“Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.”

— Julien Benda

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 110-111

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Julien Benda 19

French essayist 1867–1956

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 107-108

“The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.”

James Mill (1773–1836) Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher

The Edinburgh Review, vol. 18 (1811), p. 121

“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.”

Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.

“To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Die Menge nicht zu achten, ist sittlich; sie zu ehren, ist rechtlich.
Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Athenaeum Fragments” § 211

“It is the business of the preacher, not only to state moral truths, but to inspire his hearers with a realising sense of their value, and to awaken in them the desire to act accordingly.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Context: It is the business of the preacher, not only to state moral truths, but to inspire his hearers with a realising sense of their value, and to awaken in them the desire to act accordingly. He can do this only by putting his own purpose as a yeast into their hearts. The influence of the right sort of preachers cannot be spared. The human race is not yet so far advanced that it can dispense with the impulses that come from men of more than average intensity of moral energy.
Let us produce, through the efficacy of a better moral life and of a deeper moral experience, a surer faith in the ultimate victory of the good.
Let us found religion upon a basis of perfect intellectual honesty. Religion, if it is to mean anything at all, must stand for the highest truth. How then can the cause of truth be served by the sacrifice, more or less disguised, of one's intellectual convictions?