THE 20TH CENTURY
POLITICAL OUTLOOK
“Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for
some real thing of honor and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty.”
— SPENGLER
“The time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the
world— the compulsion to great politics.”
— NIETZSCHE, 1885
Introduction
THE DISTRIBUTION of powers in the first two World Wars was grotesque— the way it was occasioned is
examined elsewhere. The results of these two wars were consequently grotesque. In both of them the
outlook of the nineteenth century was apparently victorious. Superficially it was indeed, but actually such
a thing is impossible. Owing to the organic nature of a Culture, as well as of the nations it creates, the
Past cannot triumph over the Future— the alternatives are always only two in organic life: either forward
development, or sickness and extinction.
The Western Civilization was not extinguished by these fearful conflicts, even though its existence was
brought to the lowest possible point politically.
The First of the series of World Wars created a new world. The old ideas of history, politics, war,
nations, economics, society, culture, art, education, ethics, were swept away. The new ideas of these
things however were possessed only by the best brains of Europe, the small Culture-bearing stratum.
Unfortunately the political leaders in Europe immediately after the First World War— save one— did not
belong to this stratum.
The Second in the series arose from the fact that all Europe had not yet come under the impress of the
new idea, the 20th century world-outlook. Half of Europe continued to play the old-fashioned, fatal game
of petty-stateism. The leaders responsible for this represent what Goethe had in mind when he said: “The
most terrible thing in the world is ignorance in action.” Europe has not yet paid the full price for the
malice and stupidity of these leaders. Nietzsche had wished to see such an increase in the threatening
attitude of Russia that Europe would be forced to unite, to abandon the miserable game of political
nationalism, petty-stateism. Not only did this happen politically, it happened culturally— Russia seceded
totally from Europe and returned to Asia, whence Peter the Great had dragged it. But Europe continued to
luxuriate in the repulsive game of frontiers and customs, little plans, little projects, little secrets— even
after it had looked on at the spectacle of the Bolshevik revolution. Nietzsche had assumed in his thought
that brains would be present at the helm— in Europe he forgot to wish that.
Readers in the year 2000 will find it hard to believe that in 1947 a French aspirant for power based
himself on a program for making France secure from Germany, or that in 1947 England and France
signed at Dünkirchen a treaty of alliance against Germany. Both America and Russia allowed these two
political powers of yesterday to sign this harmless treaty— it could not in any way conflict with the plans
of the extra-Europeans in Moscow and Washington, for it looked not to the future, or even to the present,
but solely to the Past. Is it possible that the people who prepared and signed this treaty were under a
collective hallucination that the year was 1750, 1850, or in any other century? When politicians become
subjects of confusion, their countries must suffer.
Such things could not happen— Europe could not have reached such a low— if the new outlook on
politics, the organically necessary outlook, had been clearly present in the ruling stratum in every
European land. This new outlook— which becomes automatically the view of anyone who understands
it is now formulated here for the first time in its entirety.
The word politics itself has been subject in recent history— say, since 1850— to a deep
misunderstanding. Two things are responsible: first the economic obsession of the nations of our
Civilization during the 19th century, second the culture-distorting influence of America on certain
European areas. The economic obsession gradually developed into the view that politics was something
outmoded, that it only reflected preceding economic realities, that ultimately it would pass away. Thus
war came to be regarded as an anachronism.
In America, because of the special conditions which prevailed there, unique in Western history, the
word politics came to mean adherence to a group or an idea from a chicane motive. American politicians
continually accused one another of engaging in “politics.” This meant that politics was regarded as something unnecessary, something dishonest, something that could and should be done away with. This
was in very truth their understanding of the word.
This deep misunderstanding of the nature of politics in Europe grew because of the extraordinarily long
period of peace among the European nations between 1871 and 1914. This seemed to prove that war and
politics were gone. The idea was so deeply fixed that 1914 only seemed to be the exception that proved
the rule. There was also a mental necessity on the part of weak heads in Europe and America to regard
the 1914 war as the last war. Nor did 1939 change this. Again there was a last war. People with this
viewpoint are not embarrassed by the necessity of regarding every war as the last war. To an ideologist,
his theory is normative— it is the facts which go askew.
The time has come when persistence in this sort of mental legerdemain must cease. Politics is not a
subject for logical exercises, but a field for action in the Spirit of the Age.
The Nature of Politics
FIRST, what is politics? That is, politics as a fact. Politics is activity in relation to power.
Politics is a domain of its own— the domain of power. Thus it is not morality, it is not esthetics, it is
not economics. Politics is a way of thinking, just as these others are. Each of these forms of thought
isolates part of the totality of the world and claims it for its own. Morality distinguishes between good
and evil; esthetics between beautiful and ugly; economics between utile and inutile (in its later, purely
trading phase these are identical with profitable and unprofitable). The way politics divides the world is
into friend and enemy. These express for it the highest possible degree of connection, and the highest
possible degree of separation.
Political thought is as separate from these other forms of thought as they are from each other. It can
exist without them, they without it. The enemy can be good, he can be beautiful, he may be economically
utile, business with him may be profitable— but if his power activity converges on mine, he is my enemy.
He is that one with whom existential conflicts are possible. But esthetics, economics, morality are not
concerned with existence, but only with norms of activity and thinking within an assured existence.
While as a matter of psychological fact, the enemy is easily represented as ugly, injurious, and evil,
nevertheless this is subsidiary to politics, and does not destroy the independence of political thinking and
activity. The political dis-junction, concerned as it is with existence, is the deepest of all dis-junctions and
thus, has a tendency to seek every type of persuasion, compulsion, and justification in order to carry its
activity forward. The extent to which this occurs is in direct ratio to the purity of political thinking in the
leaders. The more their outlooks contain of moral, economic or other ways of thinking, the more they
will use propaganda along such lines to further their political aims. It may even happen that they are not
conscious that their activity is political. There is every indication that Cromwell regarded himself as a
religionist and not as a politician. A variation was provided by the French journal which fanned the war
spirit of its readers in 1870 with the expectation that the poilus would bring car-loads of blonde women
back from Prussia.
On the other side, Japanese propaganda for the home populace during the Second World War, accented
almost entirely the existential, i.e., purely political nature of the struggle. Another may be ugly, evil and
injurious and yet not be an enemy; or he may be good, beautiful, and useful, and yet be an enemy.
Friend and enemy are concrete realities. They are not figurative. They are unmixed with moral,
esthetic or economic elements. They do not describe a private relationship of antipathy. Antipathy is no
necessary part of the political dis-junction of friend and enemy. Hatred is a private phenomenon. If
politicians inoculate their populations with hatred against the enemy, it is only to give them a personal
interest in the public struggle which they would otherwise not have. Between super personal organisms
there is no hatred, although there may be existential struggles. The dis-junction love-hatred is not political
and does not intersect at any point the political one of friend-enemy. Alliance does not mean love, any
more than war means hate. Clear thinking in the realm of politics demands at the outset a strong power of
dissociation of ideas.
The world-outlook of Liberalism, here as always completely emancipated from reality, said that the
concept enemy described either an economic competitor, or else an ideational opponent. But in
economics there are no enemies, but only competitors; in a world which was purely moralized (i.e., one in
which only moral contrasts existed) there could be no enemies, but only ideational opponents.
Liberalism, strengthened by the unique long peace, 1871-1914, pronounced politics to be atavistic, the
grouping of friend-enemy to be retrograde. This of course belongs to politics as a branch of philosophy.
In that realm no misstatement is possible; no accumulation of facts can prove a theory wrong, for over
these theories are supreme, History is not the arbiter in matters of political outlook, Reason decides all,and everyone decides for himself what is reasonable. This is concerned however only with facts, and the
only objection made here to such an outlook in the last analysis is that it is not factual.
Enemy, then, does not mean competitor. Nor does it mean opponent in general. Least of all does it
describe a person whom one hates from feelings of personal antipathy. Latin possessed two words: hostis
for the public enemy, inimicus for a private enemy. Our Western languages unfortunately do not make
this important distinction. Greek however did possess it, and had further a deep distinction between two
types of wars: those against other Greeks, and those against outsiders of the Culture, barbarians. The
former were “agons” and only the latter were true wars. An agon was originally a contest for a prize at
the public games, and the opponent was the “antagonist.” This distinction has value for us because in
comparison with wars in this age, intra-European wars of the preceding 800 years were agonal. As
nationalistic politics assumed the ascendancy within the Classical Culture, with the Peloponnese Wars,
the distinction passed out of Greek usage. 17th and 18th century wars in West-Europe were in the nature
of contests for a prize— the prize being a strip of territory, a throne, a title. The participants were
dynasties, not peoples. The idea of destroying the opposing dynasty was not present, and only in the
exceptional case was there even the possibility of such a thing happening. Enemy in the political sense
means thus public enemy. It is unlimited, and it is thus distinguished from private enmity. The distinction
public-private can only arise when there is a super-personal unit present. When there is, it determines
who is friend and enemy, and thus no private person can make such a determination. He may hate those
who oppose him or who are distasteful to him, or who compete with him, but he may not treat them as
enemies in the unlimited sense.
The lack of two words to distinguish public and private enemy also has contributed to confusion in the
interpretation of the well-known Biblical passage (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27) “Love your enemies.” The
Greek and Latin versions use the words referring to a private enemy. And this is indeed to what the
passage refers. It is obviously an adjuration to put aside hatred and malice, but there is no necessity
whatever that one hate the public enemy. Hatred is not contained in political thinking. Any hatred
worked up against the public enemy is non-political, and always shows some weakness in the internal
political situation. This Biblical passage does not adjure one to love the public enemy, and during the
wars against Saracen and Turk no Pope, saint, or philosopher so construed it. It certainly does not counsel
treason out of love for the public enemy.
II
Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other
becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as
enemies. The State as a political unit excludes by its nature opposition of such types as these. If however
a dis-junction occurs in the population of a State which is so deep and strong that it divides them into
friends and enemies, it shows that the State, at least temporarily, does not exist in fact. It is no longer a
political unit, since all political decisions are no longer concentrated in it. All States whatever keep a
monopoly of political decision. This is another way of saying they maintain inner peace. If some group
or idea becomes so strong that it can effect a friend-enemy grouping, it is a political unit; and if forces are
generated which the State cannot manage peaceably, it has disappeared for the time at least. If the State
has to resort to force, this in itself shows that there are two political units, in other words, two States
instead of the one originally there.
This raises the question of the significance of internal politics. Within a State, we speak of social-politics,
judicial-politics, religious-politics, party-politics and the like. Obviously they represent another
meaning of the word, since they do not contain the possibility of a friend-enemy dis-junction. They occur
within a pacified unit. They can only be called “secondary.” The essence of the State is that within its
realm it excludes the possibility of a friend-enemy grouping. Thus conflicts occurring within a State are
by their nature limited, whereas the truly political conflict is unlimited. Every one of these internal limited struggles of course may become the focus of a true political disjunction, if the idea opposing the
State is strong enough, and the leaders of the State have lost their sureness. If it does— again, the State is
gone. An organism either follows its own law, or it becomes ill. This is organic logic and governs all
organisms, plant, animal, man, High Culture. They are either themselves, or they sicken and die. Not for
them is the rational and logical view which says that whatever can be cogently written down into a system
can then be foisted on to an organism. Rational thinking is merely one of the multifarious creations of
organic life, and it cannot, being subsidiary, include the whole within its contemplation. It is limited and
can only work in a certain way, and on material which is adapted to such treatment. The organism is the
whole, however, and does not yield its secrets to a method which it develops out of its own adaptive
ability to cope with non-organic problems it has to overcome.
Secondary politics often can distort primary politics. For instance the female politics of petty jealousy and personal hatred that was effective in the court of Louis XV was instrumental in devoting much of French political energy to the less important struggle against Frederick, and little French political energy to the more important struggle against England in Canada and India and on the seas. Frederick the Great was not beloved by the Pompadour, and France paid an empire to chastise him. When private hostility exerts such an effect on public decision, it is proper to speak of political distortion, and of such a policy as a distorted one. When an organism consults or is in the grip of any force outside of its own developmental law, its life is distorted. The relation between a private enmity and a public politics it is circumstanced to distort is the same as that between European petty-Stateism and the Western Civilization. The collectively suicidal game of nationalistic politics distorted the whole destiny of the West after 1900 to the advantage of the extra-European forces.
Similarly, the word “fascist” was used purely as a term of abuse, without any descriptive basis
whatever, just as the word democracy was a word of praise but not of description. In the American press,
for example, both during the 1914 war and the 1939 war, Russia was always described as a “democracy.”
The House of Romanov and the Bolshevik regime were equally democratic. This was necessary to
preserve the homogeneous picture of these wars which this press had painted for its readers: the war was
one of democracy against dictatorship; Europe was dictatorship, ergo, anything fighting Europe was
democracy. In the same way, Machiavelli described any State that was not a monarchy as a republic, a
polemical definition that has remained to this day. To Jack Cade the word nobility was a term of
damnation, to those who put down his rebellion, it was everything good. In a legal treatise, the class warrior
Karl Renner described rent paid by tenant to landlord as “tribute.” In the same way, Ortega y
Gasset calls the resurgence of State authority, of the ideas of order, hierarchy and discipline, a revolt of
the masses. And to a real class warrior, any navvy is socially valuable, but an officer is a “parasite.”
During the period when Liberalism ruled in the Western Civilization, and the State was reduced, theoretically, to the role of “night-watchman,” the very word “politics” changed its fundamental meaning. From having described the power activities of the State, it now described the efforts of private individuals and their organizations to secure positions in the government as a means of livelihood, in other words politics came to mean party-politics. Readers in 2050 will have difficulty in understanding these relationships, for the age of parties will be as forgotten then as the Opium War is now.
All State organisms were distorted, sick, in crisis, and this introspection was one great symptom of it. Supposedly internal politics was primary.
If internal politics was actually primary, it must have meant that friend-enemy groupings could arise on an internal political question. If this did happen, in the extreme case civil war was the result, but unless a civil war occurred, internal politics was still in fact secondary, limited, private, and not public. The very contention that inner politics was primary was polemical: what was meant was that it should be. The Liberals and class-warriors, then as now, spoke of their wishes and hope as facts, near-facts, or potential facts. The sole result of focusing energy onto inner problems was to weaken the State, in its dealings with other States. The law of every organism allows only two alternatives: either the organism must be true to itself, or it goes down into sickness or death. The nature, the essence of the State is inner peace and outer struggle. If the inner peace is disturbed or broken, the outer struggle is damaged.
The organic and the inorganic ways of thinking do not intersect: ordinary class-room logic, the logic of philosophy textbooks tells us that there is no reason why State, politics and war need even exist. There is no logical reason why humanity could not be organized as a society, or as a purely economic enterprise, or as a vast book-club. But the higher organisms of States, and the highest organisms, the High Cultures, do not ask logicians for permission to exist— the very existence of this type of rationalist, the man emancipated from reality, is only a symptom of a crisis in the High Culture, and when the crisis passes, the rationalists pass away with it. The fact that the rationalists are not in touch with the invisible, organic forces of History is shown by their predictions of events. Before 1914, they universally asserted that a general European war was impossible. Two different types of rationalists gave their two different reasons. The class-warriors of the Internationale, said that international class-war socialism would make it impossible to mobilize “the workers” of one country against “the workers” in another country. The other type— also with its center of gravity in economics, since rationalism and materialism are indissolubly wedded— said no general war was possible because mobilization would bring about such a dislocation of the economic life of the countries that a breakdown would come in a few weeks.
First, a definition: war is an armed struggle between organized political units. It is not a question of the method of fighting, for weapons are merely a way of killing. Nor of military organization— these things determine nothing about the inner nature of war. War is the highest possible expression of the friend enemy dis-junction. It confers the practical meaning on the word enemy. The enemy is he upon whom one is preparing to make or upon whom one is making war. If there is no question of war he is not an enemy. He may be a mere opponent in a contest for a prize, he may be a mere heathen, a mere ideological opponent, a competitor, a hateful thing for reasons of antipathy. The minute he becomes an enemy, the possibility or actuality of armed struggle war, enters. War is not an agon, and thus the armed struggles among the States of the Western Culture up to the middle of the 18th century were not wars in the 20th century meaning of the word. They were limited in their object and scope, and vis-à-vis the opponent they were not existential. Thus they were not political in the 20th century meaning of the word— they were not fought against enemies in our sense of the term. Unfortunately our Western languages lack the precision which Greek had in this respect to distinguish between intra-Hellenic struggles, agons, with the opponent the “antagonist,” on the one hand, and wars against the non-Culture member, on the other hand, in which the opponent, e.g., the Persian, was the enemy. The Crusades were thus war in the full unlimited sense of the word: the deep spiritual objective was the assertion of the Cultural superiority, and of the true Faith against the heathen. The opponent— though one naturally extended personal magnanimity to his soldiers because of the inner imperative of chivalrous honor— was an enemy, not to be allowed to continue in his unity if it could be destroyed.
Honor in the Crusades forbade personal meanness, but did not exclude total destruction of the enemy organized unit. Honor in intra-European struggles did forbid imposing too harsh a treaty upon the defeated opponent, and it entered no one’s mind to deny the opponent the right to existence as an organized unit.
During the history of our Culture, from Pope Gregory VII to Napoleon, the struggle against a member of the Culture was limited, but that against the heathen, the non-member of the Culture was true, unlimited war.
Wars before, after and outside a Culture are unlimited. They are a more pure expression of the barbarian in man, in that they are not highly symbolic. They are spiritual, for everything human is spiritual. The spirit is primary with man, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual development. Man sees symbolic significance in that around him— his experiencing of these symbols and his acting and organizing in accordance are what make him man, even though he carry within him also the animal instincts. His soul of course, with its transforming symbolism, completely changes the expression of these instincts. They pass into the service of the soul and its symbolism. Man does not kill, like a tiger, for food to eat— he kills because of spiritual necessity. Not even wars entirely outside a High Culture are purely animal, entirely devoid of symbolic content. With man that would be impossible— only something spiritual can bring masses on to a battlefield. But the symbolism of a High Culture is a grand symbolism— it links past, present and future and the totality of things, dissolving them all into a magnificent performance of which it is later realized that that, too, was a symbol. It is only in comparison with these grand meanings, this grand super-personal destiny, that extra-Cultural human phenomena seem merely zoological. Thus, because of their lower symbolic content, lower spiritual potential, these wars can never approach the intensity, scale, or duration of wars connected with High Culture. Defeat is acknowledged much more easily, for it is only the souls of those engaged that are affected. In Cultural wars however, the soul of the Culture is at work, lending its invisible, but invincible strength to those in its service, and a struggle can be maintained for years against fearful odds. A few defeats, and all would have been up with Genghis Khan. Not so with Friedrich der Grosse, or George Washington, for they felt themselves to be the vehicle of an Idea, of the Future.
There can not be said to exist an enmity unless the possibility of war is present. A possibility in fact, not a mere conceivability. Nor need the possibility be daily and imminent. Nor need the door be closed on negotiations before the possibility of war, and therefore true enmity can be said to exist.
Not even among warlike States is life a daily blood-shed. War is the highest possible intensification of politics, but there must also be something less intense, the period of recuperating, negotiating, steering, preparing. Without the fact of peace, we would not have the word war, and— what the pacifists have never thought of— without war, we could not have peace, in the blissful, dreamy, saccharine, way they use the word. All the fierce energy that war devotes to super-personal struggles would go into domestic discord of one sort or another, and the casualty list would hardly be less.
The relation of war to politics is clear. Clausewitz, in the usually misquoted passage, called war “the continuation of political intercourse by other means.” Usually misquoted, because it does not mean that the military fighting is the continuation of politics, for this it is not. Fighting has its own strategic and tactical grammar. It has its own organic rules and imperatives. War does not have however a motivation of its own— this is supplied by politics. As is the intensity of the political struggle, i.e., of the enmity, so is the war.
It was insight into this interrelationship that prompted an English diplomat to say that a politician was better trained for fighting than the soldier, for he fights continually and the soldier only occasionally. It is also observable that professional soldiers would turn a war into an agon before political soldiers would. The phrase political soldier is only ad hoc, to designate anyone fighting from conviction, rather than from profession.
Clausewitz expressed in the same chapter a description of this relationship between politics and war that has validity in this century: “As war belongs to politics, so does it take on its character. When politics becomes grand and powerful, so does the war, which can ascend to the height where it attains to its absolute form.”
War presupposes politics, just as politics presupposes war. Politics determines the enemy, and the time of opening the war. These are not problems for the soldier. Armies must be prepared to fight any political unit.
War and politics cannot be defined in terms of mutual aim, or purpose. It makes no organic sense to say that war is the aim of politics, or politics of war. It could not be, in either case. Each is the prerequisite of the other, neither could exist without the other. A given policy could aim at a certain war, naturally, but no politics could possibly aim at war in general.
It is the eventuality of war which gives to political thinking its hall-mark that makes it a different form of thinking from, say, economic thinking, moral, scientific, or esthetic thinking.
But the essential thing is that neutrality as a policy stands in the shade of the practical possibility of war and active politics. For a country to become neutral as a form of existence would be to cease to exist as a political unit. It might continue to exist economically, socially, culturally, but politically it could not exist if it were neutral. To renounce war is to renounce the right to an enemy. As long as a power is committed to war in any one given eventuality, it has not adopted total neutrality. Thus, Belgium’s neutrality during the 19th century was only a word, and not a fact, for it maintained an army, diplomatic representation abroad, and it entered into military understandings with France and England against Germany. As long as a country maintains an army it cannot say its basic national policy is neutrality. An army is an instrument of politics, even if only a politics of self-defense. Politics and neutrality exclude one another, as do neutrality and continued existence. Here again, another instance of the polemical nature of all political language: Neutrality was turned into a polemical word by certain small countries of Europe. Actually by their very existence they were serving the political purposes of one half of Europe against the other half. This position, of being committed by their very existence to one side of a struggle, they called “neutrality.” They knew their politics would involve them in war, they knew on which side they would be, and when the war did come, they cried aloud that their “neutrality” had been violated.
To renounce politics— which is what total neutrality means— is to renounce existence as a unit. In many cases it is the part of wisdom and the dictates of Culture to amalgamate with another power, to renounce an empty existence as a unit, an existence without a meaning or a future.
In addition to neutrality as a precarious fact, during war, and neutrality as a polemical fraud, there is neutrality which arises from the hopelessness of carrying on a war successfully. This is closer to true neutrality, for what it means is that powers reduced to such a case have disappeared from the calculations of the other powers, unless of course the land in question is attractive as spoils or as a battlefield. In this case, it must choose for itself to which of the powers still in the struggle it will surrender its independence. If it fails to do this, the choice will be made for it. A power which by its economic weakness, small size, or age, cannot possibly carry on a war has in effect renounced war and become neutral. Whether it is allowed to continue a posthumous existence depends entirely on how attractive its domains are. For purposes of high politics, it is not a political, but a neutral factor.
From the development of colossal war technics came the fact that few powers can support or wage a war. This led the rationalists and Liberals, ever bright with a new wish-informed thought, to announce that the world was becoming pacified. No more war or politics— “power-politics” is their word, just as one could talk of beauty-esthetics, utile-economics, good-morality, piety-religion, legal-law— the world is become neutral, the occasions of war are going, political powers can no longer afford wars, and the like. It is not war or politics which is disappearing, it is only that the number of contestants has grown less.
A pacified world would be one in which there was no politics. It would thus be one where no human difference could possibly arise which could range men against one another as enemies. In a purely economic world men could be opposed, but only as competitors. If morality was also there the proponents of different theories could oppose one another, but only in discussion. Religionists could oppose one another, but only with the propaganda of their respective faiths. It would have to be a world in which there was no one who would kill, or better yet, such a languid, colorless and boring world that no one could possibly take anything seriously enough to kill or risk his life about it.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that a rationalist, Liberal, or pacifist who believes that it is possible for war to vanish simply does not understand what the word war means, its reciprocal existence with politics or the nature of politics as the ranging of men against one another as enemies. In other words, and in the kindliest words possible, these people do not know what they are talking about. They wish to abolish war by politics, or even by war. If war were gone and politics remained, they would then abolish politics by war, or perhaps by politics. They confuse verbal virtuosity with political thinking, logic with soul-necessities, accident with history. As for super personal forces, they do not exist, because they cannot be seen, weighed and measured.
For this reason the Liberals and rationalists comfortably convinced themselves before 1914 that war had vanished because it did not show a profit. They were moving in their private world of abstraction, where economics was the sole motive of human conduct, and where invisible super personal forces did not exist. And 1914 did not cause them to change their theory— no, where the facts and theory conflict, it is the facts which need revision. 1914 caused them to re-implement their theory: The First World War was all the more proof of their viewpoint, for it showed that it was economically necessary that war disappear. These people did not know that economic necessity of human beings is never taken into account by super personal forces. Could they get no clue from the statement of one of the most immediate participants in the feverish flurry of negotiations of July, 1914, that all of the statesmen concerned merely drifted into the war? A strictly factual view shows that super personal organisms have no economics in our sense of the word, for they are purely spiritual. When Culture populations nourish themselves— and that is what economics is— they are nourishing the higher organism, for the populations are its cells. Its cells are to the super personal soul as the cells of a human body are to the human soul.
A war from purely religious, economic, or other, motives would be senseless as well as impossible. From religious contrasts arise the thought-categories of believer and non-believer, from economics those of co-worker and competitor, from ideological those of agreer and disagreer. Only from political contrasts come friend-enemy groupings, and only from enmity can come war. The enmity can start elsewhere the personal distaste of the mistress of a ruler has brought about an enmity grouping among Western States— but when it comes to enmity, it is politics. Although the enmity may have started on a religious contrast, when it comes to war, one will fight against believers, or accept the help of nonbelievers. Only the Thirty Years War need be mentioned in this connection. Though economics be the beginning of the enmity, once it rises to the intensity of enmity, one fights without regard to the economic consequences of his fighting, but only to the political consequences.
Other thought-categories claim they should have a monopoly of thinking, that the political should be subject to them. The 20th century outlook on politics merely observes that they do not as a matter of fact. From an esthetic standpoint, war and politics may be ugly, from an economic, wasteful, from the moral, wicked, from the religious, sinful. These viewpoints, however, are neutral from the political standpoint, which tries first, to assess the facts, and second to change them, but never tries to value them according to a non-political scheme of values. Some politicians do this, it is true. English politicians in particular, after Cromwell, felt an inner compulsion to present every one of their wars as somehow directly involving Christianity, even a war which planted the Hammer and Sickle in the heart of Europe was a war for Christianity. But this does not affect what I am saying here, as this sort of thing only affects vocabulary, but does not touch facts, or action. Using a nonpolitical terminology or propaganda cannot depoliticize politics, any more than using a pacifist terminology can debellicize war.
Politicians are usually not pure in their thinking any more than other men. Even a saint commits sins, even a scientist has his private superstitions, even a divine may have his little taint of mechanism, even a Liberal may have his minuscule trace of animal instinct which if released may cause a sanguinary war, after the conclusion of which he may try to exterminate the human beings comprising the population of the former enemy.
Just as a war cannot, as a matter of fact, be purely economic, religious, or moral, it follows that a war need not qualify under any other category in order to be justifiable from the political standpoint. The Scholastic philosophers set forth the ethico-religious prerequisites of a just war. St. Thomas Aquinas formulated them in a fashion which is final for ethico-religious thought. From the political standpoint however, the test of the justification is quite different. It is of course obvious that the word justification is inadequate, since this word belongs originally to moral thinking and not to political thinking. It must therefore not be interpreted as an invasion of the field of morality if the word justification is used in this connection, for what is meant is appropriateness, desirability, advantageousness, and indeed these are contained in the secondary meaning of the word justification. Now, in this practical, political sense, what wars are justified? Politics is activity in regard to power. Units engaged in politics may gain or lose power. Instinct and understanding direct them to seek to increase power. War is the most intense method of trying to increase power. Thus a war which has no practically foreseeable possibility of increasing power is not politically justifiable. A war which promises an increase in power is politically justifiable. This is what the word success means in this connection, i.e., that increased power is the result of the war. When diminished power is the result of the war, the war was unsuccessful.
To be specific instead of general: after the First World War, England, although on the side of the victorious in a military sense, was weaker in the political sense, i.e., it had less power afterwards than before the War. In the War of the Spanish Succession, France emerged from the War weaker than it had entered, despite the fact that it had gained the military victory.
But between these two sets of meanings of the words victory and defeat, there is an order of rank: the political meaning is primary, for war itself is subsidiary to politics. Any politician would prefer a military defeat coupled with political victory to the converse. Despite the military defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, Talleyrand negotiated a political victory for France out of the Congress of Vienna. To say that a unit gained a military victory and also suffered a political defeat is only another way of saying that the military opponent was not a real enemy. A real enemy is he whom one can strike down and thereby increase one’s own power.
It is for the politician to determine whom to fight, and if he selects as the enemy a unit at whose expense no power can possibly be gained even in a militarily successful war, that politician was incapable. He may be merely stupid, he may be carrying on a private parasite-politics, using the lives of his countrymen to implement his personal antipathies, like Graf Brühl in the Seven Years War, he may be a distorter, representing an outer force not belonging to the Nation, or even to the Culture.
Such a politician may also be a traitor who sells himself for a private economic consideration, like the Poles who disappeared upon the outbreak of war in 1939 and were never heard of again.
But regardless of why a politician chooses for an enemy a unit which was not a real enemy, the fact remains that in so doing he is abdicating the sovereignty of his State and placing it therewith in the service of another State.
The classic example of this in recent history is, of course, England’s participation in the Second World War. England was on the victorious side in the military sense, but sustained a total defeat in the political sense. Already during the war a member of the English Parliament was able to announce that apparently England was a dependency of America. At the conclusion of that War, England’s power and prestige had sunk so low that it had to abandon the Empire. Extra-European forces were the victors. England had fought in the Second World War and had given lives and position for the political victory of others. It was not the first time in history, nor will it be the last, but because of its magnitude, it will always remain the classic example.
A tiny island of some 242,000 quadrate kilometers, with only 40,000,000 population, nevertheless, England controlled in 1900 17/20 of the surface of the earth. This includes all the seas, on which England was supreme in the sense that it could deny them to any other power. In less than 25 years, or after the First World War, 1914-1918, England found this sea supremacy gone as well as its commercial primacy, and its position of arbiter of Europe in the sense that it could prevent any power taking first place. In less than 50 years, or after the Second World War, 1939-1945, all was gone, the Empire and also the independence of the homeland. The lesson of course is that a structure built through centuries of war, bloodshed, and high political tradition of choosing always for an enemy him whose defeat would increase the Empire of England— that this can be lost through one or two wars against a power not a real enemy.
In 1939 even there could be no difference of opinion among political thinkers that England could not have an enemy in Europe, since the extra-European forces, Japan, Russia and America had become decisive in world-politics. But in 1946 there could be no difference of opinion on this subject among human beings anywhere in the world, regardless of their ability or inability to think politically. Always excepting the Liberals, of course, who move among theories, and not among facts. Indeed, even after this disastrous War, Liberals, distorter and stupid persons in England continued to glory in the “victory” of England. From the political standpoint, the most hopeful fact for England’s future in the period after the War was that the extra-European occupation forces were withdrawn from England.
Thus we have seen again the existential nature of organic alternatives: a unit can either fight a real enemy, or it must lose. And again, a unit not fighting a real enemy is in the service of another power— there is no middle ground. If a unit is not fighting for itself, it is fighting against itself. The broadest formulation of this fundament is: an organism must be true to its own inner law of existence, or it will sicken and die. It is the inner law of a political organism that it must increase its own power; this is the only way it can behave toward power. If it tries to confer power on another organism, it injures itself. If it tries merely to prevent another organism from attaining power, it injures itself; if it gives up its complete existence to blocking another organism, quite regardless of its success in this negative aim, it will destroy itself.
