Whilst I thus emphatically reject the doctrine of historic right, and even regard the phrase as a contradiction in terms, we must be careful to avoid appealing to historic right to justify revolution. This is the error of those who in the name of progress would acclaim the demand for innovation as the only sound principle.
Neither the old nor the new is per se right and true. A thing is not necessarily true and right because it has actually existed and continues to exist. This settles the whole problem! The democrat who contests the validity of the principle of catholicity (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus), realises clearly that history, chronology, cannot replace logic and ethics.
This conception must be emphatically counterposed both to the doctrine of the reactionaries and to that of the radicals. The defenders of revolutionism, no less than the defenders of a particular revolution, must attain to clear ideas on the subject.
The radicalism that is always apt and eager for revolution, stricken with blindness to philosophico-historical and political realities, is often a danger owing to the way in which it plays into the hands of reaction. All well-informed political thinkers of modern times have recognised how revolution may promote reaction, and it must therefore be the aim of true democrats and scientific statesmen to get the better of radicalism. I do not mean by this that we should attempt to discover a so-called golden mean between extremes, for the paltry doctrine of the golden mean has ever been a favourite with reactionaries, and it implies the continued existence of the oppositions it pretends to conciliate. What we have to do is to remain consistently progressive in our thoughts and in our actions, so that by creative progress we may render reaction and radicalism alike impossible.[1]
- ↑ We recall Metternich's saying: "The sacred middle line upon which truth stands is accessible to but a few.'
and injustice." Merkel is thinking of a revolution from above, of a coup d'état; but his remarks obviously apply with equal force to a revolution from below. The drift of his argument is that might precedes right and makes right, and the official jurisconsults are sufficiently ingenious to cloak these hard facts in legal terminology. What sort of "moral forces" are these, what sort of "condonation"; how can "habituation," how can "other intermediating factors," make "the forces of the popular consciousness . . . favourable" so that "right or justice can issue from force and injustice?" In face of such logic and such ethics, Engels was perfectly justified in contending that the right to revolution was the only true historic right.
