Germaine de Staël Quotes
Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.
Staël, Germaine de. Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France. Librairie Fischbacher, 1906.
This is a very important quotation. No one likes to make moral compromises, but Mann realized that there was a necessity in a complex society—especially a republic to make compromises. Politics cannot function without compromises of all kinds moral and otherwise as different people have different views of morality and rectitude. Mann observed that if compromises must be made, it is better for the politicians to make them than the educators, physicians, clerics, and other professional groups. Therefore politics takes the heat so that the other institutions of society do not have to. Thus politics has this crucial role among its others according to Mann.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time.