France from 1871 onward is an example of the latter. The whole idea of the existence of France as a State was to block and frustrate a neighboring State. The inspiriting slogan of this idea was Revanche. The idea was pursued for decades, and in the process, French power was destroyed. The policy could not of course have arisen in a healthy organism.
First the Law of Totality: Any contrast, opposition, or hostility whatever existing within groups among the organism may become political in its nature, if it reaches the point where a group or a unit feels another group, class or stratum to be a real enemy. For such a unit to arise within an organism is for the possibility of civil war to be present, or a severe crisis in the organism, which renders the organism liable to damage or extinction from without. Therefore, every organism, by its very existence, has the characteristic that it assumes power over the determination of all issues. This does not mean that it plans the total life of the population— economic, social, religious, educational, legal, technical, recreational. It means merely that all of these things are subject to political determination. Many of these things are neutral to some States, but objects of interest to others. But all organisms will intervene when an inner grouping may possibly become a focus of a friend-enemy dis-junction. This describes all political units whatever, entirely independently of how they formulate their written constitutions, if they have any.
The Law of Totality affects individuals by embracing them existentially in the life of the organism. Politics places the life of every man within the political unit in the balance. It demands, by its very existence, the readiness of all individuals in the service of its fulfillment to risk their lives. Other groups may demand dues, periodical attendance at meetings, investment of time in group projects. If they demand however— so fundamental is this organic law of totality— that the member plight his life to the group, they become therewith political. The French public law professor Haurion designated it as the hall-mark of a political unit that it embraced the individual entirely, whereas non-political groups embrace him only partially.
This is the Law of Totality in other words. It is thus a touchstone of a group for this purpose whether it demands an existential oath.
If a group extracts such an oath from members, the group is political. This Law of Totality, it is hardly necessary to add, is not at all derived from conscription for military service. Conscription exists only for a few centuries within a High Culture, whereas the Law of Totality describes the Culture itself when it is itself constituted as a political organism, and, during the period of concentration of politics in Culture States, it describes every individual State. Like all organic laws it is existential: if any inner force can challenge it, the organism is sick; if the challenge is attended with success, the organism is in severe crisis and may be annihilated. In any case, its unity will be temporarily in abeyance, with the possibility of partitioning by outer powers.
The Law of Sovereignty is the inner necessity of organic existence which places the decision in every important juncture with the organism, as opposed to allowing any group within to make the decision. An important juncture is any one which affects the organism as a whole, its steering in the world, its choice of allies and enemies, the decision of war and peace, its inner peace, its unchallenged inner right to decide controversies. If any of these can be called into question, it is a sign that the organism is sick. In the healthy organism, this sovereignty is absolutely undisputed, and may continue so for centuries. But a new age with new interests may raise contrasts which the rulers do not grasp; they may blunder, and find themselves on the defensive in a civil war. The challenge of the sovereignty of the organism was the first symptom of crisis. If the organism survives the crisis, the new rulers of the same organism will be the focus of the same sovereignty.
An important fact has been touched upon with this: it is not the rulers who are sovereign within the meaning of this law. Their powers in fact are derived from their symbolic-representative position. If a stratum represents and acts in the Spirit of the Age, revolution against it is impossible. An organism true to itself cannot be sick or in crisis.
The Law of Sovereignty does not mean that every aspect of group life within the organism is dominated at all times by the political, nor that everything is organized, or that a centralized system of government necessarily reaches out always and destroys every organization of whatever kind. The outlook developed here is purely factual, and the Law of Sovereignty describes all political organisms; it is a formulation in words of a quintessential characteristic of a political organism.
Totality of organization— the “Total State”— is a phase of political organizations at certain times and under certain conditions. Some States are neutral in religious matters, others promulgate an official religion. Some States during the 19th century were more or less neutral economically, others intervened in the economic life. In the 20th century all States intervene in economic affairs. Different terminology is used to describe this intervention in different States, and the degree of intervention depends on the necessity of the organism. Thus an organism with relatively abundant economic resources will intervene to a lesser degree than one which must make every particle of work and material count. But this does not alter the fact that all States intervene in economics in the 20th century.
The Law of Sovereignty is independent of the fact that in a given organism some internal force, say, religion or economics, may be stronger than the government. Such a thing can, and often does, exist. If this internal force is not yet strong enough to hinder the government, it is not yet political; if it is strong enough only to stalemate the government, but not yet strong enough to create war, then there is no political unit present. If no one can make a determination of enmity, or of war, there is no politics. This means that other units which preserve their political character can either ignore the sick unit in making their own combinations, or can attack it with good initial advantage.
The Law of Sovereignty is thus also existential. It describes a healthy organism, on its path to fulfillment. Where this law does not obtain, the organism is— vis-à-vis other organisms of the same kind— in abeyance, and if this condition persists, the political organism will disappear. The best example of a case where the Law of Sovereignty showed its existential character is that of 18th century anarchic Poland. The weakness and sickness of the organism led to its repeated partitioning.
“This colossal thing is dead,” announced the French and Italian syndicalists. They were heard by other
rationalists, and Otto von Gierke came out with his doctrine of “the essential equality of all human
groups.” This was, of course, a way of denying the primacy of the State, and was thus polemical and not
factual. The intellectuals wanted the State to be dead, and so they announced its passing as a fact. This
theory came to be known as the doctrine of “the pluralistic State.” It took its philosophical foundation
and its political theology from pragmatism, a philosophy of materialization of the spiritual evolved in
America. Pragmatism branded the seeking for a last unity, in whatever realm, even in that of nature study,
as a superstition, a remnant of Scholastic. Thus no more Cosmos, and naturally no more State.
This outlook was peculiarly adapted to the members of the Second Internationale, which was liberal in
tendency. Its two poles of thought were the individual, at one extreme, and humanity, at the other. It saw
the “individual” as living in “society” as a member of many organizations, an economic enterprise, a
home, a church, a Turnverein, a trade-union, a nation, a State, but none of these organizations had any
sovereignty whatever over the others, and all were politically neutral. The fighting proletariat of the
Communists became in such a pluralistic State also a politically neutral trade-union or party. All the
organizations would have their claim on the individual, who would be bound to a “plurality of obligations
and loyalties.” The organizations would have relations and mutual interests, but no subjection to the
State, which would be merely an organization among organizations, not even primes inter pares.
Such a pluralistic State is of course not a political organism. If an external danger were to threaten such a State, it would either succumb at once, or else fight, in which case, it would become at once a political organism, and the “pluralism” would vanish. Such a pluralistic thing is not politically viable. There is always the possibility of an external danger, an internal natural catastrophe, such as a drought, famine or earthquake, which would force centralization, or the arising of a group with political instincts which aims at total power over other groups, and which does not have enough intellect to understand the refined theory of the “pluralistic” State. America, before 1914, was more or less such a thing, and from 1921 to 1933 it resumed its pluralism. This “pluralistic State” came to an end in 1933, when a group arose which seized for itself a totality of power.
Political theories, like “pluralistic State,” “dictatorship of proletariat,” “Rechtstaat,” “check and balance,” all have political significance, provided they attain to a certain vogue. This significance is dual: first, all such theories are imperative and polemical, and, by demanding a change in the internal form of the State, show by their very existence at least that the State against which they are complaining is sick; secondly, they are a technic for weakening the State further, by working up real contrasts and finally rising to the intensity of a friend-enemy dis-junction, i.e., Civil War.
The 19th century was the heyday of using theories as political technics. It will be as difficult for the 21st century to understand the idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as it is for us to understand how Rousseau’s theories could have been the focus of so much political passion. The frightful crisis that occurs in all High Cultures when they enter upon their last great phase, Civilization, the externalization of the Culture-soul, is also the birth-time of Rationalism. As Napoleon said, “Intellect runs about the pavements in France.” Intellect, the externalized, analyzing, dissecting faculty of the soul, applies itself also to politics. The results are a spate of theories, decline in the internal authority of all States, and the calling into question of the internal authority in all States.
We have seen that a State which fights a power not a real enemy is thereby fighting for a third power. This was but an instance of a law which is broader, and which is called the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power.
It may be thus formulated: In any age, the amount of power in a State-system is constant, and if one organic unit is diminished in power, another unit, or other units are increased in power by the same amount.
If a statesman, entrusted with the destiny of a State, moves with the sure consciousness of mastery which a feeling for organic laws confers upon him, he can never choose for the enemy of his State a power which his State cannot defeat, for such a power would not be a real enemy. He would know, even if only unconsciously, that the power which his own State would lose, in a war it could not win, would merely be transferred to some other power, either the one wrongly chosen as enemy, or a third power. One of the many phenomena which instance the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power is that of a given State being racked internally by groups using theories to work up internal contrasts. A point will be reached— short of the point of civil war, which of course dissolves the organism at least temporarily— in this process at which the external power of the organism will be diminished. The power lost passes thereby to another State or States.
The circumstances of the total situation determine which other power will be the beneficiary of this accretion of power. Even the particular theory which the agitating group is using plays often a certain role, for certain theories are owned by certain powers. France owned the theories of “democracy” and “equality” from 1789 to 1815. England owned the theory of “liberalism” in its many forms from the middle of the 19th century down to the First World War. Russia took over the theory of “dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1917.
In “democratic” conditions— the origin and historical significance of “democracy” are shown elsewhere— occur the inner-political phenomena known as “elections.” It was the theory of “democracy” arising about 1750 that the “absolute” power of the monarch, or the aristocracy, depending on local conditions, must be broken, and this power transferred to “the people.” This use of the word “people” shows again the necessarily polemical nature of all words used politically. “People” was merely a negative; it merely wished to deny that the dynasty, or else the aristocracy, belonged to “the people.” It was thus an attempt to deny the monarch or aristocracy political existence; in other words, this word implicitly defined them as the enemy, in the true political sense. It was the first time in Western history that an intellectualized theory became the focus of political happening. Wherever the monarch or aristocracy were stupid or incapable, wherever they looked backward instead of adapting themselves to the new century, they went down. Wherever they took over the theories themselves and interpreted them officially, they retained their power and their command.
The technique of transferring this “absolute” power to “the people” was to be through plebiscites, or “elections.” The theoretical proposal was to give the power to millions of human beings, to each his nth/millionth fraction of total existing political power. This was of course impossible in a way that even the intellectuals could see, so the compromise was “elections” through which each individual in the organism could “choose” a “representative” for himself. If the representative did something, by a satisfying fiction it was agreed that each little individual “represented” had done that himself. In a short time it became obvious to men interested in power, either for themselves personally, or to carry through their ideas, that if one worked previously to one of these “elections” to influence the minds of the voting populace, he would be “elected.” The greater one’s means of persuasion of the masses of voters, the more certain was his subsequent “election.” The means of persuasion were whatever one had at hand: rhetoric, money, newsprint. Since elections were large things, disposing of large amounts of power, only those who commanded corresponding means of persuasion could control them. Oratory came into its own, the Press stepped out as a lord of the land, the power of Money towered above all. A monarch could not be bought; what bribe could appeal to him? He could not be put under the usurers’ pressure— he could not be sued. But party politicians, living in times when values became increasingly money-values, could be bought. Thus democracy presented the picture of the populace under the compulsion of elections, the delegates under the compulsion of Money, and Money sitting in the seat of the monarch.
So the absolute power remained— as it must in any organism, for it is an existential law of every organism that: The power within an organism is constant, and if individuals, groups, or ideas within the organism are diminished in power, some other individuals, groups, or ideas are increased in power by that amount. This Law of Constancy of Intra-Organismic Power is existential, for if a diminution of power in one place within does not pass elsewhere within the organism, the organism is sickened, weaker, and may have lost its political existence as an independent unit. The history of South America from 1900 to 1950 is rich in examples of triumphant revolutions against regimes that stripped them of power— which then moved to the United States of North America, and as long as that condition continued, the country in which such a revolution had occurred was a colony of Yanqui imperialismo.
Animals can be classified spiritually— and there is no point in any other classification, such as the materialistic Linnean one— into two great groups, herbivores and beasts of prey. If the materialistic thinkers had ever looked at it so, they would surely have put man down as a beast of prey. And they would have been correct for the animal part of him. This animal part is in constant tension with the spiritual part, the specifically human soul which sees symbolism in things and gives the symbol primacy over the mere phenomenon. For this is in very truth the deepest depth of all philosophizing whatever. Where does the question of a conflict between “appearance” and “reality” ever come from in the first place? All great philosophy in High Cultures, and there is none without High Cultures, has been saturated with the idea of establishing the true relationship between appearance and reality, and this was in obedience to an instinct which embodies the essence of man: his human soul tells him that Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
The will-to-power of the beasts of prey is limited and practical; it is fierce but unspiritual. Man carries within him this same will-to-power, but his soul infuses into it a purely spiritual intensity that raises its demands and its performances incomparably above the level of the beast. To the beast his will-to-power comes into play only in killing. Man, however, seeks not to kill, but to control. To control he will kill, but as Clausewitz correctly said, conquerors prefer submission and peace, it is the victim who makes the war. A man with a strong will-to-power wants control, not war as an end in itself.
But a display of will-power by one man calls forth opposition elsewhere. Similarly with super personal organisms— they do not and cannot exist alone, since, in their political aspect they are units of opposition. Each one exists as a unit-with-the-power-to-choose-and-fight-enemies. The ability to create a friend-enemy dis-junction is the essence of the political.
But this ability necessitates opponents of similar rank. Hence it is quite total political stupidity to speak of a world with only one State, one Parliament, one government or however they put it. One could forgive Tennyson, but one can only say that if a politician talks about a world with “one State,” “one Parliament,” or “one government,” he is the perfect type of the intellectual ass, and should be anywhere except in a position to distort the destiny of a State and bring misery to the individuals in it. He is an ass, even though he knows better, for— and this will sound self-evident to readers of 1980 and after— there is absolutely no necessity for a politician to deal in lies exclusively, as the Liberal school, the class-warriors, and the distorters believe. Men who are fighting against the Future perhaps have good reason to practice deception constantly, to throw clouds of theories over their actions, to say peace when they mean war, and war when they mean peace, and to keep elaborate classifications of “secret,” “confidential” and the like.
The only secrecy that needs to exist in politics is that created by limitations of understanding on the part of individuals— and absolutely nothing can be done about this type of secrecy. For instance, the facts about the nature of politics and power which have been set down here will remain secret from the intellectuals and rationalists forever, even though they read this.
And similarly with lies: quite obviously the statesman who is the embodiment of the Spirit of the Age has no need of fundamental lies. He cannot fear the truth, since his actions are those of organic necessity, against which no force within the organism can prevail. Equally obviously he who sets out to strangle the Future, like Metternich and the Fürstenbund, or the Liberals, democrats, party-leaders of whatever nature, culture-distorters, and intellectuals of the period 1900-1975 have daily, pressing need of lies, ever bigger and better lies. They like to call this Macchiavellism, and to accuse others of it. But Macchiavelli was certainly not a “Macchiavellian,” or he would not have written his factual, truthful book. Instead he would have written a book about how good human nature is in general, and how extraordinarily good in particular is the nature of princes. Where Macchiavelli writes of deception he is thinking of deceiving the enemy— Liberals and distorters regard deception as the norm of conduct toward the populations whose destiny is in their hands, and over whose lives they hold the power of disposition.
The classic example in this realm is and will always remain the “election” in America in the Fall of 1940. There were two candidates, representing the same interests, and the populace was offered its “choice” between them. The issue which the populace would thereby “decide” was whether or not America would intervene in the Second World War. Both candidates said publicly in totally unequivocal language that they would not involve America in the War. Yet both of them were committed to the interests which made them candidates to involve America in the war as soon as possible. Both candidates were of course successful, for in late democratic conditions, the parties become trusts and no longer compete, since competition would injure them both. After the “election,” the two successful candidates carried out their real commitment, took America to war, and sent to their deaths the very men whose lives they had vowed to spare from death in the Second World War, which did not affect American interests. One of the candidates explained after the “election” that his non-intervention promise to the populace was mere “campaign oratory.”
In such a case, there is no doubt whatever that Macchiavelli would have counseled the rulers of America to have both candidates declare for intervention. But party-politicians deal in lies from inner compulsion, for their activity itself is an organic lie.
The political organisms however remained organic, and thus subject to the Law of Sovereignty. If a political unit exists it is sovereign; the member units of these two “leagues of nations” continued to exist politically and thus were sovereign. Incidentally the organic Law of Sovereignty is not the “principle of sovereignty of nations” of Grotius and Pufendorff; that was a legal concept and thus subject to juristic quibbling, whereas the organic Law of Sovereignty describes all political units whatever since it belongs to their very existence.
Thus the dilemma was that the “leagues of nations” had no sovereignty— again I am speaking of factual, organic sovereignty, not legal sovereignty— and hence were not political units. There is no political unit without organic sovereignty; there is no organic sovereignty without a political unit.
What, then, were these two “leagues of nations”? They had two aspects, the ethical and the practical-political.
In terms of practical politics, they were polemical realities. Whatever power controlled them could thus speak for all nations, and thus any power opposing it was hors-la-loi, outside the comity of nations, not even human, for the league was humanity. They rapidly of course, needless to say, passed into the control of certain member-States, according to the Law of Sovereignty— where there is no sovereignty there is no independent political unit, and sovereignty must therefore reside elsewhere. And, in fact, the first league of nations, formed after the First World War, passed into the control of England. The second league of nations, formed in a time— after the Second World War— when politics had entered upon a more absolute stage, was seized by America.
This was foreseeable from the fact that Russia had allowed the geographical site of it to be established in America. This was not merely to keep out the undesirable swarms of ideologues, parasites, and holiday-makers, such as necessarily accompany every “league of nations,” and to keep out the spies who populate in such a condition, but it actually showed a limited and secondary interest in the thing.
In the past, certain powers have owned certain theories. Conversely, there has never been an important theory that did not have practical, political ownership. A theory without a political unit to use it to practical purpose is not important; if the protagonists of a theory have sufficient passion and non theoretical political skill to work up intense feeling with their theory, they will possibly attain power with such a weapon. If they reach a point just short of power, an already existing political unit will appropriate the theory for practical purposes. Example: Marxism, taken over in 1918 by Bolshevik Russia for political use against Europe, when its protagonists in Germany showed themselves politically stillborn.
The “league of nations” theory was, in fact, owned by America. Whoever spread the idea— even England, which seized the first “league”— was increasing the power of America, whether he knew it or not.
It was inevitable that politicians free of ideology, like the Kremlin Mongols, would see this. Since they understood how to use theories, it was obvious they would allow no political unit to hamstring them with its theory. Thus perished the second and last “league of nations.”
There was also an ethical aspect to these leagues. They were another example of the deception that was still thought in the first half of the 20th century to be a necessity of political conduct. They were actually nothing but polemical attempts to deny Europe. The formation of Europe as a political unit was in the Spirit of the Age. Whoever agitated anything else was merely negating this idea. This explains the fact that though the two “leagues of nations” accomplished nothing else as a political fact, nevertheless they prevented— Europe. This is quite independent of whether all people participating were conscious of this. However, it is the organic task of the politician to be conscious of political reality and to understand and assess rightly the possibilities of the time. It is of course now known that many persons who participated in these world-frauds were quite conscious of the realities.
From what has been said about the nature of political organisms the relation of the statesman to his political organism is obvious: just as he calls on his populace to die, he cannot refuse if necessary to give his own life. To his political unit he owes all his physical energies and all his talent and genius. For him to be careless in researching a situation— and above all— for him to do that which he knows is contrary to the furtherance of the life of the organism is to forfeit his right to live. He can consider himself lucky indeed if he is able to die of a heart attack, brain concussion, blood clot or simply old age.
When the extra-European forces gradually increased their power to such an extent that the independent existence of the West became problematical— this was evident from 1920 onward, and was transparent from 1933— it was the collective duty to their States and to the Western Civilization for all statesmen in Europe to endeavor to save their respective States and Western States collectively from political annihilation by extra-European forces. Thus any statesman in a European State who sabotaged the general West-European understanding and final settlement that was sought by the custodians of the spirit of the Western Civilization was a strangler and distorter of the destiny of his own country and of that of the Western Civilization.
The ethics thus formulated is an ethics of fact. It is organic, political, factual and nothing else.
Its sole imperative is an organic-political one. It is distinguished from religious ethics in that it has no theological sanction. It is distinguished from all ethical systems whatever in that it only sees one relationship— that of the individual to the political unit. Nor does it have a sanction in the punitive sense. The organic relationship between the political unit and the statesman itself sets the ethical imperative. If the statesman violates it by injuring instead of furthering the life of the organism, the sanction is a matter for Destiny, the inner force of organisms. By doing so he forfeits his right to live, but often he is fortunate enough to escape with his life. The existential embrace of the lives of the individuals in it which has been shown to be an essential characteristic of a political unit makes no exception in favor of politicians. At its highest tension, this organic imperative causes a statesman in its service to tie his own life to the success of his own idea for the organism. Bismarck and Friedrich der Grosse also were determined to take their lives in the event of failure.
The Parliament considered itself the government, the monarchists considered themselves the government. A political outlook naturally does not concern itself with the question of which was “right.” Such a question has no political meaning. It has only a legal meaning, and law is a reflex of politics. Politics is concerned with assessing facts and acting upon them; law comes afterward and has the function of consolidating a given political fact-complex. Law formulates the dis-junction legal-illegal according to political dictate. If there is no political unit to prescribe the law, there can be no law. Thus in time of Civil War there is no law— there are two laws. If the result of the War is a reconstitution of the former people and territory again as a political unit, it will always turn out that the victor was the one who was legally right all the time, and the defeated was legally wrong. This invariable fact shows the nature of law.
Nevertheless, Parliament and King stood opposed, each claiming to be England. Politically, they were both wrong, for there was no England. In political language, two Englands equal no England. Each of the two groups was a political unit, and had become such by determining an enemy. Each of them was conducting itself as a government and each availed itself of the organic political right— also, but afterward a legal right— to determine the inner enemy. An organic characteristic of all political units whatever— that they determine the inner enemy when they feel it necessary— is the internal corollary of the Law of Sovereignty. Thus Cavaliers in Parliamentary territory were the enemy of the government, and their existence was that of outlaws. Correspondingly with adherents of Parliament in Royal territory. It must not be supposed because of the example used of a Civil War, that such determination of the inner enemy only occurs then. On the contrary, if Charles I had declared his opponents to be inner enemies from the very beginning, and had treated them as such, there had been no Civil War. To do this however, he lacked the vigor and the understanding. He should have consulted Hobbes, who understood these things. But Charles was not a reading man, and did not know Hobbes’s treatises on Human Nature and De Corpore Politico.
Every political unit in history has exercised in need, and sometimes not in need, its organic power to determine the inner enemy. If it does it soon and proceeds thoroughly, the danger is past. If it procrastinates and takes half-measures, it ceases to be a political unit.
If it exercises this power when there is no need, it is merely persecuting its own population, and is sowing seeds of hatred that will one day bear surprising fruit. The organic ethic of the relation of the statesman to his political unit applies also to conduct of this type. The statesman has no organic right to dispose wantonly of the lives of the populace. To send subjects to their death in a war against a power not a real enemy, a war which thus by its very nature must be unsuccessful, or to declare a group as an inner enemy when it does not contain the real possibility of constituting itself as a true political unit, is vicious, non-political conduct in both cases. Such a man exposes himself to the organic sanction that Destiny often imposes in such cases.
This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination. It may be economic pressure— such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A “blacklist” or boycott may destroy the group or individual.
It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need. Thus the transatlantic part of the anti-Europe coalition in the Second World War carried out, quite independently of necessity, since there was no real inner enemy as a matter of fact, extensive inner persecutions directed against groups and strata of its population. It does not affect the political nature of this activity that it was done by culture-distorting elements, for the organic laws set out here describe all political units whatever, even if they fall into the hands of political and cultural outsiders.
In old Roman public law the undesirable was declared solemnly to be “hostis,” which was the word describing the public enemy. The Imperial proscriptions, regardless of their economic motive, were an application of the same organic function. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Acht und Bann were directed against inner dangerous or unwanted elements. They were declared Friedlos, and placed outside all protection. Anyone aiding such a person fell thereby into the same category. The Jacobins and the Comité de salut public slew their thousands of victims, both with and without declaration of enmity.
In early democratic conditions, the weakening of the State vis-à-vis internal groups would have made it more difficult to invoke this right, but correspondingly, since all Western States were in more or less the same internal condition, the necessity for its invocation was not often present. In any case the triumph of theories of equality and freedom in the realm of political vocabulary made it inexpedient to invoke the right in the old open, declared, legalistic way.
The early democracy was, in the Western Civilization, from about 1800 to 1850. During this period internal sovereignty as exemplified by determination of the internal enemy was more refined, intellectualized, concealed. Examples: The American Alien and Sedition Laws, the Austrian measures against democrats 1815-1848. Bismarck’s laws against class-warriors. Of course in war the right was as forcefully exercised as ever, but was usually legally formless: the Yankees in the American War of Secession, 1861-1865; French Communards, 1871.
With the sudden transition to non-democratic conditions marked by the First World War, began the Age of Wars of Annihilation. It could also be called the Age of Absolute Politics. The 19th century was the Age of Economics— not that economics was ever prior in a real sense in the world of action, but economics supplied much of the motivation of politics, as shown by phenomena like the Opium War, the American War of Secession, the Boer War. Economics wants a weak State, and in the Age of Economics, the States were on the defensive, but the new Zeitgeist changed the entire meaning of History and content of action. Because of the fact that the Zeitgeist of the 20th century did not attain to external triumph in all Europe, many supposed that the Age of Economics was not only continuing but was attaining to new victorious heights.
That this was not the case was shown by the war which greeted the opening of the century. The war in question was between the Boer State, a colony of the Western Civilization, and England. The War was not against savages, or aborigines of spoil lands and thus does not come into the same classification as the Australian war against the autochthonous tribes of Tasmania, when the victims were hunted down like rabbits to total extermination. We have seen that the armed contests between Western Culture-States were not true wars, but were agonal in nature. The turning point to Civilization was marked by Napoleon, the herald of absolute war and politics, but this tradition continued so strong that in the French War against Prussia, 1870-1871, victorious Prussia still did not think of annihilating the totally defeated foe, nor of subjecting it to an endless military occupation, but contented itself with re-incorporating two provinces and imposing an indemnity which was paid off in a few years.
England had also so conducted itself in intra-Cultural armed contests. And yet in 1900, it carried the war against the Boers to complete annihilation. This was in true 20th century style, and note that it was England, the organism which had brought forth the idea of the 19th century and was not destined to produce the idea of the 20th century, which thus acted completely within the spirit of the new age. So strong is the Spirit of the Age— it compels inner submission even though one use the formula of the past and believe that he is leading a moribund idea to new life.
The Boer War was mentioned because it marked a turning point also in the matter of the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty. In this War, the English armies initiated the 20th century method of designating and handling the inner enemy. It is nonetheless an historical epoch in this matter that no real political need existed for what occurred, for we are interested in what did occur, and not in re-writing history. In this War, large numbers of civilian Boers, men, women and children, came into the custody of the English armies. They were taken into custody on the theory that they were a danger to the internal security of the territory controlled by the Empire, that thus they were inner enemies. The numbers involved were considerable, too great for the systems of prisons and jails there existing. The solution adopted was to place them into detention camps, hastily constructed ad hoc. These were called “concentration camps,” and this word was to have a destiny of its own.
After the First World War, the Age of Absolute Politics showed its manifestations everywhere, and one way it did it was to introduce this “concentration camp” system into every country in the Western Civilization. The more dangerous its external situation, the greater was the necessity of firm inner control, unbroken and unbreakable inner peace, and thus those countries with the most political concern introduced large numbers of persons they declared inner enemies, or in any case treated as inner enemies, into prison camps. But since the word was connected with politics, it acquired polemical significance, and was used by some States as a method of attacking the “morality” of other States. And yet these concentration camps were similar in all countries, just as prisons are. It is not material that extra European forces imprisoned Europeans in the camps they set up in England, or that Europe imprisoned Slavs, Jews and Bolsheviks in the camps it set up in Europe; the camps were essentially the same from the political standpoint.
They both illustrate the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty as it develops in the 20th century. The Age of Absolute Politics has a full century more in its course, and thus the number of prison camps and the number of inmates will increase and not decrease.
It remains to say a word on the future development of internal sovereignty. Since the spirit of these times and the next is no longer that of economics, but that of absolute politics, sly and veiled methods of acting against inner individuals and groups will fall into disuse. In their place will appear once more open and legally formulated inner enemy-declarations. Even economically motivated determinations will be quite openly pursued with political means.
In the exercise of its power to make war, a State disposes of the lives of its own subjects and of those of the enemy. This bloodshed is not a life-requirement of a State, but occurs merely as a part of the process of acquiring power. The State directly seeking power is not the one that brings about bloodshed and war. No politician whatever would make war against another unit if he thought it would submit to incorporation without a fight. Thus war is always the result of resistance, and not of political dynamism. War is not normative; it is existential only. In the entire panorama of the history of the High Cultures, I doubt that there has been a case where the ruling stratum of a political unit ever decided that, first of all, it wanted war, and then cast about for someone upon whom to make war. It would not be political.
Nor is the mere power over life and death generally, jus vitae ac necis, the hall-mark of a political organism. Many States in history recognized this power to be in family units. Old Rome gave it to the paterfamilias. Some States have allowed the master power over the life of the slave. Most states have permitted the victim of an imputation of dishonor to contest for the life of his vilifier. Many States have recognized the right of blood-revenge among clans— although this reaches the very frontier in this matter, and is seldom found, and then only in peace.
It is thus quite conclusive that politics, as such, seeks no monopoly of taking life. Politics at its highest potential, war, takes life only because resistance requires it. Politics is activity in relation to power, and there is only one way organic instinct behaves toward power: it seeks more. Metaphysically this is the relation between the soul of man and the soul of the High Culture on the one hand, and the habitus of the beast of prey on the other hand. Although it permits subjects in certain cases, which it determines, in accordance with the Law of Sovereignty, to take life, the State never permits subjects to make war. If a group of subjects assume this power, a new State has arisen. If the right of blood-revenge turns into clan warfare, the State must intervene, for its existence is involved. That is why, in all States engaged in serious politics, the right of blood-revenge is abrogated.
The right to make war and in the process to dispose of life is purely political. No Church could possibly ask its members to die for the Church— this is quite different from insisting that martyrdom is preferable to apostacy— unless it is becoming a political unit. In critical times, many Churches, such as Abu Bekr’s Islam, have become States, but then they are no longer Churches, and they are ruled by the political way of thinking and its basic inner, organic demand for more power, and no longer by the religious imperative of salvation and conversion.
It would be cruel and insane to ask men to die in order that the remainder would have an unimpaired, or higher standard of economic life. When war is motivated by an economic idea, the economics vanishes into the war-political situation; i.e., the test of success is the political one, the method of waging it is not reviewed as to its cost, the means used always are military-political, the leadership is always political, and would be so even if exclusively economists were used as the war leaders. Their thinking would indeed be curious, but it would not be economic. Politics and economics are two different directions of human thinking and are hostile to one another. For this reason no true politician and no true soldier would ever with full consciousness carry on or fight a war for an exclusively economic motive, no matter what grand opportunities it offered for personal distinction. Economically motivated wars like the American War of Secession, 1861-1865, the English Opium War, the Boer War were of necessity presented to the participants under an untruthful propaganda.
Economics lacks the strength in itself— i.e., “pure” economics— to rouse men to the level of action where they will risk their lives. This is because economics presupposes life, and merely seeks ways of securing, nourishing, perpetuating the life. It simply does not make sense to buy life with death— when death becomes a possibility, we are no longer in the sphere of economics. If economics wants a certain war, it can only bring it about by political means, and then also— we are no longer in the sphere of economics.
Morality has often been put forward as the motivation of war, and many wars have been waged in the name of morality. This however does not make sense— that is not according to any Western system of morality— for States are not within the purview of morality, which is valid only for individuals. Furthermore the materialistic morality of the 19th century denounced war as murder. Therefore when protagonists of this type of morality— and they continue to exist and to do so— demand a war to stop war, it is an obvious fraud. The most any one man can do about stopping murder is to refrain from murders himself, but these morality-warriors have not done that.
