Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/16

4 reform, praising the latter to the skies—very frequently, of course, without letting it become an earthly reality.

The arguments against revolution were invariably taken from the systems of thinking prevailing at the time. So long as Christianity ruled the human mind, revolution was repudiated as a sinful rebellion against the God-appointed authorities. The New Testament supplied any amount of evidence for that, since it arose in the time of the Roman Empire, at an epoch when all rebellion against the existing powers appeared hopeless, and all independent political life had ceased to exist. The revolutionary classes, of course, cited by way of reply the evidence from the Old Testament, in which the spirit of a primitive peasant democracy still makes itself frequently felt.

When, however, the theological system of thinking gave way to the juridical, the Revolution was defined as a violent breach of the existing legal order. Since no one could have the right to break the law, the right to revolution was an absurdity—revolution was in every case illegal. But the champions of the uprising classes opposed to the existing historically developed law, their own law for which they strove, as the eternal law of reason and nature, as the inalienable rights of man, and argued that the reconquest of this law, which obviously could only have been lost through some breach or breaches of the law, was certainly no breach of the law, even when brought about by a revolution.

To-day theological shibboleths have little weight—least of all with the revolutionary classes of the people. But even the appeal to the historical law has lost its force. The revolutionary origin of the law and of the Governments of to-day, is still too recent for anyone to venture to claim for them legality. Not only the Governments of France, but also the dynasties of Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, England, Holland, are of a revolutionary origin; the Kings of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, the grand Dukes of Baden and Hesse, owe not only their titles but also a considerable portion of their territories to the protection of the revolutionary upstart Napoleon; the Hohenzollerns have risen to their present position on the ruins of thrones, and even the Hapsburgs made their submission to the Hungarian Revolution. Andrassy, who had been hanged in effigy in 1852 for high treason, became Imperial Minister in 1867 without being false to the ideas of the National Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

The bourgeoisie herself took an active part in all these violations of the historical law. It, therefore, could not well, on having become the ruling class, condemn revolution in the name of that law, however much her philosophers of law tried their best to reconcile natural law with the historical one. It was obliged to look out for more effective arguments in order to condemn the revolution, and those it found in the new system which arose simultaneously with it, viz., in the natural scientific. So long as