119
*  Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia
tomaz.mastnak@guest.arnes.si
Keywords
August Ludwig von Rochau, Realpolitik, economic power, counterrevolution, 
Bonapartism, Liberalism
Abstract
The article deals with August Ludwig von Rochauʼs reformulation of Liberal politics 
after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. In response to the widely perceived crisis of 
Liberalism, von Rochau developed a realistic view of politics (he is credited with the in-
vention of the concept of Realpolitik) as the basis for a renewed Liberalism. His realism 
with regard to politics, however, did not extend to a critical view of economic power. 
Economic power was exempted from political reflection and control.
Ali je ekonomska moč institucija? Meje redefinicije liberal-
ne politike Augusta Ludwiga von Rochaua
Ključne besede
August Ludwig von Rochau, Realpolitik, ekonomska moč, kontrarevolucija, bonaparti-
zem, liberalizem
Povzetek 
Članek obravnava reformulacijo liberalistične politike po porazu revolucije leta 1848, 
ki jo je ponudil August Ludwig von Rochau. Von Rochau je kot odgovor na očitno krizo 
liberalizma razvil kritično razumevanje politike, na katerem je utemeljeval prenovlje-
ni liberalizem. Njegov realizem v odnosu do politike (von Rochau velja za iznajdite-
lja pojma Realpolitik) pa ni imel dopolnila v kritičnem razumevanju ekonomske moči. 
Ekonomska moč se je izmaknila tako politični refleksiji kot kontroli.
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 119–59
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.05
Tomaž Mastnak*
Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits 
of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of 
Liberal Politics
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tomaž mastnak
∞
Economic power is an established mode of social action whose structural ele-
ments correspond to the definition of an institution in the social sciences, yet it 
is as a rule not defined as an institution. In the social sciences, institutions are of 
prime concern. With reference to Paul Fauconnet and Marcel Mauss, Émile Dur-
kheim famously defined sociology as “the science of institutions, their genesis 
and their functioning.”1 I will here presuppose an elemental definition of insti-
tution as a social structure, organization, or system of rules, norms, and beliefs 
that regulate (shape, direct, constrain, manage, control, etc.) social behavior, 
and is in turn itself based on and regulated by its own rules, norms, and beliefs, 
as well as by public law, and will ask the question why economic power is gener-
ally not dealt with as an institution. This, in my view, is an important theoretical 
question, but also one that has huge practical implications.
Introduction
In order to outline the problem, I will begin by touching upon a relatively recent 
debate that addressed the question of economic power, and note that such de-
bates are actually rare. In one of his last publications, Lapo Berti called for lim-
iting economic power. He characterized “excessive wealth and economic power 
in private hands, which produces and presupposes excessive wealth,” as a prob-
lem that afflicts contemporary democratic regimes, yet is not taken issue with, 
or confronted, and, moreover, is not even named. He also reminded the reader 
that constitutions, which from the beginning of modernity regulate the life of 
our type of societies and enshrine the social pact, do not deal with economic 
power. “Among the powers, which [our constitutions] are trying to temper and 
control, economic power does not figure.”2
Berti belonged to the Italian operaista collective that launched the journal Pri-
mo Maggio in 1973, and more specifically to the “working group on money” as-
1 Émile Durkheim, “Préface de la seconde edition,” in Les règles de la méthode socioloqique 
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), xxii; all translations of non-English works 
are my own.
2 Lapo Berti, “Mettere un limite al potere economico,” CivicoLab, December 11, 2017, https://
www.civicolab.it/mettere-un-limite-al-potere-economico/.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
sociated with the journal.3 In retrospect, that was one of the last productive at-
tempts to retool and revitalize Marxist theory so that it would be able to engage 
with contemporary capitalism. What in the early 1970s determined contempo-
rary capitalism was the world economic crisis that was building up, and capi-
tal’s response to it. Characteristic of the crisis was an enormous expansion of 
the boundaries of monetary policy. Along with it grew the space “to maneuver 
and manipulate money for political ends.” As Berti later observed: “Money had 
become an institution with a high political value. After effectively being trans-
formed into an instrument of government, it was thus inevitable for monetary 
policy to directly intervene in the power struggle between social classes.” At the 
center of the working group on money’s analysis was the insight that “money is 
an institution which is part of the governance of society.”4
The analyses of the working group on money were initiated and given direction 
by Sergio Bologna’s rereading of Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobilier, published 
during the world economic crisis of the mid-1850s. Bologna argued that those 
forgotten or neglected articles represented an important shift in Marx’s theoret-
ical development. In them, Marx turned his attention to the “money form.” The 
“institutional organization of the money form, the bank, becomes the point of 
departure for Marx’s analysis of the whole of the bourgeoisie, of capital in its 
entirety.”5
Crédit Mobilier was “the first appearance of investment banking in the nascent 
European capitalism.”6 The celebrated Italian economist Piero Sraffa in his lec-
tures at Cambridge in 1929–30, for example, presented it as “an antecedent of 
industrial banking, and industrial banking as a type (or ideal-type) of a conti-
3 See Stefano Lucarelli, “The 1973–1978 Workgroup on Money of the Journal Primo Maggio: 
An Example of a Pluralist Critique of Political Economy,” International Journal of Pluralism 
and Economics Education 4, no. 1 (2013): 30–50, http://doi.org/10.1504/ijpee.2013.053585.
4 Lapo Berti, “Interview: Marx, Money and Capital,” interview by Paolo Davoli and Letizia 
Rustichelli, trans. Ettore Lancellotti and Letizia Rustichelli (n.p.: Rhizosfera, 2016) 16–17, 
19, 23, https://monoskop.org/images/1/1a/Marx%2C_Money_and_Capital._An_Interview_
with_Lapo_Berti.pdf.
5 Sergio Bologna, “Moneta e crisi: Marx corrispondente della ‘New York Daily Tribune,’ ” 
Primo Maggio: Saggi e documenti per una storia di classe 1, no. 1 (June–September 1973): 3.
6 Joseph Ricciardi, “Marx on Financial Intermediation: Lessons of the French Crédit Mobilier 
in the New York Daily Tribune,” Science and Society 79, no. 4 (October 2015): 498, http://
doi.org/10.1521/siso.2015.79.4.497.
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tomaž mastnak
nental banking system differing from the English system.” Crédit Mobilier was 
an institutional innovation that answered the problem of financing industry.7 
From a different perspective, Crédit Mobilier was a key institution of the new 
Bonapartist regime, which Louis Bonaparte established in France after his coup 
d’état in December 1851. Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobilier represent an impor-
tant advance in his understanding and critique of Bonapartism as first laid out 
in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, as well as in his understanding 
of capitalism.8
It is easy to observe a cross-fertilization between the Italian operaists’ analysis 
of the 1970s economic crisis and their reading of Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobili-
er. With the new understanding of how the advanced capitalist system worked, 
it was possible to detect in Bonapartism or, to be precise, in the economic revo-
lution under the wing of the Bonapartist counter-revolutionary political dicta-
torship, elements, or beginnings, of the institutionalization of monetary power 
and of financial policies as an instrument of government. As Sergio Bologna 
wrote, Marx in his articles on Crédit Mobilier (preceding his work on the man-
uscript we know as the Grundrisse) confronted the Bonapartist regime as “the 
first accomplished form of the modern state, as the rule of social capital [. . .] as 
the first accomplished form of the modern monetary system.”9
Bologna here projected too much on Marx’s articles. Marx only came to under-
stand Bonapartism as the modern form of the state, or as the modern state, fif-
teen years later in his writings on the Paris Commune. Drafting his well-known 
Civil War in France, Marx characterized Louis Bonaparte’s rule as the “ultimate 
political form” of “bourgeois society,” as “the statepower of modern classrule.”10 
Such appreciation of Bonapartism was not unique. For Friedrich Engels, too, 
Bonapartism was “a modern form of the state,”11 as it was earlier, for example, 
7 Michel Bellet and Adrien Lutz, “Piero Sraffa and the Project to Publish Saint-Simon’s 
Works,” Social Science Research Network (SSRN) (2019): 10, 14, https://doi.org/10.2139/
ssrn.3312188.
8 I discuss this in Tomaž Mastnak, Bonapartizem: Prolegomena za študij fašizma (Ljubljana: 
Založba /*cf., 2021), chap. 10.
9 Bologna, “Moneta e crisi,” 5.
10 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France (Second Draft),” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe 
(MEGA), pt. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, Akademie Verlag, and De Gruyter, 1972–), 22:117.
11 Friedrich Engels, “Ergänzung der Vorbemerkung von 1870 zu ‘Der deutsche Bauernkrieg,’ ” 
in Marx-Engels-Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957–68), 18:513.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
for Theodor Mundt12 and Bruno Bauer (who considered Louis Bonaparte’s em-
pire a “modern empire”).13
What is important for my argument is that we find here an initial analysis of eco-
nomic power as an institution in Marx, which is intertwined with his analysis of 
the modern state. We are in the 1850s, at the junction in history that witnessed 
crucially important developments of both political and economic power. One 
might say that we are at a decisive or formative moment in the historical forma-
tion of modern political and economic power.
Just as the formation of modern political and economic power took place si-
multaneously, and the two were interlinked, so did the beginnings of their ana-
lytical and conceptual understanding. The times when political thinkers could 
write their treatises as if the economy had not existed14 were definitively over. 
However, and this is the paradox I want to highlight, whereas political power 
was widely discussed, the elements for a conceptualization of economic power 
do not seem to have been taken up and systematically developed—at least not 
with the same intensity and to the same extent as discussions of political pow-
er. And, as Berti pointed out, whatever understanding of economic power there 
existed, it was not—in contrast to political power—translated into institutional 
policies and constitutional arrangements.