A morality-war is impossible not only from the moral side, but from the war-political side. War is not a norm— one cannot fight against it. War is an existential dis-junction, not a system or an institution. There is no rational aim, program, for economic, moral, esthetic or other change, no ever-so-correct norm that would justify one in killing. To adopt war and politics is in fact to abandon the other things. One can retain non-political ideas privately, but if they become public they vanish into the political. The result is politics dressed in moral clothing.
Another fact emerges about politics mixed with morality. There are, first, two possible mixtures: that of the Cromwell-Torquemada type on the one hand, in which also the politician believes that he is actualizing morality by his policies, and the Lincoln-Roosevelt type, in which the morality is purely a deception. In the first case, in proportion as the politician thinks morally, his politics is faulty. Thus Cromwell refused in 1653 a Spanish Alliance which would have been highly advantageous to England because he abhorred the religion of Spain. His conduct was of course nonetheless politics, for he made with France the same alliance he refused with Spain and received considerably less from it than Spain had offered. In the second case, where it is not taken seriously, as in the case of Roosevelt, it is not morality at all and is repulsive to honor. Thus morality in politics makes bad politics if taken seriously, and if used cynically, it dishonors him who uses it.
The question may be asked why moral vocabulary is imported into politics in this Age of Absolute Politics. The answer is that it is done quite deliberately and politically. It is elementary that politics does not include within the idea enemy any subsidiary content of malice or hatred. Hatred is private; it occurs between anti-pathetical persons out of their own private hostility. Even though this terminology is different from that of Hegel, the idea is identical. He spoke of the hatred of the public enemy as being undifferentiated and totally free from personality. This is no longer hatred in the primary meaning of that word. War is between States, and when the enemy State is overcome what overcome means is a reflex of the Age, and in an Age of Absolute Politics means total incorporation of the other State— there can be no more war. Enmity ceases, and if there ever was any animosity of any kind it must cease now, since it was directed, if it was political, against the enemy State. That State is gone.
But— if the population of a State has been given exclusively propaganda to the effect that the war was not political, but for moral, humanitarian, legal, scientific and other reasons, this population will regard the end of the war as the beginning of unlimited opportunities of oppressing the population of the former enemy State. Moral propaganda thus stands forth in its nakedness— in the 20th century it is a means of fighting a war after the war, a war not this time against a State with weapons in its hands, but against the survivors of the defeat. Herein is the true significance of a phenomenon that mystified many persons at that time— I refer to the “concentration camp” propaganda against Europe, which was developed to its full height after the Second World War. This propaganda was solely for the purpose of a war after the war, thus not a true war, since there was no opposing unit, but an attempt to rouse extra-European populations and extra-European armies of occupation to ever-renewed ferocity and personal hatred against a defenseless European population.
Thus a moral “war to end war” develops in actuality into an endless war. A war for humanitarian purposes develops into a war to exterminate by starvation the population of the former State. A war against concentration camps results in bigger and more numerous concentration camps. This must be so in an Age of Absolute Politics, for obviously moral reasons for a war are not necessary in such an age. Propaganda cannot bring more men on to the battlefield than can the Spirit of the Age. Therefore he who is using the vocabulary of morality wishes to import into the struggle a viciousness that the spirit of politics alone cannot develop. Proudhon observed: “Whoever says humanity wishes to deceive.”
Only politics shows the real meaning of war. Economics, esthetics, law and the other forms of thought cannot supply its meaning, for war is politics at its highest intensity. The political meaning of a war is that it is waged against a real enemy. To be justified politically, the war must be an affirmation of the political organism or for the saving of the organism. To expend human life in any other war is distortion of the destiny of the State and treacherous dishonorable killing of the soldiers and civilians who die in it. The decision as to who is the enemy must be made by statesmen who embody the national idea, and if it is not, the result is political distortion. In the language of politics a just war is only that one waged against a real enemy.
It is immature thinking to suggest that military men should decide in such matters. It is possible for a politician to be also a soldier, but a soldier does not become ipso facto a politician. In Rome all statesmen generally speaking were ex-commanders, but they had gone into the field as part of their political careers. Caesar embarked late in life upon the military career, but how many professional soldiers could have gone into politics with corresponding attainment? In matters of politics, soldiers are circumstanced the same as the populace in general.
The famous Kellog Pact— what 21st century historians will designate as the high point of ideology politics— did not even try to obligate its signatories to renounce war. The pact merely “condemns” war. The French version was “condamner,” the German “verurteilen.” Naturally in an age when many politicians were masquerading as clerics, most anyone was willing to “condemn” war. But the leading clerical powers made reservations to their condemnation. Thus England said that it could not condemn war in the case of its national honor, self-defense, implementation of the League of Nations or of neutrality treaties, or of the Locarno treaty, the welfare of spheres of interest like Egypt, Palestine and so on. France made similar exceptions, as did Poland. It was soon observed by political thinkers that the pact did not forbid, but sanctioned war, for the exceptions covered all possible cases. Thenceforward wars were to be legally formulated. Other political thinkers compared it to a New Year’s resolution.
Organic realities were thus obeyed by this singular Kellog Pact, even though it purported to set them aside. Instead of law abolishing politics, politics used law, as usual, to prop up a certain political state of affairs.
The Pact also spoke only of war “as an instrument of national policy.” As an instrument of some other idea however, nothing was said, not even of international policy. Thus the most vicious wars were not covered by the treaty. A war for an international policy, for “humanity,” for “morality” and the like is the worst of all possible wars, for it dehumanizes the opponent, makes him into a personal enemy, sanctions any type of cruelty against him, and removes all restraints of honor from the person conducting such a war.
Nor is it possible to give up political existence entirely. Only a unit may disappear. The Organic Law of Political Plenum appears. If a given State should become tired through old age, and wished no longer to carry on war or politics, it could, if it desired, announce its idea to the world of States. It could say that it had renounced enmity and embraced all States as its friends, that it would make no more war and wanted only peace. Such conduct, no matter how logical it would be to effectuate such a wish, would not have that result. Logic does not obtain in politics. A State would by such conduct create a political vacuum, and other States not tired of war and politics would immediately abolish this vacuum and bring the area and population of the abdicating State into its own realm. Such a plenary action might be open and undisguised, or it might be veiled. In any case an abdicating power moves at once into a larger realm. A political vacuum is an impossibility in a system of States. This Law of Political Plenum describes actual political situations, and there need be no announcement of abdication by the disappearing State. If such a State merely by reason of the general development of the larger situation sinks into the place where it cannot wage war, i.e., engage in politics, the Law of Political Plenum is at once operative. It is not necessary for the incorporation of the disappearing State into the larger State to be accompanied by the marching in of troops. This is of course the 20th century method of doing it, for this is the Age of Absolute Politics, and any type of disguise for political action is both unnecessary and inappropriate. It occurs automatically with the lowering of political potential in the disappearing State.
Thus, for example, the American seizure of half Europe after the Second World War was a mixture of military and crypto-political means. The seizure of the other half of Europe by Russia was more open, but still loaded with 19th century talk of “justification,” “non-interference,” “security,” “military necessity,” and so forth. In both cases the fiction of independence of the former political units of Europe was maintained.
This dividing of the Western Civilization between the two extra-European forces occurred as an instance of the Law of Political Plenum. European States were individually unable to wage war after 1945 because of the enormous requirements in industrial establishment and man-power. These existed only in Russia and America. Europe collectively thus became a political vacuum, because of the individual political incapacity of the States of the Western Civilization.
Inability to wage war is abdication in fact of political existence, whether the abdicating State knows this or not. Thus, apart from all fiction, the frontiers which were maintained for a while in Europe after the Second World War were not power-frontiers, but administrative lines of demarcation. Thus America and Russia did not take these frontiers seriously each within its own half of Europe. The only frontier Russia and America took seriously was the one remaining power-frontier in Europe, that between them. The world of actual politics at any one time is described by powers capable of waging war.
Only political independence can be given up, not political existence. Politics still is present, with its existential embrace of the lives of the whole population. We stand before the Organic Law of Protection and Obedience.
Thus— Protection and Obedience. This organic law is again a description of an existential reality. Without the relationship of protection in one place and obedience in another, there is no politics. Every political organism exhibits it, and the extent of protection and obedience describes the territorial frontiers of the organism. Wherever a power is under the protection of another power, the two are one for external political purposes. Whatever apparent anomalies have existed disappear as soon as political tension in the area in question heightens. Looking at the organism inwardly, the amount of protection and the amount of obedience, and the quality of these things, describes the inner strength of the unit. A high degree of protection and a high degree of obedience constitute an integrated organism that can stand the test of politics. Such an organism can often prevail against great odds. A low degree of the protection obedience relationship describes a unit that is inwardly weak. It cannot stand a real hard struggle, and will often succumb in a test even to an organism with fewer material means and numbers.
Thus when in the 20th century an organism dare not conscript a population within its area, such an area is one of inner weakness; and cannot be counted part of the political body. Such a situation can only continue as long as such an area is not the focus of political tension. The law also describes the geographical extent of a political unit. Where protection and obedience stop, there are the actual frontiers.
Once more the words protection and obedience have also been used with an entire absence of any moral content. Thus “protection” can mean unlimited terror by military means, and “obedience” may be a reflection of the alternative of the concentration camp. The condition of occupied Europe under extra European armies is protection within the meaning of this organic law. Even though these extra-European armies are starving and torturing the populace, nevertheless they are protecting that part of Europe from incorporation by another political unit. America protects its half from Russia and Russia protects its half from America. Thus the word is neutral vis-à-vis the dis-junction of altruism-egoism. Protection is not kindliness, it is acquisition of power. Obedience is not gratitude, it is political submission from whatever motive.
Where the protecting force is within a Culture and the area and populace protected also belong to the Culture, the obedience will be full, natural and voluntary, on the part of the Culture-bearing stratum at least when the issue is the existence of the Culture.
This Law describes Western feudalism, for instance. Feudalism is the strongest political system that can arise. It is integrated inwardly and outwardly. It is the system where political activity is within a self evident cadre of forms. It is an Internationale in the only true sense of the word; it is a phenomenon of equal validity in the whole Culture. In our case, it was the form and vessel of all Western happenings for 300 years. The basic formulation of the feudal Idea is nothing but Protection and Obedience.
Protectorates such as Western international law recognizes are examples of the law. It also describes any federal units that arise. The central government is the only political one, for it protects and thus receives political obedience.
The existential nature of the Law is also shown by the fact that if a State is unable to protect an area and population within its system, that area and population will pass into the system of another State that can protect and has the will to protect. The passing may be by revolt, it may be by war. It may be by negotiation, particularly if the protecting State allows a quasi-government to exist in the protected area, which can make a private understanding with other powers to deliver to them the population and territory. This shows incidentally the danger of carrying fictions too far in politics. To boast too loudly that vassals are not vassals may be to transfer them to another allegiance. Similarly to describe one’s fortresses as impregnable is dangerous; this will never convince a resolute State of equal rank, but may convince their owner.
A more inclusive way of saying this is that in an Age of Absolute Politics political appearances should correspond to political reality. In the century of economico-moral cant, mastery consisted in maintaining an elaborate pretense of freedom, and simultaneously therewith a rigid condition of servitude. This sort of thing becomes both impracticable and disgusting in this Age which will embrace the two next centuries. Impracticable because the danger constantly exists of deceiving only one’s self, and not the political enemy. Disgusting because the more robust forces of this Age scorn sly deceits and veiled formula for the fact of political subordination.
In a country where the cant of morality exercises a monopoly over political vocabulary, politicians cannot speak openly even to one another. The propaganda terror necessary to maintain such an absurd type of political terminology in contradiction to facts ends by weakening from within governments in such countries. Anyone making a purely factual remark becomes suspect, and some of the best brains have found their way thus into the concentration camps.
The importance of the distinction is that an interstate organization presupposes States. If they are true States and not States merely in name, they are described by the laws of Sovereignty and Totality. And in truth in both leagues at least some of the members were true States in this sense. In the first league, there were at various times five, six or seven such States. In the second league there were only two. But as long as there are two, such a league is merely an arena for the conduct of interstate politics.
An Internationale, provided it comes from the soul of the Culture, has the possibility of absorbing all States into it, provided it is an idea embracing life totally, i.e., a Cultural idea, and not merely a political scheme— and above all not a mere abstraction of some kind, an ideal— and feudalism was such an Internationale. Needless to say the various class-war revolutionary “internationales” were not this, for they had their origin purely in politics, and were purely negative. A Cultural Idea cannot be negative; such an Idea is not made by men, but comes from the development of the Culture, and represents an organic necessity of the higher organism. The phrase Spirit of the Age is transferable with the phrase Culture-idea. Both are super personal, and the most that a man can do is to formulate the Idea, try to actualize it, or try to strangle and distort it. Change it, or destroy it, he cannot.
An Internationale representing a Culture-idea is of course supra-national as well as international in the true sense, for nations are creations of the High Culture. Only such an Internationale could absorb States into it— and then only the States within the Culture. The idea would naturally have no inner effect on populations and areas outside its organic body. Thus no Western Internationale could inwardly touch China, India, Japan, Islam or Russia. Their reaction to such an Internationale, provided they were affected by its external effects would of necessity be purely negative. If such an Internationale were to constitute the West as a unit also for political purposes— and the outer world has quite correctly always regarded the West as a unit for all other purposes— it would tend to create an anti-Western unity among the areas and populations outside. This would be only because the Western Civilization— the first one to do so— has made the whole world into its sphere of activity. For the first time in the history of the High Cultures, a Culture-political system embraced the entire world. For the politics of the extra-European forces is also in its depths motivated by the historically omnipotent force of our Western Civilization, in this way, that extra-European forces only derive their unity from the fact that they are a negation of Europe. If there were no Europe, Russia would merely be the scene of nomadic groups wandering with their herds, and engaging in small-scale inter-tribal warfare. Similarly, the famous “Chinese Revolution” of 1911 was a mere echo-phenomenon of Western currents, and its whole significance is that it had an anti-Western effect in the area the West calls China.
A true Internationale acts directly upon the entire Culture-area and all the populations in it. Capitalism was such a true Internationale— it was an expression of the Spirit of the Age. England was the vessel chosen by the Culture to actualize this idea, and England remained the spiritual home of Capitalism. The other nations were forced to orient their lives to this idea— which was also a world-outlook more than a system of economics. They could either affirm it, or negate it. This choice existed only because the Spirit of the Age also contained political nationalism, and thus Capitalism, belonging as it did to one nation, did not and never could have amalgamated all the Western nations into one nation. Political nationalism was moribund even before the First World War, and thereafter the practice of political nationalism was simply Culture-distortion— every nation of the West was injured by it individually, and all of them collectively.
The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism. The whole world is the spoils in this gigantic political age, and obviously tiny units, like the various former States of Europe, with a few tens of thousands of quadrate kilometers, with a few tens of millions of population cannot engage in a political struggle in a world filled with a population of 2,000,000,000 of human beings. The smallest possible unit that could even begin to participate in this world-struggle would have to have an area the size of Europe and hither Russia. Any struggle preliminary to this is local.
The two “leagues of nations” were merely interstate phenomena, thus pre-supposed States, thus were not themselves political units, thus could not engage in politics, thus did not exist as political realities. The Laws of Sovereignty and Totality, formulated herein, described the member-States of the leagues, but not the leagues themselves. Liberals and rationalists, moralists and logicians adrift in the world of facts, were not dismayed by the situation presented. They said that all that was necessary was to transfer sovereignty— mere legal sovereignty, for they knew nothing, and can know nothing, of the Organic Law of Sovereignty— from the member-States to the league itself. They thought that “sovereignty” was a word written down on a piece of paper, and was thus, according to the calculus of symbolic logic, manipulable at will. Sovereignty however, happens to be an existential characteristic of a political organism, and these organisms are not subject to human control, but, on the contrary, control the human beings in their areas politically. This is a fact and thus exists on a different plane from logic, a plane which can never possibly intersect that of logic. Logic deals with one phase of Culture-man, his intellect, and that only. It can only dissect, analyze, conduct spiritual post-mortems. Thus it cannot act, for action is creation. Politics in this light resembles art more than it does logic. Logic is light, politics is chiaroscuro; logic is cameo, politics is intaglio; logic is rigid, politics fluid. Creation is of the whole soul, and logic is only one product of a small part of the soul. Nonsense in logic may be sound politics; nonsense in politics may be sound logic. Culture-political ideas precede reality; intellectual ideals bark at the heels of reality.
The basic idea of the leagues of nations was to abolish war and politics. To provide a meeting place for war-political units could hardly do it, and consequently these meeting places had no political significance, which continued to reside in the capitals.
We have seen that a world with one State is organic nonsense, since a State is a unit of opposition. But some of the intellectuals wanted a world with no States whatever, singular or plural. They spoke of “humanity,” and wished to unite it for the purpose of abolishing politics by politics, war by war. They were thus affirming war and politics, but this remained hidden from them. The name “humanity” became thus a polemical word— it described everyone except the enemy. This was of course nothing new, for this overworked word had appeared as a political word in the 18th century, when it was used by the intellectuals and equality-ideologues to describe everyone, except the nobility and clergy. It thus dehumanized the nobility and clergy and when power came into the hands of the intellectuals, in the French Terror of 1793, they showed that they considered their enemies subject to inhuman treatment because they did not belong to “humanity.” Again, politics and logic separate out: humanity in logic means inhumanity in politics.
But yet the word humanity excludes no one, semantically speaking. The enemy is also human. Therefore humanity can have no enemy, and the “one State” liberals and the “humanity” intellectuals were involved in the very sort of thing they wished to abolish— politics and war. “Humanity” was not a peace word, but a war slogan. The “one State” remained in the world of dreams. Politics remained in the world and turned all of these anti-political things to its own use.
What would be a world without politics? Nowhere would there be protection or obedience, there would be no aristocracy, no democracy, no empire, no fatherland, no patriotism, no frontiers, no customs, no rulers, no political assemblies, no superiors, no subordinates.
For this world to come about or to continue to exist, there would have to be a total absence of men with lust for adventure and domination. No will-to-power, no barbarian instincts, no criminals, no superiority feelings, no Messianic ideas, no unpeaceable men, no programs of action, no proselyting, no ambition, no economics above the personal level, no foreigners, no race, no ideas.
We come to the fundamental dis-junction between political thinking and mere thinking about politics. All intellectual thinking about politics posits a certain great non-existent characteristic of human nature.
Every Rationalistic political or State theory regards man as “good” by nature. The Encyclopedist's, the Illuminati and the devotees of Baron Holbach’s philosophy were all symptomatic of the advent of Rationalism in the 18th century. All talked of “the essential goodness of human nature.” Rousseau was the most forceful and radical of 18th century writers in this respect. Voltaire set himself apart by denying totally this essential goodness of human nature.
It is curious that a theory of politics could ever possibly ground itself on such an assumption, since politics actualizes itself only in the form of the friend-enemy dis-junction. Thus a theory of hostility assumes that human nature is essentially peaceable and non-hostile.
The middle of the 18th century is the beginning of the word liberalism, and of the idea-complex liberalism. Since human nature is basically good, there is no need to be strict with it, one can be “liberal.” This idea was derived from the English Sensualist philosophers. The Social Contract theory of Rousseau originated with the Englishman Locke in the previous century. All Liberalism predicates a sensualistic, materialistic philosophy. Such philosophies are rationalistic in tendency, and Liberalism is simply one variety of politically applied rationalism.
The leading 17th century political thinkers, like Hobbes and Pufendorff, looked upon the condition of “nature,” in which States existed, as one of continual danger and risk, in which those engaged in action were driven by all the instincts and impulses of the beasts— hunger, fear, jealousy, rivalries of all kinds, desire. Hobbes observed that true enmity is possible only between men, that the friend-enemy dis-junction is as much deeper between men than between animals as the world of men is spiritually above the world of the beasts.
The two political anthropologies are illustrated in the story, found in Carlyle, of the conversation between Frederick the Great and Sulzer, in which Sulzer was explaining the new discovery of Rationalism that human nature was essentially good. Ach, mein lieber Salzer, Ihr kennt nicht diese verdammte Rasse, said Friedrich “You don’t know this damned race.”
The assumption of the goodness of human nature developed two main branches of theory. Anarchism is the result of radical acceptance of this assumption. Liberalism uses the assumption merely to weaken the State and make it subservient to “society.” Thomas Paine, an early Liberal, expressed the idea in a formula that remains valid for Liberalism to-day: Society is the result of our reasonably regulated needs; the State is the result of our vices. Anarchism is the more radical in proportion to the completeness of its acceptance of the human goodness assumption.
The idea of “balance of power,” a technic of weakening the State, is Liberal throughout. By this means the State is to be rendered subject to economics. It cannot be called a State theory, for it is a mere negative. It does not deny the State completely, but wants it decentralized and weakened. It does not want the State to be the center of gravity of the political organism. It prefers to think of the organism as “society,” a loose grouping of free and independent groups and individuals, whose freedom finds its sole limitation with the customary criminal law. Thus Liberalism has no objection to individuals being more powerful than the State, being above the law. What Liberalism dislikes is authority. The State, as the grandest symbol of authority, is hated. The two noble orders, as the symbols of authority, are likewise hated.
Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies. During the 19th century, anarchism was a force to be reckoned with, although it was nearly always allied with some other movement. Particularly in 19th and early 20th century Russia was anarchism a powerful political reality. It was known there as Nihilism. The local strength of anarchism in Russia was owing to its coincidental attractiveness for the tremendous anti-Western feeling under the thin Petrine crust. To be anti-Western was to be against everything, therefore anti-Western Asiatic negativism adopted the Western theory of Anarchism as its vehicle of expression.
Liberalism, however, with its compromising, vague attitude, incapable of precise formulation, incapable also of rousing precise feelings, either affirmative or negative, is not an idea of political force. Its numerous devotees, in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have taken part in practical politics only as the ally of other groups. It could not create an issue; it could not line up men as friends or enemies; therefore it was not a political idea, but only an idea about politics. Its followers had to be for or against other ideas as a means of expressing their Liberalism.
Anarchism was able to rouse men to sacrifice of life, not so Liberalism. It is one thing to die to wipe out all order, all State; it is quite another to die in order to bring about a decentralization of State power. Liberalism is in essence nonpolitical; it is outside of politics. It would like to have politics serve as the handmaid of economics and society.
The “Enlightenment” period of Western history which set in after the Counter-Reformation laid more and more stress on intellect, reason and logic as it developed. By the middle of the 18th century this tendency produced Rationalism. Rationalism regarded all spiritual values as its objects and proceeded to revalue them from the standpoint of “reason.” Inorganic logic is the faculty men have always used for solving problems of mathematics, engineering, transportation, physics and in other non-valuing situations. Its insistence on identity and rejection of contradiction are practicable in material activity. They afford intellectual satisfaction also in matters of purely abstract thought, like mathematics and logic, but if pursued far enough they turn into mere techniques, simple assumptions whose only justification is empirical. The end of Rationalism is Pragmatism, the suicide of Reason.
This adaptation of reason to material problems causes all problems whatever to become mechanical when surveyed in “the light of reason,” without any mystical admixture of thought or tendency whatever. Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automaton— or equally, an animal. Organisms became problems in chemistry and physics, and super personal organism simply no longer existed, for they are not amenable to reason, not being visible or measurable. Newton provided the universe of stars with a non-spiritual self-regulating force; the next century removed the spirit from man, his history and his affairs.
Reason detests the inexplicable, the mysterious, the half-light. In a practical problem in machinery or ship-building one must feel that all the factors are under his knowledge and control. There must be nothing unpredictable or out of control. Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. If a thing actually cannot be calculated, Reason merely says that the factors are so numerous and complicated that in a purely practical way they render the calculation unfeasible, but do not make it theoretically impossible. Thus Reason also has its Will-to-Power: whatever does not submit is pronounced recalcitrant, or is simply denied existence.
When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was “emerging” during all those millennia, he was “progressing” from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from “superstition” to “science,” from violence to “reason,” from dogma to criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are “the individual” and “humanity.” Anything separating them is “irrational.”
This branding of things as irrational is in fact correct. Rationalism must mechanize everything, and whatever cannot be mechanized is of necessity irrational. Thus the entirety of History becomes irrational: its chronicles, its processes, its secret force, Destiny. Rationalism itself, as a by-product of a certain stage in the development of a High Culture, is also irrational. Why Rationalism follows one spiritual phase, why it exercises its brief sway, why it vanishes once more into religion— these questions are historical, thus irrational.
Liberalism is Rationalism in politics. It rejects the State as an organism, and can only see it as the result of a contract between individuals. The purpose of Life has nothing to do with States, for they have no independent existence. Thus the “happiness” of “the individual” becomes the purpose of Life. Bentham made this as coarse as it could be made in collectivizing it into “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” If herding-animals could talk, they would use this slogan against the wolves. To most humans, who are the mere material of History, and not actors in it, “happiness” means economic well being. Reason is quantitative, not qualitative, and thus makes the average man into “Man.” “Man” is a thing of food, clothing, shelter, social and family life, and leisure. Politics sometimes demands sacrifice of life for invisible things. This is against “happiness,” and must not be. Economics, however, is not against “happiness,” but is almost co-extensive with it. Religion and Church wish to interpret the whole of Life on the basis of invisible things, and so militate against “happiness.” Social ethics, on the other hand, secure economic order, thus promote “happiness. “
Here Liberalism found its two poles of thought: economics and ethics. They correspond to individual and humanity. The ethics of course is purely social, materialistic; if older ethics is retained, its former metaphysical foundation is forgotten, and it is promulgated as a social, and not a religious, imperative. Ethics is necessary to maintain the order necessary as a framework for economic activity. Within that framework, however, “the individual” must be “free.” This is the great cry of Liberalism, “freedom.” Man is only himself, and is not tied to anything except by choice. Thus “society” is the “free” association of men and groups. The State, however, is un-freedom, compulsion, violence. The Church is spiritual un-freedom.
All things in the political domain were transvalued by Liberalism. War was transformed into either competition, seen from the economic pole, or ideological difference, seen from the ethical pole. Instead of the mystical rhythmical alternation of war and peace, it sees only the perpetual concurrence of competition or ideological contrast, which in no case becomes hostile or bloody. The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side. The will to accomplish a political aim is transformed into the making of a program of “social ideals” on the ethical side, of calculation on the economic side. Power becomes propaganda, ethically speaking, and regulation, economically speaking.
The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant. In 1814 he set forth his views on the “progress” of “man.” He looked upon the 18th century Enlightenment with its intellectualistic-humanitarian cast as merely preliminary to the true liberation, that of the 19th century. Economics, industrialism, and technics represented the means of “freedom.” Rationalism was the natural ally of this trend. Feudalism, Reaction, War, Violence, State, Politics, Authority— all were overcome by the new idea, supplanted by Reason, Economics, Freedom, Progress and Parliamentarism. War, being violent and brutal, was unreasonable, and is replaced by Trade, which is intelligent and civilized. War is condemned from every standpoint: economically it is a loss even to the victor. The new war technics— artillery— made personal heroism senseless, and thus the charm and glory of war departed with its economic usefulness. In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth.
A moment’s reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force. It wishes to depose the twin authorities of Church and State, substituting for them economic freedom and social ethics. It happens that organic realities do not permit of more than the two alternatives: the organism can be true to itself, or it becomes sick and distorted, a prey for other organisms. Thus the natural polarity of leaders and led cannot be abolished without annihilating the organism. Liberalism was never entirely successful in its fight against the State, despite the fact that it engaged in political activity throughout the 19th century in alliance with every other type of State disintegrating force. Thus there were National-Liberals, Social-Liberals, Free-Conservatives, Liberal-Catholics. They allied themselves with democracy, which is not Liberal, but irresistibly authoritarian in success. They sympathized with Anarchists when the forces of Authority sought to defend themselves against them. In the 20th century, Liberalism joined Bolshevism in Spain, and European and American Liberals sympathized with Russian Bolsheviks.
Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea. Its great word “freedom” is a negative it means in fact, freedom from authority, i.e., disintegration of the organism. In its last stages it produces social atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family. Divorce takes equal rank with marriage, children with parents. This constant thinking in negatives caused political activists like Marx, Lorenz v. Stein and Ferdinand Lasalle to despair of it as a political vehicle. Its attitudes were always contradictory, it sought always a compromise. It sought always to “balance” democracy against monarchy, managers against hand-workers, State against Society, legislative against judicial. In a crisis, Liberalism as such was not to be found. Liberals found their way on to one or the other side of a revolutionary struggle, depending on the consistency of their Liberalism, and its degree of hostility to authority.
Because Liberalism views most men as harmonious, or good, it follows that they should be allowed to do as they like. Since there is no higher unit to which all are tied, and whose super personal life dominates the lives of the individuals, each field of human activity serves only itself— as long as it does not wish to become authoritative, and stays within the framework of “society.” Thus Art becomes “Art for Art’s sake,” l’art pour l’art. All areas of thought and action become equally autonomous. Religion becomes mere social discipline, since to be more is to assume authority. Science, philosophy, education, all are equally worlds unto themselves. None are subject to anything higher. Literature and Technics are entitled to the same autonomy. The function of the State is merely to protect them by patents and copyrights. But above all— economics and law are independent of organic authority, i.e., of politics.
Twenty-first century readers will find it difficult to believe that once the idea prevailed that each person should be free to do as he pleased in economic matters, even if his personal activity involved the starvation of hundreds of thousands, the devastation of entire forest and mineral areas, and the stunting of the power of the organism; that it was quite permissible for such an individual to raise himself above the weakened public authority, and to dominate, by private means, the inmost thoughts of whole populations by his control of press, radio and mechanized drama.
They will find it more difficult yet to understand how such a person could go to the law to enforce his destructive will. Thus a usurer could, even in the middle of the 20th century, invoke successfully the assistance of the law in dispossessing any numbers of peasants and farmers. It is hard to imagine how an individual could injure the political organism more than by thus mobilizing the soil into dust, in the phrase of the great Freiherr von Stein.
But— this followed inevitably from the idea of the independence of economics and law from political authority. There is nothing higher, no State; it is only individuals against one another. It is but natural that the economically more astute individuals accumulate most of the mobile wealth into their hands. They do not however, if they are true Liberals, want authority with this wealth, for authority has two aspects: power, and responsibility. Individualism, psychologically speaking, is egoism. “Happiness” = selfishness. Rousseau, the grandfather of Liberalism, was a true individualist, and sent his five children to the foundling hospital.
Law, as a field of human thought and endeavor, has as much independence, and as much dependence as every other field. Within the organic framework, it is free to think and organize its material. But like other forms of thought, it can be enrolled in the service of outside ideas. Thus law, originally the means of codifying and maintaining the inner peace of the organism by keeping order and preventing private disputes from growing, was transmuted by Liberal thought into a means of keeping inner disorder, and allowing economically strong individuals to liquidate the weaker ones. This was called the “rule of law,” the “law-State,” “independence of the judiciary.” The idea of bringing in the law to make a given state of affairs sacrosanct was not original with Liberalism. Back in Hobbes’s day, other groups were trying it, but the incorruptible mind of Hobbes said with the most precise clarity that the rule of law means the rule of those who determine and administer the law, that the rule of a “higher order” is an empty phrase, and is only given content by the concrete rule of given men and groups over a lower order.
