class-consciousness and party inclination, race and intellect, growth and construction. Aristocracy in the completed Culture, and Democracy in the incipient cosmopolitan Civilization, stand opposed till both are submerged in Cæsarism. As surely as the nobility is the Estate (and the Tiers État never manages to get itself into real form in this fashion), so surely the nobility fails to feel as a party, though it may organize itself as one.
It has in fact no choice but to do so. All modern constitutions repudiate the Estates and are built on the Party as self-evidently the basic form of politics. The nineteenth century — correspondingly, therefore, the third century B.C. — is the heyday of party politics. Its democratic character compels the formation counter-parties, and whereas formerly, as late even as the eighteenth century, the "Tiers" constituted itself in imitation of the nobility as an Estate, now there arises the defensive figure of the Conservative party, copied from the Liberal,[1] dominated completely by the latter's forms, bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois, and obliged to fight with rules and methods that liberalism has laid down. It has the choice of handling these means better than its adversary[2] or of perishing; but it is of the intimate structure of an Estate that it does not understand the situation and challenges the form instead of the foe, and is thus involved in that use of extreme methods which we see dominating the inner politics of whole states in the early phases of every Civilization, and delivering them helpless into the hands of the enemy. The compulsion that there is upon every party to be bourgeois, at any rate in appearance, turns to sheer caricature when below the bourgeoisie of education and possessions the Residue also organizes itself as a party. Marxism, for example, is in theory a negation of bourgeoisie, but as a party it is in attitude and leadership essentially middle-class. There is a continuous conflict between its will — which necessarily steps outside the bounds of party politics and therefore of constitutionalism (both being exclusively liberal phenomena), and can in honesty only be called civil war — and the appearances which it feels obliged, in justice to itself, to keep up. But for Marxism, again, these appearances are indispensable, at this particular period, if durable success is to be attained. A noble party in a parliament is inwardly just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the bourgeoisie is in its natural place there.
In Rome, from the introduction of the Tribunes, in 471, to the recognition of their legislative omnipotence, in the revolution of 287,[3] patricians and plebeians had fought their fight essentially as Estates, classes. But thereafter these opposite terms possessed hardly more than genealogical significance, and there developed instead parties, to which the terms liberal and conservative
- ↑ And wherever, as in Egypt, India, and the West, there exists a political opposition between the two primary Estates, there is also a clerical party — the party, so to speak, of the Church as distinct from religion and of the priest as distinct from the believer.
- ↑ And with its content of race-strength it has an excellent chance of successfully doing so.
- ↑ P. 409.