Economic power would become a practical issue, for example, in the United 
States with the antitrust Sherman Act of 1890, or with the suspension of the 
Act during the World War II industrial mobilization, and it was theoretically ad-
dressed in the work of Thorstein Veblen, the British New Liberals (J. A. Hobson in 
the first place), and the German Ordoliberals (especially Franz Böhm and Walter 
Eucken, but also Hans Grossmann-Doerth).15 But the volume of these writings 
12 Theodor Mundt, Paris und Louis Napoleon: Neue Skizzen aus dem französischen Kaiserreich 
(Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1858), 2:175.
13 Bruno Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum (Charlottenburg: Verlag von Egbert Bauer, 
1853), 75.
14 See István Hont, introduction to Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the 
Nation-State in Historcal Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 1–156.
15 More on this in Tomaž Mastnak, Črna internacionala: Vojna, veliki biznis in vpeljava neolib-
eralizma (Ljubljana: Založba /*cf., 2019), chap. 1, 2, 5.
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seems negligible in comparison with all that has been and continues to be writ-
ten and talked about political power, and today hardly anyone discusses them.
A history of the sporadic and fragmented thinking about economic power is a 
desideratum. Here, however, I aim to elucidate the absence of such thinking at 
a point in political and intellectual history, where one would, by the “logic of 
things,” expect it to occur. I will de-center my discussion from the already men-
tioned “English model,” which has decisively shaped and dominated our views 
on modern political-economic history as well as on the societies we live in, and 
blinded us to the issue of economic power, while at the same time glorifying it. I 
will turn instead to the developments in continental Europe. I will focus on Au-
gust Ludwig von Rochau’s book The Principles of Realpolitik.
Published in 1853, von Rochau’s book redefined liberal politics and policies af-
ter the defeat of the progressive forces in the 1848–49 revolution, and was wide-
ly read and influential in Germany in the third quarter of the nineteenth centu-
ry.16 The book was polemical, a Streitschrift, yet it also brought about a shift in 
theoretical perspectives on politics. As such, von Rochau has earned his charac-
terization as one of the most interesting German political writers of the second 
half of the nineteenth century.17
While the book was an intervention into German political life, it was not provin-
cial. At the core of von Rochau’s theoretical innovations were reflections upon 
Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état in France and upon the Bonapartist system that 
the violent seizure of power had inaugurated. The Italian historian Trocini has re-
cently credited von Rochau with discovering the “law of power.”18 Since this term 
refers to political power, I take von Rochau and his Principles of Realpolitik to be 
a perfect case for asking the question of why this discovery of the “law of pow-
er,” that is, these new reflections on power, did not encompass economic power.
16 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die sta-
atlichen Zustände Deutschlands, by Ludwig August von Rochau, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler 
(Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), 7–21.
17 Federico Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik” e la scoperta della “legge del potere”: 
August Ludwig von Rochau tra radicalismo e nazional-liberalismo (Bologna: Società edi-
trice il Mulino, 2009), 15.
18 Trocini.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
I will first say a few things about von Rochau. I will then present his ideas about 
a realistic approach to politics and the introduction of the concept of Realpoli-
tik.19 This will be followed by addressing the question of how to understand von 
Rochau’s redefinition of liberalism, which will include a discussion of Bonapar-
tism, of the defeat of the 1848 revolution, and of contemporary critiques of liber-
alism. I will conclude by exploring the limits of Realpolitik, that is, von Rochau’s 
failure to take issue with economic power.
August Ludwig von Rochau
August Ludwig von Rochau was born in 1810 in Prussia. During his student 
years, in the early 1830s, he was heavily involved with Burschenschaften, stu-
dent associations or fraternities. In order to escape imprisonment for his radical 
activities—a court in Frankfurt had sentenced him to life—he fled to France in 
1836. From Paris, where he became acquainted with other German exiles and 
developed an interest in Fourierism, he worked as a translator and wrote as a 
correspondent for a number of German liberal newspapers. In 1840, he pub-
lished a book on Charles Fourier’s “social theory” and seven years later another 
one on his travels in southern France and Spain.
In 1846, von Rochau returned to Germany and worked as an editor in Heidel-
berg. After the general amnesty of March 1848, he took part in the Vorparla-
ment in Frankfurt and was active as a journalist. On the liberal left himself, he 
soon began to criticize the impotence of German liberals—their lack of “moral 
and material strength”—as well as the “eccentricities of the extreme left” and 
19 Whether the concept of Realpolitik was indeed invented by von Rochau is of secondary im-
portance. The point is that he introduced the concept into wide public usage. See Wehler, 
introduction to Grundsätze, 7. Duncan Kelley calls von Rochau “the most important de-
veloper of the concept.” Ducan Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau and Realpolitik as 
Historical Political Theory,” Global Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2018): 302, https://doi.org
/10.1080/23801883.2017.1387331. See also John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2016), chap. 1. According to Trocini (L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 
8), von Rochau also introduced to the German political language the term “socialism” 
(Socialismus). His reference seems to be to von Rochau’s early publication on Fourier’s 
“social theory.” However, the term does not appear in that text, in which von Rochau in 
fact used the term “socialist.” See the use of the term Socialisten in Rochau’s book, written 
under the pseudonym A. L. Churoa, Kritische Darstellung der Socialtheorie Fourier’s, ed. 
Gustav Bacherer (Braunschweig: G. C. F. Meyer sen., 1840), 67.
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tomaž mastnak
the “arrogance of the conservatives.”20 Soon after the defeat of the revolution, 
he emigrated again, this time to Switzerland, travelled through Italy, and pub-
lished a book about the travels. In 1852 he took residence in Heidelberg and 
dedicated himself to writing. He published books on Louis Bonaparte’s coup 
d’état and on the Moriscos in Spain, the Principles of Realpolitik, and later in the 
1850s a history of France in two volumes, and a new edition of the Principles of 
Realpolitik.
That second edition of the Principles of Realpolitik impacted the younger gen-
eration of German liberals like a “bolt of lightning,” as von Rochau’s younger 
contemporary, the historian and liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke was 
to say in his obituary for von Rochau.21 In the late 1850s, von Rochau entered 
politics and as one of the leaders of the liberal Nationalverein and worked for 
the unification of Germany. This finally brought him to supporting Prussia and 
its Minister-President Otto von Bismarck for their leading role in the state uni-
fication process. Von Bismarck, as we know, was and remains something of a 
symbol of anti-liberalism, and von Rochau had a clash with him in 1850, which 
cost him his journalistic license. Up to 1866, von Rochau regarded von Bismarck 
as the “Messiah of feudal aristocracy.”22 But the war in 1866, in which Prussia 
defeated Austria and established itself as the leading German state and the un-
disputed bearer of national unification, changed the political calculus—not only 
for the liberals, but also for the socialist labor movement as well.23
Soon after von Rochau the politician had made his nod to von Bismarck’s politi-
cal success, to what he regarded as Erfolgspolitik, he offered a theoretical justifi-
cation as well. In 1869, he published the second part of the Principles of Realpo-
litik. The first volume in 1853 had appeared anonymously and prompted guesses 
about the authorship. Some, for example, attributed the work to Arnold Ruge. I 
find this an interesting choice because, on the eve of the 1848 revolution, Ruge 
20 For these citations, see Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 32.
21 Quoted in Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 35. For a more cautious view, cf. 
Natascha Doll, Recht, Politik und “Realpolitik” bei August Ludwig von Rochau (1810–1873) 
(Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005).
22 Quoted in Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 36.
23 See Cora Stephan, “Genossen, wir dürfen uns nicht von der Geduld hinreißen lassen!” Zur 
Theoriebildung in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1862–1878 (Frankfurt: Europäische 
Verlag sanstalt, 1981), chap. 2, 3.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
(an erstwhile close associate of Marx) published a “self-critique of liberalism,” 
in which he called on his fellow radical democrats to make the transition from 
liberalism to “democratism.”24 The second volume of the Principles of Realpoli-
tik, too, was printed without von Rochau’s name on the title page, yet this time 
the authorship was not kept a secret. In the eyes of some scholars, the book es-
tablished von Rochau as a literary precursor of Bismarckian politics, and von 
Bismarck himself now on some occasions passed flattering judgement on him.25 
Von Rochau died in 1873 as a member of the German Reichstag.
Realpolitik, Constitutional Politics, Force
In his Principles of Realpolitik, von Rochau goes in medias res. His starting point 
is the state, and his objective is to define “the dynamic basic law of the state 
[Staatswesen].” The state is “the political organism of human society,” whose 
existence is “based on natural necessity.”26 This “natural” necessity is under-
stood historically: in a historically given state, it is fulfilled through the inter-
action of manifold forces, whose composition, measure, and results endlessly 
change with time and place. “The starting point of all political understanding 
is the study of the forces that shape, maintain, and transform the state, and its 
first step leads to the following insight: that the law of strength [Stärke] domi-
nates the life of the state in a similar way that the law of gravitation dominates 
the material world.”27
Whereas the old Staatswissenschaft fully understood that “truth,” it drew from 
it a “false and baleful” conclusion: “the right of the stronger.” In modern times, 
this “unethical erroneous conclusion” (that the stronger has the right) was cor-
rected, yet at the same time something important was lost from sight: “the real 
power [Macht] of the stronger,” whose importance in and for the state necessari-
24 Arnold Ruge, “Selbstkritik des Liberalismus,” in Arnold Ruge’s sämmtliche Werke, 2nd ed. 
(Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1847–48), 4:116. On attribution, see Trocini, L’invenzione della 
“Realpolitik”, 13n10.
