As lately as 1945
feudal pockets remained in Eastern Europe.
An even more profound transformation of European society is made in the
course of the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. The transformation is in
its early stages. During the process, the political life of
Europe-in-transition will be administered by the political institutions
of the bourgeois state, together with the closely related state patterns
of socialism-communism which have come into being during the present
century.
During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the
outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the
elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by
the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois
interests.
Today the bourgeois state is a bulwark of conservatism; devoting its
energies to the preservation of bourgeois forms and practices and doing
its utmost to fulfill its counter-revolutionary role of resisting and,
if possible, destroying the institutions and practices needed to replace
the political institutions and practices of civilization by the new
institutions required to move mankind from the outmoded lifestyle of
civilization to a lifestyle beyond and above that to which humanity has
become adapted during the now obsolete epoch of civilization.
At the same time, the socialist-communist variant of the bourgeois state
pattern is providing the framework within which the institutions and
practices needed for the transition from civilization to a newer and
more universal social order are being matured.
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