This was political thinking, which is directed to the distribution and movement of power. It is also politics to expose the hypocrisy, immorality and cynicism of the usurer who loudly demands the rule of law, which means riches to him and poverty to millions of others, and all in the name of something higher, something with supra-human validity. When Authority re-surges once more against the forces of Rationalism and Economics, it proceeds at once to show that the complex of transcendental ideals with which Liberalism equipped itself is as valid as the Legitimism of the era of Absolute Monarchy, and no more. The Monarchs were the strongest protagonists of Legitimism, the financiers of Liberalism. But the monarch was tied to the organism with his whole existence, he was responsible organically even where he was not responsible in fact. Thus Louis XVI and Charles I. Countless other monarchs and absolute rulers have had to flee because of their symbolic responsibility. But the financier has only power, no responsibility, not even symbolic, for, as often as not, his name is not generally known. History, Destiny, organic continuity, Fame, all exert their powerful influence on an absolute political ruler, and in addition his position places him entirely outside the sphere of base corruptibility. The financier, however, is private, anonymous, purely economic, irresponsible. In nothing can he be altruistic; his very existence is the apotheosis of egoism. He does not think of History, of Fame, of the furtherance of the life of the organism, of Destiny, and furthermore he is eminently corruptible by base means, as his ruling desire is for money and ever more money.
In his contest against Authority the finance-Liberal evolved a theory that power corrupts men. It is, however, vast anonymous wealth which corrupts, since there are no super personal restraints on it, such as bring the true statesman completely into the service of the political organism, and place him above corruption.
It was precisely in the fields of economics and law that the Liberal doctrine had the most destructive effects on the health of the Western Civilization. It did not matter much that esthetics became independent, for the only art-form in the West which still had a future, Western Music, paid no attention to theories and continued on its grand creative course to its end in Wagner and his epigones. Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art: sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose. Man as individualist, an atom without connections, the Liberal ideal of personality. It was in fields of action rather than of thought that the injury was greatest.
Allowing the initiative in economic and technical matters to rest with individuals, subject to little political control, resulted in the creation of a group of individuals whose personal wills were more important than the collective destiny of the organism and the millions of the population. The law which served this state of affairs was completely divorced from morality and honor. To disintegrate the organism from the spiritual side, what morality was recognized was divorced from metaphysics and religion, and related only to “society.” The criminal law reflected finance-Liberalism by punishing crimes of violence and passion, but not classifying such things as destroying national resources, throwing millions into want, or usury on a national scale.
The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of faith with Liberalism. This was not subject to discussion. There was even evolved an abstraction named “economic man,” whose actions could be predicted as though economics were a vacuum. Economic gain was his sole motive, greed alone spurred him on. The Technic of success was to concentrate on one’s own gain and ignore everything else. This “economic man” was however man in general to the Liberals. He was the unit of their world-picture. “Humanity” was the sum total of these economic grains of sand.
Thus this type of thought starts from facts. This is political thinking in general, as opposed to mere thinking about politics, rationalizing. Even the wave of Rationalism did not submerge this kind of thinking. Political thinkers differ greatly in creativeness and depth, but they agree that facts are normative. The very word theory has been brought into disrepute by intellectuals and Liberals who use it to describe their pet view of how they would like things to be. Originally theory was explanation of facts. To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.
A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible. These limits cannot be found in the domain of Reason. The Age of Reason was born in bloodshed, and will pass out of vogue in more bloodshed. With its doctrine against war, politics, and violence, it presided over the greatest wars and revolutions in 5,000 years, and it ushered in the Age of Absolute Politics. With its gospel of the Brotherhood of Man, it carried on the largest-scale starvation, humiliation, torture and extermination in history against populations within the Western Civilization after the first two World Wars. By outlawing political thinking, and turning war into a moral-struggle instead of a power-struggle it flung the chivalry and honor of a millennium into the dust. The conclusion is compelling that Reason also became political when it entered politics, even though it used its own vocabulary. When Reason stripped territory from a conquered foe after a war, it called it “disannexation.” The document consolidating the new position was called a “Treaty,” even though it was dictated in the middle of a starvation-blockade. The defeated political enemy had to admit in the “Treaty” that he was “guilty” of the war, that he is morally unfit to have colonies, that his soldiers alone committed “war crimes.” But no matter how heavy the moral disguise, how consistent the ideological vocabulary, it is only politics, and the Age of Absolute Politics reverts once again to the type of political thinking which starts from facts, recognizes power and the will to-power of men and higher organisms as facts, and finds any attempt to describe politics in terms of morals as grotesque as it would be to describe chemistry in terms of theology.
There is a whole tradition of political thinking in the Western Culture, of which some of the leading representatives are Montaigne, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Hippolyte Taine, Hegel, Carlyle. While Herbert Spencer was describing history as the “progress” from military-feudal to commercial-industrial organization, Carlyle was showing to England the Prussian spirit of Ethical Socialism, whose inner superiority would exert on the whole Western Civilization in the coming Political Age an equally fundamental transformation as had Capitalism in the Economic Age. This was creative political thinking, but was unfortunately not understood, and the resulting ignorance allowed distorting influences to fling England into two senseless World Wars from which it emerged with almost everything lost.
Hegel posited a three-stage development of mankind from the natural community through the bourgeois community to the State. His State-theory is thoroughly organic, and his definition of the bourgeois is quite appropriate for the 20th century. To him the bourgeois is the man who does not wish to leave the sphere of internal political security, who sets himself up, with his sanctified private property, as an individual against the whole, who finds a substitute for his political nullity in the fruits of peace and possessions and perfect security in his enjoyment of them, who therefore wishes to dispense with courage and remain secure from the possibility of violent death. He described the true Liberal with these words.
The political thinkers mentioned do not enjoy popularity with the great masses of human beings. As long as things are going well, most people do not wish to hear talk of power-struggles, violence, wars, or theories relating to them. Thus in the 18th and 19th centuries was developed the attitude that political thinkers— and Machiavelli was the prime victim— were wicked men, atavistic, bloodthirsty. The simple statement that wars would always continue was sufficient to put the speaker down as a person who wanted wars to continue. To draw attention to the vast, impersonal rhythm of war and peace showed a sick mind with moral deficiency and emotional taint. To describe facts was held to be wishing them and creating them. As late as the 20th century, anyone pointing out the political nullity of the “leagues of nations” was a prophet of despair. Rationalism is anti-historical; political thinking is applied history. In peace it is unpopular to mention war, in war it is unpopular to mention peace. The theory which becomes most quickly popular is one which praises existing things and the tendency they supposedly illustrate as obviously the best order, and as preordained by all foregoing history. Thus Hegel was anathema to the intellectuals because of his State-orientation, which made him a “reactionary,” and also because he refused to join the revolutionary crowd.
Since most people wish to hear only soporific talk about politics, and not demanding calls to action, and since in democratic conditions it matters to political Technics what most people wish to hear, democratic politicians evolved in the 19th century a whole dialectic of party-politics. The idea was to examine the held of action from a “disinterested” standpoint, moral, scientific, or economic, and to kind that the opponent was immoral, unscientific, uneconomic— in fact— he was political. This was devilishness that must be combated. One’s own standpoint was entirely “non-political.” Politics was a word of reproach in the Economic Age. Curiously however, in certain situations, usually those involving foreign relations, “unpolitical” could also be a term of abuse, meaning the man so described lacked skill in negotiating. The party-politician also had to feign unwillingness to accept office. Finally a demonstration of carefully arranged “popular will” broke down his reluctance, and he consented to “serve.” This was described as Machiavellian, but obviously Machiavelli was a political thinker, and not a camouflager. A book by a party-politician does not read like The Prince, but praises the entire human race, except certain perverse people, the author’s opponents.
Actually Machiavelli’s book is defensive in tone, justifying politically the conduct of certain statesmen by giving examples drawn from foreign invasions of Italy. During Machiavelli's century, Italy was invaded at different times by Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards and Turks. When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the Rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics.
One can say that there are three possible attitudes toward human conduct, from the point of evaluating its motives: the sentimental, the realistic, and the cynical. The sentimental imputes a good motive to everybody, the cynical a bad motive, and the realistic simply seeks the facts. When a sentimentalist, e.g., a Liberal, enters politics, he becomes perforce a hypocrite. The ultimate exposure of this hypocrisy creates cynicism. Part of the spiritual sickness following the First World War was a wave of cynicism which arose from the transparent, revolting, and incredible hypocrisy of the little men who were presiding over affairs at that time. Macchiavelli had however an incorruptible intellect and did not write in a cynical spirit. He sought to portray the anatomy of politics with its peculiar problems and tensions, inner and outer. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. A tiny politician of the Liberal type even sought to prevent talk about the Third World War, after the Second. Liberalism is, in one word, weakness. It wants every day to be a birthday, Life to be a long party.
The inexorable movement of Time, Destiny, History, the cruelty of accomplishment, sternness, heroism, sacrifice, superpersonal ideas— these are the enemy. Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History to herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness. Nietzsche, in his last and greatest work, designated the 18th century as the century of feminism, and immediately mentioned Rousseau, the leader of the mass-escape from Reality. Feminism itself— what is it but a means of feminizing man? If it makes women man-like, it does so only by transforming man first into a creature whose only concern is with his personal economics and his relation to “society,” i.e., a woman. “Society” is the element of woman, it is static and formal, its contests are purely personal, and are free from the possibility of heroism and violence. Conversation, not action; formality, not deeds. How different is the idea of rank used in connection with a social affair, from when it is applied on a battlefield! In the field, it is fate-laden; in the salon it is vain and pompous. A war is fought for control, social contests are inspired by feminine vanity and jealousy to show that one is “better” than someone else.
And yet what does Liberalism do ultimately to woman: it puts a uniform on her and calls her a “soldier.” This ridiculous performance but illustrates the eternal fact that History is masculine, that its stern demands cannot be evaded, that the fundamental realities cannot be renounced, even, by the most elaborate make-believe. Liberalistic tampering with sexual polarity only wreaks havoc on the souls of individuals, confusing and distorting them, but the man-woman and the woman-man it creates are both subject to the higher Destiny of History.
It arose in the middle of the 18th century with the coming of Rationalism. Rationalism negated History as a basis for any thought or endeavor whatever, and therefore, Church and State, Nobility and Clergy had no rights based on tradition. Reason is quantitative, and thus the Estates were regarded as less important than the insignificant masses of the population. Previous centuries had referred to the monarch by the name of the country. Thus the King of France was “France.” An assembly of the Estates was also called “France,” or “England” or “Spain.” But to Rationalism, not quality but quantity determines, so the mass became the nation. “The People” became a polemical word to shut out the Estates, and deny them the right to political existence. At first, the mass was called “The Third Estate,” but later all Estates were denied.
The idea of Democracy was, however, saturated with will-to-power; it is not a mere abstraction, it is an organic idea, with super personal force. The whole development which produced Rationalism, the epoch at which Culture turned to Civilization, was of course a crisis in the Western organism. It was thus illness, and Democracy was illness, but it was a one through which every High Culture has gone, and was therefore impelled by organic necessity. Democracy seeks no compromise, no “balancing,” no destruction of authority it seeks power. It denies the Estates in order to supplant them.
One characteristic of Democracy was that it rejected the aristocratic principle which equated social significance with political significance. It wished to turn this around and make social dependent on political. This of course was merely the foundation of a new aristocracy, and in very fact democracy was self-destructive: when it attained power, it turned into aristocracy.
Napoleon has also in this respect the greatest possible symbolic significance. He, the great Democrat, the great Vulgarian, spread the Revolution against Dynasty and Aristocracy, but created his own Dynasty and made his Marshals into Dukes. This was not cynicism, nor faithlessness to conviction— Napoleon as Emperor was just as much a Democrat as when he cleared the mob from the streets of Paris. Democracy, by mobilizing the masses of the population, enormously raises the power-potential of the nations and of the Culture. Democracy is the idea that a Duke does not thereby become a Marshal, but a Marshal does thereby become a Duke. As a Technic of ruling, it is solely and simply a new method of furnishing the political leaders. It makes social rank dependent on political-military rank, instead of vice-versa.
The new Dynasty of Democracy, and the new democratic aristocracy are filled with the same will to duration that animated the Hohenstaufen, the Capet, the Norman, the Hapsburg, the Welf, the feudal barons whose names and traditions still persist.
Historically speaking, Democracy is a feeling, and has nothing whatever to do with “equality,” “representative government” or anything of the sort. The whole cycle of Democracy was compressed with intense symbolism into the comparatively short career of the great Napoleon. This man’s formula La carriére ouverte aux talens expresses whatever “equality” sentiment Democracy contains, namely equality of opportunity. There is no thought whatever of abolishing rank or gradation of rights. Revolution, Consolidation, Imperialism— the history of Democracy.
But the expression of the whole cycle of Democracy in the short span of Napoleon’s life, was symbolic only, for Democracy had most of its life span of two centuries ahead of it. Democracy is not a retreat from Reality, from War, History and Politics, like Liberalism. It remains within politics, but seeks to make politics a thing of mass. It seeks to make everyone subject to politics, and to make everyone into a politician. Napoleon’s remark to Goethe “Politics is Destiny” expresses this widening of the base of political power that is Democracy. Up to the end of the 18th century, war and politics were for the Cabinets, the Kings, and small professional armies. Politics and war seldom touched the ordinary person. Democracy changed all this: it put the entire man-power of the nation onto the battlefields, it forced everyone to have an opinion on matters of government, it forced him then to express the opinion in plebiscites and elections. If he had no independent opinion— and more than 99% of men do not— it forced an opinion on him, and told him it was his.
It was Fate for the idea of Democracy that it was born at the same time as the Economic Age. It meant that its authoritarian tendency was, as it were, strangled, and it would have to wait for a political age to express itself again, after its brief flash of glory in Napoleon. But the end of the Economic Age was also the end of the Democracy Idea. Thus Democracy in fact was throughout most of its history a servant of Economics in its battle against Authority.
Democracy had two poles, ability and mass. It put everyone into politics, and allowed the successful ones an amount of power tenfold that of any absolute monarch. But Napoleon himself could not stand against the forces which Money mobilized against him in the Economic Age, and the lesser democratic dictators were more easily overwhelmed. In Spanish South America, where the money power was not absolute, a whole tradition of democratic dictators— Bolivar, Rosas, Francia, O’Higgins, some of the best known— show the powerful authoritarian tendency in popular government.
But in most countries only the vocabulary of democracy was retained, and this enabled the economic powers to conduct themselves in a more or less absolute fashion, for they hat struck down the State with Democracy, and then bought Democracy. In later democratic conditions— in our case from 1850— it was solely the financier whose interest was served by the constitutionalized anarchy called Democracy. The word democracy thus passed into the possession of Money, and it was transformed from its historical meaning into its 20th century meaning. The Culture-distorters use it as meaning the denial of qualitative differences among nations and races; thus the foreigner must be admitted to the positions of wealth and authority. To the financier, it means the “rule of law”— his law, which makes possible his unprecedented usury by means of his monopoly of money.
But Democracy perishes with Rationalism. The idea of basing political power on the masses of the population was a technic at best. Either it proceeded to authoritarian rule like that of Napoleon or Mussolini, or else it was a mere cover for unhampered looting by the financier. Authoritarian rule is the end of democracy, but is not itself democracy. With the coming of the Age of Absolute Politics, the necessity for pretexts falls away. Plebiscites and elections become old-fashioned, and finally cease altogether. The symbiosis of war and politics supports itself and does not claim it “represents” any class. In the annihilation-war between Authority and Money, “Democracy” may be a slogan for either side, but more than a slogan it cannot be.
The authoritarian political tendency of Democracy was, as seen, strangled at birth by the power of Money in an Economic Age. But the word then became a slogan in the social battle, and in the economic battle. It always meant mass, quantity, numbers as opposed to quality and tradition. The first version of the idea was to make everything higher into common property, and as this was shown to be unfeasible, the next idea was to destroy all quality and superiority by merging it into the mass. The weaker Tradition was, the greater was the success of the mass-spirit. Thus in America, its victory was complete, and the principle of mass was applied even to the field of education. America with less than half the population of the home soil of Western Culture had in the 20th century ten times as many institutions of higher learning, so-called. For, in everything, Democracy must fail, even in success. The practice of giving everyone a diploma meant quite simply that the diploma became meaningless.
The ultimate in this direction was reached by an American writer who branded higher chemistry, physics, technics and mathematics as “undemocratic,” because they were the possession of a few, and were thus tending to create some sort of aristocracy. It never occurred to this person that the theory of Democracy is also the possession of a few: these masses did not mobilize themselves; the Spirit of the Age, acting on certain individuals of the population, spread abroad the feeling that everything should be set in motion, everything should be externalized, de-spiritualized, rendered into “mass,” numbered and counted.
And thus, with the coming of the 20th century, “Democracy” has a different meaning from its original one. Its original two poles of Ability and Mass have become merged for the purposes of the powers of Economics, who own the word “democracy” in this century. They place upon it solely the meaning of mass, and use it to combat the new resurgent Authority-Idea. The economic lords of the earth mobilized the masses against the authority of the State, and miscalled it “democracy.” The Age of Absolute Politics begins by mobilizing the masses against the power of Money and Economics, and will end Napoleon wise in the restoration of Authority. But there will at last be no more plebiscites, no more elections, no more propaganda, no more mass audience attending the political drama. The two centuries of democracy end in Empire. With the natural death of the idea of mass counting for something, Authority makes no intellectual appeal whatever to justify itself. It is simply there, and it is not a problem.
In the century 1750-1850, democracy had undermined the State and opened the way for the Economic Age. But the financier and the industrial baron replaced the absolute monarch. Communism is the symbol of the transference of the democratic struggle to the sphere of economics.
Communism fitted itself out with a Rationalistic philosophy: a materialistic meta physic, an atomistic logic, a social ethic, an economic politics. It even offered a philosophy of history which said that human history was the history of economic development and struggles! And these people ridiculed the Scholastic philosophers for the nature of the problems they set themselves! Religion— that was economic, politics, of course, also. Technics and art were clearly economic. This theory was actually the crowning intellectual stupidity of the Age of Economics. The Age asserted thus its omnipotence and universality. “Everything within economics, nothing outside economics, nothing against economics” might well have been the slogan.
Just as the political aspect of Democracy had been directed against quality and tradition, so the economic aspect was directed against even such quality and superiority as was engendered by economic differences. Political class war became economic class war. Just as the appeal in the first stage had been made to anyone not belonging to the two Estates, so later the appeal was directed to the non-possessors. Not all non-possessors, but only those in the great cities, and within this group, only the manual workers, for only these were physically concentrated so that they could be brought on to the streets for class war.
But Communism was political, unlike Liberalism, and named an enemy who must be annihilated— the bourgeoisie. The better to make the program of action go ahead, the picture was simplified: there are only two realities in the whole world, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Nations and States are bourgeois devices to keep the proletariat divided and thus conquered. This was the origin of the idea that Communism was an Internationale, but its strength as an Internationale was shown in 1914, when the class-war organizations in all countries threw themselves heartily into the fight among the nations. It was never an Internationale in the true sense.
Nevertheless it was an affirmation of politics, and was a force to be reckoned with during the Economic Age. It was able in various Western countries to bring about Civil War e.g., France, 1871. Its high point was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, 1918, when the theory of Communism was actually adopted by a non-theoretical Asiatic regime as a weapon of foreign policy.
It was in the essence of Communism, as in every by-product of Rationalism, that its wish-picture could never become actualized. Using inorganic logic to construct a program for actuality does not change the fact that an organism has its own structure, development, and tempo. This can be injured, distorted, annihilated from without, but inwardly changed it cannot be. Thus Communism was purely destructive in effect, and this was why the Asiatic power on Europe’s boundary adopted it as a program to disintegrate all European States. Communism, like all Utopias, is impossible of realization, because they are rational and Life is irrational. The sole novelty about the Utopia of Communism is that it proclaims itself as inevitable. This was a tribute to its will-to-power, but this vain boast had the same life span as Rationalism. With the advent of the Age of Absolute Politics, even class-war drops theory. History receives Rationalism and all its debris into its vaults of the dead. Death, and not refutation, is the fate of rationalistic theories of politics and economics. We who live in the middle of the 20th century will witness the final desuetude of Rationalism and its progeny.
A world without abstract thought— the world of the dog, for example— is a world wherein a complete continuity reigns. Each thing fits quite perfectly into its place or sphere. By comparison with the human world, it is non-problematical. Reality and appearance are one. The distinctively human soul sees the macrocosm however as symbolic; it differentiates between Appearance and Reality, the symbol and that which is symbolized. All constructive human thinking whatever contains this as its essence. But this separating of things into appearance and reality, this singling out of one thing from another and bestowing intense abstract thought on it, is itself a distortion of its quiet, non-problematical relation to other things. Thus to think is to exaggerate.
For Culture-man, the High Culture in which he is fated to be born, live and die, is the world of his spirit. The High Culture sets the spiritual boundaries of this world. The High Culture sets its impress on almost every form of thought and activity of the individuals and groups in its domain. Within this realm, the thought-forms and thoughts, action-forms and actions, all fit into their natural places and occupy their non-problematical relations to one another. These relations continue, even though thought is applied to a sphere to exaggerate its part in the destiny of the whole. To think is to exaggerate, but this exaggeration affects only thought and does not disturb the macrocosm. The same is true of any one man: the various directions of his energy stand in an organically unified, harmonious relationship to one another. There is no “economic man”— there is only this man directing his energy toward economics for the moment. Nor is there any “reasonable man,” such as some Western legal systems predicate. There is only this man being reasonable for this occasion. The essential characteristic of the higher organisms, man, and High Culture, is the soul. Thus this particular man acts economically in quite a different fashion from another man, because his soul is different. This makes all of his thought and action peculiar to him. One man has strong interests and abilities in a certain direction, another man elsewhere. High Cultures are also differentiated from one another by unequal endowment in various directions. The principium individuationis applies also to the High Cultures.
Every organism, from the plants and animals to men and Cultures, has a multiplicity of functions, a diversity that increases in refinement and articulation as we proceed upward. This functional versatility does not however disturb the unity of the organism. It is the very unity of the organism that creates this necessity for expression in various directions. For one direction to be pursued at the expense of another is distortion and brings illness and death, if persisted in. I am concerned only with organisms in health here, and in these, the changing of direction of energy is governed by the inner rhythm of the organism. This rhythm is different in each organism, and is affected by individuality, age, sex, adaptation, and milieu. Each human being has his daily sequence of changes of direction of energy-flow. All organisms have their inner rhythm that governs which function is called into play at a given moment. A Culture has such a rhythm also, and at various stages of its development, this rhythm accents first one, then another, field of thought of activity. Similarly any man, and a Culture-man in particular, has his appropriate type of activity and of thought for each age of his development. It has been well said that a young man is an idealist, a mature man a realist, an old man a mystic. This rhythm in a Culture which gives primacy to a certain side of its life during a given period is the source of The Spirit of the Age.
It is only the accent, the beat, which is affected in this changing of direction. The various functions all continue, but one is primary. This describes both men and Cultures. Thus “economic man” continues to exist as a unit, even in his economic activity; his individuality continues, and his other spiritual sides still exist, even though not given primacy at the moment. Similarly with Cultures: all types of thought and activity exist in all ages, even though for a given Age a certain side of Life is uppermost. This is the meaning of “anachronism” in its historical use. Thus Fausto Sozzini is an anachronism in the 16th century, Carlyle in the 19th.
So much for the association of forms of thought and action. They are also dissociated.
The expression change of direction was used to denote the shifting of emphasis from one function to another. These changes of direction are forms of adaptation to different types of situations. It is the type of situation, of problem to be solved, that gives the uniqueness to a way of thinking or acting. Self evidently one would not approach the problem of fixing a piece of machinery as a power-problem— that would end in the smashing of the enemy machinery. Nevertheless many Rationalists and Liberals tried to treat power-problems as mechanical in nature.
The various fields of thought and endeavor thus separate out. Considered by themselves, they are quite autonomous. Each has different conscious assumptions, and a different unconscious attitude. Some of the most important must be listed, with their fundamental structures.
First, there is religion. From the viewpoint of spiritual content, this is the highest of all human forms of thought. Religion has the great, ever-present characteristic that it sees the totality of things under a sacred aspect. It is divine metaphysics, and regards every other form of human thought and action as subsidiary. Religion is not a method of social improvement, it is not a codification of knowledge, it is not ethics— it is the presentation of a sacred ultimate reality, and all of its phases flow from this.
Philosophy, however, is essentially a different direction of thought. Even a theistic philosophy has a different attitude from the religions. In a theistic philosophy, the beginning of religion sets the boundary to the philosophic endeavor. The philosophy lies this side of religion and gives a purely natural explanation to its subject-matter.
Science is yet another direction of thought: it is directed only to finding interrelations between phenomena, and generalizing the results, but it does not attempt to give ultimate explanations.
Technics has nothing to do with science, for it is not a form of pure thinking at all, but thought directed to action. Technics has one aim: power over the macrocosm. It uses the results of science as its tools, scientific theoretical generalizations as levers, but it discards them when their efficacy ceases. Technics is not concerned with what is true, but with what works: if a materialistic theory yields no results, and a theological one does, Technics adopts the latter. It was thus Destiny that Pragmatism should appear in America, the land of worship of Technics. This “philosophy” teaches that what is true is what works. This is simply another way of saying that one is not interested in truth, and is thus the abdication of philosophy. This could be called the elevation of Technics or the degradation of philosophy, but the total difference of direction between Technics and philosophy is not thereby altered; it is merely that the age placed strong emphasis on Technics, and little on philosophy. Nor can the alliance, in 20th century practice almost an identity, between practitioners of Science and Technics obliterate the difference of direction between these two fields. The same man can think at one time as a scientist, seeking information, and in the next moment as a technician, applying it to get power over Nature. Science and Technics are as different from Philosophy as they are from each other: neither one seeks to give explanations, these are for philosophy and religion. If someone thinks he is founding a “scientific philosophy,” he is mistaken, and on the very first page he is bound to abandon the scientific attitude and assume the philosophic. One cannot face two directions at once. If precedence is given to Science over Philosophy, this is something else; this merely reflects the Spirit of the Age as being an externalized one. But important is that all these forms of thought and action are embedded in the flux and rhythm of the development of a High Culture; a given direction of thought has its vogue of supremacy just so long as the Culture-stage lasts which chose it for this role.
Economics is a form of action. Specifically, it is action designed to nourish and enrich private life. Any attempt to control other lives thus departs from Economics. When Cecil Rhodes thought primarily of making himself wealthy, he was thinking economically; when he proceeded to use his wealth for control over the populations of Africa, he was thinking politically. It is only rarely that a man of action is capable of mastery of both these different directions of endeavor, so different are their respective techniques. Economics again has two phases, production and trade, whose special techniques are again so different ordinarily one man does not master both.
The refinements of ways of thinking and acting are numerous. For instance, the data of metaphysics do not matter to ethics, even though one use a similar principle in both of them. Actually the data of ethics are its own. Mathematics also has its own attitude, related to but distinct from that of logic. Esthetics singles out one aspect of the totality of relationships, and this determines its basic assumptions
What is Life? It is the process of actualization of the possible. Actualization— and thus action. Life has its center of gravity on the side of action, and not on the side of abstract thought. For purposes of action, then, there is an order of rank which places practical skill above theorizing. It is this which makes Macchiavelli more valuable politically than Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, Fourier, Marx, Edward Bellamy or Samuel Butler. He wrote of politics as it is, the others as it should be, or as they wanted it to be.
It is fairly well known that nothing can be proved by violence— this is because the two spheres of abstract thought and action, truths and facts, do not intersect. It is not as well understood that the reverse is also true, that no violence can be done by proof; in other words, effects cannot be gained in the world of action by truths. Merely to start to try to actualize an abstract theory is to abandon it. The net result of the attempt to impose a way of thinking where it is not appropriate is bungling. There is no choice between a chemistry-artist and a physics-artist, but only between a good artist and a poor one. To approach a mechanical problem as though good and evil are involved in it is to prepare a failure. Each aspect of life yields its secrets only to the method adapted to it. Politics always has refused to give any power to the man who is out to “reform” it according to a morality. Nor can it be understood by trying to impose foreign methods of thought upon it. Politics is the opposite of abstract; derivatively abstract means “drawn away from”— away from what?— from action, reality, facts.
This whole outlook is one of the fact side of the human being. This work is concerned only with action, because the Age of Absolute Politics in which it appears is an age of action. No one has ever said politics should be immoral— but all political thinkers have said that politics is politics. Questions of should are on the other side of the soul, and are not treated here. The fact that politics and morality do not intersect is shown by the example of the Second World War. The American half of the extra-European coalition against Europe stated most decisively that it was fighting for Christian morality, yet after the war it carried out the attempt to exterminate physically the Culture-bearing stratum within its jurisdiction in occupied Europe. Beyond this, mass-starvation and looting were employed to destroy many millions of Europeans, physically, economically. The example is not unique: the victorious powers after the First World War had carried out a starvation blockade of the defeated enemy after the War, and that War also was conducted by those victorious powers in the name of Christian morality.
In the practice of politics, a moral approach can only result in inefficiency or disaster. It is destructive in exact proportion as it is taken seriously.
If the morality is used quite cynically, as propaganda to increase the brutalization of a war, it distorts war and politics in the direction of bestiality.
In the 20th century, politics reconquers once more its own realm. The motivation of politics is no longer derived from economics. Law, technics, economics, social organization— all reflect the great realities of politics. In this last formative age of a great Culture, which will last through the 21st century, the motivation of the perpetual power-struggle is supplied by the unity of the Western Civilization itself. The real front of the wars of this age is simply Europe versus anti-Europe. There are border areas, like those between Russia and Europe, like the northern countries of South America. Each side has its allies: the white populations strewn over the world belong to Europe; the Asiatic distorting elements of cohesion and power in the various Western countries belong to non-Europe. It is the struggle of a positive against a negative, of creation against destruction, of Cultural superiority against the envy of the outsider. It is the unrelenting battle against the master of yesterday by his liberated slaves, burning with vengeance for their centuries of slavery.
These wars of course will be true unlimited wars, like the Crusades, and not agonal like intra-European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. They will be correspondingly absolute in their means and in their duration. For example, prisoner-of-war usages developed in the Western Civilization on considerations of humanitarianism and military honor. After the Second World War Russia abolished the first of these bases, by starving and enslaving prisoners, and America abolished the second by hanging prisoners-of war en mass, and ignoring the Hague Conventions in its post-war occupation of Europe.
The coming wars will thus revive the older practices of enslaving and killing war prisoners, and remove the protections hitherto extended to the civilian population. Instead of the codified military honor of a High Culture, honor will eventually become a matter of inner personal imperative, and the individual will decide for himself, the importance of his decision depending upon his position. It is not dishonorable per se to kill prisoners, but only if they surrender and give up their arms on condition their lives are to be spared, as the European soldiers and leaders did who were later hanged by the Americans after the Second World War.
In the last act of our grand Western Culture-drama, the idea of the Culture itself demonstrates its unimpaired vigor— Destiny is always young, says the philosopher of this Age— by placing itself in the center of Life and defining all men as friends or enemies according as they adhere to it, or oppose it. Culture-politics is the end of the train of religion-politics, family-politics, and faction-politics from the Crusades to the Reformation, dynasty-politics to the Vienna-Congress, national-politics and economic-politics to the Second World War. The crisis of Rationalism subsides. Its attendant phenomena grow colorless, more forced, and one by one they fade away: Equality, Democracy, Happiness, Instability, Commercialism, High Finance and its power of Money, Class War, Trade as an end in itself, Social Atomism, Parliamentarism, Liberalism, Communism, Materialism, Mass-Propaganda. All these proud banners trail finally in the dust. They are nothing but the symbols of Reason’s daring and bold, but hopeless, attempt to conquer the kingdom of the Soul.
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CULTURAL VITALISM
Secondary politics often can distort primary politics. For instance the female politics of petty jealousy and personal hatred that was effective in the court of Louis XV was instrumental in devoting much of French political energy to the less important struggle against Frederick, and little French political energy to the more important struggle against England in Canada and India and on the seas. Frederick the Great was not beloved by the Pompadour, and France paid an empire to chastise him. When private hostility exerts such an effect on public decision, it is proper to speak of political distortion, and of such a policy as a distorted one. When an organism consults or is in the grip of any force outside of its own developmental law, its life is distorted. The relation between a private enmity and a public politics it is circumstanced to distort is the same as that between European petty-Stateism and the Western Civilization. The collectively suicidal game of nationalistic politics distorted the whole destiny of the West after 1900 to the advantage of the extra-European forces.