25 See Trocini, 39, 47, 228.
26 On the “organism” metaphor, see Lynn K. Nyhart, “The Political Organism: Karl Vogt on 
Animals and States in the 1840s and ’50s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 47, no. 
5 (November 2017): 602–28, https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2017.47.5.602.
27 August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen 
Zustände Deutschlands (Stuttgart: Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1853), 1. I will refer to this work 
as Grundsätze (1853).
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tomaž mastnak
ly needed to be recognized. “This error is the cause of the grossest blunders and 
heaviest defeats of the constitutional politics [Verfassungspolitik], committed 
and suffered in European states for some generations.”28
There is a lot to unpack here, but let us just note first that the formulations of von 
Rochau that I cited belie the criticism that his was a “social Darwinism avant la 
lettre,”29 and turn to the core of his argument, to his critique of constitutional 
politics. Whereas his view of politics was definitively state-centered, his view of 
the state was just as clearly not constitution-centered.
The examination of the question of who ought to govern, whether the right, wis-
dom, [or] virtue, whether one, or few, or many—this question belongs to the realm 
of philosophical speculation; the practical politics first has to deal with the sim-
ple fact only power alone is that which can govern. To govern means exercising 
power, and solely he who has power can exercise power. This direct connection 
between power and governing is the basic truth of all politics and the key to the 
entire history.30
As we see, von Rochau blamed political blunders and defeats of the recent 
past—which included the 1848 revolution—on the preoccupation with constitu-
tional politics, that is, with the form of government. This is how he interpreted 
the recent and lived history. Early in the twentieth century, the great liberal his-
torian Guido de Ruggiero offered a very similar interpretation, describing two of 
the three main proposals put forward by German liberals in 1848 as “to obtain, 
especially in Prussia, genuinely modern constitutions in place of the old feudal 
diets; and to make these constitutions a bond of political union for the whole 
German people.”31
There was a theoretical dimension to von Rochau’s interpretation. His decenter-
ing of the state from the question of the constitution was very much an expres-
sion of the Zeitgeist. In the aftermath of the 1789 French Revolution, the more 
perceptive political thinkers of the time tended to turn their attention away from 
28 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 1–2.
29 Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze, 11.
30 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 2.
31 Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1927), 248.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
the constitution and progressively ceased to rely on the classical political lan-
guage of the forms of government. Such was the case with Benjamin Constant, 
who was among the leading thinkers seeking to reformulate or reconstruct the 
post-revolutionary political theory and rehabilitate political language, and who 
observed that “the study of the constitutional organisation of government [. . .] 
had generally fallen into disgrace.”32 Refusing to differentiate between the forms 
of government, he in his Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, instead introduced 
the distinction between “regular government and that which is not [regular],” 
and the concept of usurpation, which applied to the latter.33
As another example of turning away from the question of constitution as the 
central political question, I will cite Lorenz Stein (later in life: von Stein). Stein 
was von Rochau’s contemporary and even lived in Paris when von Rochau, too, 
was there. And like the latter, he studied the contemporary French socialism 
and communism, and French political developments in general. I have seen 
no mention of their ever meeting, but Stein cited von Rochau’s pseudonymous 
book on Fourier in his own account of “socialism and communism in today’s 
France.”34 In a later work, analyzing contemporary French political struggles, 
Stein detected the shift from Verfassung to Verwaltung, that is, from constitu-
tion, or the form of government, to administration (or management). For Stein, 
administration was the application, or the use, of state power.35 The question 
was who uses state power and for what purposes.
Stein linked that shift to the emergence of “social democracy” as a fusion of the 
radical democratic republican “political movement” with the socialist “social 
32 Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1991), 18; see also 13, 15, 27.
33 Benjamin Constant, “De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans les rapports avec la 
civilisation européenne,” in Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 
181, 184.
34 Lorenz Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs: Ein Beitrag zur 
Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1842), 263, 278.
35 Lorenz Stein, Das Königthum, die Republik und die Souveränität der französischen Gesell-
schaft seit der Februarrevolution 1848, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1855), 216. 
In his voluminous later work on the science of administration, or management, he defined 
administration as the “concrete realization of the will or essence of the state.” Lorenz Stein, 
Die Verwaltungslehre: Erster Theil (Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cottaschen Buchhandlung, 
1865), 9.
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tomaž mastnak
movement.” In his interpretation, the key importance of the administration of 
the state was recognized precisely by the labor movement. As long as the prop-
ertied class, which had state power in its hands, did not use it in the interest of 
the propertyless class, the latter had to fight to take over the administration of 
the state. Then it could use “all the means of state power to promote the laboring 
class with regard to its most essential interest.” The administration of the state 
by the working class meant the “administration of social reform.”36 Von Rochau 
himself wrote about the “struggle for the possession of public authority [öffentli-
che Gewalt]” between the governed and the governing, which had run through 
the “whole of European history” and had been the moving force “in the present 
century more than in any preceding.”37
The final discredit of the forms of government approach to politics and the state 
was brought about by Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat. On the one hand, Louis 
Bonaparte’s seizure of power dispensed with constitutional niceties and was 
an apotheosis of the politics of force that sent waves of admiration (among the 
ruling classes) and horror (among those with democratic leanings) across Eu-
rope. On the other hand, the fact of the successful coup and the system of pow-
er it inaugurated, the so-called Bonapartism (or Caesarism), posed a problem 
to apologists and critics alike: its nature could not be explained in the existing 
(traditional) language of politics and in particular could not be captured with 
the categories of the forms of government.38
When von Rochau relegated reflections on politics in terms of forms of govern-
ment to “philosophical speculation,” he put at the center of thinking about 
practical politics—for practical, or real, politics was what he was interested in—
the “fact” (Tatsache) of strength, force, and power. In this regard, too, he was 
very much expressing the spirit of the age. A good example of how “force” began 
to be considered of central importance is von Rochau’s French contemporary 
Auguste Romieu. Even before Louis Bonaparte seized power, Romieu wrote of 
“Caesarism” as a new political phenomenon. Writing about new political phe-
nomena as a rule goes together with new ways of looking at politics, as well as 
with realizing that the old concepts have lost their explanatory power. In this 
36 Stein, Das Königthum, 217–18.
37 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 41.
38 I quote the textual evidence in Mastnak, Bonapartizem, chap. 1–2.
131
is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
sense Romieu wrote, for example, that the emerging Caesarism “signifies nei-
ther royalty, nor empire, nor despotism, nor tyranny.”39
Romieu connected the advent of Caesarism with the decline of monarchies. Na-
poleon may have wanted to restore “monarchical foundations” for his rule, but 
could not succeed in that intention. Monarchy rested on faith and the hereditary 
principle, but the era of faith had been succeeded by the age of reason. Conse-
quently, Caesarism could not be “founded,” like monarchy had been, but had to 
be “established.” To be precise: it had to “establish” itself. It could only rely on 
itself, and that ultimately meant relying on force.40 With the sacred gone under 
the new reign of reason, only force had remained. Force was a “FACT,” it was at 
the bottom of all human institutions, even those believed to have been born “in 
the name of liberty.”41
Bonapartism and Realpolitik
Bonapartism made a big impact on von Rochau’s understanding of politics. It 
was a revealing moment. Von Rochau was quick to describe the coup d’état in 
great detail. He published a booklet in which he explained how Louis Bonaparte 
had “seized absolute power [Alleinherrschaft] with violence” and had his autoc-
racy legitimized both democratically, through a plebiscitary vote of the people, 
and priestly, by the Church, which “with a Te Deum declared God the originator 
of the coup d’état.”42 In his History of France, he again narrated the preparations 
for and the execution of the coup, and the political changes it introduced. That 
narration made it clear how easily Louis Bonaparte repeatedly dispensed with 
the existing constitution and the law, and how he, relying on force and pow-
er, shaped the new constitution according to his will.43 In his booklet on Louis 
Bonaparte’s coup d’état, von Rochau cited Auguste Thiers, who had allegedly 
retorted to the police officer who came to arrest him “in the name of law,” that 
39 Auguste Romieu, L’ère des césars, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ledoyen, 1850), 30.
40 Romieu, 194–95, 197.
41 Romieu, 200–3.
42 August Ludwig von Rochau, Vier Wochen französischer Geschichte: 1. December 1851–1. 
Januar 1852 (Leipzig: Avenarius & Mendelssohn, 1852), 139, 161.
43 August Ludwig von Rochau, Geschichte Frankreichs vom Sturze Napoleon bis zur Wieder-
herstellung des Kaiserthumes, 1814–1852 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1858), 2:314–30.
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tomaž mastnak
the arrest was made “in the name of violence.”44 In the History of France, the di-
mension of violence and force is even more pronounced.
In the Principles of Realpolitik, however, von Rochau delivered a categorical 
judgment of Louis Bonaparte’s coup. He characterized it as an epochal moment 
in modern political history (eine große Epoche in der politischen Geschichte der 
Neuzeit). He confronted his reader with the following shocking fact (Tatsache):
The people that have for two generations stood at the helm of the European move-
ment, that have in the name of civic freedom gone through a string of most diffi-
cult trials and withstood them, that after the fall of Napoleonic domination seem 
to have made themselves completely at home in the parliamentarian system, 
these people have overnight lapsed back into an absolutism, which on this side of 
the Russian border does not have an equal any longer.45
How was one to understand the fact that “the highest official of the French peo-
ple overthrew the constitution and the law [Gesetz], private and public law [Re-
cht] of the country, and seized for himself a plenitude of power, thanks to which 
he can with unlimited arbitrariness command not only over the state institu-
tions but also over the life, freedom, and property of citizens”?46 Von Rochau 
had an answer: 
These events hold one of the biggest political lessons that history has ever taught. 
