These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once
established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which
is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot
use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well
institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They
prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow
up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set
political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break
existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are
themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which
generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of
possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the
dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states
is so often effected only by revolution. The creation of adequately
flexible and responsive political and legal machinery has so far been
beyond the wit of man. An epoch in which the needs of a newly forming
public are counteracted by established forms of the state is one in
which there is increasing disparagement and disregard of the state.
General apathy, neglect and contempt find expression in resort to
various short-cuts of direct action. And direct action is taken by many
other interests than those which employ “direct action” as a slogan,
often most energetically by intrenched class-interests which profess
the greatest reverence for the established “law and order” of the
existing state. By its very nature, a state is ever something to be
scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is
stabilized, it needs to be re-made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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