III
The concrete nature of politics is shown by certain linguistic facts which appear in all Western
languages. Invariably the concepts, ideas, and vocabulary of a political group are polemical,
propagandistic. This is true throughout all higher history. The words State, class, King, society— all
have their polemical content, and they have an entirely different meaning to partisans from what they
have to opponents. Dictatorship, government of laws, proletariat, bourgeoisie these words have no
meaning other than their polemical one, and one does not know what they are intended to convey unless
one knows also who is using them and against whom. During the Second World War, for instance,
freedom and democracy were used as terms to describe all members of the coalition against Europe, with
an entire disregard of semantics. The word “dictatorship” was used by the extra-European coalition to
describe not only Europe, but any country which refused to join the coalition.During the period when Liberalism ruled in the Western Civilization, and the State was reduced, theoretically, to the role of “night-watchman,” the very word “politics” changed its fundamental meaning. From having described the power activities of the State, it now described the efforts of private individuals and their organizations to secure positions in the government as a means of livelihood, in other words politics came to mean party-politics. Readers in 2050 will have difficulty in understanding these relationships, for the age of parties will be as forgotten then as the Opium War is now.
All State organisms were distorted, sick, in crisis, and this introspection was one great symptom of it. Supposedly internal politics was primary.
If internal politics was actually primary, it must have meant that friend-enemy groupings could arise on an internal political question. If this did happen, in the extreme case civil war was the result, but unless a civil war occurred, internal politics was still in fact secondary, limited, private, and not public. The very contention that inner politics was primary was polemical: what was meant was that it should be. The Liberals and class-warriors, then as now, spoke of their wishes and hope as facts, near-facts, or potential facts. The sole result of focusing energy onto inner problems was to weaken the State, in its dealings with other States. The law of every organism allows only two alternatives: either the organism must be true to itself, or it goes down into sickness or death. The nature, the essence of the State is inner peace and outer struggle. If the inner peace is disturbed or broken, the outer struggle is damaged.
The organic and the inorganic ways of thinking do not intersect: ordinary class-room logic, the logic of philosophy textbooks tells us that there is no reason why State, politics and war need even exist. There is no logical reason why humanity could not be organized as a society, or as a purely economic enterprise, or as a vast book-club. But the higher organisms of States, and the highest organisms, the High Cultures, do not ask logicians for permission to exist— the very existence of this type of rationalist, the man emancipated from reality, is only a symptom of a crisis in the High Culture, and when the crisis passes, the rationalists pass away with it. The fact that the rationalists are not in touch with the invisible, organic forces of History is shown by their predictions of events. Before 1914, they universally asserted that a general European war was impossible. Two different types of rationalists gave their two different reasons. The class-warriors of the Internationale, said that international class-war socialism would make it impossible to mobilize “the workers” of one country against “the workers” in another country. The other type— also with its center of gravity in economics, since rationalism and materialism are indissolubly wedded— said no general war was possible because mobilization would bring about such a dislocation of the economic life of the countries that a breakdown would come in a few weeks.
The War-Politics Symbiosis
WE COME to the relation of war to politics. It is not proposed to treat of the metaphysics of war, but to
develop a practical outlook of the possibilities and necessities of war to serve as a basis for action. First, a definition: war is an armed struggle between organized political units. It is not a question of the method of fighting, for weapons are merely a way of killing. Nor of military organization— these things determine nothing about the inner nature of war. War is the highest possible expression of the friend enemy dis-junction. It confers the practical meaning on the word enemy. The enemy is he upon whom one is preparing to make or upon whom one is making war. If there is no question of war he is not an enemy. He may be a mere opponent in a contest for a prize, he may be a mere heathen, a mere ideological opponent, a competitor, a hateful thing for reasons of antipathy. The minute he becomes an enemy, the possibility or actuality of armed struggle war, enters. War is not an agon, and thus the armed struggles among the States of the Western Culture up to the middle of the 18th century were not wars in the 20th century meaning of the word. They were limited in their object and scope, and vis-à-vis the opponent they were not existential. Thus they were not political in the 20th century meaning of the word— they were not fought against enemies in our sense of the term. Unfortunately our Western languages lack the precision which Greek had in this respect to distinguish between intra-Hellenic struggles, agons, with the opponent the “antagonist,” on the one hand, and wars against the non-Culture member, on the other hand, in which the opponent, e.g., the Persian, was the enemy. The Crusades were thus war in the full unlimited sense of the word: the deep spiritual objective was the assertion of the Cultural superiority, and of the true Faith against the heathen. The opponent— though one naturally extended personal magnanimity to his soldiers because of the inner imperative of chivalrous honor— was an enemy, not to be allowed to continue in his unity if it could be destroyed.
Honor in the Crusades forbade personal meanness, but did not exclude total destruction of the enemy organized unit. Honor in intra-European struggles did forbid imposing too harsh a treaty upon the defeated opponent, and it entered no one’s mind to deny the opponent the right to existence as an organized unit.
During the history of our Culture, from Pope Gregory VII to Napoleon, the struggle against a member of the Culture was limited, but that against the heathen, the non-member of the Culture was true, unlimited war.
Wars before, after and outside a Culture are unlimited. They are a more pure expression of the barbarian in man, in that they are not highly symbolic. They are spiritual, for everything human is spiritual. The spirit is primary with man, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual development. Man sees symbolic significance in that around him— his experiencing of these symbols and his acting and organizing in accordance are what make him man, even though he carry within him also the animal instincts. His soul of course, with its transforming symbolism, completely changes the expression of these instincts. They pass into the service of the soul and its symbolism. Man does not kill, like a tiger, for food to eat— he kills because of spiritual necessity. Not even wars entirely outside a High Culture are purely animal, entirely devoid of symbolic content. With man that would be impossible— only something spiritual can bring masses on to a battlefield. But the symbolism of a High Culture is a grand symbolism— it links past, present and future and the totality of things, dissolving them all into a magnificent performance of which it is later realized that that, too, was a symbol. It is only in comparison with these grand meanings, this grand super-personal destiny, that extra-Cultural human phenomena seem merely zoological. Thus, because of their lower symbolic content, lower spiritual potential, these wars can never approach the intensity, scale, or duration of wars connected with High Culture. Defeat is acknowledged much more easily, for it is only the souls of those engaged that are affected. In Cultural wars however, the soul of the Culture is at work, lending its invisible, but invincible strength to those in its service, and a struggle can be maintained for years against fearful odds. A few defeats, and all would have been up with Genghis Khan. Not so with Friedrich der Grosse, or George Washington, for they felt themselves to be the vehicle of an Idea, of the Future.
There can not be said to exist an enmity unless the possibility of war is present. A possibility in fact, not a mere conceivability. Nor need the possibility be daily and imminent. Nor need the door be closed on negotiations before the possibility of war, and therefore true enmity can be said to exist.
Not even among warlike States is life a daily blood-shed. War is the highest possible intensification of politics, but there must also be something less intense, the period of recuperating, negotiating, steering, preparing. Without the fact of peace, we would not have the word war, and— what the pacifists have never thought of— without war, we could not have peace, in the blissful, dreamy, saccharine, way they use the word. All the fierce energy that war devotes to super-personal struggles would go into domestic discord of one sort or another, and the casualty list would hardly be less.
The relation of war to politics is clear. Clausewitz, in the usually misquoted passage, called war “the continuation of political intercourse by other means.” Usually misquoted, because it does not mean that the military fighting is the continuation of politics, for this it is not. Fighting has its own strategic and tactical grammar. It has its own organic rules and imperatives. War does not have however a motivation of its own— this is supplied by politics. As is the intensity of the political struggle, i.e., of the enmity, so is the war.
It was insight into this interrelationship that prompted an English diplomat to say that a politician was better trained for fighting than the soldier, for he fights continually and the soldier only occasionally. It is also observable that professional soldiers would turn a war into an agon before political soldiers would. The phrase political soldier is only ad hoc, to designate anyone fighting from conviction, rather than from profession.
Clausewitz expressed in the same chapter a description of this relationship between politics and war that has validity in this century: “As war belongs to politics, so does it take on its character. When politics becomes grand and powerful, so does the war, which can ascend to the height where it attains to its absolute form.”
War presupposes politics, just as politics presupposes war. Politics determines the enemy, and the time of opening the war. These are not problems for the soldier. Armies must be prepared to fight any political unit.
War and politics cannot be defined in terms of mutual aim, or purpose. It makes no organic sense to say that war is the aim of politics, or politics of war. It could not be, in either case. Each is the prerequisite of the other, neither could exist without the other. A given policy could aim at a certain war, naturally, but no politics could possibly aim at war in general.
It is the eventuality of war which gives to political thinking its hall-mark that makes it a different form of thinking from, say, economic thinking, moral, scientific, or esthetic thinking.
II
The dis-junction of friend-enemy being the essence of political thinking and acting, is this to say that
there is nothing between? No, for neutrality exists as a fact. It has its own rules and conditions of
existence. The Western Culture developed as a part of its international law— a law governing neutrality.
The very formulation of these rules for neutrals shows that the decisive thing is the conflict, the friend enemy
dis-junction. The problem for a neutral is how to keep out; it is not the problem of the others in the
usual case how to keep the neutral out. The whole practice of the law of neutrality was dependent upon
who was at war. If the Great Powers were at war, neutrals had as a matter of practice, few rights. If small
powers were engaged in a war, and the Great Powers were neutral, neutrals had many rights.But the essential thing is that neutrality as a policy stands in the shade of the practical possibility of war and active politics. For a country to become neutral as a form of existence would be to cease to exist as a political unit. It might continue to exist economically, socially, culturally, but politically it could not exist if it were neutral. To renounce war is to renounce the right to an enemy. As long as a power is committed to war in any one given eventuality, it has not adopted total neutrality. Thus, Belgium’s neutrality during the 19th century was only a word, and not a fact, for it maintained an army, diplomatic representation abroad, and it entered into military understandings with France and England against Germany. As long as a country maintains an army it cannot say its basic national policy is neutrality. An army is an instrument of politics, even if only a politics of self-defense. Politics and neutrality exclude one another, as do neutrality and continued existence. Here again, another instance of the polemical nature of all political language: Neutrality was turned into a polemical word by certain small countries of Europe. Actually by their very existence they were serving the political purposes of one half of Europe against the other half. This position, of being committed by their very existence to one side of a struggle, they called “neutrality.” They knew their politics would involve them in war, they knew on which side they would be, and when the war did come, they cried aloud that their “neutrality” had been violated.
To renounce politics— which is what total neutrality means— is to renounce existence as a unit. In many cases it is the part of wisdom and the dictates of Culture to amalgamate with another power, to renounce an empty existence as a unit, an existence without a meaning or a future.
In addition to neutrality as a precarious fact, during war, and neutrality as a polemical fraud, there is neutrality which arises from the hopelessness of carrying on a war successfully. This is closer to true neutrality, for what it means is that powers reduced to such a case have disappeared from the calculations of the other powers, unless of course the land in question is attractive as spoils or as a battlefield. In this case, it must choose for itself to which of the powers still in the struggle it will surrender its independence. If it fails to do this, the choice will be made for it. A power which by its economic weakness, small size, or age, cannot possibly carry on a war has in effect renounced war and become neutral. Whether it is allowed to continue a posthumous existence depends entirely on how attractive its domains are. For purposes of high politics, it is not a political, but a neutral factor.
From the development of colossal war technics came the fact that few powers can support or wage a war. This led the rationalists and Liberals, ever bright with a new wish-informed thought, to announce that the world was becoming pacified. No more war or politics— “power-politics” is their word, just as one could talk of beauty-esthetics, utile-economics, good-morality, piety-religion, legal-law— the world is become neutral, the occasions of war are going, political powers can no longer afford wars, and the like. It is not war or politics which is disappearing, it is only that the number of contestants has grown less.
A pacified world would be one in which there was no politics. It would thus be one where no human difference could possibly arise which could range men against one another as enemies. In a purely economic world men could be opposed, but only as competitors. If morality was also there the proponents of different theories could oppose one another, but only in discussion. Religionists could oppose one another, but only with the propaganda of their respective faiths. It would have to be a world in which there was no one who would kill, or better yet, such a languid, colorless and boring world that no one could possibly take anything seriously enough to kill or risk his life about it.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that a rationalist, Liberal, or pacifist who believes that it is possible for war to vanish simply does not understand what the word war means, its reciprocal existence with politics or the nature of politics as the ranging of men against one another as enemies. In other words, and in the kindliest words possible, these people do not know what they are talking about. They wish to abolish war by politics, or even by war. If war were gone and politics remained, they would then abolish politics by war, or perhaps by politics. They confuse verbal virtuosity with political thinking, logic with soul-necessities, accident with history. As for super personal forces, they do not exist, because they cannot be seen, weighed and measured.
III
Since the symbiosis of war and politics forms its own thought-category, independent of other ways of
thinking, it follows that a war could not be carried on from a purely nonpolitical motive. If a religious
difference, an economic contrast, an ideological disjunction, were to reach the degree of intensity of
feeling at which it would range men against one another as enemies, it would thereby become political,
and such units as formed would be political units and would be guided by a political way of maneuvering,
thinking, and valuing, and not by a religious, economic or other way of thinking. Pure economics could
not possibly wage a war, for war does not pay economically. Pure religion could not wage a war, nor
pure ideology, because war cannot spread religion, cannot convert, but can only result in an accretion or
diminution of power. Motives other than strictly political ones can indeed actuate a war— but the war
takes them up into itself, and they vanish into it. Western Christianity has motivated wars, such as the
Crusades, but these wars did not let loose the forces upon which Christianity places a positive value.
Economics has motivated wars, but the immediate result of a war has never been a profit. For this reason the Liberals and rationalists comfortably convinced themselves before 1914 that war had vanished because it did not show a profit. They were moving in their private world of abstraction, where economics was the sole motive of human conduct, and where invisible super personal forces did not exist. And 1914 did not cause them to change their theory— no, where the facts and theory conflict, it is the facts which need revision. 1914 caused them to re-implement their theory: The First World War was all the more proof of their viewpoint, for it showed that it was economically necessary that war disappear. These people did not know that economic necessity of human beings is never taken into account by super personal forces. Could they get no clue from the statement of one of the most immediate participants in the feverish flurry of negotiations of July, 1914, that all of the statesmen concerned merely drifted into the war? A strictly factual view shows that super personal organisms have no economics in our sense of the word, for they are purely spiritual. When Culture populations nourish themselves— and that is what economics is— they are nourishing the higher organism, for the populations are its cells. Its cells are to the super personal soul as the cells of a human body are to the human soul.
A war from purely religious, economic, or other, motives would be senseless as well as impossible. From religious contrasts arise the thought-categories of believer and non-believer, from economics those of co-worker and competitor, from ideological those of agreer and disagreer. Only from political contrasts come friend-enemy groupings, and only from enmity can come war. The enmity can start elsewhere the personal distaste of the mistress of a ruler has brought about an enmity grouping among Western States— but when it comes to enmity, it is politics. Although the enmity may have started on a religious contrast, when it comes to war, one will fight against believers, or accept the help of nonbelievers. Only the Thirty Years War need be mentioned in this connection. Though economics be the beginning of the enmity, once it rises to the intensity of enmity, one fights without regard to the economic consequences of his fighting, but only to the political consequences.
Other thought-categories claim they should have a monopoly of thinking, that the political should be subject to them. The 20th century outlook on politics merely observes that they do not as a matter of fact. From an esthetic standpoint, war and politics may be ugly, from an economic, wasteful, from the moral, wicked, from the religious, sinful. These viewpoints, however, are neutral from the political standpoint, which tries first, to assess the facts, and second to change them, but never tries to value them according to a non-political scheme of values. Some politicians do this, it is true. English politicians in particular, after Cromwell, felt an inner compulsion to present every one of their wars as somehow directly involving Christianity, even a war which planted the Hammer and Sickle in the heart of Europe was a war for Christianity. But this does not affect what I am saying here, as this sort of thing only affects vocabulary, but does not touch facts, or action. Using a nonpolitical terminology or propaganda cannot depoliticize politics, any more than using a pacifist terminology can debellicize war.
Politicians are usually not pure in their thinking any more than other men. Even a saint commits sins, even a scientist has his private superstitions, even a divine may have his little taint of mechanism, even a Liberal may have his minuscule trace of animal instinct which if released may cause a sanguinary war, after the conclusion of which he may try to exterminate the human beings comprising the population of the former enemy.
Just as a war cannot, as a matter of fact, be purely economic, religious, or moral, it follows that a war need not qualify under any other category in order to be justifiable from the political standpoint. The Scholastic philosophers set forth the ethico-religious prerequisites of a just war. St. Thomas Aquinas formulated them in a fashion which is final for ethico-religious thought. From the political standpoint however, the test of the justification is quite different. It is of course obvious that the word justification is inadequate, since this word belongs originally to moral thinking and not to political thinking. It must therefore not be interpreted as an invasion of the field of morality if the word justification is used in this connection, for what is meant is appropriateness, desirability, advantageousness, and indeed these are contained in the secondary meaning of the word justification. Now, in this practical, political sense, what wars are justified? Politics is activity in regard to power. Units engaged in politics may gain or lose power. Instinct and understanding direct them to seek to increase power. War is the most intense method of trying to increase power. Thus a war which has no practically foreseeable possibility of increasing power is not politically justifiable. A war which promises an increase in power is politically justifiable. This is what the word success means in this connection, i.e., that increased power is the result of the war. When diminished power is the result of the war, the war was unsuccessful.
IV
The words defeat and victory thus divide into two sharply and precisely defined sets of meanings: the
military and the political. Although the armies in the field may be on the winning side, nevertheless the
unit to which they supposedly belong may emerge from the war with less power than it entered upon it. I
say supposedly belong for the reason that when a political unit is in the situation where even military
victory means political defeat, it is not in political reality an independent unit. Thus: if there were only
two powers in the world, the one gaining the military victory in a war would of necessity gain the political
victory. There is no second possibility. But if there were more than two powers engaged in a war, and a
military victory was gained, one or more powers must have gained the political victory, i.e., must have
increased in power. Thus if any power, despite the fact that it was on the winning side in a military sense,
nevertheless emerged with less power, it was in fact fighting for the political victory of another power. In
other words it was not actually an independent unit, but was in the service of another unit. To be specific instead of general: after the First World War, England, although on the side of the victorious in a military sense, was weaker in the political sense, i.e., it had less power afterwards than before the War. In the War of the Spanish Succession, France emerged from the War weaker than it had entered, despite the fact that it had gained the military victory.
But between these two sets of meanings of the words victory and defeat, there is an order of rank: the political meaning is primary, for war itself is subsidiary to politics. Any politician would prefer a military defeat coupled with political victory to the converse. Despite the military defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, Talleyrand negotiated a political victory for France out of the Congress of Vienna. To say that a unit gained a military victory and also suffered a political defeat is only another way of saying that the military opponent was not a real enemy. A real enemy is he whom one can strike down and thereby increase one’s own power.
It is for the politician to determine whom to fight, and if he selects as the enemy a unit at whose expense no power can possibly be gained even in a militarily successful war, that politician was incapable. He may be merely stupid, he may be carrying on a private parasite-politics, using the lives of his countrymen to implement his personal antipathies, like Graf Brühl in the Seven Years War, he may be a distorter, representing an outer force not belonging to the Nation, or even to the Culture.
Such a politician may also be a traitor who sells himself for a private economic consideration, like the Poles who disappeared upon the outbreak of war in 1939 and were never heard of again.
But regardless of why a politician chooses for an enemy a unit which was not a real enemy, the fact remains that in so doing he is abdicating the sovereignty of his State and placing it therewith in the service of another State.
The classic example of this in recent history is, of course, England’s participation in the Second World War. England was on the victorious side in the military sense, but sustained a total defeat in the political sense. Already during the war a member of the English Parliament was able to announce that apparently England was a dependency of America. At the conclusion of that War, England’s power and prestige had sunk so low that it had to abandon the Empire. Extra-European forces were the victors. England had fought in the Second World War and had given lives and position for the political victory of others. It was not the first time in history, nor will it be the last, but because of its magnitude, it will always remain the classic example.
A tiny island of some 242,000 quadrate kilometers, with only 40,000,000 population, nevertheless, England controlled in 1900 17/20 of the surface of the earth. This includes all the seas, on which England was supreme in the sense that it could deny them to any other power. In less than 25 years, or after the First World War, 1914-1918, England found this sea supremacy gone as well as its commercial primacy, and its position of arbiter of Europe in the sense that it could prevent any power taking first place. In less than 50 years, or after the Second World War, 1939-1945, all was gone, the Empire and also the independence of the homeland. The lesson of course is that a structure built through centuries of war, bloodshed, and high political tradition of choosing always for an enemy him whose defeat would increase the Empire of England— that this can be lost through one or two wars against a power not a real enemy.
In 1939 even there could be no difference of opinion among political thinkers that England could not have an enemy in Europe, since the extra-European forces, Japan, Russia and America had become decisive in world-politics. But in 1946 there could be no difference of opinion on this subject among human beings anywhere in the world, regardless of their ability or inability to think politically. Always excepting the Liberals, of course, who move among theories, and not among facts. Indeed, even after this disastrous War, Liberals, distorter and stupid persons in England continued to glory in the “victory” of England. From the political standpoint, the most hopeful fact for England’s future in the period after the War was that the extra-European occupation forces were withdrawn from England.
Thus we have seen again the existential nature of organic alternatives: a unit can either fight a real enemy, or it must lose. And again, a unit not fighting a real enemy is in the service of another power— there is no middle ground. If a unit is not fighting for itself, it is fighting against itself. The broadest formulation of this fundament is: an organism must be true to its own inner law of existence, or it will sicken and die. It is the inner law of a political organism that it must increase its own power; this is the only way it can behave toward power. If it tries to confer power on another organism, it injures itself. If it tries merely to prevent another organism from attaining power, it injures itself; if it gives up its complete existence to blocking another organism, quite regardless of its success in this negative aim, it will destroy itself.
France from 1871 onward is an example of the latter. The whole idea of the existence of France as a State was to block and frustrate a neighboring State. The inspiriting slogan of this idea was Revanche. The idea was pursued for decades, and in the process, French power was destroyed. The policy could not of course have arisen in a healthy organism.
The Laws of Totality and Sovereignty
THE ORGANIC Laws of Sovereignty and Totality refer to all political units whatever. They describe any
unit, whatever its provenance, that reaches the degree of intensity of expression at which it participates in
a friend-enemy dis-junction. Totality refers both to issues within the organism and to persons within the
organism. Any issue within the organism is subject to political determination, because every issue is
potentially political. Any person in the organism is existentially embraced in the organism. Sovereignty
places the decision in every important juncture with the organism. Both of these laws are existential, like
all organic conditions: either the organism is true to them, or it is faced with sickness and death. Both
laws will be explained. First the Law of Totality: Any contrast, opposition, or hostility whatever existing within groups among the organism may become political in its nature, if it reaches the point where a group or a unit feels another group, class or stratum to be a real enemy. For such a unit to arise within an organism is for the possibility of civil war to be present, or a severe crisis in the organism, which renders the organism liable to damage or extinction from without. Therefore, every organism, by its very existence, has the characteristic that it assumes power over the determination of all issues. This does not mean that it plans the total life of the population— economic, social, religious, educational, legal, technical, recreational. It means merely that all of these things are subject to political determination. Many of these things are neutral to some States, but objects of interest to others. But all organisms will intervene when an inner grouping may possibly become a focus of a friend-enemy dis-junction. This describes all political units whatever, entirely independently of how they formulate their written constitutions, if they have any.
The Law of Totality affects individuals by embracing them existentially in the life of the organism. Politics places the life of every man within the political unit in the balance. It demands, by its very existence, the readiness of all individuals in the service of its fulfillment to risk their lives. Other groups may demand dues, periodical attendance at meetings, investment of time in group projects. If they demand however— so fundamental is this organic law of totality— that the member plight his life to the group, they become therewith political. The French public law professor Haurion designated it as the hall-mark of a political unit that it embraced the individual entirely, whereas non-political groups embrace him only partially.
This is the Law of Totality in other words. It is thus a touchstone of a group for this purpose whether it demands an existential oath.
If a group extracts such an oath from members, the group is political. This Law of Totality, it is hardly necessary to add, is not at all derived from conscription for military service. Conscription exists only for a few centuries within a High Culture, whereas the Law of Totality describes the Culture itself when it is itself constituted as a political organism, and, during the period of concentration of politics in Culture States, it describes every individual State. Like all organic laws it is existential: if any inner force can challenge it, the organism is sick; if the challenge is attended with success, the organism is in severe crisis and may be annihilated. In any case, its unity will be temporarily in abeyance, with the possibility of partitioning by outer powers.
The Law of Sovereignty is the inner necessity of organic existence which places the decision in every important juncture with the organism, as opposed to allowing any group within to make the decision. An important juncture is any one which affects the organism as a whole, its steering in the world, its choice of allies and enemies, the decision of war and peace, its inner peace, its unchallenged inner right to decide controversies. If any of these can be called into question, it is a sign that the organism is sick. In the healthy organism, this sovereignty is absolutely undisputed, and may continue so for centuries. But a new age with new interests may raise contrasts which the rulers do not grasp; they may blunder, and find themselves on the defensive in a civil war. The challenge of the sovereignty of the organism was the first symptom of crisis. If the organism survives the crisis, the new rulers of the same organism will be the focus of the same sovereignty.
An important fact has been touched upon with this: it is not the rulers who are sovereign within the meaning of this law. Their powers in fact are derived from their symbolic-representative position. If a stratum represents and acts in the Spirit of the Age, revolution against it is impossible. An organism true to itself cannot be sick or in crisis.
The Law of Sovereignty does not mean that every aspect of group life within the organism is dominated at all times by the political, nor that everything is organized, or that a centralized system of government necessarily reaches out always and destroys every organization of whatever kind. The outlook developed here is purely factual, and the Law of Sovereignty describes all political organisms; it is a formulation in words of a quintessential characteristic of a political organism.
Totality of organization— the “Total State”— is a phase of political organizations at certain times and under certain conditions. Some States are neutral in religious matters, others promulgate an official religion. Some States during the 19th century were more or less neutral economically, others intervened in the economic life. In the 20th century all States intervene in economic affairs. Different terminology is used to describe this intervention in different States, and the degree of intervention depends on the necessity of the organism. Thus an organism with relatively abundant economic resources will intervene to a lesser degree than one which must make every particle of work and material count. But this does not alter the fact that all States intervene in economics in the 20th century.
The Law of Sovereignty is independent of the fact that in a given organism some internal force, say, religion or economics, may be stronger than the government. Such a thing can, and often does, exist. If this internal force is not yet strong enough to hinder the government, it is not yet political; if it is strong enough only to stalemate the government, but not yet strong enough to create war, then there is no political unit present. If no one can make a determination of enmity, or of war, there is no politics. This means that other units which preserve their political character can either ignore the sick unit in making their own combinations, or can attack it with good initial advantage.
The Law of Sovereignty is thus also existential. It describes a healthy organism, on its path to fulfillment. Where this law does not obtain, the organism is— vis-à-vis other organisms of the same kind— in abeyance, and if this condition persists, the political organism will disappear. The best example of a case where the Law of Sovereignty showed its existential character is that of 18th century anarchic Poland. The weakness and sickness of the organism led to its repeated partitioning.
The Pluralistic State
IN THE 19TH CENTURY Western Civilization, the comparative neutrality of the various States, and
therefore the apparent weakness of the States vis-à-vis internal economics units and their tactics, e.g.,
trade unions with their strikes, led the Liberals and intellectuals to announce, a bit prematurely as it turned
out, that the State was dead. Such a pluralistic State is of course not a political organism. If an external danger were to threaten such a State, it would either succumb at once, or else fight, in which case, it would become at once a political organism, and the “pluralism” would vanish. Such a pluralistic thing is not politically viable. There is always the possibility of an external danger, an internal natural catastrophe, such as a drought, famine or earthquake, which would force centralization, or the arising of a group with political instincts which aims at total power over other groups, and which does not have enough intellect to understand the refined theory of the “pluralistic” State. America, before 1914, was more or less such a thing, and from 1921 to 1933 it resumed its pluralism. This “pluralistic State” came to an end in 1933, when a group arose which seized for itself a totality of power.
Political theories, like “pluralistic State,” “dictatorship of proletariat,” “Rechtstaat,” “check and balance,” all have political significance, provided they attain to a certain vogue. This significance is dual: first, all such theories are imperative and polemical, and, by demanding a change in the internal form of the State, show by their very existence at least that the State against which they are complaining is sick; secondly, they are a technic for weakening the State further, by working up real contrasts and finally rising to the intensity of a friend-enemy dis-junction, i.e., Civil War.
The 19th century was the heyday of using theories as political technics. It will be as difficult for the 21st century to understand the idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as it is for us to understand how Rousseau’s theories could have been the focus of so much political passion. The frightful crisis that occurs in all High Cultures when they enter upon their last great phase, Civilization, the externalization of the Culture-soul, is also the birth-time of Rationalism. As Napoleon said, “Intellect runs about the pavements in France.” Intellect, the externalized, analyzing, dissecting faculty of the soul, applies itself also to politics. The results are a spate of theories, decline in the internal authority of all States, and the calling into question of the internal authority in all States.
The Law of Constancy of
Inter-Organismic Power
IT HAS BEEN SEEN that theories are a Technic for weakening the State by trying to work up a friend-enemy
dis-junction on the basis of the theory. This Technic is available not only to internal groups which
aspire to attain to true political significance, but also to other States. The other State need not even have
to carry out an intervention in order to reap the benefit of the activity of theorizing groups in another
State. We have seen that a State which fights a power not a real enemy is thereby fighting for a third power. This was but an instance of a law which is broader, and which is called the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power.
It may be thus formulated: In any age, the amount of power in a State-system is constant, and if one organic unit is diminished in power, another unit, or other units are increased in power by the same amount.
If a statesman, entrusted with the destiny of a State, moves with the sure consciousness of mastery which a feeling for organic laws confers upon him, he can never choose for the enemy of his State a power which his State cannot defeat, for such a power would not be a real enemy. He would know, even if only unconsciously, that the power which his own State would lose, in a war it could not win, would merely be transferred to some other power, either the one wrongly chosen as enemy, or a third power. One of the many phenomena which instance the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power is that of a given State being racked internally by groups using theories to work up internal contrasts. A point will be reached— short of the point of civil war, which of course dissolves the organism at least temporarily— in this process at which the external power of the organism will be diminished. The power lost passes thereby to another State or States.
The circumstances of the total situation determine which other power will be the beneficiary of this accretion of power. Even the particular theory which the agitating group is using plays often a certain role, for certain theories are owned by certain powers. France owned the theories of “democracy” and “equality” from 1789 to 1815. England owned the theory of “liberalism” in its many forms from the middle of the 19th century down to the First World War. Russia took over the theory of “dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1917.
II
In reality there is no such thing as a “political association” or a “political society”— there can only be a
political unit, a political organism. If a group has real political significance, as shown by its ability to
determine a real enmity, with the actuality or possibility of war, the political unity becomes decisive, and,
even though it started out as a free intellectual association, it has become a political unit, and has lost
entirely any “social” or “associative” character it may have had. This is no mere distinction of words, for
the political is its own thought category. To be in politics is not the same as to be in a society, since a
society involves no risk of life. Nor can a society become political by calling itself so. True political
thinking, occasioned by the presence of a political organism will not take place in it, unless it acquires
real political unity, and the only way it can do this is to be the focus of an enmity-opposition, with its
possibility of war. The fact that a group in an “election” votes as a unit does not confer upon it political
significance; usually the “election” itself has no political significance.