What emerges from them in the first place, and with an unprecedented clarity, 
is the incurable nothingness of constitutions, which seek to separate public law 
from public power, that confront the armed power with unarmed right. The pol-
itics of facts overthrows governments and creates governments; the constitutive 
constitutional politics on the contrary has essentially nothing else to do but to rec-
ognize the existing powers and consecrate them with the written law.47
Some historians of political thought hold the view that Bonapartism entered 
von Rochau’s thinking in the first place as regarding international relations.48 I 
44 Rochau, Vier Wochen französischer Geschichte, 18.
45 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 207.
46 Rochau, 207–8.
47 Rochau, 208.
48 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 312 et passim.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
do not think so. France under Emperor Bonaparte—whom von Rochau, just like, 
for example, his contemporaries Stein and Mundt, saw as being bent on war49—
was of course a big issue for German foreign policy. But an effective foreign pol-
icy clearly demanded building up German unity, that is, it was reflected on the 
internal political changes.
Bonapartism (and French contemporary politics in general) had a formative im-
pact on von Rochau’s thinking about the nature of politics. I do not think that 
that impact can properly be explained as his—or Stein’s—“nationalizing in Ger-
man form the social diagnoses of French political theory.”50 Rather, both von Ro-
chau and Stein were following and reflecting upon the “raw” politics and social 
movements in the neighboring country and, based on their observations and 
analyses, formulated their own theories. Stein, studying French political devel-
opments, hammered out a “theory of society,” or social theory.51 Von Rochau, 
himself stimulated by French political developments but primarily concerned 
with the state of the fragmented German nation, worked out a theory of politics 
in a realistic key.
“Realism” was a philosophical concept. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s influential state-
ment, which reverberated especially on the Hegelian left, Realismus represent-
ed the spirit of the time or of the future.52 It was opposed to “theology,” and “the 
negation of theology” was “the essence of the modern time [Wesen der neuern 
Zeit].” If in Feuerbach’s critique, realism was the opposite of “refined illusions 
and unbecoming [vettelhaft] prejudices,”53 in von Rochau’s polemics it was pit-
ted against abstraction, speculation, chimeras, dogmatism, doctrinairism, cas-
tles in the air, the autonomous power of ideas and principles, and “creatures 
49 For Rochau, see the 1859 edition of Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die sta-
atlichen Zustände Deutschlands: Neue, mit einer Einleitung vermehrte Ausgabe (Stuttgart: 
Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1859), iii.
50 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 311.
51 See Lorenz Stein, Der Begriff der Gesellschaft und die sociale Geschichte der französischen 
Revolution bis zum Jahre 1830, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1855), especially 
the long introduction.
52 Quoted in Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze, 7, and Trocini, L’invenzione della 
“Realpolitik”, 13.
53 Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Zürich: Verlag des literarisch-
en Comptoirs, 1843), iii, 23.
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tomaž mastnak
of ideas.”54 The same applies to repeated references to “facts.” These referenc-
es were an expression of the rise and growing prestige of the natural scienc-
es, which Feuerbach counted among “the so-called real sciences [reale Wissen-
schaften]” as prime examples of “empiricism or realism.”55
Just like Stein, who was well acquainted with Hegelian philosophy, turned to class 
struggles, von Rochau turned to social struggles or, to use a more cautious formu-
lation, social dynamics. He postulated the importance of studying social forces 
(gesellschaftliche Kräfte) “that shape, maintain, and transform the state.” (If this 
formulation sounds rather Machivellian, it is because it probably was: Machia-
velli was at the time an important presence in German thinking about French 
politics.)56 In von Rochau’s view, the constitution of a state was “determined by 
reciprocal relations among the forces that are either active or resting within that 
state. Each social force [gesellschaftliche Kraft] claims a standing within the state 
that corresponds to its magnitude, and the state power [Staatskraft] itself is solely 
the sum of the social forces that the state has integrated into itself.”57
In his analysis of the active and passive social forces in Germany, and ponder-
ing their intellectual and monetary power—he spoke of Geistes- und Geldkräfte 
der Gesellschaft58—von Rochau privileged the historical position and role of the 
rising middle classes, of the “middle estate.” That Mittelstand possessed in the 
greatest measure “wealth, opinion, and intelligence,” the “main social forces,” 
the “three factors” that had to be reflected in the representative system.59 This 
social analysis was clearly pregnant with a political program. It postulated the 
need to adjust the political system to the social transformation, which meant the 
necessity of the state integrating the advancing social forces, as well as mirror-
ing the waning strength of the old social forces.
54 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 2, 3, 23, 32, 91, 106, 131, 153, 165, 212.
55 Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie, 23. Nyhart writes that “the natural world and 
its sciences” provided “a source of legitimation for politics, especially liberal politics.” 
Nyhart, “Political Organism,” 32.
56 Theodor Mundt, for example, published three editions of his book on Machiavelli between 
1851 and 1861 (I cite the first and the third enlarged edition in notes 72 and 82). See also 
Jacob Venedey, Machiavel, Montesquieu, Rousseau (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1850). Von 
Rochau was close with Venedey during his French exile.
57 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 4.
58 Rochau, 9.
59 Rochau, 24.
135
is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
Following such “historical-sociological” approach, however, would lead us 
away from the main concern of this paper, which is not so much the social trans-
formation as the political transformation. I differentiate between them for the 
sake of argument, and want to further specify that the political transformation 
I am primarily interested in here is that which concerns political ideology and 
theory. And of special interest to me in this regard are the fortunes of liberalism.
Was the Revolution Defeated?
The few scholars who have studied von Rochau agree that his Principles of Re-
alpolitik was a book that crucially contributed to the reformulation of German 
liberalism.60 These appreciations of von Rochau’s work turn on the question of 
the failure of the 1848 revolution. The reformulation of liberal theory, ideology, 
and politics appears to have been prompted by the experience of defeat. But 
let us first ask: Was the revolution really defeated? This question contains two 
sub-questions: Which revolution? Whose revolution?
The question of the defeat of the 1848 revolution was a moot question already 
for contemporaries. Karl Marx famously wrote that, “with the exception of only 
a few chapters, every major section of the annals of the revolution of 1848 to 
1849 carries the heading: Defeat of the revolution!”61 The German historian Jo-
hann Gustav Droysen had a more nuanced view. He wrote that Louis Bonapar-
te’s regime rested “on the European movement of 1848” and was “its ripe fruit.” 
He explained: “Everywhere else the big European reaction has won, only in 
France did the wild movement coalesce into a new positive foundation.”62
Considering Bonapartism the fruit of the 1848 revolution may be confusing. To 
untangle the confusion, Droysen referred to the conservative legal scholar Frie-
drich Julius Stahl and his “confreres,” who had commented that “the street tu-
mult, barricades, the revolts, etc.,” as such were not to be understood as revo-
60 I cannot enter into a discussion of this literature here. For an exhaustive list of sources, see 
Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, and Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau”; see also 
Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze.
61 Karl Marx, “Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1849,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamt-
ausgabe, pt. 1, 10:119.
62 Johann Gustav Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik der europäishen Krisis,” in Politische Schrif-
ten, ed. Felix Gilbert, (Munich: Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1933), 310.
136
tomaž mastnak
lution.63 Droysen added that it was “also certain that [revolution] was not end-
ed in the moment when it stabilized itself in a monarchistic form.”64 (That was 
also Stahl’s view: that Bonapartism, characterized by “mechanical violence,” 
was not “the closing of the revolution but its consolidation.”)65 For beyond the 
“street tumult,” momentous changes were taking place in nineteenth century 
Europe, of which the year 1848 was only one moment: “All the basics and con-
ditions of European life, all social and state forces, all mental and material fac-
tors have changed.”66 Droysen’s description of those changes was not unlike the 
picture Marx and Engels drew in the Communist Manifesto.67 Only that Droysen 
seems not to have found much to celebrate in “the destruction of the old,” which 
progressed with an “insuperable force.”68
Unlike von Rochau, who portrayed the growing importance and strength of the 
middle classes, Droysen saw them already helplessly falling victim to the Verpö-
belung generated by the economic changes that the Communist Manifesto por-
trayed as the revolutionary work of the liberal bourgeoisie: just like the “lower 
strata,” the “middle strata” were being “reduced to mob.”69 But like von Ro-
63 Droysen, 310. Droysen referred to Friedrich Julius Stahl, Was ist die Revolution? Ein 
Vortrag, auf Veranstaltung des Evangelischen Vereins für kirchliche Zwecke am 8. März 1852 
gehalten, 3rd ed., with an addendum Die Reformation und die Revolution (Berlin: Verlag 
von Wilhelm Schultze, 1852), 8–9.
64 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 310.
65 Stahl, Was ist die Revolution?, 13. Constantin Frantz saw “mechanic coercive power [mech-
anische Zwangsgewalt]” as characteristic of liberalism. Constantin Frantz, Vorschule zur 
Physiologie der Staaten (Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider, 1857), 290.
66 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 322. Here, too, Stahl held a similar view: “Revolution is not 
a one-off act; it is a continued condition, a new order of things,” brought about by turn-
ing the world upside down, by an Umwälzung. Stahl, Was ist die Revolution?, 4, 8. Von 
Rochau, for his part, held a negative view of the historical school of law, to which Stahl 
belonged. See Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 93–95.
67 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” in Marx-Engels-
Werke, 4:459–93, especially pt. I.
68 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 324.
