longer regard each other as man to man? The human masses who feel themselves exposed, powerless, to the effects of modern means of annihilation, know first of all that they are, in fact, powerless. The reality of power surpasses the reality of man. I do not say that it is evil. Much less do I say that it is neutral. And I would be ashamed to say, as a thinking man, that it is good if I have it, and bad if my enemy has it. I am only saying that it is for everyone, also in the face of the powerful, an autonomous reality, and that it drags them along in its dialectic. Power is stronger than any will to power, stronger than any human goodness and happily also stronger than any human evil.

E. It is reassuring that power is, as an objective magnitude, stronger than any evil of men, who exercise power; but, on the other hand, it is not so satisfactory that it is also stronger than the goodness of men. This is not positive enough for me. I hope you are not a Machiavellian.

C. S. Of course I am not. Besides, Machiavelli himself was not a Machiavellian either.

E. This seems to me too paradoxical.

C. S. I find it very simple. If Machiavelli had been a Machiavellian, he would certainly not have written books that would have given him a bad name. He would have published pious and edifying books, and rather an anti-Machiavelli.

E. Then he would have been clever, of course! But there must be practical applications of your theory. What is it that we must do, after all?

C.S. What is it that we must do? Do you remember the beginning of our conversation? You asked me the following question: “Do I myself have power?” Well, now let us turn the sentence passive, and I ask you: Do you yourself have power or do you not have it?

E. It seems that you want to take advantage of my question in order not to deal with any useful application.

C.S. On the contrary. I only wanted to create a possibility for myself to give a sensible answer to your question. If someone, in relation to power, asks for a practical application, there must be a difference between having power and not having power.

E. Obviously. But you keep saying that power is something objective and stronger than any man who wields it. For this there must be some examples of practical application.

C.S. There are infinite ones, both for those who have power and for those who don't have it. It would already be a great success if real power were to appear publicly and visibly on the political stage. To the powerful I would recommend, for example, never to appear in public without the ministerial uniform or the corresponding finery. To a non-powerful person I would say: don't think you are good just because you have no power. And if he suffers with it, with the lack of power, I would remind him that the will to power is as self-destructive as the will to pleasure or other small things. I would instill upon the members of a constituent or consultative assembly the problem of access to the top, so that they would not believe that they could organize the government of their country according to any scheme, as a well-known speculation. In short, you see that there are many practical applications.

E. But what about Man? Where is Man?

C.S. Everything that a man — with or without power — thinks or does, passes through the corridor of human consciousness and other individual human powers.

E. Then Man is for man a man.

C. S. He is also a man. Certainly always in a very concrete way. This means, for example: The man Stalin is for the man Trotsky a Stalin, and the man Trotsky is for the man Stalin a Trotsky.

E. Is this your last word'?

C.S. No. I only wanted to tell you that the beautiful formula, “man is for man a man” — homo homini homo — is no solution, but only the beginning of our problematic. I mean this from a critical, affirmative point of view, and in the sense of the great verse:

To be a man remains, however, a decision.

This one will be my final word.