"Both German and English-speaking peoples make much of personal liberty, as is the fashion in modern Christendom, but it would seem that in the German conception this liberty is freedom to give orders and freely to follow orders, while in the English conception it is rather an exemption from orders—a somewhat anarchistic habit of thought. It was this dynastic power of the Prussian State, resting on an authentic tradition of personal fealty, unlimited in the last resort, that was the largest single factor of a cultural kind entering into the Imperial era from the German side."
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Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), p. 167
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/German_Empire
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