69 Droysen, 324. A few decades later, Wilhelm Roscher made a similar point, writing about 
the middle estate melting away at both the top and at bottom and the people splitting 
“into the opposition of the over-rich capitalists and the wholly propertyless workers.” He 
called the emerging system plutocracy, giving rise to “Caesarism.” See Wilhelm Roscher, 
“Umrisse zur Naturlehre des Cäsarismus,” in Abhandlungen der philologisch-historisch-
en Classe der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 
1888), 10:641–42. An earlier “Naturlehre” of Caesarism can be found in Constantin Frantz, 
137
is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
chau, Droysen detected the change in the nature of political power, at the core of 
which was the expansion of “power” and of its importance. The key change was 
not that power simply expanded, grew, but that it now began to generate itself. 
The state became an “institution” that was “engendering [erzeugen: producing, 
generating] power and exercising it.”70
Droysen compared this new type of institutionalized power to that “insuperable 
force” with which the economic changes asserted themselves. He described the 
state as similar to the “big mechanized [or: machine-based] industry.” This state 
machine, absorbing the power of the “artisanal” type and eating up the “auton-
omy of all the lower circles,” became omnipotent. It “needed and demanded 
omnipotence” in order to have everyone and everything at its disposal at any 
given time, to use for its own purposes, to determine, and to mobilize.71 Where-
as von Rochau used the medieval legal term plenitude (or fullness) of power 
(plenitudo potestatis) to describe the post-revolutionary French state, Droysen 
described it as omnipotent. In contrast to the static state of the preceding pe-
riod, which had summed up in itself the existing stable relations of power, the 
omnipotent new state was producing power: its own power. It became a produc-
tive force on the industrial model.
If we understand revolution in the modern sense as a radical change (and not 
in the traditional meaning of a circular motion), the transformation of political 
power Droysen described was revolutionary. However, the omnipotent state ma-
chine he depicted was the Caesarist, or Bonapartist, state of France, and it was 
an exception. (Only in retrospect does it appear as a political vanguard, the har-
binger of “the new normal.”) Elsewhere in Europe, as Droysen wrote, reaction 
had won. And even if we consider the Bonapartist type of power to have been 
the fruit of revolution, that does not mean that it was a revolutionary type of 
power. In fact, that was a reactionary, or counter-revolutionary, regime.
Theodore Mundt captured the paradox when he characterized Bonapartism (he 
called it Napoleonism) as “the true system of revolutionary reaction in modern 
Naturlehre des Staates als Grundlage aller Staatswissenschaft (Leipzig: C. F. Winter’sche 
Verlagshandlung, 1870), especially 173–74 et passim, and even earlier in Constantin 
Frantz, Vorschule zur Physiologie, passim.
70 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 323.
71 Droysen, 323.
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tomaž mastnak
Europe.”72 Already in 1849, Alfred Meißner, a German writer of democratic lean-
ings (whom Marx and Engels ridiculed as a “true socialist”), wrote of the “work 
of the counterrevolution,” that is, of the counterrevolution at work within the 
French Revolution.73 In that context he described the plans of Louis Bonaparte 
and his “Napoleonic party” as part of the “plans of the counterrevolution” and 
as a “parody of the eighteenth Brumaire.”74 Meißner’s descriptions and insights 
are interesting, yet to the best of my knowledge Karl Korsch—reflecting on the 
victorious fascist counterrevolution in Europe on the eve of World War II—was 
the first to clearly point out that no one, neither Marx and Marxists nor liberals, 
had had a theory of counterrevolution. That amounted to saying that they were 
unable to think of counterrevolution as a productive force of history and as a 
phase of social development. Instead, they regarded it as an “abnormal inter-
ruption” or a “temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development.”75 
Yet counterrevolution could generate new realities and revolutionary changes, 
and in that sense it was a revolutionary force. Bonapartism was a case in point.
Political and Economic Revolution, Critiques of Liberalism
All this means that there is not one single, and straightforward, answer to the 
question of whether the 1848 revolution was defeated. The basic distinction that 
emerged in the aftermath of the revolution, reflecting what had taken place, was 
between political and economic revolution. Contemporaries came to the realiza-
72 Theodor Mundt, Niccolò Machiavelli und das System der modernen Politik, 3rd edition 
(Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1861), 307–8.
73 Alfred Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris (1849) (Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt, 
1849), 1:107. According to a biographical sketch in the series on German “moderne 
Klassiker,” Meißner moved to Paris in the winter of 1849, because he could not stand seeing 
the streets of his native Prague flooded with “foreign agitators from all the Slavic regions,” 
who had gathered there for the revolutionary “Slavic Vorparlament.” During his sojourn 
in Paris he then wrote the work I cite. See Alfred Meißner (Cassel: Ernst Balde, 1854), 15. 
Neither did von Rochau show much understanding, not to speak of sympathies, for the 
Slavic peoples in his reflections on German politics. On the “true socialism,” see Friedrich 
Engels, “Die wahren Sozialisten,” in Marx-Engels-Werke, 4:248–90, especially 270–78.
74 Alfred Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:209, 218; see also 164, where Meißner 
said that the “fool” Louis Napoleon conceived of “an imitation of the 18th Brumaire.”
75 Karl Korsch, “The Fascist Counter-revolution,” Living Marxism 5, no. 2 (Fall 1940): 29–37, 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1940/fascist-counterrrevolution.htm; see also 
Karl Korsch, “State and Counter-Revolution,” The Modern Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1939): https:// 
www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1939/state-counterrevolution.htm.
139
is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
tion that the two did not coincide, and tended to agree that whereas the political 
revolution was defeated, the economic revolution gained momentum. Mundt’s 
youthful friend Ferdinand Kühne, for example, in his review of Alfred Meißner’s 
Parisian Revolutionary Studies cited above, wrote that “the political revolution 
in France has failed.”76 Marx and Engels, on the other hand, observed that the 
defeated proletarian revolution was succeeded by “economic revolution.”77
But if political revolution was, or may have been, defeated, who exactly was 
defeated? Whose revolution? Who experienced a political defeat? For Karl 
Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was the proletarian revolution. This view became 
more concise as the years went by.78 The German philosopher, political writ-
er, and politician Constantin Frantz, whose political position is more difficult 
to define than Marx and Engels’s, also wrote of the “victory over the proletar-
ians.”79 Alfred Meißner delineated the defeat of democratic forces. Two years 
ahead of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, he depicted the “de-democratization 
[Entdemokratisirung] of France.”80 Since republic was the “form” in which de-
mocracy was “organized and strengthened,” moreover, since republic was “the 
only” political form “in which democracy can appear,” the defeat of democratic 
forces coincided with the defeat of republicanism.81 For Theodor Mundt, what 
happened all across Europe was a defeat of the people, of popular politics. He 
detected the same “fatal turning of popular politics [Volkspolitik] into cabinet 
76 Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, “Alfred Meißner’s revolutionäre Studien aus Paris,” in Mein 
Tagebuch in bewegter Zeit (Leipzig: L. Denicke, 1863), 682.
77 See, for example, Friedrich Engels, “Einleitung zu Karl Marx’s ‘Klassenkämpfe in 
Frankreich 1848 bis 1850,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 32:337–38.
78 See Engels, 337–38.
79 Constantin Frantz, Louis Napoleon, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Schneider & Comp., 1852), 6. For 
Frantz, see the entry Erich Wittenberg, “Frantz, Gustav Adolph Constantin,” Deutsche 
Biographie, accessed June 25, 2024, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118534939.
html; for a balanced recent assessment see Iain McDaniel, “Constantin Frantz and the 
Intellectual History of Bonapartism and Caesarism: A Reassessment,” Intellectual History 
Review 28, no. 2 (2018): 317–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2017.1361218. Von Rochau 
called Frantz “a man of conservatism,” while “conservative” in his view was a self-de-
scription of the “old liberalism that has become unfit to do anything.” Rochau, Grundsätze 
(1853), 125, 128.
80 Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:105.
81 Meißner, 1:109.
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tomaž mastnak
politics [Cabinetspolitik]” that Machiavelli had identified in the Florentine poli-
tics of his own time.82
All these descriptions point to the popular masses, to the underlying classes (to 
use Veblen’s term) as the loser. But what about liberals? Were they among the 
defeated? And if that was the case, how did they relate to the other defeated so-
cial or political foces, and how did these other defeated forces relate to them? 
Let us start with the French writer and politician Victor Hugo, whom we may 
see, as some contemporaries did, as an icon of liberalism.
After the coup d’état, in exile, Hugo wrote an invective against Louis Bonaparte, 
whom he had earlier supported. Meißner portrayed him as “shallow and puffed 
up as always,” giving a bland speech of no purpose in the National Assembly in 
early 1849, finding fault with the legislative body for “not being Napoleonic.” 
The speech was interrupted by the laughter of the Left.83 Bruno Bauer mocked 
his bemoaning the Bonapartist suppression of “the tribune, the press, the in-
telligence, the word, the thought, all that used to be freedom.” Hugo compared 
“the French tribune” with the “open mouth of human spirit.”84 Bauer brushed 
off this comparison as pathetic. He asked rhetorically: “Toward what barba-
rism would mankind be heading should it really learn only from the bickering 
of parliamentary factions, from the trivial quarrels between the right-center and 
left-center, for example, what intelligence, word, thought are capable of achiev-
ing?”85 Karl Marx later remarked that Hugo actually made “Napoleon the Little” 
big because he ascribed to him a “personal power of initiative, which was with-
out parallel in world history,” that is, because he did not understand that the 
coup was a result of historical social and political struggles, in a word: because 
he did not understand history.86
These remarks ad personam may give a glimpse of the low esteem in which rad-
icals on the political left held the liberals. A heavier blow against liberalism 
82 Theodor Mundt, Machiavelli und der Gang der europäischen Politik (Leipzig: Dyk’sche 
Buchhandlung, 1851), iii.
