Political Considerations of Vienna Period
from one mistake into the other. If Parliament was worthless, the Hapsburgs were worth even less—certainly not more under any circumstances. To oppose parliamentiarism here was not enough, for the question would still remain, what then? The abolition of the Reichsrat would have left only the House of Hapsburg as a governing power—an idea to me especially intolerable.
The difficulty of this particular case led me to a more thorough consideration of the problem in itself than one would perhaps otherwise have given at so early an age.
The thing that first struck me and gave me most food for thought was the obvious lack of any individual responsibility.
Let Parliament take a resolution, no matter how disastrous its result, and no one is responsible; no one can be called to account. After all, is it assuming responsibility for the guilty government to retire after an unparalleled collapse? Or for the coalition to change, or even for Parliament to be dissolved? Can any vacillating majority of persons ever be made responsible? Is not the very idea of responsibility indissolubly connected with persons? And can one, in practice, make the leading figure of a government accountable for actions whose existence and execution must be blamed exclusively upon the will and inclination of a multiplicity of persons?
Again, is the task of a governing statesman not regarded as less the actual producing of a creative idea or plan than the art of making a herd of empty-headed sheep realize the genius in his plans, and then of successfully begging for their kind approval?
Is it the sign of a statesman that he be as perfect in the art of convincing as in that of statesmanlike wisdom in making decisions or laying down broad lines of conduct?
Is a leader’s incapacity proved because he does not succeed in converting to a certain idea the majority of a crowd flung together by more or less savory accidents?
Has this crowd, in fact, ever understood any idea before success proclaimed its greatness? Is not every deed of genius in this world the genius’s visible protest against the inertia of the masses?
But what is the statesman to do if by flattery he fails to win this
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