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surpassing might, in whom the total group views itself, shall be equipped with prerogatives.
Only when man s capacity of reason is interpreted as his actual might does the demand of
equal rights follow.
C. Power, law, and interest
On this basis then the tendency can develop to dissolve power for the sake of a law which is
independent of any powerful group, the realization of which is the work of functionaries
rather than possessors of power. This ideal is common to all socialistic aims. But the question
is this: is there a law independent of power in form as well as in content? The answer to both
must be negative. There is no independent law from the point of view of its form, because the
power determining law in free decision and executing it belongs to the law and therefore can
never be resolved into a mechanism of administration. There is no independent law from the
point of view of content, because the concrete existence of a special social group is expressed
in each law. And indeed it should be the existence of the total group; in reality, it usually is
only the existence of the individual group, in which the total group realizes itself. Only a
completely homogeneous total group would need no representative sub-group. But such
homogeneity is to be expected nowhere, if our description is true that every life is a unity of
remaining within itself and advancing beyond itself. For each of these tendencies requires a
certain psychological and sociological structure, and therefore a particular supporting group.
It is characteristic that homogeneous groups (as far as the reports are dependable) can be
found only in very primitive, entirely undynamic societies, whose life process passes
essentially vegetatively. The assumption that after the removal of the class contrast through
the proletarian revolution, a complete homogeneity of society could come into existence,
would force one to expect a static-vegetative final stage. Such an expectation, of course,
would not mean the beginning, as Marx thinks, but rather the end of history. Man would fall
into a sub-historical sphere, and with that stop being what for us is concretely "man."
As soon, however, as the assumption of a simply homogeneous static, vegetative society is
abandoned, the question arises of the mode in which a group within society takes over the
function of advance. Each advance of a group depends on "interest" and has no reality without
taking interest into account. Interest here is in no wise to be held equivalent with economic
interest, unless one interprets "economic" so broadly as to embrace all possibilities of human
fulfillment of existence. Interest is meant as tension toward higher fulfillment of existence in
every sense. And it is not to be doubted that a social group which is the bearer of that
advance, has this position only as a result of this tension. The consequence of this, however, is
that the law and politics of a state are always the expression as well of the interest of the
groups in power. This is posited with the universal identity of existence and tension of might,
of social existence and tension of power, and can be denied no more than the dynamics of life
and the concreteness of culture itself. Only through being the expression of an existence,
therefore of a power, is culture concrete, real culture and not an abstraction, an impotent
Utopia. Whoever rejects power in the sense of our exposition, must also reject the
concreteness of culture, must resolve reality into an abstract pattern of reason. A social power
becomes distorted only at the moment when the position of power created by a society is in
the possession of a group whose interests have come into exclusive conflict with the interests
of other groups and thereby with the interest of the total society. At this moment the
revolutionary situation occurs, i.e., the social group faces a decision fundamental to its
existence. The question of the existence of a group is raised anew as a question about the
group which is to come into power. And the answer to this question necessarily occurs in
latent or manifest revolution.
D. Power and spirit
If the concept of power is claimed for the social position of power, then a concept like
"spiritual power" seems to lose its meaning. For spiritual power, to be sure, is effective in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]