83 Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:216.
84 Victor Hugo, Napoléon le Petit (London: Jeffs, 1852), 19, 145.
85 Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum, 81.
86 Karl Marx, “Vorwort zur zweiten Ausgabe von ‘Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis 
Bonaparte,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 21:130–31.
141
is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
came from the political right. It was dealt by Auguste Romieu, whose thoughts 
on the role of force in the contemporary politics I cited above. Describing the 
political situation in France, Romieu located the main threat of violence in the 
popular “masses” or “proletarians,” whom he depicted as being “in organized 
uprising.”87 He admitted that he was “horrified” by “the poor, set up to envy, 
hate, thirst for pillage, ready to ravage by a million hands the castles, luxurious 
apartments.”88 Yet his accusing finger pointed at the liberals. He characterized 
liberalism as both deadly and dead, as destructive and self-destructive.
“I’m telling you, O bourgeois! that your role is finished,” Romieu theatrically 
turned to the liberal. On the one hand, the bourgeois revolution was a charade. 
What had taken place in France was a foolishly and hastily played comedy in 
which the bourgeois had changed too many costumes and had been too quick 
in picking up the ermine coats thrown out the windows of the aristocracy. The 
bourgeois remade for their own use all that which they had destroyed with the 
punches of their words, all that which the theater, the printing press, the chan-
son, and the tribune had helped them demolish.89
On the other hand, the liberals could not realize their own ideas or, rather, the 
realization of their ideas was destructive of liberalism itself. That was fateful. 
The society they had made was incapable of living. “It is that the society, such 
as that made by the bourgeoisie, is not capable of anything more. That socie-
ty has to die.” The illegitimate, “bastard” order, l’ordre bâtard, established by 
the “sophists” (that is, the Enlightenment philosophers and their descendants), 
could not be maintained and preserved. The bourgeois was no longer fit to rule: 
“No, bourgeois, you are not going to rule any longer!”90 What the bourgeois had 
sown, they were now going to reap. “You had, O bourgeois, soiled the beginning 
of your work with blood.” Robespierre and Danton, their advocates, had taught 
people to murder, their successors had continued that teaching, and the people 
had learned it in their own way. The spilling of blood was returning with the 
“tom-tom of the revolt of the poor.”91
87 Romieu, L’ère des césars, 77, 92, 169, 203.
88 Auguste Romieu, Le spectre rouge de 1852 (Paris: Ledoyen, 1851), 47.
89 Romieu, 62–63.
90 Romieu, 66.
91 Romieu, 67.
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The liberal idea had arrived at the point of its accomplishment. It had ended 
up in the hands of the poor in revolt and turned against the bourgeoisie. That 
was the point at which “the liberal idea accomplishes its last ravage,” Romieu 
wrote. “In my reflections on that which is wrong with the liberal ideas, nothing 
has struck me more than this extreme result of their application.” And that re-
sult was inevitable.92
Romieu, as we see, regarded the revolt of the popular masses as the logical out-
come, or a consequence, of liberalism, which was destructive of liberalism it-
self. He was scared of the spectre rouge, of the “red specter” of socialism and 
communism. The realization of the liberal idea by socialist hands, in socialism, 
meant the end of liberal society and liberalism. Liberals themselves became 
scared of socialism and afraid of the historical dialectics they had set in motion 
and that was now turning against them. Once socialism appeared to them as if 
it were a logical consequence, or development, of liberalism, the liberals had to 
block that development so it would not empower social and political forces op-
posed to liberalism, but by doing so they themselves paralyzed liberalism.
This dialectics of the self-paralysis of liberalism was well captured by Karl Marx 
in his first critique of Bonapartism. He depicted how the liberals began to be 
afraid of their own ideas, ideals, and principles as “socialistic,” and distanced 
themselves from them.93 He observed that the
bourgeoisie had the correct insight that all the weapons it had forged against feu-
dalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had 
produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created fell 
away from it. It grasped that all the so-called civil liberties and progressive organs 
attacked and threatened its class domination concurrently at its social founda-
tion and its political top, and had therefore become “socialistic.”94
According to Marx’s critical analysis, what the bourgeoisie had “earlier celebrat-
ed as ‘liberal,’ it now denounced as ‘socialistic.’ ”95 But that meant denouncing 
92 Romieu, 91, 99.
93 Karl Marx, “Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 
11:106, 134–35.
94 Marx, 135.
95 Marx, 136.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
liberalism. When the liberal bourgeoisie, in order to defend itself, attacked so-
cialism, it had to curtail civil liberties and thus thwart liberal ideas and princi-
ples. In order to protect itself from being negated by socialism, liberalism negat-
ed itself. And in negating itself, and its principles and ideas, the liberal bour-
geoisie itself both reached for repression and made the way for a repressive, 
dictatorial Bonapartist regime to step in.
The function of that repressive political regime was to keep the underlying class-
es in place and thus to ensure that the bourgeoisie could exercise its economic 
power freely, unimpeded. Marx did not use the concept of economic power. He 
argued that the bourgeoisie renounced its political power, or accepted that “its 
political power be broken,” in order to “maintain its social power unscathed.” 
In order to be able to exploit other classes, the “private bourgeois” acquiesced to 
their class being reduced to the same “political nothingness” as all other class-
es.96 But was that really the case?
It seems to me that rather than being reduced to political nothingness, the lib-
eral bourgeoisie gave up the burden and responsibility of holding political pow-
er, and opted (as Stein observed) to hold the state power “through the person 
of Louis Napoleon.”97 In this way, it could more effectively and safely exercise 
and increase its economic power. Under Louis Bonaparte, its ability to subject 
and exploit the underlying classes, to enrich itself, and enjoy its privileges only 
increased. In Engels’s vivid description, Louis Bonaparte’s rule gave impetus to 
industrial development and trade, to speculation and stock market swindles, to 
corruption and massive stealing. The whole bourgeoisie had enriched itself to a 
hitherto unheard of extent, while Bonaparte’s court extracted a hefty percent-
age from this enrichment.98 The factional struggles within the ruling classes, 
between Louis Bonaparte and the liberal bourgeoisie, led to a re-articulation 
of the relationship between economic and political power, which overcame the 
vulnerability and instability of liberal class rule. The shift of power in the illib-
eral direction, rather than endangering the class rule of the liberal bourgeoisie, 
96 Marx, 135–36.
97 Stein, Das Königthum, 421.
98 See Friedrich Engels, “Einleitung zur dritten deutschen Auflage von Karl Marx’ ‘Der 
Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 32:8; Friedrich Engels, 
“Entwurf des Kapitels IV der Broschüre ‘Die Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte,’ ” in Marx-
Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 31:72.
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strengthened it and made it possible for the consolidated ruling class to more 
efficiently, and without being accounatble, govern and control the underlying 
population.
Von Rochau’s Reformulation of Liberalism
I am aware that, in the preceding pages, I was describing the French political 
situation at greater length than the German. I claim, however, that this back-
ground is relevant, even indispensable, for judging von Rochau’s reformulation 
of liberalism. First, let me repeat, Bonapartism had a big, formative impact on 
von Rochau’s political thinking. And second, Bonapartism loomed large not 
only beyond the German border and unavoidably entered foreign policy calcula-
tions. With Bismarck’s presidency, Bonapartism also came to Germany. At least 
that was the perception of many a contemporary.99 As Marx wrote in the name of 
the First International, the Bonapartist regime “got its counterfeit” on the other 
side of the Rhine, in Bismarck’s regime.100 It is not only that Bonapartism rep-
resented “the first accomplished form of the modern state,”101 or that, as Engels 
observed, the “Bonapartist half-dictatorship” was “the normal form” of “man-
aging the state and society in the interest of the bourgeoisie,”102 but also that 
Prussia accomplished its bourgeois revolution “in the delightful form of Bona-
partism.”103 So how does all this relate to von Rochau’s Realpolitik?
If I may simplify, von Rochau’s reformulation of the liberal view of politics and 
of liberal politics tends to be explained in two main ways. The first is not really 
flattering and can basically be reduced to the charge of opportunism.104 The dis-
illusionment caused by the defeat of the political revolution led to the accept-
ance of the political realities, to the abandonment of the ideals and principles of 
the revolutionary years, and to conformity with “power politics” (Machtpolitik), 
99 See Iain McDaniel, “Constantin Frantz.”
100 Karl Marx, “The General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association ON THE 
WAR. To the Members of the International Workingmen’s Association in Europe and the 
United States,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 21:247.
101 Bologna, “Moneta e crisi,” 5.
102 Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, April 13, 1866, in Marx-Engels-Werke, 31:208.
103 Engels, “Ergänzung der Vorbemerkung,’ ” 513.
104 See Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 15, 44, 210, 222.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
that is, to the politics that now had revealed its real nature as being determined 
by those who possessed social power and means of violence.
The other explanation seems to have the unspoken intention of preserving the 
idea of the continued progress of liberalism. In a sophisticated and well-in-
formed version of this view, “initially radical ideas and ideals” had not been 
“destroyed through failure in 1848,” but were rather “repackaged and re-de-
scribed by Rochau, both as part of the social fabric of contemporary politics, 
and as being natural or inevitable in the present.” Accordingly, what von Ro-
chau produced was “a post-revolutionary political theory that re-described lib-
eral ‘idealism’ around 1848 as political ‘realism’ in the 1850s and 1860s, in order 
to show that the untimeliness of those early demands had nevertheless become 
timely now, making their adaptation an obligatory part of a newly realistic ac-
count of contemporary politics.”105
To me, this sounds dangerously like projecting the dominant twenty-first-centu-
ry Western politics—politics as the ever more consummate art of presentation—
back onto the 1850s. The problem is that this—“our”—kind of politics is increas-
ingly being freed from facts and reality, whereas back then political thinkers 
like von Rochau claimed they were trying to do precisely the opposite: to tie the 
understanding of politics to “facts,” Tatsachen, and reality. One might say that 
von Rochau was inventing new politics according to reality, whereas today poli-
ticians are inventing reality. But let us not wade into discussing today’s politics.
