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He held office for twenty-eight years and transformed his world more completely than anybody in Europe during the nineteenth century with the exception of Napoleon, who was an Emperor and a General. Bismarck did it while being neither the one nor the other.
Burke had a dim view of human nature. Nothing changes. Human vice and folly merely assume new guises. Burke took an equally dim view of human foresight. Plans always go wrong because they ignore the law of unintended consequences.
The key feature of the royal government then and in presidential government in those states where it exists today is the social space of power. If you see the King or President every day, especially if you see him alone, you have power irrespective of the title of your office or its place in the hierarchy.
the Punktation of Olmütz,
The structure and arrangement of the Final Act of 1820 have the charm and clarity of the Lisbon Treaty of the European Union of 2007. Nobody but experts ever really cared to understand it, just as today very few outside Brussels can explain how the EU works.
who will sacrifice everything even his personal hatred to the success of his game—and an individual with the strangest and still stronger antipathies who will sacrifice everything except his combinations.
The rule of central European power had been constant since 1700 (and in a way still is): when Russia is up Germany is down; when Germany is up, Russia is down.
term; do what works and serves your interests.
They established the doctrine that it took three years of active duty to turn a civilian into a Prussian soldier, a matter which aroused parliamentary opposition from 1859 to the outbreak of the First World War.
a senior civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs (the Kultusministerium),
He’s the fox that you think you have shot, throw over your shoulder to take home and which then bites you in the arse.’
‘whichever way the locomotive goes, I ride with it in order—with time and opportunity—to halt it or else throw out the engineer and drive it myself.’
The amount of gold depended on its production. When economic growth exceeded the growth of money supply which it did until the late 1890s, then something had to give. When too many goods chase too little money, prices fall.
The crash of 1873 thus ushered in a new era, one which nobody had experienced before in human history: an international crisis of capitalism.
The Princess has an alphabetically ordered list of the ‘Deklaranten’, that is, those who signed the declaration in favour of the Kreuzzeitung which the Prince had attacked. All these are seen as personal enemies who will never be forgiven and to whom visiting cards will not be returned.
When the French Revolution cleared away the mini-states of the old Reich, and abolished all closed corporations, it left a legacy of dissatisfaction and rage among the artisans at their lost privileges which never died away.
Economists, Glagau writes, call boom and bust ‘a necessary evil’ but much of it is the work of crooks and fraudsters.
Princess Elisabeth von Corolath-Beuthen
Bismarck as a non-liberal could do what the liberal democracies found and still find hard: to see the state as the guarantor of justice for the poor. During the 1880s Bismarck completed the social security network by getting an accident insurance system into place which the Reichstag accepted on 27 June 1884 and an old age and disability insurance bill passed in 1889. The state system of social security gave Germany the first modern social welfare safety net in the world and still forms part of the modern German social security system, a significant achievement and entirely Bismarck’s doing.
‘minister étranger aux affaires’.
