United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
National boundary and State frontier do not coincide because there are still some twelve million Germans living outside Germany, in Austria-Hungary; Germany is a State, but not a unitary State, for she still retains the obsolete "particularism" of the eighteenth century, with its petty princes and dynastic frontiers; and lastly, the government of Germany cannot claim to express the general will, while more than a third of the voters in the empire are sworn to overthrow the whole system at the earliest opportunity.
But populism and particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of government now enabled sober statesmen to point the prospect of ruin through chaos and get a hearing in their advocacy of sound system. Exalted theorising on the principles of liberty had merely destroyed the old régime: matter-of-fact reckoning on principles of law and responsibility must build the new.
It is for the German believers, who have weathered the storm, to arise and promote the Cause, to proclaim the non-political character of their Faith, to establish its nascent institutions and prove by their words and acts their freedom from every taint of particularism and prejudice. May the Almighty guide their steps, sustain them in their efforts and bless their activities. Shoghi 14 June 1933
In addition to this, an unhappy historical development which shattered the national and religious unity of the nation created in the system of small States and in confessionalism a fertile soil for the natural tendency to particularism, on which it flourished luxuriantly as soon as the nation was no longer inspired with great and unifying thoughts.
The Fundamental Assemblies in their turn assented to it by 165,520 votes to 11,597, considerable official pressure being exerted to secure this result; and the Constitution came thus into legal existence. Its principal provisions were directed to the complete obliteration of the old provincial particularism.
It detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it achieved no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction because the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. It fell into particularism and failed.
It is clear that such a process must gradually wipe out the distinction between the different peoples, and substitute for particularism something of universal import. In such a process what, we ask once more, becomes of the principle of nationality, which is one of our immediate aims?
During the first half century of the Republic, the North and South were changing coats from time to time, on the subject of State Rights and the right to secede, but meanwhile the Constitution itself was working silently in the North to undermine the particularism of Jefferson and to strengthen the nationalism of Hamilton.
But with respect to your plan of each man establishing his own religion, I had still something to say to you, that a particularism like this is totally and absolutely opposed to the nature of mankind, and therefore would abolish all social order.
This Propagandist origin of the Free Press stamped it from its outset with a character it still bears, and will continue to bear, until it has had that effect in correcting, and, perhaps, destroying, the Official Press, to which I shall later turn. I mean that the Free Press has had stamped upon it the character of disparate particularism.
Word Of The Day