To Politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their action--supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional thinkers who have turned their attention to the _faits accomplis_ of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions--for preference, abstraction-myths like justice, virtue, freedom--and then applied them as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening. Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts, and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political science whereby we can form the course of the world according to an ideal recipe. As nothing of the kind has ever or anywhere happened, political doing has come to be considered as so trivial in comparison with abstract thinking that they debate in their books whether there is a “genius of action” at all.

Here, on the contrary, the attempt will be made to give, instead of an ideological system, a _physiognomy_ of politics as it has actually been practised in the course of general history, and not as it might or ought to have been practised. The problem was, and is, to penetrate to the final meaning of great events, to “see” them, to feel and to transcribe the symbolically important in them. The projects of world-improvers and the actuality of History have nothing to do with one another.[791]

The being-streams of humanity are called History when we regard them as movement, and family, estate, people, nation, when we regard them as the object moved.[792] Politics is the way in which this fluent Being maintains itself, _grows_, triumphs over other life-streams. _All living is politics_, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost marrow.[793] That which we nowadays like to call life-energy (vitality), the “it” in us that at all costs strives forward and upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth, the “home”-land; the directedness, the need to actualize--it is this that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or _it dies out_; there is no third possibility.

For this reason the nobility, as expression of a strong race-quality, is the truly political Order, and training and not shaping is the truly political sort of education. Every great politician, a centre of forces in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is microcosmic and “intellect” is unpolitical, and so there is a something of priestliness in all program-politics and ideology. The best diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something, a cosmic “it” that is bound up in the individual being breaks out immediately and with the sure tread of the sleep-walker. They do not learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older--hence the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman.

It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible, therefore, in the plural. A people _is_, really, only in relation to peoples.[794] But the natural, “race,” relation between them is for that very reason a relation of war--this is a fact that no truths avail to alter. War is the primary politics of _everything_ that lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for this, like “_orrusta_” and “_orlog_,” mean seriousness and destiny in contrast to jest and play--and the contrast is one of intensity, not of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary relationship between diplomacy and the war-art endures. The character of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the operations. The aim, too, remains the same--namely, the growth of one’s own life-unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other’s. And every attempt to eliminate the “race” element only leads to its transfer to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of parties, or that of areas, or (if there also the will to growth is extinct) that of the adventurers’ retinues, to whose doings the rest of the population unresistingly adjusts itself.

In every war between life-powers the question at issue is which is to govern the whole. It is always a life, never a system, law, or program that gives the beat in the stream of happening.[795] To be the centre of action and effective focus of a multitude,[796] to make the inward form of one’s own personality into that of whole peoples and periods, to be history’s commanding officer, with the aim of bringing one’s own people or family or purposes to the top of events--that is the scarce-conscious but irresistible impulse in every individual being that has a historical vocation in it. There is only _personal_ history, and consequently only _personal_ politics. The struggle of, not principles but men, not ideals but race-qualities, for executive power is the alpha and omega. Even revolutions are no exception, for the “sovereignty of the people” only expresses the fact that the ruling power has assumed the title of people’s leader instead of that of king. The method of governing is scarcely altered thereby, and the position of the governed not at all. And even world-peace, in every case where it has existed, has been nothing but the slavery of an entire humanity under the regimen imposed by a few strong natures determined to rule.

The conception of executive power implies that the life-unit--even in the case of the animals--is subdivided into subjects and objects of government. This is so self-evident that no mass-unit has ever for a moment, even in the severest crises (such as 1789), lost the sense of this inner structure of itself. Only the incumbent vanishes, not the office, and if a people does actually, in the tide of events, lose all leadership and float on haphazard, it only means that control has passed to outside hands, that it has become _in its entirety_ the mere object.

Politically gifted _peoples_ do not exist. Those which are supposed to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form. The English as a people are just as unthinking, narrow, and unpractical in political matters as any other nation, but they possess--for all their liking for public debate--a _tradition of confidence_. The difference is simply that the Englishman is the object of a regimen of very old and successful habits, in which he acquiesces because experience has shown him their advantage. From an acquiescence that has the outward appearance of agreement, it is only one step to the conviction that this government depends upon his will, although paradoxically it is the government that, for technical reasons of its own, unceasingly hammers the notion into his head. The ruling class in England has developed its aims and methods quite independently of the “people,” and it works with and within an unwritten constitution of which the refinements--which have arisen from practice and are wholly innocent of theory--are to the uninitiated as opaque as they are unintelligible. But the courage of a troop depends on its confidence in the leadership, and confidence means involuntary abstention from criticism. It is the officer who makes cowards into heroes, or heroes into cowards, and this holds good equally for armies, peoples, classes, and parties. _Political talent in a people_ is nothing but confidence in its leading. But that confidence has to be acquired; it will ripen only in its own good time, and success will stabilize it and make it into a tradition. What appears as a lack of the feeling of certainty in the ruled is really lack of leadership-talent in the ruling classes, which generates that sort of uninstinctive and meddlesome criticism which by its very existence shows that a people has got “out of condition.”