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Updated: July 22, 2025
It is the same conception which has triumphed in the Realpolitik and Weltpolitik, and the elimination of the moral factor from the activities of high policy. The tyranny of the race dogma permeates the majority of the German historians and publicists from the early nineteenth century.
To him politics are not, like mathematics, an abstract or a deductive science. We cannot build an ideal political structure in the air. The political thinker must be more modest in his ambitions. He cannot adduce first principles. All politics must be Realpolitik. All politics must be based on concrete historical facts—i.e., circumscribed in time and space.
Indeed, from the standpoint of Realpolitik, it might be argued that in the case of America self-government was shown to be a dangerous gift; for the American colonies, which alone among European settlements had obtained this supreme endowment, were the first, and indeed the only, European settlements to throw off deliberately their connection with the mother-country.
There must be a reality in the thing that calls forth such sacrifices, a reality of the kind to which Realpolitik, with its concentration upon purely material concerns, is wholly blind: it is the reality of an ideal of honour, and justice, and freedom.
It is not by arms but by arguments and facts that economists like us, faithful to the teachings of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith, have sought to protect ourselves against it. On the eve of the war, at the inauguration of Turgot's Monument, we set forth his ideas of liberty and humanity in opposition to the German realpolitik.
Government representatives have told the Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue a 'healthy egoism, and forswear 'humanitarianism and irrational sentimentality. 'The Hereros must be forced to work, and to work without compensation and for their food only. ... The sentiments of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionaries work must be repudiated with all energy. This is what is called Realpolitik.
Descended from Orleanist Bourbons on the mother's side and from the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the father's, he was purely Prussian in his realpolitik, and observed no principle in his conduct save that of aggrandizement for his adopted country and himself.
Every lady, he said, should have some knowledge of history, and sufficient acquaintance with the three kinds of politics, Politik, Weltpolitik, and Realpolitik, to enable her to avoid wrong and frivolous conclusions such as the one the young Fraulein had just informed them she had reached, and to listen intelligently to her husband or son when they discuss these matters.
It is significant that the earliest suggestion of partition came from Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was obliged to take Russia and Austria into his counsels, as he knew that they would never allow him to annex the whole country himself. Indeed, from first to last, the story of the Polish partitions is a good example of Prussian Realpolitik.
The third essential, as essential as the other two, is the conservation of those other nations which can only exist on sufferance so long as Realpolitik is practised with impunity. To minor nationalities it should be clear that England is their friend, and cannot choose but stand their friend.
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