One problem I find with this second explanation is the idea of “untimeliness” 
applied to political demands (which then in unexplained ways turn “timely”). 
One can find this logic at work in Marx and Engels’s attempts at putting a brave 
face on the defeat of the proletarian revolution. The time for the proletarian rev-
olution had not been ripe, yet the progress of history was going to eventually 
create the material conditions for the proletarian victory. In the explanation of 
von Rochau’s reinvention of liberalism I referred to above, “the apparent failures 
of 1848” were due to the fact that “the constitutions then outlined had failed,” 
because the political situation was not ripe (yet).106 Based on what I said earli-
105 This is how Kelley (“August Ludwig von Rochau,” 306, 309) refers to Natascha Doll’s thesis 
in Doll, Recht, Politik und “Realpolitik”.
106 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 311.
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er in this article on the waning importance of the constitution-centered view of 
politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, I want to argue that von Ro-
chau’s realistic turn did not lie in recognizing the untimeliness of the “outlined 
constitutions” but in recognizing the futility of concentrating politics on outlin-
ing constitutions. The problem was not that those constitutions were not timely. 
The (liberal) political focus on outlining constitutions was a wrong approach.
The other problem with the discussed explanation lies in weaving the tale of 
liberalism’s progress into the long-term development tendencies that led to the 
Prussian hegemony and toward the unification of Germany. Duncan Kelley cit-
ed Hermann Baumgarten’s “self-critique” of liberalism as a typical—and influ-
ential—case of how “the history of Germany into the 1860s became a myriad 
tale of political and cultural development since the Reformation culminating in 
Prussian-led claims for unification.”107 From this perspective, if liberalism was 
to have, or be seen as having, a continuous life, it had to be part of that story, 
and Realpolitik meant adjusting to, or rather adopting, Prussian hegemony. Yet 
Baumgarten himself wrote that, before the Prussian military victory over Aus-
tria in 1866, which consolidated Prussia’s leading role in German politics, even 
“those friends of Prussia who had most believed in it,” found it “hardly believa-
ble” that the political struggles would turn out the way they did.108
I do not think von Rochau’s Principles of Realpolitik can really be judged a 
“self-critique” of liberalism, like Ruge’s in the late 1840s or Buamgarten’s a good 
twenty years later. Von Rochau’s book was, rather, a critique of the politics of 
the era of revolution, especially of the politics on the revolutionary side of social 
and political struggles, and it was a critique of political forces and their policies 
in the aftermath of the revolution. Even if written by an ex-left liberal, it was a 
critique of politics in general, rather than a specific critique—or self-critique—of 
liberalism. Or to put it differently: the critique of liberalism was part of a wid-
er critique of contemporary politics. It was general reflections on politics that 
had implications for, and an impact on, conceiving liberal politics, on figuring 
out what liberal politics for the post-revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, era 
107 Kelley, 310.
108 Hermann Baumgarten, Der deutsche Liberalismus: Eine Selbstkritik. Abdruck aus dem 
achtzehnten Bande der Preußischen Jahrbücher (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg 
Reimer, 1866), 108.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
might be like. It would be misplaced to look for the continuity of liberal ideas, 
because the view of politics had changed. To be more precise, whatever continu-
ity of liberal political ideas there might have been, it was criss-crossed by new 
ways of looking at politics.
The new politics was not about “repackaging” old radical ideas but about think-
ing about politics in a radically different way. That is why none of the two main 
explanations of what von Rochau’s work had done does justice to his work, yet 
taken together they come close to opening a productive perspective on it: the 
continuity of liberalism lay precisely in abandoning its ideas, ideals, and prin-
ciples (under today’s “dictatorship of values,” one would, of course, say “val-
ues”) in order to keep economic power untouched and untouchable. Liberalism 
sloughed off its political skin in order to grow its economic power, and thus de-
politicized economic power. With Bonapartism, periodic political discontinui-
ties became the condition for the continuity of economic liberalism. The con-
tinuity of liberalism is the continuity of economic liberalism. The distinction 
between political and economic revolution that emerged with the defeat of the 
1848 revolutions is complemented by the distinction between political and eco-
nomic liberalism, and both are crucial for understanding the post-revolutionary 
reformulation of liberalism and its subsequent history.109
The Economic Limits to Realpolitik: Economic Power without Political 
Limits
Without entering into a discussion of von Rochau’s concrete political views and 
analyses, there is not much more to be said about the leading principles of his 
realistic view of politics than has already been said. But before proceeding fur-
ther, I want to add that those concrete political views and analyses are not some-
thing accidental. One may disregard them only at the cost of fully understand-
ing von Rochau’s Realpolitik. They are integral to his political thought: a mode 
of thinking.
The distinction of von Rochau’s realistic political thinking is his thinking about 
politics concretely. Concrete political thinking meant looking at “the real social 
109 See Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 
2010).
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conditions and their development” instead of being fixated on “state forms”: 
analyzing the manifold social forces, whose interaction shapes, maintains, and 
transforms a historically given state, and which—just like their interactions and 
the results of their interactions—change endlessly according to time and space, 
“nach Raum und Zeit.”110 And the social forces shaping, maintaining, and trans-
forming the state were not only “wealth, opinion, and intelligence,”111 not only 
“the new factors of social life” such as the “civic consciousness, the idea of free-
dom, national spirit, the idea of human equality, the political factionalism of 
the parties, the press,” and “public opinion,”112 but also “stupidity,” “lies or any 
other immorality,” and “even crime.”113 Early in the twentieth century, Vladimir 
Ilich Lenin on the left and Carl Schmitt on the right stand out as model repre-
sentatives of this way of thinking politically.
Limiting my discussion to a more abstract level, and seeing von Rochau’s real-
politisch views as resting on his formulation of the “law of power,” I will con-
clude this paper by looking at the limitations of that “law of power.”114 The law 
of power, according to von Rochau, “dominates the life of the state.” Among 
the forces that “shape, maintain, and transform the state,” the stronger prevail: 
“Power responds [gehorcht: obeys] only to the bigger power, and the strong can-
not allow themselves to be swayed [sich beherrschen lassen: dominated] by the 
weak.”115 A realistic view of politics needs to recognize the “real power of the 
stronger” and realize the standing and importance “the stronger” by “necessi-
ty” have to have in the state. For power alone “can govern.” As von Rochau put 
110  Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 1, 8.
111  Rochau, 24; see also 24n60.
112  Rochau, 11.
113  Rochau, 9.
114 Von Rochau used the term “das Gesetz der Stärke.” Stärke has multiple meanings, includ-
ing “strength,” “force,” and “power.” English and Italian translations of von Rochau often 
render it as “power,” or “potere”—hence the “law of power,” or “legge del potere,” respec-
tively. Von Rochau used distinct terms for “force” (Kraft, e.g., “gesellschaftliche Kräfte” for 
“social forces”) and “power” (Macht, especially in connection with politics, e.g., “poli-
tische Macht” for “political power”). Some of his contemporaries, e.g. Treitschke, used the 
term Machtpolitik (politics of power) as roughly equivalent to von Rochau’s Realpolitik. 
See Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 44, 149–50n34, 232. I think a more precise 
translation would be “the law of strength” (especially because von Rochau writes, for ex-
ample, of the “power of the strong,” “Macht des Stärken”). But with these explanations, I 
may as well use “the law of power.”
115 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 3.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
it: “To govern means exercising power, and solely he who has power can exer-
cise power.”116
This language of power, however, fell silent when it came to the economy. Not 
only did von Rochau himself abstain from using the language of power when 
discussing the economic life of society. He polemicized against those who did 
use it. He accused, for example, the Berlin press that was sympathetic to so-
cialism of using “the language of toxic demagogy” against “the ‘bourgeoisie,’ 
against the ‘monopoly of capital,’ against the ‘exploitation of the worker’ by 
the entrepreneur, yes, even against the machinery.” Arguing, as the pro-social-
ist press did, that “the existing national-economic [volkswirtschaftliche] system” 
originates “only in the selfishness and greed of money-men” and, as such, had 
to be “transformed from the bottom up for the benefit of the laboring classes,” 
was for von Rochau nothing short of “incitement.”117
It is interesting and telling that most of what von Rochau had to say about the 
economy was said in the context of polemics against socialism and “the mass-
es.” “The masses” was a new term for a new social phenomenon. They became 
a political factor that could not be ignored—as Louis Bonaparte was quick to 
comprehend and skillfully use to his advantage.118 Von Rochau had a haughty 
and dismissive attitude toward the masses. They were unworthy of polemics. So-
cialism was a different matter, even though the masses were sometimes drawn 
to socialism. Socialism’s distinction was that it had a theoretical and political 
answer to the social evils produced by the new “industrial system.”
116 Rochau, 1–2.
117 August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatliche 
Zustände Deutschlands: Zweiter Theil (Heidelberg: Akademische Verlagshandlung von J. 
C. B. Mohr, 1869), 138.
118 Louis Bonaparte represented himself as the “instrument, the creation of the mass-
es.” See Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie: 
Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig: Verlag von 
Dr. Werner Klinkhardt, 1911), 204. In his time, Louis Bonaparte explained, “one can only 
govern with the masses; therefore, they have to be organized in order that they could for-
mulate their will, and disciplined in order that they could be steered toward and enlight-
ened about their proper interests.” Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte, Extinction du pauperisme, 
5th ed. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1844), 17.