The Law of Constancy of
Intra-Organismic Power
IN THE MATTER OF elections which had a vogue of almost two centuries during the life of the Western
Civilization, both in Europe and in its spiritually dominated areas elsewhere, an important law of political
organisms is shown. In “democratic” conditions— the origin and historical significance of “democracy” are shown elsewhere— occur the inner-political phenomena known as “elections.” It was the theory of “democracy” arising about 1750 that the “absolute” power of the monarch, or the aristocracy, depending on local conditions, must be broken, and this power transferred to “the people.” This use of the word “people” shows again the necessarily polemical nature of all words used politically. “People” was merely a negative; it merely wished to deny that the dynasty, or else the aristocracy, belonged to “the people.” It was thus an attempt to deny the monarch or aristocracy political existence; in other words, this word implicitly defined them as the enemy, in the true political sense. It was the first time in Western history that an intellectualized theory became the focus of political happening. Wherever the monarch or aristocracy were stupid or incapable, wherever they looked backward instead of adapting themselves to the new century, they went down. Wherever they took over the theories themselves and interpreted them officially, they retained their power and their command.
The technique of transferring this “absolute” power to “the people” was to be through plebiscites, or “elections.” The theoretical proposal was to give the power to millions of human beings, to each his nth/millionth fraction of total existing political power. This was of course impossible in a way that even the intellectuals could see, so the compromise was “elections” through which each individual in the organism could “choose” a “representative” for himself. If the representative did something, by a satisfying fiction it was agreed that each little individual “represented” had done that himself. In a short time it became obvious to men interested in power, either for themselves personally, or to carry through their ideas, that if one worked previously to one of these “elections” to influence the minds of the voting populace, he would be “elected.” The greater one’s means of persuasion of the masses of voters, the more certain was his subsequent “election.” The means of persuasion were whatever one had at hand: rhetoric, money, newsprint. Since elections were large things, disposing of large amounts of power, only those who commanded corresponding means of persuasion could control them. Oratory came into its own, the Press stepped out as a lord of the land, the power of Money towered above all. A monarch could not be bought; what bribe could appeal to him? He could not be put under the usurers’ pressure— he could not be sued. But party politicians, living in times when values became increasingly money-values, could be bought. Thus democracy presented the picture of the populace under the compulsion of elections, the delegates under the compulsion of Money, and Money sitting in the seat of the monarch.
So the absolute power remained— as it must in any organism, for it is an existential law of every organism that: The power within an organism is constant, and if individuals, groups, or ideas within the organism are diminished in power, some other individuals, groups, or ideas are increased in power by that amount. This Law of Constancy of Intra-Organismic Power is existential, for if a diminution of power in one place within does not pass elsewhere within the organism, the organism is sickened, weaker, and may have lost its political existence as an independent unit. The history of South America from 1900 to 1950 is rich in examples of triumphant revolutions against regimes that stripped them of power— which then moved to the United States of North America, and as long as that condition continued, the country in which such a revolution had occurred was a colony of Yanqui imperialismo.
The Political Pluriverse
WE HAVE SEEN what the pluralistic State is. There is, however, another type of pluralism, one of fact
and not of theory. There is a pluriverse in fact, which is not merely an attempt to prove one philosophy or
to deride another. The world of politics is a pluriverse. Although politics has been defined as activity in
relation to power, and the inner nature, prerequisites, and invariable characteristic of politics have been set
forth, nevertheless the nature of power itself remains to be shown. Power is a relation of control between
two similar organisms. The degree of control is determined by the nature of the two organisms acting
reciprocally on one another. Power appears, in its dim beginnings, in the animal world, where the beasts
of prey exert something similar to power over their prospective victims. As something more than
transitory, something constituted, however, it begins with man. Animals can be classified spiritually— and there is no point in any other classification, such as the materialistic Linnean one— into two great groups, herbivores and beasts of prey. If the materialistic thinkers had ever looked at it so, they would surely have put man down as a beast of prey. And they would have been correct for the animal part of him. This animal part is in constant tension with the spiritual part, the specifically human soul which sees symbolism in things and gives the symbol primacy over the mere phenomenon. For this is in very truth the deepest depth of all philosophizing whatever. Where does the question of a conflict between “appearance” and “reality” ever come from in the first place? All great philosophy in High Cultures, and there is none without High Cultures, has been saturated with the idea of establishing the true relationship between appearance and reality, and this was in obedience to an instinct which embodies the essence of man: his human soul tells him that Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
The will-to-power of the beasts of prey is limited and practical; it is fierce but unspiritual. Man carries within him this same will-to-power, but his soul infuses into it a purely spiritual intensity that raises its demands and its performances incomparably above the level of the beast. To the beast his will-to-power comes into play only in killing. Man, however, seeks not to kill, but to control. To control he will kill, but as Clausewitz correctly said, conquerors prefer submission and peace, it is the victim who makes the war. A man with a strong will-to-power wants control, not war as an end in itself.
But a display of will-power by one man calls forth opposition elsewhere. Similarly with super personal organisms— they do not and cannot exist alone, since, in their political aspect they are units of opposition. Each one exists as a unit-with-the-power-to-choose-and-fight-enemies. The ability to create a friend-enemy dis-junction is the essence of the political.
But this ability necessitates opponents of similar rank. Hence it is quite total political stupidity to speak of a world with only one State, one Parliament, one government or however they put it. One could forgive Tennyson, but one can only say that if a politician talks about a world with “one State,” “one Parliament,” or “one government,” he is the perfect type of the intellectual ass, and should be anywhere except in a position to distort the destiny of a State and bring misery to the individuals in it. He is an ass, even though he knows better, for— and this will sound self-evident to readers of 1980 and after— there is absolutely no necessity for a politician to deal in lies exclusively, as the Liberal school, the class-warriors, and the distorters believe. Men who are fighting against the Future perhaps have good reason to practice deception constantly, to throw clouds of theories over their actions, to say peace when they mean war, and war when they mean peace, and to keep elaborate classifications of “secret,” “confidential” and the like.
The only secrecy that needs to exist in politics is that created by limitations of understanding on the part of individuals— and absolutely nothing can be done about this type of secrecy. For instance, the facts about the nature of politics and power which have been set down here will remain secret from the intellectuals and rationalists forever, even though they read this.
And similarly with lies: quite obviously the statesman who is the embodiment of the Spirit of the Age has no need of fundamental lies. He cannot fear the truth, since his actions are those of organic necessity, against which no force within the organism can prevail. Equally obviously he who sets out to strangle the Future, like Metternich and the Fürstenbund, or the Liberals, democrats, party-leaders of whatever nature, culture-distorters, and intellectuals of the period 1900-1975 have daily, pressing need of lies, ever bigger and better lies. They like to call this Macchiavellism, and to accuse others of it. But Macchiavelli was certainly not a “Macchiavellian,” or he would not have written his factual, truthful book. Instead he would have written a book about how good human nature is in general, and how extraordinarily good in particular is the nature of princes. Where Macchiavelli writes of deception he is thinking of deceiving the enemy— Liberals and distorters regard deception as the norm of conduct toward the populations whose destiny is in their hands, and over whose lives they hold the power of disposition.
The classic example in this realm is and will always remain the “election” in America in the Fall of 1940. There were two candidates, representing the same interests, and the populace was offered its “choice” between them. The issue which the populace would thereby “decide” was whether or not America would intervene in the Second World War. Both candidates said publicly in totally unequivocal language that they would not involve America in the War. Yet both of them were committed to the interests which made them candidates to involve America in the war as soon as possible. Both candidates were of course successful, for in late democratic conditions, the parties become trusts and no longer compete, since competition would injure them both. After the “election,” the two successful candidates carried out their real commitment, took America to war, and sent to their deaths the very men whose lives they had vowed to spare from death in the Second World War, which did not affect American interests. One of the candidates explained after the “election” that his non-intervention promise to the populace was mere “campaign oratory.”
In such a case, there is no doubt whatever that Macchiavelli would have counseled the rulers of America to have both candidates declare for intervention. But party-politicians deal in lies from inner compulsion, for their activity itself is an organic lie.
League of Nations
THE FACT that a world with one State or one government was an organic impossibility was well shown
by two attempts on the part of what might be called the Holy Alliance of the 20th century to institute such
a condition. After each of the first two World Wars the extra-European Holy Alliance against Europe
established a “League of Nations.” The political organisms however remained organic, and thus subject to the Law of Sovereignty. If a political unit exists it is sovereign; the member units of these two “leagues of nations” continued to exist politically and thus were sovereign. Incidentally the organic Law of Sovereignty is not the “principle of sovereignty of nations” of Grotius and Pufendorff; that was a legal concept and thus subject to juristic quibbling, whereas the organic Law of Sovereignty describes all political units whatever since it belongs to their very existence.
Thus the dilemma was that the “leagues of nations” had no sovereignty— again I am speaking of factual, organic sovereignty, not legal sovereignty— and hence were not political units. There is no political unit without organic sovereignty; there is no organic sovereignty without a political unit.
What, then, were these two “leagues of nations”? They had two aspects, the ethical and the practical-political.
In terms of practical politics, they were polemical realities. Whatever power controlled them could thus speak for all nations, and thus any power opposing it was hors-la-loi, outside the comity of nations, not even human, for the league was humanity. They rapidly of course, needless to say, passed into the control of certain member-States, according to the Law of Sovereignty— where there is no sovereignty there is no independent political unit, and sovereignty must therefore reside elsewhere. And, in fact, the first league of nations, formed after the First World War, passed into the control of England. The second league of nations, formed in a time— after the Second World War— when politics had entered upon a more absolute stage, was seized by America.
This was foreseeable from the fact that Russia had allowed the geographical site of it to be established in America. This was not merely to keep out the undesirable swarms of ideologues, parasites, and holiday-makers, such as necessarily accompany every “league of nations,” and to keep out the spies who populate in such a condition, but it actually showed a limited and secondary interest in the thing.
In the past, certain powers have owned certain theories. Conversely, there has never been an important theory that did not have practical, political ownership. A theory without a political unit to use it to practical purpose is not important; if the protagonists of a theory have sufficient passion and non theoretical political skill to work up intense feeling with their theory, they will possibly attain power with such a weapon. If they reach a point just short of power, an already existing political unit will appropriate the theory for practical purposes. Example: Marxism, taken over in 1918 by Bolshevik Russia for political use against Europe, when its protagonists in Germany showed themselves politically stillborn.
The “league of nations” theory was, in fact, owned by America. Whoever spread the idea— even England, which seized the first “league”— was increasing the power of America, whether he knew it or not.
It was inevitable that politicians free of ideology, like the Kremlin Mongols, would see this. Since they understood how to use theories, it was obvious they would allow no political unit to hamstring them with its theory. Thus perished the second and last “league of nations.”
There was also an ethical aspect to these leagues. They were another example of the deception that was still thought in the first half of the 20th century to be a necessity of political conduct. They were actually nothing but polemical attempts to deny Europe. The formation of Europe as a political unit was in the Spirit of the Age. Whoever agitated anything else was merely negating this idea. This explains the fact that though the two “leagues of nations” accomplished nothing else as a political fact, nevertheless they prevented— Europe. This is quite independent of whether all people participating were conscious of this. However, it is the organic task of the politician to be conscious of political reality and to understand and assess rightly the possibilities of the time. It is of course now known that many persons who participated in these world-frauds were quite conscious of the realities.
From what has been said about the nature of political organisms the relation of the statesman to his political organism is obvious: just as he calls on his populace to die, he cannot refuse if necessary to give his own life. To his political unit he owes all his physical energies and all his talent and genius. For him to be careless in researching a situation— and above all— for him to do that which he knows is contrary to the furtherance of the life of the organism is to forfeit his right to live. He can consider himself lucky indeed if he is able to die of a heart attack, brain concussion, blood clot or simply old age.
When the extra-European forces gradually increased their power to such an extent that the independent existence of the West became problematical— this was evident from 1920 onward, and was transparent from 1933— it was the collective duty to their States and to the Western Civilization for all statesmen in Europe to endeavor to save their respective States and Western States collectively from political annihilation by extra-European forces. Thus any statesman in a European State who sabotaged the general West-European understanding and final settlement that was sought by the custodians of the spirit of the Western Civilization was a strangler and distorter of the destiny of his own country and of that of the Western Civilization.
The ethics thus formulated is an ethics of fact. It is organic, political, factual and nothing else.
Its sole imperative is an organic-political one. It is distinguished from religious ethics in that it has no theological sanction. It is distinguished from all ethical systems whatever in that it only sees one relationship— that of the individual to the political unit. Nor does it have a sanction in the punitive sense. The organic relationship between the political unit and the statesman itself sets the ethical imperative. If the statesman violates it by injuring instead of furthering the life of the organism, the sanction is a matter for Destiny, the inner force of organisms. By doing so he forfeits his right to live, but often he is fortunate enough to escape with his life. The existential embrace of the lives of the individuals in it which has been shown to be an essential characteristic of a political unit makes no exception in favor of politicians. At its highest tension, this organic imperative causes a statesman in its service to tie his own life to the success of his own idea for the organism. Bismarck and Friedrich der Grosse also were determined to take their lives in the event of failure.
The Inner Aspect of
the Law of Sovereignty
THE LAW OF SOVEREIGNTY describes characteristics of all political units whatever. It places the
decision in every matter having political significance with the organism. Depending on circumstances
any one, or even more, internal issues may become important politically, i.e., may begin to assume the
form of a political unit and determine a friend-enemy dis-junction. The government of the organism will
always intervene at this point if its understanding and will are unimpaired. Charles I of England allowed
this critical juncture to pass, by allowing his first Parliament to send Montague to the tower for preaching
the divine right of kings. From then on the situation deteriorated steadily, and a correspondingly
increasing amount of force was necessary to attempt to change the direction events were moving. The
actual significance of the struggle was seen from the very beginning by the contemporary political thinker
Thomas Hobbes, who wrote against the State-destroying nature of the Parliamentary position. He was
also sensitive enough to the situation to know when things had reached the stage of personal insecurity,
and left England in 1640. During these years of internal enmity, England did not exist as a political unit,
it was ignored in European power-combinations, and it can thank the total European situation that it was
not partitioned.The Parliament considered itself the government, the monarchists considered themselves the government. A political outlook naturally does not concern itself with the question of which was “right.” Such a question has no political meaning. It has only a legal meaning, and law is a reflex of politics. Politics is concerned with assessing facts and acting upon them; law comes afterward and has the function of consolidating a given political fact-complex. Law formulates the dis-junction legal-illegal according to political dictate. If there is no political unit to prescribe the law, there can be no law. Thus in time of Civil War there is no law— there are two laws. If the result of the War is a reconstitution of the former people and territory again as a political unit, it will always turn out that the victor was the one who was legally right all the time, and the defeated was legally wrong. This invariable fact shows the nature of law.
Nevertheless, Parliament and King stood opposed, each claiming to be England. Politically, they were both wrong, for there was no England. In political language, two Englands equal no England. Each of the two groups was a political unit, and had become such by determining an enemy. Each of them was conducting itself as a government and each availed itself of the organic political right— also, but afterward a legal right— to determine the inner enemy. An organic characteristic of all political units whatever— that they determine the inner enemy when they feel it necessary— is the internal corollary of the Law of Sovereignty. Thus Cavaliers in Parliamentary territory were the enemy of the government, and their existence was that of outlaws. Correspondingly with adherents of Parliament in Royal territory. It must not be supposed because of the example used of a Civil War, that such determination of the inner enemy only occurs then. On the contrary, if Charles I had declared his opponents to be inner enemies from the very beginning, and had treated them as such, there had been no Civil War. To do this however, he lacked the vigor and the understanding. He should have consulted Hobbes, who understood these things. But Charles was not a reading man, and did not know Hobbes’s treatises on Human Nature and De Corpore Politico.
Every political unit in history has exercised in need, and sometimes not in need, its organic power to determine the inner enemy. If it does it soon and proceeds thoroughly, the danger is past. If it procrastinates and takes half-measures, it ceases to be a political unit.
If it exercises this power when there is no need, it is merely persecuting its own population, and is sowing seeds of hatred that will one day bear surprising fruit. The organic ethic of the relation of the statesman to his political unit applies also to conduct of this type. The statesman has no organic right to dispose wantonly of the lives of the populace. To send subjects to their death in a war against a power not a real enemy, a war which thus by its very nature must be unsuccessful, or to declare a group as an inner enemy when it does not contain the real possibility of constituting itself as a true political unit, is vicious, non-political conduct in both cases. Such a man exposes himself to the organic sanction that Destiny often imposes in such cases.
This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination. It may be economic pressure— such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A “blacklist” or boycott may destroy the group or individual.
It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need. Thus the transatlantic part of the anti-Europe coalition in the Second World War carried out, quite independently of necessity, since there was no real inner enemy as a matter of fact, extensive inner persecutions directed against groups and strata of its population. It does not affect the political nature of this activity that it was done by culture-distorting elements, for the organic laws set out here describe all political units whatever, even if they fall into the hands of political and cultural outsiders.
II
This inward application of the Law of Sovereignty is of course valid for political units in all the High
Cultures. Our information on it in the Classical Culture is sufficient to show its development there. The
best-known example is that of the Resolution of Demophantos in the year 410 B.C. which declared of
every person who sought to destroy Athenian democracy that he was “an enemy of the Athenians.” In the
same period the Ephors of Sparta declared war on all Helots found living within the territory of Sparta. In
our own Culture, the activities of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada are instructive, and above all the
famous document by which Phillip II condemned the entire population of the Netherlands to death as
heretics represents about the ultimate development of which this organic right is capable. Calvin’s
theocracy in Geneva was outdone by Phillip only quantitatively.In old Roman public law the undesirable was declared solemnly to be “hostis,” which was the word describing the public enemy. The Imperial proscriptions, regardless of their economic motive, were an application of the same organic function. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Acht und Bann were directed against inner dangerous or unwanted elements. They were declared Friedlos, and placed outside all protection. Anyone aiding such a person fell thereby into the same category. The Jacobins and the Comité de salut public slew their thousands of victims, both with and without declaration of enmity.
In early democratic conditions, the weakening of the State vis-à-vis internal groups would have made it more difficult to invoke this right, but correspondingly, since all Western States were in more or less the same internal condition, the necessity for its invocation was not often present. In any case the triumph of theories of equality and freedom in the realm of political vocabulary made it inexpedient to invoke the right in the old open, declared, legalistic way.
The early democracy was, in the Western Civilization, from about 1800 to 1850. During this period internal sovereignty as exemplified by determination of the internal enemy was more refined, intellectualized, concealed. Examples: The American Alien and Sedition Laws, the Austrian measures against democrats 1815-1848. Bismarck’s laws against class-warriors. Of course in war the right was as forcefully exercised as ever, but was usually legally formless: the Yankees in the American War of Secession, 1861-1865; French Communards, 1871.
With the sudden transition to non-democratic conditions marked by the First World War, began the Age of Wars of Annihilation. It could also be called the Age of Absolute Politics. The 19th century was the Age of Economics— not that economics was ever prior in a real sense in the world of action, but economics supplied much of the motivation of politics, as shown by phenomena like the Opium War, the American War of Secession, the Boer War. Economics wants a weak State, and in the Age of Economics, the States were on the defensive, but the new Zeitgeist changed the entire meaning of History and content of action. Because of the fact that the Zeitgeist of the 20th century did not attain to external triumph in all Europe, many supposed that the Age of Economics was not only continuing but was attaining to new victorious heights.
That this was not the case was shown by the war which greeted the opening of the century. The war in question was between the Boer State, a colony of the Western Civilization, and England. The War was not against savages, or aborigines of spoil lands and thus does not come into the same classification as the Australian war against the autochthonous tribes of Tasmania, when the victims were hunted down like rabbits to total extermination. We have seen that the armed contests between Western Culture-States were not true wars, but were agonal in nature. The turning point to Civilization was marked by Napoleon, the herald of absolute war and politics, but this tradition continued so strong that in the French War against Prussia, 1870-1871, victorious Prussia still did not think of annihilating the totally defeated foe, nor of subjecting it to an endless military occupation, but contented itself with re-incorporating two provinces and imposing an indemnity which was paid off in a few years.
England had also so conducted itself in intra-Cultural armed contests. And yet in 1900, it carried the war against the Boers to complete annihilation. This was in true 20th century style, and note that it was England, the organism which had brought forth the idea of the 19th century and was not destined to produce the idea of the 20th century, which thus acted completely within the spirit of the new age. So strong is the Spirit of the Age— it compels inner submission even though one use the formula of the past and believe that he is leading a moribund idea to new life.
The Boer War was mentioned because it marked a turning point also in the matter of the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty. In this War, the English armies initiated the 20th century method of designating and handling the inner enemy. It is nonetheless an historical epoch in this matter that no real political need existed for what occurred, for we are interested in what did occur, and not in re-writing history. In this War, large numbers of civilian Boers, men, women and children, came into the custody of the English armies. They were taken into custody on the theory that they were a danger to the internal security of the territory controlled by the Empire, that thus they were inner enemies. The numbers involved were considerable, too great for the systems of prisons and jails there existing. The solution adopted was to place them into detention camps, hastily constructed ad hoc. These were called “concentration camps,” and this word was to have a destiny of its own.
After the First World War, the Age of Absolute Politics showed its manifestations everywhere, and one way it did it was to introduce this “concentration camp” system into every country in the Western Civilization. The more dangerous its external situation, the greater was the necessity of firm inner control, unbroken and unbreakable inner peace, and thus those countries with the most political concern introduced large numbers of persons they declared inner enemies, or in any case treated as inner enemies, into prison camps. But since the word was connected with politics, it acquired polemical significance, and was used by some States as a method of attacking the “morality” of other States. And yet these concentration camps were similar in all countries, just as prisons are. It is not material that extra European forces imprisoned Europeans in the camps they set up in England, or that Europe imprisoned Slavs, Jews and Bolsheviks in the camps it set up in Europe; the camps were essentially the same from the political standpoint.
They both illustrate the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty as it develops in the 20th century. The Age of Absolute Politics has a full century more in its course, and thus the number of prison camps and the number of inmates will increase and not decrease.
It remains to say a word on the future development of internal sovereignty. Since the spirit of these times and the next is no longer that of economics, but that of absolute politics, sly and veiled methods of acting against inner individuals and groups will fall into disuse. In their place will appear once more open and legally formulated inner enemy-declarations. Even economically motivated determinations will be quite openly pursued with political means.
Political Organisms and War
A POLITICAL UNIT has the jus belli, the organic right to make war on the enemy it has determined. Not
moral right here— this organic right is a thing independent of morality, even though also the strictest
Scholastic philosophers gave to political units the purely moral right to wage war. But it is in a purely
political way that the word is used here: the right to make war is a part of the habitus of the organism.
The existence as a political unit, the determination of an enemy, the making of war, the maintenance of
the inner peace, the declaration of the inner enemy, the power of life and death over the life of all
subjects— these are merely different facets of politico-organic existence. They cannot be separated; they
are an indivisible whole; insofar as they can be defined at all, they can only be so in terms of each other.In the exercise of its power to make war, a State disposes of the lives of its own subjects and of those of the enemy. This bloodshed is not a life-requirement of a State, but occurs merely as a part of the process of acquiring power. The State directly seeking power is not the one that brings about bloodshed and war. No politician whatever would make war against another unit if he thought it would submit to incorporation without a fight. Thus war is always the result of resistance, and not of political dynamism. War is not normative; it is existential only. In the entire panorama of the history of the High Cultures, I doubt that there has been a case where the ruling stratum of a political unit ever decided that, first of all, it wanted war, and then cast about for someone upon whom to make war. It would not be political.
Nor is the mere power over life and death generally, jus vitae ac necis, the hall-mark of a political organism. Many States in history recognized this power to be in family units. Old Rome gave it to the paterfamilias. Some States have allowed the master power over the life of the slave. Most states have permitted the victim of an imputation of dishonor to contest for the life of his vilifier. Many States have recognized the right of blood-revenge among clans— although this reaches the very frontier in this matter, and is seldom found, and then only in peace.
It is thus quite conclusive that politics, as such, seeks no monopoly of taking life. Politics at its highest potential, war, takes life only because resistance requires it. Politics is activity in relation to power, and there is only one way organic instinct behaves toward power: it seeks more. Metaphysically this is the relation between the soul of man and the soul of the High Culture on the one hand, and the habitus of the beast of prey on the other hand. Although it permits subjects in certain cases, which it determines, in accordance with the Law of Sovereignty, to take life, the State never permits subjects to make war. If a group of subjects assume this power, a new State has arisen. If the right of blood-revenge turns into clan warfare, the State must intervene, for its existence is involved. That is why, in all States engaged in serious politics, the right of blood-revenge is abrogated.
The right to make war and in the process to dispose of life is purely political. No Church could possibly ask its members to die for the Church— this is quite different from insisting that martyrdom is preferable to apostacy— unless it is becoming a political unit. In critical times, many Churches, such as Abu Bekr’s Islam, have become States, but then they are no longer Churches, and they are ruled by the political way of thinking and its basic inner, organic demand for more power, and no longer by the religious imperative of salvation and conversion.
It would be cruel and insane to ask men to die in order that the remainder would have an unimpaired, or higher standard of economic life. When war is motivated by an economic idea, the economics vanishes into the war-political situation; i.e., the test of success is the political one, the method of waging it is not reviewed as to its cost, the means used always are military-political, the leadership is always political, and would be so even if exclusively economists were used as the war leaders. Their thinking would indeed be curious, but it would not be economic. Politics and economics are two different directions of human thinking and are hostile to one another. For this reason no true politician and no true soldier would ever with full consciousness carry on or fight a war for an exclusively economic motive, no matter what grand opportunities it offered for personal distinction. Economically motivated wars like the American War of Secession, 1861-1865, the English Opium War, the Boer War were of necessity presented to the participants under an untruthful propaganda.
Economics lacks the strength in itself— i.e., “pure” economics— to rouse men to the level of action where they will risk their lives. This is because economics presupposes life, and merely seeks ways of securing, nourishing, perpetuating the life. It simply does not make sense to buy life with death— when death becomes a possibility, we are no longer in the sphere of economics. If economics wants a certain war, it can only bring it about by political means, and then also— we are no longer in the sphere of economics.
Morality has often been put forward as the motivation of war, and many wars have been waged in the name of morality. This however does not make sense— that is not according to any Western system of morality— for States are not within the purview of morality, which is valid only for individuals. Furthermore the materialistic morality of the 19th century denounced war as murder. Therefore when protagonists of this type of morality— and they continue to exist and to do so— demand a war to stop war, it is an obvious fraud. The most any one man can do about stopping murder is to refrain from murders himself, but these morality-warriors have not done that.
A morality-war is impossible not only from the moral side, but from the war-political side. War is not a norm— one cannot fight against it. War is an existential dis-junction, not a system or an institution. There is no rational aim, program, for economic, moral, esthetic or other change, no ever-so-correct norm that would justify one in killing. To adopt war and politics is in fact to abandon the other things. One can retain non-political ideas privately, but if they become public they vanish into the political. The result is politics dressed in moral clothing.
Another fact emerges about politics mixed with morality. There are, first, two possible mixtures: that of the Cromwell-Torquemada type on the one hand, in which also the politician believes that he is actualizing morality by his policies, and the Lincoln-Roosevelt type, in which the morality is purely a deception. In the first case, in proportion as the politician thinks morally, his politics is faulty. Thus Cromwell refused in 1653 a Spanish Alliance which would have been highly advantageous to England because he abhorred the religion of Spain. His conduct was of course nonetheless politics, for he made with France the same alliance he refused with Spain and received considerably less from it than Spain had offered. In the second case, where it is not taken seriously, as in the case of Roosevelt, it is not morality at all and is repulsive to honor. Thus morality in politics makes bad politics if taken seriously, and if used cynically, it dishonors him who uses it.
The question may be asked why moral vocabulary is imported into politics in this Age of Absolute Politics. The answer is that it is done quite deliberately and politically. It is elementary that politics does not include within the idea enemy any subsidiary content of malice or hatred. Hatred is private; it occurs between anti-pathetical persons out of their own private hostility. Even though this terminology is different from that of Hegel, the idea is identical. He spoke of the hatred of the public enemy as being undifferentiated and totally free from personality. This is no longer hatred in the primary meaning of that word. War is between States, and when the enemy State is overcome what overcome means is a reflex of the Age, and in an Age of Absolute Politics means total incorporation of the other State— there can be no more war. Enmity ceases, and if there ever was any animosity of any kind it must cease now, since it was directed, if it was political, against the enemy State. That State is gone.
But— if the population of a State has been given exclusively propaganda to the effect that the war was not political, but for moral, humanitarian, legal, scientific and other reasons, this population will regard the end of the war as the beginning of unlimited opportunities of oppressing the population of the former enemy State. Moral propaganda thus stands forth in its nakedness— in the 20th century it is a means of fighting a war after the war, a war not this time against a State with weapons in its hands, but against the survivors of the defeat. Herein is the true significance of a phenomenon that mystified many persons at that time— I refer to the “concentration camp” propaganda against Europe, which was developed to its full height after the Second World War. This propaganda was solely for the purpose of a war after the war, thus not a true war, since there was no opposing unit, but an attempt to rouse extra-European populations and extra-European armies of occupation to ever-renewed ferocity and personal hatred against a defenseless European population.
Thus a moral “war to end war” develops in actuality into an endless war. A war for humanitarian purposes develops into a war to exterminate by starvation the population of the former State. A war against concentration camps results in bigger and more numerous concentration camps. This must be so in an Age of Absolute Politics, for obviously moral reasons for a war are not necessary in such an age. Propaganda cannot bring more men on to the battlefield than can the Spirit of the Age. Therefore he who is using the vocabulary of morality wishes to import into the struggle a viciousness that the spirit of politics alone cannot develop. Proudhon observed: “Whoever says humanity wishes to deceive.”
Only politics shows the real meaning of war. Economics, esthetics, law and the other forms of thought cannot supply its meaning, for war is politics at its highest intensity. The political meaning of a war is that it is waged against a real enemy. To be justified politically, the war must be an affirmation of the political organism or for the saving of the organism. To expend human life in any other war is distortion of the destiny of the State and treacherous dishonorable killing of the soldiers and civilians who die in it. The decision as to who is the enemy must be made by statesmen who embody the national idea, and if it is not, the result is political distortion. In the language of politics a just war is only that one waged against a real enemy.
It is immature thinking to suggest that military men should decide in such matters. It is possible for a politician to be also a soldier, but a soldier does not become ipso facto a politician. In Rome all statesmen generally speaking were ex-commanders, but they had gone into the field as part of their political careers. Caesar embarked late in life upon the military career, but how many professional soldiers could have gone into politics with corresponding attainment? In matters of politics, soldiers are circumstanced the same as the populace in general.
The Law of Political Plenum
THE ESSENTIALITY OF WAR to organic political existence is shown by the fact that a State cannot give up
its jus belli without thereby giving up political existence. There have been in the history of the High
Cultures very few examples of a political unit abandoning, either openly and consciously, or simply
through submission, the organic right to make war. And in no case has a power that was important, or
even considered itself to be important, renounced this right.The famous Kellog Pact— what 21st century historians will designate as the high point of ideology politics— did not even try to obligate its signatories to renounce war. The pact merely “condemns” war. The French version was “condamner,” the German “verurteilen.” Naturally in an age when many politicians were masquerading as clerics, most anyone was willing to “condemn” war. But the leading clerical powers made reservations to their condemnation. Thus England said that it could not condemn war in the case of its national honor, self-defense, implementation of the League of Nations or of neutrality treaties, or of the Locarno treaty, the welfare of spheres of interest like Egypt, Palestine and so on. France made similar exceptions, as did Poland. It was soon observed by political thinkers that the pact did not forbid, but sanctioned war, for the exceptions covered all possible cases. Thenceforward wars were to be legally formulated. Other political thinkers compared it to a New Year’s resolution.
