131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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development can eliminate dictatorship just as it could declare a permanent dictatorship. For
the actions of people, there is always the argument that the highest level of consciousness can
and must exercise dominion over the lower. In political and practical terms that is the
equivalent of a rationalist educational dictator. But Hegelianism, like every rationalist
system, thus negates the individual as accidental and inessential, and elevates the whole
systematically into an absolute.
The Weltgeist only manifests itself in a few minds at any stage of its development. The spirit
of an age does not thrust itself into the awareness of every person at a single stroke, nor does
it appear in all members of the dominant nation or social group. There will always be a
vanguard of the Weltgeist, the apex of the development of consciousness, an avant-garde that
has the right to act because it possesses correct knowledge and consciousness, not as the
chosen of a personal God, but as a moment in development. This vanguard does not wish to
escape from the immanence of world-historical evolution at all, but is, according to the
vulgar image, the midwife of coming things. The world-historical personality—Theseus,
Caesar, Napoleon—is an instrument of the Weltgeist; his diktat rests upon his position in the
historical moment. The world soul that Hegel saw riding by in Jena in 1806 was a soldier, not
a Hegelian. 7 It was the representative of the alliance between philosophy and the saber but
only from the side of the saber. But it was Hegelians, conscious of knowing their own time
correctly, who demanded a political dictatorship in which they naturally would become the
dictators. In no way different from Fichte, they were "ready to prove to the world that their
view was infallible." That gave them the right to dictatorship. 8
3—
Dictatorship and Dialectics in Marxist Socialism
The interpretation of Hegel's philosophy presented here, that it has a side whose practical
consequences can lead to a rationalist dictatorship, also holds true for Marxism, and certainly
in the kind of proof
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