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Von Rochau admitted that “the transformation of crafts into the factory system 
has its serious wrongs [Uebelstände].” However, he was sure that “there is no 
power in this world that is able to prevent that transformation or even undo it.” 
Any attempt to make things better must start from this understanding.119 Once 
the transformation is regarded as given and necessary, and property—which von 
Rochau, unlike for example Stein, did not see as a social relation of domination 
and subjection (and resistance), that is, as a power relation—as untouchable, 
those wrongs or evils appear as a necessary evil. And yet von Rochau agreed that 
“the economic condition of the poorest popular classes” had to be bettered—but 
only within certain limits.120 Such prudent limited improvement might be called 
“social reform,” whereas the socialists called for “social revolution.” The latter, 
a “violent act of politics,” was a “chimera [Hirngespinst].”121
Von Rochau called those who spoke for revolutionary socialism “fanatics of the-
ory.”122 As their opposite, Realpolitik in this context surprisingly turned into a re-
jection of the politics of force. Von Rochau dismissed social revolution as a “vi-
olent and radical change of property,” for which one needed only a “sufficient 
number of fists.”123 Here, a big enough force to be politically effective did not 
count as an argument. Realpolitik also became concerned with limiting power. 
For social reform, acting within certain limits when attempting to better the mis-
erable conditions of the laboring poor was about putting limits on state action. 
Defining the limits of state action was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s aim in an essay 
he wrote at the time of the French Revolution, but which was only published in 
1851—and was adopted by liberals as their own classic text.124 In von Rochau’s 
book, however, whose declared realism lay in recognizing and accepting the 
role of power in politics and in defining the state by the law of power, speaking 
about limits on the tasks of the state appears somewhat incongruous.
Just as it was “self-evident” that one should find a “remedy” for the “economic 
suffering” of those times, moreover, that that was an “urgent need,” it appears 
119 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 98.
120 Rochau, 163.
121 Rochau, 163, 165.
122 Rochau, 165.
123 Rochau, 165.
124 Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Veruch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats 
zu bestimmen (Breslau: Verlag von Eduard Trewend, 1851).
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
that it was also evident that such a remedy meant, or involved, state interven-
tion. The question was: How big a room for action should the state be given? 
Von Rochau gave his answer as soon as he asked that question: “However big a 
room for action is given to state measures for this purpose, they meet their limit 
in property rights.” Whereas remedying “economic suffering” was the “econom-
ic task of the state,” that task had to be fulfilled “within those limits.”125 It was 
not the state power that defined the scope of the state’s action, or its limits. The 
power that imposed limits on the state was economic.
Von Rochau’s preferred “big means of social reform” were two: reducing the 
costs of running the state (Ersparnis im Staatshaushalt), that is, cutting the 
budget, and the “freedom of exercising economic force” (Freiheit der wirtschaft-
lichen Kraftübung). The perception of wrongs and evils shifted from the “eco-
nomic suffering” of the “poorest popular classes” to state spending and imped-
iments to economic freedom: “The oversized budgets and the laws that under 
different pretexts impede the freedom of economic movements—these are the 
two and sole biggest evils in the economic realm.” What one might expect from 
politics was the removal of those two evils. The rest of the wrongs would be tak-
en care of by “slow organic development” by the “development of the economic 
strength of the people [wirtschaftliche Volkskräfte], in which politics [. . .] has 
solely the task of warding off external interference.”126
While von Rochau defined state action negatively, by limiting it he ascribed a 
positive role to the economy: “The positive part of the task falls to the national 
economy [Volkswirttschaft] itself, and it will, and can be, accomplished only in 
measure to which production increases.”127 The “increase of production” was first 
an argument against the lingering remnants of the guild system, or artisanal 
production. The “economic interest of society” or, more emphatically, the
first, the most urgent, and the most irrefutable demand of the economic interest 
is the following: that each economic force be realized [verwerthet: utilized or ex-
ploited to produce value] as much as possible. The economic interest of society 
does not ask for a certificate of apprenticeship or for a masterpiece, but for the 
125 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 163.
126 Rochau, 164–65.
127 Rochau, 165.
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ability to produce as much as possible [Leistungsfähigkeit], regardless of how and 
where it is acquired.128 
The answer for Germany was “economic freedom” (Gewerbefreiheit), such as it 
existed in the countries which stood “at the forefront of world industry.”129
The same argument was then used against socialism, because, as von Rochau 
asserted, the social revolution, with entails the violent transformation of prop-
erty, could not “increase social production” and “augment public wealth.”130 By 
the time von Rochau wrote his Principles of Realpolitik, economic science had 
made enough progress to relegate into oblivion the sober—one may say realis-
tic—view that increased production, while it might multiply individual riches, 
did not necessarily increase public wealth (rather the opposite was often the 
case).131 Since, as von Rochau contended, a “new economic system,” such as im-
agined by the socialists, was simply a “folly”132—that is, since liberalism already 
in its first reformulation adopted the position that “there is no alternative”—the 
most logical solution for getting out of the crisis and going forward was indeed 
an increase in productivity. The sum total of what the labor of the whole society 
yielded was insufficient to cover the existing needs, and a different distribution 
of the fruits of labor would achieve “little or nothing,” unless production was in-
creased. “But the increase in production is not a matter of politics, and politics 
can basically do nothing to support it except for removing the impediments.”133
This applied also to the proletariat. An honest and smart thing to do would be to 
“bluntly tell the proletariat that by and large one cannot help them in any other 
way but by creating the legal possibility that they can help themselves.” Von Ro-
chau not only reminded his reader of the German folk wisdom “Help yourself, 
and God will help you,” but also brought up the “motto of the North American 
entrepreneurial spirit and of the North American labor force,” which was: “Help 
128 Rochau, 97.
129 Rochau, 99.
130 Rochau, 165.
131 See especially James Maitland, The Earl of Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and 
Origin of Public Wealth, and into the Means and Causes of Its Increase (Edinburgh: 
Archibald Constable, 1804).
132 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 165.
133 Rochau, 165.
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is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . .
yourself.” That was the “magic formula” which in two generations made Ameri-
ca a “first class economic power” and created a general welfare such as had not 
been seen in the whole of history.134
In this context, von Rochau found it worth repeating that “the big means of so-
cial reform, which stands at offer to German national politics, is the freedom of 
economic movement.” Only under the conditions of economic freedom could 
“each economic force be exercised” and yield the most it could, and “the high-
est increase in economic production” be achieved. That would also benefit “the 
so-called workingmen’s estate.” Consequently, that is what the workers could 
demand from the state: “The free use of their economic force is the most right-
ful, the most irrefutable, demand that the proletariat can make of the state.”135
All of this could be described as a staple laissez-faire. The irony of it would be 
that von Rochau, in his turning away from philosophy and his realistic commit-
ment to “facts,” ended up with him embracing a philosophy—for, as Keynes was 
to say, that is what laissez-faire actually was.136 If laissez-faire had been econom-
ic science, one could say that von Rochau was actually consistent with his politi-
cal realism project. But one would have to understand economic science like von 
Rochau’s contemporary Frantz did: as a science insisting on observing “what is 
going on and how is it going on,” instead of developing a doctrine “scholasti-
cally”—which was characteristic of the theoretical doctrine of the state, Staats-
lehre—i.e., proceeding from a general idea.137 Understood in this way, economic 
science offered “something real,” and because it was in this sense superior to 
state doctrine, the latter “struck sail” in front of it and “made economy the orga-
non of all political thinking.” Consequently, the state would become simply “an 
economic institution.”138
This is not what von Rochau’s embracing laissez-faire was. If anything, he made 
the state a handmaiden of economy, of the existing “economic system.” But with 
regard to his political-theoretical project, the embrace of laissez-faire philoso-
phy was a failure. Instead of sticking to the “facts,” a set of facts was kept be-
134 Rochau, 168.
135 Rochau, 169, 170–71.
136 John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth Press, 1926).
137 Frantz, Naturlehre des Staates, 71.
138 Frantz, 74.
154
tomaž mastnak
yond questioning. Even more seriously, those were the facts that involved pow-
er, more precisely: the exercise of power. The exercise of power within the eco-
nomic realm was closed to political thinking, while the state was locked into 
protecting and maintaining, one may say serving, that exercise of power. In-
stead of analyzing the exercise of economic power, von Rochau spoke of the de-
velopment of economic forces—he consistently uses the term Kraft in this con-
text, never Macht—i.e., an increase in economic productivity, efficiency, and 
freedom.139 While those who wielded economic power were free from state in-
terference, but were shielded by the state from “external” “impediments,” the 
proletarians were given the freedom to be proletarians. That was the help they 
could hope for by the state. The state power was limited by economic power, 
while economic power was kept politically unlimited. The law of power did not 
extend into the realm of the economy. It was limited to reflections on the state 
and politics, while economic power, never named, was a law unto itself, legibus 
solutus. As such, it was in no conceivable sense an institution.
Discussing the crisis of liberalism early in the twentieth century, John Hobson 
wrote of “the shipwreck which Continental Liberalism has suffered when it was 
driven on the submerged reefs of the economic problem in politics.”140 One may 
say that von Rochau’s Realpolitik was shipwrecked on economic power, which 
he himself turned into a submerged reef. But the failure of his realpolitisch pro-
ject did not impact his reformulation of liberalism. In that very failure lay a suc-
cessful reformulation of liberalism: the exemption of economic power from po-
litical reflection and control.
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