Organic realities were thus obeyed by this singular Kellog Pact, even though it purported to set them aside. Instead of law abolishing politics, politics used law, as usual, to prop up a certain political state of affairs.
The Pact also spoke only of war “as an instrument of national policy.” As an instrument of some other idea however, nothing was said, not even of international policy. Thus the most vicious wars were not covered by the treaty. A war for an international policy, for “humanity,” for “morality” and the like is the worst of all possible wars, for it dehumanizes the opponent, makes him into a personal enemy, sanctions any type of cruelty against him, and removes all restraints of honor from the person conducting such a war.
Nor is it possible to give up political existence entirely. Only a unit may disappear. The Organic Law of Political Plenum appears. If a given State should become tired through old age, and wished no longer to carry on war or politics, it could, if it desired, announce its idea to the world of States. It could say that it had renounced enmity and embraced all States as its friends, that it would make no more war and wanted only peace. Such conduct, no matter how logical it would be to effectuate such a wish, would not have that result. Logic does not obtain in politics. A State would by such conduct create a political vacuum, and other States not tired of war and politics would immediately abolish this vacuum and bring the area and population of the abdicating State into its own realm. Such a plenary action might be open and undisguised, or it might be veiled. In any case an abdicating power moves at once into a larger realm. A political vacuum is an impossibility in a system of States. This Law of Political Plenum describes actual political situations, and there need be no announcement of abdication by the disappearing State. If such a State merely by reason of the general development of the larger situation sinks into the place where it cannot wage war, i.e., engage in politics, the Law of Political Plenum is at once operative. It is not necessary for the incorporation of the disappearing State into the larger State to be accompanied by the marching in of troops. This is of course the 20th century method of doing it, for this is the Age of Absolute Politics, and any type of disguise for political action is both unnecessary and inappropriate. It occurs automatically with the lowering of political potential in the disappearing State.
Thus, for example, the American seizure of half Europe after the Second World War was a mixture of military and crypto-political means. The seizure of the other half of Europe by Russia was more open, but still loaded with 19th century talk of “justification,” “non-interference,” “security,” “military necessity,” and so forth. In both cases the fiction of independence of the former political units of Europe was maintained.
This dividing of the Western Civilization between the two extra-European forces occurred as an instance of the Law of Political Plenum. European States were individually unable to wage war after 1945 because of the enormous requirements in industrial establishment and man-power. These existed only in Russia and America. Europe collectively thus became a political vacuum, because of the individual political incapacity of the States of the Western Civilization.
Inability to wage war is abdication in fact of political existence, whether the abdicating State knows this or not. Thus, apart from all fiction, the frontiers which were maintained for a while in Europe after the Second World War were not power-frontiers, but administrative lines of demarcation. Thus America and Russia did not take these frontiers seriously each within its own half of Europe. The only frontier Russia and America took seriously was the one remaining power-frontier in Europe, that between them. The world of actual politics at any one time is described by powers capable of waging war.
Only political independence can be given up, not political existence. Politics still is present, with its existential embrace of the lives of the whole population. We stand before the Organic Law of Protection and Obedience.
The Law of Protection and Obedience
THE PURPOSE for which the great political thinker Hobbes wrote his Leviathan was to show the world
once more the “Mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience,” demanded alike by human nature
and divine law. The Roman formula was protego ergo obligo. To him who supplies protection also goes
obedience. It will go either voluntarily, as the result of persuasion, or as the result of force. Once more,
there is here no moral content in this formula. It may have also a moral aspect, but nothing said about it
here relates to any such aspect, or to any other aspect than the purely political. A 20th century outlook on
politics is necessarily purely factual, and neither approves nor disapproves of political realities. Approval
and disapproval on a moral basis is outside politics. Approval and disapproval on the basis of Culture feelings,
taste and instinct is, however, the driving-force of politics. But in examining realities as a
prerequisite to acting upon the realities, we put aside all pre-conceptions whatever.Thus— Protection and Obedience. This organic law is again a description of an existential reality. Without the relationship of protection in one place and obedience in another, there is no politics. Every political organism exhibits it, and the extent of protection and obedience describes the territorial frontiers of the organism. Wherever a power is under the protection of another power, the two are one for external political purposes. Whatever apparent anomalies have existed disappear as soon as political tension in the area in question heightens. Looking at the organism inwardly, the amount of protection and the amount of obedience, and the quality of these things, describes the inner strength of the unit. A high degree of protection and a high degree of obedience constitute an integrated organism that can stand the test of politics. Such an organism can often prevail against great odds. A low degree of the protection obedience relationship describes a unit that is inwardly weak. It cannot stand a real hard struggle, and will often succumb in a test even to an organism with fewer material means and numbers.
Thus when in the 20th century an organism dare not conscript a population within its area, such an area is one of inner weakness; and cannot be counted part of the political body. Such a situation can only continue as long as such an area is not the focus of political tension. The law also describes the geographical extent of a political unit. Where protection and obedience stop, there are the actual frontiers.
Once more the words protection and obedience have also been used with an entire absence of any moral content. Thus “protection” can mean unlimited terror by military means, and “obedience” may be a reflection of the alternative of the concentration camp. The condition of occupied Europe under extra European armies is protection within the meaning of this organic law. Even though these extra-European armies are starving and torturing the populace, nevertheless they are protecting that part of Europe from incorporation by another political unit. America protects its half from Russia and Russia protects its half from America. Thus the word is neutral vis-à-vis the dis-junction of altruism-egoism. Protection is not kindliness, it is acquisition of power. Obedience is not gratitude, it is political submission from whatever motive.
Where the protecting force is within a Culture and the area and populace protected also belong to the Culture, the obedience will be full, natural and voluntary, on the part of the Culture-bearing stratum at least when the issue is the existence of the Culture.
This Law describes Western feudalism, for instance. Feudalism is the strongest political system that can arise. It is integrated inwardly and outwardly. It is the system where political activity is within a self evident cadre of forms. It is an Internationale in the only true sense of the word; it is a phenomenon of equal validity in the whole Culture. In our case, it was the form and vessel of all Western happenings for 300 years. The basic formulation of the feudal Idea is nothing but Protection and Obedience.
Protectorates such as Western international law recognizes are examples of the law. It also describes any federal units that arise. The central government is the only political one, for it protects and thus receives political obedience.
The existential nature of the Law is also shown by the fact that if a State is unable to protect an area and population within its system, that area and population will pass into the system of another State that can protect and has the will to protect. The passing may be by revolt, it may be by war. It may be by negotiation, particularly if the protecting State allows a quasi-government to exist in the protected area, which can make a private understanding with other powers to deliver to them the population and territory. This shows incidentally the danger of carrying fictions too far in politics. To boast too loudly that vassals are not vassals may be to transfer them to another allegiance. Similarly to describe one’s fortresses as impregnable is dangerous; this will never convince a resolute State of equal rank, but may convince their owner.
A more inclusive way of saying this is that in an Age of Absolute Politics political appearances should correspond to political reality. In the century of economico-moral cant, mastery consisted in maintaining an elaborate pretense of freedom, and simultaneously therewith a rigid condition of servitude. This sort of thing becomes both impracticable and disgusting in this Age which will embrace the two next centuries. Impracticable because the danger constantly exists of deceiving only one’s self, and not the political enemy. Disgusting because the more robust forces of this Age scorn sly deceits and veiled formula for the fact of political subordination.
In a country where the cant of morality exercises a monopoly over political vocabulary, politicians cannot speak openly even to one another. The propaganda terror necessary to maintain such an absurd type of political terminology in contradiction to facts ends by weakening from within governments in such countries. Anyone making a purely factual remark becomes suspect, and some of the best brains have found their way thus into the concentration camps.
Internationale
IT HAS BEEN SEEN that the world of politics is a pluriverse. This organic fact has within it fatal
consequences for the league of nations type of ideologist, and upon it his schemes founder. Neither of the
two “leagues of nations” which were established by extra-European forces after the first two World Wars
were international organizations, but merely interstate organizations. The English language does not
permit of the clarity of the distinction with the same self-evidence as the German language. German
“zwischenstaatlich” means occurring between States, as self-contained impenetrable units; “international”
in German means occurring inside of both States, and passing through the State frontiers in every sense.
Thus Macedonian terrorism in the 19th and 20th centuries was truly international, but it was not interstate.
If the populations of the various States of the world were represented in a “league of nations” quite
independently of their various States, and if the States had no standing in it whatever, it could then
possibly be called an international organization. When the sole membership is of States, then the
organization is merely “zwischenstaatlich,” or in English, “interstate." The importance of the distinction is that an interstate organization presupposes States. If they are true States and not States merely in name, they are described by the laws of Sovereignty and Totality. And in truth in both leagues at least some of the members were true States in this sense. In the first league, there were at various times five, six or seven such States. In the second league there were only two. But as long as there are two, such a league is merely an arena for the conduct of interstate politics.
An Internationale, provided it comes from the soul of the Culture, has the possibility of absorbing all States into it, provided it is an idea embracing life totally, i.e., a Cultural idea, and not merely a political scheme— and above all not a mere abstraction of some kind, an ideal— and feudalism was such an Internationale. Needless to say the various class-war revolutionary “internationales” were not this, for they had their origin purely in politics, and were purely negative. A Cultural Idea cannot be negative; such an Idea is not made by men, but comes from the development of the Culture, and represents an organic necessity of the higher organism. The phrase Spirit of the Age is transferable with the phrase Culture-idea. Both are super personal, and the most that a man can do is to formulate the Idea, try to actualize it, or try to strangle and distort it. Change it, or destroy it, he cannot.
An Internationale representing a Culture-idea is of course supra-national as well as international in the true sense, for nations are creations of the High Culture. Only such an Internationale could absorb States into it— and then only the States within the Culture. The idea would naturally have no inner effect on populations and areas outside its organic body. Thus no Western Internationale could inwardly touch China, India, Japan, Islam or Russia. Their reaction to such an Internationale, provided they were affected by its external effects would of necessity be purely negative. If such an Internationale were to constitute the West as a unit also for political purposes— and the outer world has quite correctly always regarded the West as a unit for all other purposes— it would tend to create an anti-Western unity among the areas and populations outside. This would be only because the Western Civilization— the first one to do so— has made the whole world into its sphere of activity. For the first time in the history of the High Cultures, a Culture-political system embraced the entire world. For the politics of the extra-European forces is also in its depths motivated by the historically omnipotent force of our Western Civilization, in this way, that extra-European forces only derive their unity from the fact that they are a negation of Europe. If there were no Europe, Russia would merely be the scene of nomadic groups wandering with their herds, and engaging in small-scale inter-tribal warfare. Similarly, the famous “Chinese Revolution” of 1911 was a mere echo-phenomenon of Western currents, and its whole significance is that it had an anti-Western effect in the area the West calls China.
A true Internationale acts directly upon the entire Culture-area and all the populations in it. Capitalism was such a true Internationale— it was an expression of the Spirit of the Age. England was the vessel chosen by the Culture to actualize this idea, and England remained the spiritual home of Capitalism. The other nations were forced to orient their lives to this idea— which was also a world-outlook more than a system of economics. They could either affirm it, or negate it. This choice existed only because the Spirit of the Age also contained political nationalism, and thus Capitalism, belonging as it did to one nation, did not and never could have amalgamated all the Western nations into one nation. Political nationalism was moribund even before the First World War, and thereafter the practice of political nationalism was simply Culture-distortion— every nation of the West was injured by it individually, and all of them collectively.
The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism. The whole world is the spoils in this gigantic political age, and obviously tiny units, like the various former States of Europe, with a few tens of thousands of quadrate kilometers, with a few tens of millions of population cannot engage in a political struggle in a world filled with a population of 2,000,000,000 of human beings. The smallest possible unit that could even begin to participate in this world-struggle would have to have an area the size of Europe and hither Russia. Any struggle preliminary to this is local.
The two “leagues of nations” were merely interstate phenomena, thus pre-supposed States, thus were not themselves political units, thus could not engage in politics, thus did not exist as political realities. The Laws of Sovereignty and Totality, formulated herein, described the member-States of the leagues, but not the leagues themselves. Liberals and rationalists, moralists and logicians adrift in the world of facts, were not dismayed by the situation presented. They said that all that was necessary was to transfer sovereignty— mere legal sovereignty, for they knew nothing, and can know nothing, of the Organic Law of Sovereignty— from the member-States to the league itself. They thought that “sovereignty” was a word written down on a piece of paper, and was thus, according to the calculus of symbolic logic, manipulable at will. Sovereignty however, happens to be an existential characteristic of a political organism, and these organisms are not subject to human control, but, on the contrary, control the human beings in their areas politically. This is a fact and thus exists on a different plane from logic, a plane which can never possibly intersect that of logic. Logic deals with one phase of Culture-man, his intellect, and that only. It can only dissect, analyze, conduct spiritual post-mortems. Thus it cannot act, for action is creation. Politics in this light resembles art more than it does logic. Logic is light, politics is chiaroscuro; logic is cameo, politics is intaglio; logic is rigid, politics fluid. Creation is of the whole soul, and logic is only one product of a small part of the soul. Nonsense in logic may be sound politics; nonsense in politics may be sound logic. Culture-political ideas precede reality; intellectual ideals bark at the heels of reality.
The basic idea of the leagues of nations was to abolish war and politics. To provide a meeting place for war-political units could hardly do it, and consequently these meeting places had no political significance, which continued to reside in the capitals.
We have seen that a world with one State is organic nonsense, since a State is a unit of opposition. But some of the intellectuals wanted a world with no States whatever, singular or plural. They spoke of “humanity,” and wished to unite it for the purpose of abolishing politics by politics, war by war. They were thus affirming war and politics, but this remained hidden from them. The name “humanity” became thus a polemical word— it described everyone except the enemy. This was of course nothing new, for this overworked word had appeared as a political word in the 18th century, when it was used by the intellectuals and equality-ideologues to describe everyone, except the nobility and clergy. It thus dehumanized the nobility and clergy and when power came into the hands of the intellectuals, in the French Terror of 1793, they showed that they considered their enemies subject to inhuman treatment because they did not belong to “humanity.” Again, politics and logic separate out: humanity in logic means inhumanity in politics.
But yet the word humanity excludes no one, semantically speaking. The enemy is also human. Therefore humanity can have no enemy, and the “one State” liberals and the “humanity” intellectuals were involved in the very sort of thing they wished to abolish— politics and war. “Humanity” was not a peace word, but a war slogan. The “one State” remained in the world of dreams. Politics remained in the world and turned all of these anti-political things to its own use.
What would be a world without politics? Nowhere would there be protection or obedience, there would be no aristocracy, no democracy, no empire, no fatherland, no patriotism, no frontiers, no customs, no rulers, no political assemblies, no superiors, no subordinates.
For this world to come about or to continue to exist, there would have to be a total absence of men with lust for adventure and domination. No will-to-power, no barbarian instincts, no criminals, no superiority feelings, no Messianic ideas, no unpeaceable men, no programs of action, no proselyting, no ambition, no economics above the personal level, no foreigners, no race, no ideas.
We come to the fundamental dis-junction between political thinking and mere thinking about politics. All intellectual thinking about politics posits a certain great non-existent characteristic of human nature.
The Two Political Anthropologies
THE TOUCHSTONE of any political theory whatever is its attitude to the fundamental ethical quality of
human nature. From this standpoint there are only two kinds: those which posit a “naturally good” human
nature, and those which see human nature as it is on the other hand. Good has meant reasonable,
perfectible, peaceful, educable, desiring to improve, and various other things.Every Rationalistic political or State theory regards man as “good” by nature. The Encyclopedist's, the Illuminati and the devotees of Baron Holbach’s philosophy were all symptomatic of the advent of Rationalism in the 18th century. All talked of “the essential goodness of human nature.” Rousseau was the most forceful and radical of 18th century writers in this respect. Voltaire set himself apart by denying totally this essential goodness of human nature.
It is curious that a theory of politics could ever possibly ground itself on such an assumption, since politics actualizes itself only in the form of the friend-enemy dis-junction. Thus a theory of hostility assumes that human nature is essentially peaceable and non-hostile.
The middle of the 18th century is the beginning of the word liberalism, and of the idea-complex liberalism. Since human nature is basically good, there is no need to be strict with it, one can be “liberal.” This idea was derived from the English Sensualist philosophers. The Social Contract theory of Rousseau originated with the Englishman Locke in the previous century. All Liberalism predicates a sensualistic, materialistic philosophy. Such philosophies are rationalistic in tendency, and Liberalism is simply one variety of politically applied rationalism.
The leading 17th century political thinkers, like Hobbes and Pufendorff, looked upon the condition of “nature,” in which States existed, as one of continual danger and risk, in which those engaged in action were driven by all the instincts and impulses of the beasts— hunger, fear, jealousy, rivalries of all kinds, desire. Hobbes observed that true enmity is possible only between men, that the friend-enemy dis-junction is as much deeper between men than between animals as the world of men is spiritually above the world of the beasts.
The two political anthropologies are illustrated in the story, found in Carlyle, of the conversation between Frederick the Great and Sulzer, in which Sulzer was explaining the new discovery of Rationalism that human nature was essentially good. Ach, mein lieber Salzer, Ihr kennt nicht diese verdammte Rasse, said Friedrich “You don’t know this damned race.”
The assumption of the goodness of human nature developed two main branches of theory. Anarchism is the result of radical acceptance of this assumption. Liberalism uses the assumption merely to weaken the State and make it subservient to “society.” Thomas Paine, an early Liberal, expressed the idea in a formula that remains valid for Liberalism to-day: Society is the result of our reasonably regulated needs; the State is the result of our vices. Anarchism is the more radical in proportion to the completeness of its acceptance of the human goodness assumption.
The idea of “balance of power,” a technic of weakening the State, is Liberal throughout. By this means the State is to be rendered subject to economics. It cannot be called a State theory, for it is a mere negative. It does not deny the State completely, but wants it decentralized and weakened. It does not want the State to be the center of gravity of the political organism. It prefers to think of the organism as “society,” a loose grouping of free and independent groups and individuals, whose freedom finds its sole limitation with the customary criminal law. Thus Liberalism has no objection to individuals being more powerful than the State, being above the law. What Liberalism dislikes is authority. The State, as the grandest symbol of authority, is hated. The two noble orders, as the symbols of authority, are likewise hated.
Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies. During the 19th century, anarchism was a force to be reckoned with, although it was nearly always allied with some other movement. Particularly in 19th and early 20th century Russia was anarchism a powerful political reality. It was known there as Nihilism. The local strength of anarchism in Russia was owing to its coincidental attractiveness for the tremendous anti-Western feeling under the thin Petrine crust. To be anti-Western was to be against everything, therefore anti-Western Asiatic negativism adopted the Western theory of Anarchism as its vehicle of expression.
Liberalism, however, with its compromising, vague attitude, incapable of precise formulation, incapable also of rousing precise feelings, either affirmative or negative, is not an idea of political force. Its numerous devotees, in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have taken part in practical politics only as the ally of other groups. It could not create an issue; it could not line up men as friends or enemies; therefore it was not a political idea, but only an idea about politics. Its followers had to be for or against other ideas as a means of expressing their Liberalism.
Anarchism was able to rouse men to sacrifice of life, not so Liberalism. It is one thing to die to wipe out all order, all State; it is quite another to die in order to bring about a decentralization of State power. Liberalism is in essence nonpolitical; it is outside of politics. It would like to have politics serve as the handmaid of economics and society.
Liberalism
LIBERALISM is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly
shown. The “Enlightenment” period of Western history which set in after the Counter-Reformation laid more and more stress on intellect, reason and logic as it developed. By the middle of the 18th century this tendency produced Rationalism. Rationalism regarded all spiritual values as its objects and proceeded to revalue them from the standpoint of “reason.” Inorganic logic is the faculty men have always used for solving problems of mathematics, engineering, transportation, physics and in other non-valuing situations. Its insistence on identity and rejection of contradiction are practicable in material activity. They afford intellectual satisfaction also in matters of purely abstract thought, like mathematics and logic, but if pursued far enough they turn into mere techniques, simple assumptions whose only justification is empirical. The end of Rationalism is Pragmatism, the suicide of Reason.
This adaptation of reason to material problems causes all problems whatever to become mechanical when surveyed in “the light of reason,” without any mystical admixture of thought or tendency whatever. Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automaton— or equally, an animal. Organisms became problems in chemistry and physics, and super personal organism simply no longer existed, for they are not amenable to reason, not being visible or measurable. Newton provided the universe of stars with a non-spiritual self-regulating force; the next century removed the spirit from man, his history and his affairs.
Reason detests the inexplicable, the mysterious, the half-light. In a practical problem in machinery or ship-building one must feel that all the factors are under his knowledge and control. There must be nothing unpredictable or out of control. Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. If a thing actually cannot be calculated, Reason merely says that the factors are so numerous and complicated that in a purely practical way they render the calculation unfeasible, but do not make it theoretically impossible. Thus Reason also has its Will-to-Power: whatever does not submit is pronounced recalcitrant, or is simply denied existence.
When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was “emerging” during all those millennia, he was “progressing” from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from “superstition” to “science,” from violence to “reason,” from dogma to criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are “the individual” and “humanity.” Anything separating them is “irrational.”
This branding of things as irrational is in fact correct. Rationalism must mechanize everything, and whatever cannot be mechanized is of necessity irrational. Thus the entirety of History becomes irrational: its chronicles, its processes, its secret force, Destiny. Rationalism itself, as a by-product of a certain stage in the development of a High Culture, is also irrational. Why Rationalism follows one spiritual phase, why it exercises its brief sway, why it vanishes once more into religion— these questions are historical, thus irrational.
Liberalism is Rationalism in politics. It rejects the State as an organism, and can only see it as the result of a contract between individuals. The purpose of Life has nothing to do with States, for they have no independent existence. Thus the “happiness” of “the individual” becomes the purpose of Life. Bentham made this as coarse as it could be made in collectivizing it into “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” If herding-animals could talk, they would use this slogan against the wolves. To most humans, who are the mere material of History, and not actors in it, “happiness” means economic well being. Reason is quantitative, not qualitative, and thus makes the average man into “Man.” “Man” is a thing of food, clothing, shelter, social and family life, and leisure. Politics sometimes demands sacrifice of life for invisible things. This is against “happiness,” and must not be. Economics, however, is not against “happiness,” but is almost co-extensive with it. Religion and Church wish to interpret the whole of Life on the basis of invisible things, and so militate against “happiness.” Social ethics, on the other hand, secure economic order, thus promote “happiness. “
Here Liberalism found its two poles of thought: economics and ethics. They correspond to individual and humanity. The ethics of course is purely social, materialistic; if older ethics is retained, its former metaphysical foundation is forgotten, and it is promulgated as a social, and not a religious, imperative. Ethics is necessary to maintain the order necessary as a framework for economic activity. Within that framework, however, “the individual” must be “free.” This is the great cry of Liberalism, “freedom.” Man is only himself, and is not tied to anything except by choice. Thus “society” is the “free” association of men and groups. The State, however, is un-freedom, compulsion, violence. The Church is spiritual un-freedom.
All things in the political domain were transvalued by Liberalism. War was transformed into either competition, seen from the economic pole, or ideological difference, seen from the ethical pole. Instead of the mystical rhythmical alternation of war and peace, it sees only the perpetual concurrence of competition or ideological contrast, which in no case becomes hostile or bloody. The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side. The will to accomplish a political aim is transformed into the making of a program of “social ideals” on the ethical side, of calculation on the economic side. Power becomes propaganda, ethically speaking, and regulation, economically speaking.
The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant. In 1814 he set forth his views on the “progress” of “man.” He looked upon the 18th century Enlightenment with its intellectualistic-humanitarian cast as merely preliminary to the true liberation, that of the 19th century. Economics, industrialism, and technics represented the means of “freedom.” Rationalism was the natural ally of this trend. Feudalism, Reaction, War, Violence, State, Politics, Authority— all were overcome by the new idea, supplanted by Reason, Economics, Freedom, Progress and Parliamentarism. War, being violent and brutal, was unreasonable, and is replaced by Trade, which is intelligent and civilized. War is condemned from every standpoint: economically it is a loss even to the victor. The new war technics— artillery— made personal heroism senseless, and thus the charm and glory of war departed with its economic usefulness. In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth.
A moment’s reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force. It wishes to depose the twin authorities of Church and State, substituting for them economic freedom and social ethics. It happens that organic realities do not permit of more than the two alternatives: the organism can be true to itself, or it becomes sick and distorted, a prey for other organisms. Thus the natural polarity of leaders and led cannot be abolished without annihilating the organism. Liberalism was never entirely successful in its fight against the State, despite the fact that it engaged in political activity throughout the 19th century in alliance with every other type of State disintegrating force. Thus there were National-Liberals, Social-Liberals, Free-Conservatives, Liberal-Catholics. They allied themselves with democracy, which is not Liberal, but irresistibly authoritarian in success. They sympathized with Anarchists when the forces of Authority sought to defend themselves against them. In the 20th century, Liberalism joined Bolshevism in Spain, and European and American Liberals sympathized with Russian Bolsheviks.
Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea. Its great word “freedom” is a negative it means in fact, freedom from authority, i.e., disintegration of the organism. In its last stages it produces social atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family. Divorce takes equal rank with marriage, children with parents. This constant thinking in negatives caused political activists like Marx, Lorenz v. Stein and Ferdinand Lasalle to despair of it as a political vehicle. Its attitudes were always contradictory, it sought always a compromise. It sought always to “balance” democracy against monarchy, managers against hand-workers, State against Society, legislative against judicial. In a crisis, Liberalism as such was not to be found. Liberals found their way on to one or the other side of a revolutionary struggle, depending on the consistency of their Liberalism, and its degree of hostility to authority.
II
From its anthropology of the basic goodness of human nature in general, Rationalism produced 18th
century Encyclopedism, Freemasonry, Democracy, and Anarchism, as well as Liberalism, each with its
offshoots and variations. Each played its part in the history of the 19th century, and, owing to the critical
distortion of the whole Western Civilization entailed by the first two World Wars, even in the 20th
century, where Rationalism is grotesquely out of place, and slowly transformed itself into Irrationalism.
The corpse of Liberalism was not even interred by the middle of the 20th century. Consequently it is
necessary to diagnose even now the serious illness of the Western Civilization as Liberalism complicated
with alien-poisoning. Because Liberalism views most men as harmonious, or good, it follows that they should be allowed to do as they like. Since there is no higher unit to which all are tied, and whose super personal life dominates the lives of the individuals, each field of human activity serves only itself— as long as it does not wish to become authoritative, and stays within the framework of “society.” Thus Art becomes “Art for Art’s sake,” l’art pour l’art. All areas of thought and action become equally autonomous. Religion becomes mere social discipline, since to be more is to assume authority. Science, philosophy, education, all are equally worlds unto themselves. None are subject to anything higher. Literature and Technics are entitled to the same autonomy. The function of the State is merely to protect them by patents and copyrights. But above all— economics and law are independent of organic authority, i.e., of politics.
Twenty-first century readers will find it difficult to believe that once the idea prevailed that each person should be free to do as he pleased in economic matters, even if his personal activity involved the starvation of hundreds of thousands, the devastation of entire forest and mineral areas, and the stunting of the power of the organism; that it was quite permissible for such an individual to raise himself above the weakened public authority, and to dominate, by private means, the inmost thoughts of whole populations by his control of press, radio and mechanized drama.
They will find it more difficult yet to understand how such a person could go to the law to enforce his destructive will. Thus a usurer could, even in the middle of the 20th century, invoke successfully the assistance of the law in dispossessing any numbers of peasants and farmers. It is hard to imagine how an individual could injure the political organism more than by thus mobilizing the soil into dust, in the phrase of the great Freiherr von Stein.
But— this followed inevitably from the idea of the independence of economics and law from political authority. There is nothing higher, no State; it is only individuals against one another. It is but natural that the economically more astute individuals accumulate most of the mobile wealth into their hands. They do not however, if they are true Liberals, want authority with this wealth, for authority has two aspects: power, and responsibility. Individualism, psychologically speaking, is egoism. “Happiness” = selfishness. Rousseau, the grandfather of Liberalism, was a true individualist, and sent his five children to the foundling hospital.
Law, as a field of human thought and endeavor, has as much independence, and as much dependence as every other field. Within the organic framework, it is free to think and organize its material. But like other forms of thought, it can be enrolled in the service of outside ideas. Thus law, originally the means of codifying and maintaining the inner peace of the organism by keeping order and preventing private disputes from growing, was transmuted by Liberal thought into a means of keeping inner disorder, and allowing economically strong individuals to liquidate the weaker ones. This was called the “rule of law,” the “law-State,” “independence of the judiciary.” The idea of bringing in the law to make a given state of affairs sacrosanct was not original with Liberalism. Back in Hobbes’s day, other groups were trying it, but the incorruptible mind of Hobbes said with the most precise clarity that the rule of law means the rule of those who determine and administer the law, that the rule of a “higher order” is an empty phrase, and is only given content by the concrete rule of given men and groups over a lower order.
This was political thinking, which is directed to the distribution and movement of power. It is also politics to expose the hypocrisy, immorality and cynicism of the usurer who loudly demands the rule of law, which means riches to him and poverty to millions of others, and all in the name of something higher, something with supra-human validity. When Authority re-surges once more against the forces of Rationalism and Economics, it proceeds at once to show that the complex of transcendental ideals with which Liberalism equipped itself is as valid as the Legitimism of the era of Absolute Monarchy, and no more. The Monarchs were the strongest protagonists of Legitimism, the financiers of Liberalism. But the monarch was tied to the organism with his whole existence, he was responsible organically even where he was not responsible in fact. Thus Louis XVI and Charles I. Countless other monarchs and absolute rulers have had to flee because of their symbolic responsibility. But the financier has only power, no responsibility, not even symbolic, for, as often as not, his name is not generally known. History, Destiny, organic continuity, Fame, all exert their powerful influence on an absolute political ruler, and in addition his position places him entirely outside the sphere of base corruptibility. The financier, however, is private, anonymous, purely economic, irresponsible. In nothing can he be altruistic; his very existence is the apotheosis of egoism. He does not think of History, of Fame, of the furtherance of the life of the organism, of Destiny, and furthermore he is eminently corruptible by base means, as his ruling desire is for money and ever more money.
In his contest against Authority the finance-Liberal evolved a theory that power corrupts men. It is, however, vast anonymous wealth which corrupts, since there are no super personal restraints on it, such as bring the true statesman completely into the service of the political organism, and place him above corruption.
It was precisely in the fields of economics and law that the Liberal doctrine had the most destructive effects on the health of the Western Civilization. It did not matter much that esthetics became independent, for the only art-form in the West which still had a future, Western Music, paid no attention to theories and continued on its grand creative course to its end in Wagner and his epigones. Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art: sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose. Man as individualist, an atom without connections, the Liberal ideal of personality. It was in fields of action rather than of thought that the injury was greatest.
Allowing the initiative in economic and technical matters to rest with individuals, subject to little political control, resulted in the creation of a group of individuals whose personal wills were more important than the collective destiny of the organism and the millions of the population. The law which served this state of affairs was completely divorced from morality and honor. To disintegrate the organism from the spiritual side, what morality was recognized was divorced from metaphysics and religion, and related only to “society.” The criminal law reflected finance-Liberalism by punishing crimes of violence and passion, but not classifying such things as destroying national resources, throwing millions into want, or usury on a national scale.
The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of faith with Liberalism. This was not subject to discussion. There was even evolved an abstraction named “economic man,” whose actions could be predicted as though economics were a vacuum. Economic gain was his sole motive, greed alone spurred him on. The Technic of success was to concentrate on one’s own gain and ignore everything else. This “economic man” was however man in general to the Liberals. He was the unit of their world-picture. “Humanity” was the sum total of these economic grains of sand.
III
The type of mind which believes in the essential “goodness” of human nature attained to Liberalism.
