The immorality of politics, the way in which the foundations of Morality are ignored by the state, is the natural consequence of the power of rulers; for in them all the original instincts of the human beast still untamed by moral law are exaggerated by the intense realization of their loftiness, the glory and the illustriousness of their position, and they are not forced by wholesome fear of the means of coercion wielded by the moral administration to control themselves, to exercise and develop their organic powers of inhibition. The elevation of this fact of the Immorality of the state to a theory that the state is not bound by moral law, is derived from the conception which philosophers of all ages, from ancient times to the present day, have formed of the character and the purpose of the state. Plato, in the Republic, maintains the omnipotence of the state, which nothing and no one can limit; and Aristotle, not rising to such heights of error as his master, says more soberly: "It is a grave mistake to believe that every citizen is his own master." The Italian philosopher Filangieri considers the guiding principle and motive power of the state to be "love of power," which a fool three centuries later called the "will to power," whereupon other fools declared this to be a brand-new discovery.
Hegel goes farthest of all in his idolatry of the state; according to him the state is not alone moral, but Morality itself, just as God is according to the theologians. As it would be arrogant blasphemy to characterize anything that God ordains as immoral, as it would be nonsensical to wish to impose upon God a moral law from outside, not emanating from Him, to which He would have to submit even against His will, so it is reprehensible to judge the actions of the state by the standard of individual Morality; and it is equally absurd to admit any moral coercion imposed on the state from outside, any guiding principle other than the law of its necessities and the logic which indicates the means needed to attain the necessary end.
According to Treitschke the state is the highest form of human existence; nothing higher than the state exists. He has never asked himself the question whether, after all, humanity itself is not superior to the state which is the form, a form, of its existence and therefore not its essence.