The Modern State and its Crisis

Every science finds in its own nature and the procedures that appertain to it some particular and specific cause for mistakes. But possibly no sphere of human knowledge lumps together so many and perennial sources of delusions as the one that deals with the study of political institutions. These are phenomena of which it is even difficult to provide a description, because their form often conceals and distorts their substance and also because they take multiple and at the same time elusive appearances, as they stem from the continuous and never reconciled struggle between irreconcilable principles. Those that would seem the most reasonable expectations are often unsettled by the emergence of new elements, which manifest themselves all of a sudden, even when they have been prepared by age-old processes; by the combination and fusion of streams that are very distant from each other; by unpredictable historical recurrences; by deceptive mirages whereby one frequently comes across institutions whose life is only fictitious or whose death, on the contrary, is only apparent.