But there is another political anthropology, one which recognizes that man is disharmonious,
problematical, dual, dangerous. This is the general wisdom of mankind, and is reflected by the number of
guards, fences, safes, locks, jails and policemen. Every catastrophe, fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption,
flood, evokes looting. Even a police strike in an American city was the signal for looting of the shops by
the respectable and good human beings.Thus this type of thought starts from facts. This is political thinking in general, as opposed to mere thinking about politics, rationalizing. Even the wave of Rationalism did not submerge this kind of thinking. Political thinkers differ greatly in creativeness and depth, but they agree that facts are normative. The very word theory has been brought into disrepute by intellectuals and Liberals who use it to describe their pet view of how they would like things to be. Originally theory was explanation of facts. To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.
A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible. These limits cannot be found in the domain of Reason. The Age of Reason was born in bloodshed, and will pass out of vogue in more bloodshed. With its doctrine against war, politics, and violence, it presided over the greatest wars and revolutions in 5,000 years, and it ushered in the Age of Absolute Politics. With its gospel of the Brotherhood of Man, it carried on the largest-scale starvation, humiliation, torture and extermination in history against populations within the Western Civilization after the first two World Wars. By outlawing political thinking, and turning war into a moral-struggle instead of a power-struggle it flung the chivalry and honor of a millennium into the dust. The conclusion is compelling that Reason also became political when it entered politics, even though it used its own vocabulary. When Reason stripped territory from a conquered foe after a war, it called it “disannexation.” The document consolidating the new position was called a “Treaty,” even though it was dictated in the middle of a starvation-blockade. The defeated political enemy had to admit in the “Treaty” that he was “guilty” of the war, that he is morally unfit to have colonies, that his soldiers alone committed “war crimes.” But no matter how heavy the moral disguise, how consistent the ideological vocabulary, it is only politics, and the Age of Absolute Politics reverts once again to the type of political thinking which starts from facts, recognizes power and the will to-power of men and higher organisms as facts, and finds any attempt to describe politics in terms of morals as grotesque as it would be to describe chemistry in terms of theology.
There is a whole tradition of political thinking in the Western Culture, of which some of the leading representatives are Montaigne, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Hippolyte Taine, Hegel, Carlyle. While Herbert Spencer was describing history as the “progress” from military-feudal to commercial-industrial organization, Carlyle was showing to England the Prussian spirit of Ethical Socialism, whose inner superiority would exert on the whole Western Civilization in the coming Political Age an equally fundamental transformation as had Capitalism in the Economic Age. This was creative political thinking, but was unfortunately not understood, and the resulting ignorance allowed distorting influences to fling England into two senseless World Wars from which it emerged with almost everything lost.
Hegel posited a three-stage development of mankind from the natural community through the bourgeois community to the State. His State-theory is thoroughly organic, and his definition of the bourgeois is quite appropriate for the 20th century. To him the bourgeois is the man who does not wish to leave the sphere of internal political security, who sets himself up, with his sanctified private property, as an individual against the whole, who finds a substitute for his political nullity in the fruits of peace and possessions and perfect security in his enjoyment of them, who therefore wishes to dispense with courage and remain secure from the possibility of violent death. He described the true Liberal with these words.
The political thinkers mentioned do not enjoy popularity with the great masses of human beings. As long as things are going well, most people do not wish to hear talk of power-struggles, violence, wars, or theories relating to them. Thus in the 18th and 19th centuries was developed the attitude that political thinkers— and Machiavelli was the prime victim— were wicked men, atavistic, bloodthirsty. The simple statement that wars would always continue was sufficient to put the speaker down as a person who wanted wars to continue. To draw attention to the vast, impersonal rhythm of war and peace showed a sick mind with moral deficiency and emotional taint. To describe facts was held to be wishing them and creating them. As late as the 20th century, anyone pointing out the political nullity of the “leagues of nations” was a prophet of despair. Rationalism is anti-historical; political thinking is applied history. In peace it is unpopular to mention war, in war it is unpopular to mention peace. The theory which becomes most quickly popular is one which praises existing things and the tendency they supposedly illustrate as obviously the best order, and as preordained by all foregoing history. Thus Hegel was anathema to the intellectuals because of his State-orientation, which made him a “reactionary,” and also because he refused to join the revolutionary crowd.
Since most people wish to hear only soporific talk about politics, and not demanding calls to action, and since in democratic conditions it matters to political Technics what most people wish to hear, democratic politicians evolved in the 19th century a whole dialectic of party-politics. The idea was to examine the held of action from a “disinterested” standpoint, moral, scientific, or economic, and to kind that the opponent was immoral, unscientific, uneconomic— in fact— he was political. This was devilishness that must be combated. One’s own standpoint was entirely “non-political.” Politics was a word of reproach in the Economic Age. Curiously however, in certain situations, usually those involving foreign relations, “unpolitical” could also be a term of abuse, meaning the man so described lacked skill in negotiating. The party-politician also had to feign unwillingness to accept office. Finally a demonstration of carefully arranged “popular will” broke down his reluctance, and he consented to “serve.” This was described as Machiavellian, but obviously Machiavelli was a political thinker, and not a camouflager. A book by a party-politician does not read like The Prince, but praises the entire human race, except certain perverse people, the author’s opponents.
Actually Machiavelli’s book is defensive in tone, justifying politically the conduct of certain statesmen by giving examples drawn from foreign invasions of Italy. During Machiavelli's century, Italy was invaded at different times by Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards and Turks. When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the Rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics.
One can say that there are three possible attitudes toward human conduct, from the point of evaluating its motives: the sentimental, the realistic, and the cynical. The sentimental imputes a good motive to everybody, the cynical a bad motive, and the realistic simply seeks the facts. When a sentimentalist, e.g., a Liberal, enters politics, he becomes perforce a hypocrite. The ultimate exposure of this hypocrisy creates cynicism. Part of the spiritual sickness following the First World War was a wave of cynicism which arose from the transparent, revolting, and incredible hypocrisy of the little men who were presiding over affairs at that time. Macchiavelli had however an incorruptible intellect and did not write in a cynical spirit. He sought to portray the anatomy of politics with its peculiar problems and tensions, inner and outer. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. A tiny politician of the Liberal type even sought to prevent talk about the Third World War, after the Second. Liberalism is, in one word, weakness. It wants every day to be a birthday, Life to be a long party.
The inexorable movement of Time, Destiny, History, the cruelty of accomplishment, sternness, heroism, sacrifice, superpersonal ideas— these are the enemy. Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History to herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness. Nietzsche, in his last and greatest work, designated the 18th century as the century of feminism, and immediately mentioned Rousseau, the leader of the mass-escape from Reality. Feminism itself— what is it but a means of feminizing man? If it makes women man-like, it does so only by transforming man first into a creature whose only concern is with his personal economics and his relation to “society,” i.e., a woman. “Society” is the element of woman, it is static and formal, its contests are purely personal, and are free from the possibility of heroism and violence. Conversation, not action; formality, not deeds. How different is the idea of rank used in connection with a social affair, from when it is applied on a battlefield! In the field, it is fate-laden; in the salon it is vain and pompous. A war is fought for control, social contests are inspired by feminine vanity and jealousy to show that one is “better” than someone else.
And yet what does Liberalism do ultimately to woman: it puts a uniform on her and calls her a “soldier.” This ridiculous performance but illustrates the eternal fact that History is masculine, that its stern demands cannot be evaded, that the fundamental realities cannot be renounced, even, by the most elaborate make-believe. Liberalistic tampering with sexual polarity only wreaks havoc on the souls of individuals, confusing and distorting them, but the man-woman and the woman-man it creates are both subject to the higher Destiny of History.
Democracy
ANOTHER IMPORTANT BY-PRODUCT of Rationalism is Democracy. The word has many meanings, and in
the First World War it passed into the ownership of extra-European forces, and was declared synonymous
with Liberalism. This was of course, a polemical meaning, and there are several variations on this side.
But first the historical origin of Democracy.It arose in the middle of the 18th century with the coming of Rationalism. Rationalism negated History as a basis for any thought or endeavor whatever, and therefore, Church and State, Nobility and Clergy had no rights based on tradition. Reason is quantitative, and thus the Estates were regarded as less important than the insignificant masses of the population. Previous centuries had referred to the monarch by the name of the country. Thus the King of France was “France.” An assembly of the Estates was also called “France,” or “England” or “Spain.” But to Rationalism, not quality but quantity determines, so the mass became the nation. “The People” became a polemical word to shut out the Estates, and deny them the right to political existence. At first, the mass was called “The Third Estate,” but later all Estates were denied.
The idea of Democracy was, however, saturated with will-to-power; it is not a mere abstraction, it is an organic idea, with super personal force. The whole development which produced Rationalism, the epoch at which Culture turned to Civilization, was of course a crisis in the Western organism. It was thus illness, and Democracy was illness, but it was a one through which every High Culture has gone, and was therefore impelled by organic necessity. Democracy seeks no compromise, no “balancing,” no destruction of authority it seeks power. It denies the Estates in order to supplant them.
One characteristic of Democracy was that it rejected the aristocratic principle which equated social significance with political significance. It wished to turn this around and make social dependent on political. This of course was merely the foundation of a new aristocracy, and in very fact democracy was self-destructive: when it attained power, it turned into aristocracy.
Napoleon has also in this respect the greatest possible symbolic significance. He, the great Democrat, the great Vulgarian, spread the Revolution against Dynasty and Aristocracy, but created his own Dynasty and made his Marshals into Dukes. This was not cynicism, nor faithlessness to conviction— Napoleon as Emperor was just as much a Democrat as when he cleared the mob from the streets of Paris. Democracy, by mobilizing the masses of the population, enormously raises the power-potential of the nations and of the Culture. Democracy is the idea that a Duke does not thereby become a Marshal, but a Marshal does thereby become a Duke. As a Technic of ruling, it is solely and simply a new method of furnishing the political leaders. It makes social rank dependent on political-military rank, instead of vice-versa.
The new Dynasty of Democracy, and the new democratic aristocracy are filled with the same will to duration that animated the Hohenstaufen, the Capet, the Norman, the Hapsburg, the Welf, the feudal barons whose names and traditions still persist.
Historically speaking, Democracy is a feeling, and has nothing whatever to do with “equality,” “representative government” or anything of the sort. The whole cycle of Democracy was compressed with intense symbolism into the comparatively short career of the great Napoleon. This man’s formula La carriére ouverte aux talens expresses whatever “equality” sentiment Democracy contains, namely equality of opportunity. There is no thought whatever of abolishing rank or gradation of rights. Revolution, Consolidation, Imperialism— the history of Democracy.
But the expression of the whole cycle of Democracy in the short span of Napoleon’s life, was symbolic only, for Democracy had most of its life span of two centuries ahead of it. Democracy is not a retreat from Reality, from War, History and Politics, like Liberalism. It remains within politics, but seeks to make politics a thing of mass. It seeks to make everyone subject to politics, and to make everyone into a politician. Napoleon’s remark to Goethe “Politics is Destiny” expresses this widening of the base of political power that is Democracy. Up to the end of the 18th century, war and politics were for the Cabinets, the Kings, and small professional armies. Politics and war seldom touched the ordinary person. Democracy changed all this: it put the entire man-power of the nation onto the battlefields, it forced everyone to have an opinion on matters of government, it forced him then to express the opinion in plebiscites and elections. If he had no independent opinion— and more than 99% of men do not— it forced an opinion on him, and told him it was his.
It was Fate for the idea of Democracy that it was born at the same time as the Economic Age. It meant that its authoritarian tendency was, as it were, strangled, and it would have to wait for a political age to express itself again, after its brief flash of glory in Napoleon. But the end of the Economic Age was also the end of the Democracy Idea. Thus Democracy in fact was throughout most of its history a servant of Economics in its battle against Authority.
Democracy had two poles, ability and mass. It put everyone into politics, and allowed the successful ones an amount of power tenfold that of any absolute monarch. But Napoleon himself could not stand against the forces which Money mobilized against him in the Economic Age, and the lesser democratic dictators were more easily overwhelmed. In Spanish South America, where the money power was not absolute, a whole tradition of democratic dictators— Bolivar, Rosas, Francia, O’Higgins, some of the best known— show the powerful authoritarian tendency in popular government.
But in most countries only the vocabulary of democracy was retained, and this enabled the economic powers to conduct themselves in a more or less absolute fashion, for they hat struck down the State with Democracy, and then bought Democracy. In later democratic conditions— in our case from 1850— it was solely the financier whose interest was served by the constitutionalized anarchy called Democracy. The word democracy thus passed into the possession of Money, and it was transformed from its historical meaning into its 20th century meaning. The Culture-distorters use it as meaning the denial of qualitative differences among nations and races; thus the foreigner must be admitted to the positions of wealth and authority. To the financier, it means the “rule of law”— his law, which makes possible his unprecedented usury by means of his monopoly of money.
But Democracy perishes with Rationalism. The idea of basing political power on the masses of the population was a technic at best. Either it proceeded to authoritarian rule like that of Napoleon or Mussolini, or else it was a mere cover for unhampered looting by the financier. Authoritarian rule is the end of democracy, but is not itself democracy. With the coming of the Age of Absolute Politics, the necessity for pretexts falls away. Plebiscites and elections become old-fashioned, and finally cease altogether. The symbiosis of war and politics supports itself and does not claim it “represents” any class. In the annihilation-war between Authority and Money, “Democracy” may be a slogan for either side, but more than a slogan it cannot be.
II
History is cataclysmic; but it is also continuous. The superficial events are often extremely violent and
surprising, but beneath them the adjustment of one Age into the next is gradual. Thus Democracy was not
at all understood by its early protagonists as the lowering of everything human to the level of the least
valuable human beings. Its first propagators came from the higher strata of the Culture, in the main, and
those who did not, sought to give the impression they did: “de” Robespierre, “de” Kalb, “de” Voltaire,
“de” Beaumarchais. The original idea was to make everyone, so to speak, into a nobleman. Naturally in
the blind hatred and passionate jealousy of the Terror of ‘93 this was obscured, but Tradition does not
perish in one onslaught, and on the social side, the battle of Democracy versus Tradition was long and
hard. The authoritarian political tendency of Democracy was, as seen, strangled at birth by the power of Money in an Economic Age. But the word then became a slogan in the social battle, and in the economic battle. It always meant mass, quantity, numbers as opposed to quality and tradition. The first version of the idea was to make everything higher into common property, and as this was shown to be unfeasible, the next idea was to destroy all quality and superiority by merging it into the mass. The weaker Tradition was, the greater was the success of the mass-spirit. Thus in America, its victory was complete, and the principle of mass was applied even to the field of education. America with less than half the population of the home soil of Western Culture had in the 20th century ten times as many institutions of higher learning, so-called. For, in everything, Democracy must fail, even in success. The practice of giving everyone a diploma meant quite simply that the diploma became meaningless.
The ultimate in this direction was reached by an American writer who branded higher chemistry, physics, technics and mathematics as “undemocratic,” because they were the possession of a few, and were thus tending to create some sort of aristocracy. It never occurred to this person that the theory of Democracy is also the possession of a few: these masses did not mobilize themselves; the Spirit of the Age, acting on certain individuals of the population, spread abroad the feeling that everything should be set in motion, everything should be externalized, de-spiritualized, rendered into “mass,” numbered and counted.
And thus, with the coming of the 20th century, “Democracy” has a different meaning from its original one. Its original two poles of Ability and Mass have become merged for the purposes of the powers of Economics, who own the word “democracy” in this century. They place upon it solely the meaning of mass, and use it to combat the new resurgent Authority-Idea. The economic lords of the earth mobilized the masses against the authority of the State, and miscalled it “democracy.” The Age of Absolute Politics begins by mobilizing the masses against the power of Money and Economics, and will end Napoleon wise in the restoration of Authority. But there will at last be no more plebiscites, no more elections, no more propaganda, no more mass audience attending the political drama. The two centuries of democracy end in Empire. With the natural death of the idea of mass counting for something, Authority makes no intellectual appeal whatever to justify itself. It is simply there, and it is not a problem.
Communism
THE GRADUAL TRANSITION of the Spirit of the 18th century into that of the 19th century was manifested
by the increasingly radical nature of the conflict between Tradition and democracy. Rationalism became
more extreme with each decade. Its most intransigent product is Communism.In the century 1750-1850, democracy had undermined the State and opened the way for the Economic Age. But the financier and the industrial baron replaced the absolute monarch. Communism is the symbol of the transference of the democratic struggle to the sphere of economics.
Communism fitted itself out with a Rationalistic philosophy: a materialistic meta physic, an atomistic logic, a social ethic, an economic politics. It even offered a philosophy of history which said that human history was the history of economic development and struggles! And these people ridiculed the Scholastic philosophers for the nature of the problems they set themselves! Religion— that was economic, politics, of course, also. Technics and art were clearly economic. This theory was actually the crowning intellectual stupidity of the Age of Economics. The Age asserted thus its omnipotence and universality. “Everything within economics, nothing outside economics, nothing against economics” might well have been the slogan.
Just as the political aspect of Democracy had been directed against quality and tradition, so the economic aspect was directed against even such quality and superiority as was engendered by economic differences. Political class war became economic class war. Just as the appeal in the first stage had been made to anyone not belonging to the two Estates, so later the appeal was directed to the non-possessors. Not all non-possessors, but only those in the great cities, and within this group, only the manual workers, for only these were physically concentrated so that they could be brought on to the streets for class war.
But Communism was political, unlike Liberalism, and named an enemy who must be annihilated— the bourgeoisie. The better to make the program of action go ahead, the picture was simplified: there are only two realities in the whole world, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Nations and States are bourgeois devices to keep the proletariat divided and thus conquered. This was the origin of the idea that Communism was an Internationale, but its strength as an Internationale was shown in 1914, when the class-war organizations in all countries threw themselves heartily into the fight among the nations. It was never an Internationale in the true sense.
Nevertheless it was an affirmation of politics, and was a force to be reckoned with during the Economic Age. It was able in various Western countries to bring about Civil War e.g., France, 1871. Its high point was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, 1918, when the theory of Communism was actually adopted by a non-theoretical Asiatic regime as a weapon of foreign policy.
It was in the essence of Communism, as in every by-product of Rationalism, that its wish-picture could never become actualized. Using inorganic logic to construct a program for actuality does not change the fact that an organism has its own structure, development, and tempo. This can be injured, distorted, annihilated from without, but inwardly changed it cannot be. Thus Communism was purely destructive in effect, and this was why the Asiatic power on Europe’s boundary adopted it as a program to disintegrate all European States. Communism, like all Utopias, is impossible of realization, because they are rational and Life is irrational. The sole novelty about the Utopia of Communism is that it proclaims itself as inevitable. This was a tribute to its will-to-power, but this vain boast had the same life span as Rationalism. With the advent of the Age of Absolute Politics, even class-war drops theory. History receives Rationalism and all its debris into its vaults of the dead. Death, and not refutation, is the fate of rationalistic theories of politics and economics. We who live in the middle of the 20th century will witness the final desuetude of Rationalism and its progeny.
Association and Dissociation of
Forms of Thought and Action
IN DEVELOPING a 20th century outlook on politics, the first thing necessary was to dissociate politics
from other directions of human energy, particularly from economics and morality. In view of the
enormous vogue of theories which sought to explain political phenomena with ideational equipment
derived from, and appropriate to, other fields of activity or thought, this was quite necessary. We have
seen that politics is a type of activity sui generis, that its practice involves, often entirely unconsciously on
the part of the actor, its own way of thinking in action. It remains to state definitively the separability and
the inter-dependence of the various directions of human energy, and of Cultural energy.A world without abstract thought— the world of the dog, for example— is a world wherein a complete continuity reigns. Each thing fits quite perfectly into its place or sphere. By comparison with the human world, it is non-problematical. Reality and appearance are one. The distinctively human soul sees the macrocosm however as symbolic; it differentiates between Appearance and Reality, the symbol and that which is symbolized. All constructive human thinking whatever contains this as its essence. But this separating of things into appearance and reality, this singling out of one thing from another and bestowing intense abstract thought on it, is itself a distortion of its quiet, non-problematical relation to other things. Thus to think is to exaggerate.
For Culture-man, the High Culture in which he is fated to be born, live and die, is the world of his spirit. The High Culture sets the spiritual boundaries of this world. The High Culture sets its impress on almost every form of thought and activity of the individuals and groups in its domain. Within this realm, the thought-forms and thoughts, action-forms and actions, all fit into their natural places and occupy their non-problematical relations to one another. These relations continue, even though thought is applied to a sphere to exaggerate its part in the destiny of the whole. To think is to exaggerate, but this exaggeration affects only thought and does not disturb the macrocosm. The same is true of any one man: the various directions of his energy stand in an organically unified, harmonious relationship to one another. There is no “economic man”— there is only this man directing his energy toward economics for the moment. Nor is there any “reasonable man,” such as some Western legal systems predicate. There is only this man being reasonable for this occasion. The essential characteristic of the higher organisms, man, and High Culture, is the soul. Thus this particular man acts economically in quite a different fashion from another man, because his soul is different. This makes all of his thought and action peculiar to him. One man has strong interests and abilities in a certain direction, another man elsewhere. High Cultures are also differentiated from one another by unequal endowment in various directions. The principium individuationis applies also to the High Cultures.
Every organism, from the plants and animals to men and Cultures, has a multiplicity of functions, a diversity that increases in refinement and articulation as we proceed upward. This functional versatility does not however disturb the unity of the organism. It is the very unity of the organism that creates this necessity for expression in various directions. For one direction to be pursued at the expense of another is distortion and brings illness and death, if persisted in. I am concerned only with organisms in health here, and in these, the changing of direction of energy is governed by the inner rhythm of the organism. This rhythm is different in each organism, and is affected by individuality, age, sex, adaptation, and milieu. Each human being has his daily sequence of changes of direction of energy-flow. All organisms have their inner rhythm that governs which function is called into play at a given moment. A Culture has such a rhythm also, and at various stages of its development, this rhythm accents first one, then another, field of thought of activity. Similarly any man, and a Culture-man in particular, has his appropriate type of activity and of thought for each age of his development. It has been well said that a young man is an idealist, a mature man a realist, an old man a mystic. This rhythm in a Culture which gives primacy to a certain side of its life during a given period is the source of The Spirit of the Age.
It is only the accent, the beat, which is affected in this changing of direction. The various functions all continue, but one is primary. This describes both men and Cultures. Thus “economic man” continues to exist as a unit, even in his economic activity; his individuality continues, and his other spiritual sides still exist, even though not given primacy at the moment. Similarly with Cultures: all types of thought and activity exist in all ages, even though for a given Age a certain side of Life is uppermost. This is the meaning of “anachronism” in its historical use. Thus Fausto Sozzini is an anachronism in the 16th century, Carlyle in the 19th.
So much for the association of forms of thought and action. They are also dissociated.
The expression change of direction was used to denote the shifting of emphasis from one function to another. These changes of direction are forms of adaptation to different types of situations. It is the type of situation, of problem to be solved, that gives the uniqueness to a way of thinking or acting. Self evidently one would not approach the problem of fixing a piece of machinery as a power-problem— that would end in the smashing of the enemy machinery. Nevertheless many Rationalists and Liberals tried to treat power-problems as mechanical in nature.
The various fields of thought and endeavor thus separate out. Considered by themselves, they are quite autonomous. Each has different conscious assumptions, and a different unconscious attitude. Some of the most important must be listed, with their fundamental structures.
First, there is religion. From the viewpoint of spiritual content, this is the highest of all human forms of thought. Religion has the great, ever-present characteristic that it sees the totality of things under a sacred aspect. It is divine metaphysics, and regards every other form of human thought and action as subsidiary. Religion is not a method of social improvement, it is not a codification of knowledge, it is not ethics— it is the presentation of a sacred ultimate reality, and all of its phases flow from this.
Philosophy, however, is essentially a different direction of thought. Even a theistic philosophy has a different attitude from the religions. In a theistic philosophy, the beginning of religion sets the boundary to the philosophic endeavor. The philosophy lies this side of religion and gives a purely natural explanation to its subject-matter.
Science is yet another direction of thought: it is directed only to finding interrelations between phenomena, and generalizing the results, but it does not attempt to give ultimate explanations.
Technics has nothing to do with science, for it is not a form of pure thinking at all, but thought directed to action. Technics has one aim: power over the macrocosm. It uses the results of science as its tools, scientific theoretical generalizations as levers, but it discards them when their efficacy ceases. Technics is not concerned with what is true, but with what works: if a materialistic theory yields no results, and a theological one does, Technics adopts the latter. It was thus Destiny that Pragmatism should appear in America, the land of worship of Technics. This “philosophy” teaches that what is true is what works. This is simply another way of saying that one is not interested in truth, and is thus the abdication of philosophy. This could be called the elevation of Technics or the degradation of philosophy, but the total difference of direction between Technics and philosophy is not thereby altered; it is merely that the age placed strong emphasis on Technics, and little on philosophy. Nor can the alliance, in 20th century practice almost an identity, between practitioners of Science and Technics obliterate the difference of direction between these two fields. The same man can think at one time as a scientist, seeking information, and in the next moment as a technician, applying it to get power over Nature. Science and Technics are as different from Philosophy as they are from each other: neither one seeks to give explanations, these are for philosophy and religion. If someone thinks he is founding a “scientific philosophy,” he is mistaken, and on the very first page he is bound to abandon the scientific attitude and assume the philosophic. One cannot face two directions at once. If precedence is given to Science over Philosophy, this is something else; this merely reflects the Spirit of the Age as being an externalized one. But important is that all these forms of thought and action are embedded in the flux and rhythm of the development of a High Culture; a given direction of thought has its vogue of supremacy just so long as the Culture-stage lasts which chose it for this role.
Economics is a form of action. Specifically, it is action designed to nourish and enrich private life. Any attempt to control other lives thus departs from Economics. When Cecil Rhodes thought primarily of making himself wealthy, he was thinking economically; when he proceeded to use his wealth for control over the populations of Africa, he was thinking politically. It is only rarely that a man of action is capable of mastery of both these different directions of endeavor, so different are their respective techniques. Economics again has two phases, production and trade, whose special techniques are again so different ordinarily one man does not master both.
The refinements of ways of thinking and acting are numerous. For instance, the data of metaphysics do not matter to ethics, even though one use a similar principle in both of them. Actually the data of ethics are its own. Mathematics also has its own attitude, related to but distinct from that of logic. Esthetics singles out one aspect of the totality of relationships, and this determines its basic assumptions
II
Not only is there association and dissociation between forms of thought and action but there is also an
order of rank between them, depending upon the problem of the moment. The duality of man, arising
from the commingling in his nature of a human soul and of the instincts of the beast of prey, gives rise to
the fact that his action almost never conforms to his abstract thought-systems. The abstract thought has
its center of gravity on the soul side of him, the action on the beast of prey side. The man who, in a
theological discussion, resorts to physical blows in order to prove his point, is confusing the two spheres
of thought and action. So is the man who discusses politics in terms of morality. These two spheres of
thought and action have their perfectly definite frontiers. Each man has abstract thought ability, and
ability to act. When he is thinking abstractly, he does not act, and when he is acting, he does not think
abstractly. His thought then is completely submerged in the action. Abstract formulation of action may
come before action, or after action, but it does not come during action. As Goethe said: “The doer is
always conscienceless; only the spectator has a conscience.”What is Life? It is the process of actualization of the possible. Actualization— and thus action. Life has its center of gravity on the side of action, and not on the side of abstract thought. For purposes of action, then, there is an order of rank which places practical skill above theorizing. It is this which makes Macchiavelli more valuable politically than Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, Fourier, Marx, Edward Bellamy or Samuel Butler. He wrote of politics as it is, the others as it should be, or as they wanted it to be.
It is fairly well known that nothing can be proved by violence— this is because the two spheres of abstract thought and action, truths and facts, do not intersect. It is not as well understood that the reverse is also true, that no violence can be done by proof; in other words, effects cannot be gained in the world of action by truths. Merely to start to try to actualize an abstract theory is to abandon it. The net result of the attempt to impose a way of thinking where it is not appropriate is bungling. There is no choice between a chemistry-artist and a physics-artist, but only between a good artist and a poor one. To approach a mechanical problem as though good and evil are involved in it is to prepare a failure. Each aspect of life yields its secrets only to the method adapted to it. Politics always has refused to give any power to the man who is out to “reform” it according to a morality. Nor can it be understood by trying to impose foreign methods of thought upon it. Politics is the opposite of abstract; derivatively abstract means “drawn away from”— away from what?— from action, reality, facts.
This whole outlook is one of the fact side of the human being. This work is concerned only with action, because the Age of Absolute Politics in which it appears is an age of action. No one has ever said politics should be immoral— but all political thinkers have said that politics is politics. Questions of should are on the other side of the soul, and are not treated here. The fact that politics and morality do not intersect is shown by the example of the Second World War. The American half of the extra-European coalition against Europe stated most decisively that it was fighting for Christian morality, yet after the war it carried out the attempt to exterminate physically the Culture-bearing stratum within its jurisdiction in occupied Europe. Beyond this, mass-starvation and looting were employed to destroy many millions of Europeans, physically, economically. The example is not unique: the victorious powers after the First World War had carried out a starvation blockade of the defeated enemy after the War, and that War also was conducted by those victorious powers in the name of Christian morality.
In the practice of politics, a moral approach can only result in inefficiency or disaster. It is destructive in exact proportion as it is taken seriously.
If the morality is used quite cynically, as propaganda to increase the brutalization of a war, it distorts war and politics in the direction of bestiality.
In the 20th century, politics reconquers once more its own realm. The motivation of politics is no longer derived from economics. Law, technics, economics, social organization— all reflect the great realities of politics. In this last formative age of a great Culture, which will last through the 21st century, the motivation of the perpetual power-struggle is supplied by the unity of the Western Civilization itself. The real front of the wars of this age is simply Europe versus anti-Europe. There are border areas, like those between Russia and Europe, like the northern countries of South America. Each side has its allies: the white populations strewn over the world belong to Europe; the Asiatic distorting elements of cohesion and power in the various Western countries belong to non-Europe. It is the struggle of a positive against a negative, of creation against destruction, of Cultural superiority against the envy of the outsider. It is the unrelenting battle against the master of yesterday by his liberated slaves, burning with vengeance for their centuries of slavery.
These wars of course will be true unlimited wars, like the Crusades, and not agonal like intra-European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. They will be correspondingly absolute in their means and in their duration. For example, prisoner-of-war usages developed in the Western Civilization on considerations of humanitarianism and military honor. After the Second World War Russia abolished the first of these bases, by starving and enslaving prisoners, and America abolished the second by hanging prisoners-of war en mass, and ignoring the Hague Conventions in its post-war occupation of Europe.
The coming wars will thus revive the older practices of enslaving and killing war prisoners, and remove the protections hitherto extended to the civilian population. Instead of the codified military honor of a High Culture, honor will eventually become a matter of inner personal imperative, and the individual will decide for himself, the importance of his decision depending upon his position. It is not dishonorable per se to kill prisoners, but only if they surrender and give up their arms on condition their lives are to be spared, as the European soldiers and leaders did who were later hanged by the Americans after the Second World War.
In the last act of our grand Western Culture-drama, the idea of the Culture itself demonstrates its unimpaired vigor— Destiny is always young, says the philosopher of this Age— by placing itself in the center of Life and defining all men as friends or enemies according as they adhere to it, or oppose it. Culture-politics is the end of the train of religion-politics, family-politics, and faction-politics from the Crusades to the Reformation, dynasty-politics to the Vienna-Congress, national-politics and economic-politics to the Second World War. The crisis of Rationalism subsides. Its attendant phenomena grow colorless, more forced, and one by one they fade away: Equality, Democracy, Happiness, Instability, Commercialism, High Finance and its power of Money, Class War, Trade as an end in itself, Social Atomism, Parliamentarism, Liberalism, Communism, Materialism, Mass-Propaganda. All these proud banners trail finally in the dust. They are nothing but the symbols of Reason’s daring and bold, but hopeless, attempt to conquer the kingdom of the Soul.
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CULTURAL VITALISM
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