The Oswald Spengler Collection: Biographical Essay; Extracts From The Decline Of The West; The Hour Of Decision, Prussianism And Socialism

Prussianism And Socialism

Oswald Spengler

Translated from the German by Donald O. White

Contents

Introduction

The Revolution
Socialism as a Way of Life
Prussians and Englishmen
Marx
The International

Introduction

This essay is based on notes intended for the second volume of The Decline of the West. The notes comprise, at least in part, the germinal stage in the development of the entire thesis presented in that work. [1]

(1. See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), I, 46.)

The word "socialism" designates the noisiest, if not the most profound, topic of current debate. Everyone is using it. Everyone thinks it means something different. Into this universal catchword everyone injects whatever he loves or hates, fears or desires. Yet no one is aware of the scope and limitations of the word’s historical function. Is socialism an instinct, or a planned system? Is it a goal of mankind, or just a temporary condition? Or does the word perhaps refer simply to the demands made by a certain class of society? Is it the same thing as Marxism?

People who aim to change the word continually fall into the error of confusing what ought to be with what shall be. Rare indeed is the vision that can penetrate beyond the tangle and flux of contemporary events. I have yet to find someone who has really understood this German Revolution, who has fathomed its meaning or foreseen its duration. Moments are being mistaken for epochs, next year for the next century, whims for ideas, books for human beings.

Our Marxists show strength only when they are tearing down; when it comes to thinking or acting positively they are helpless. By their actions they are confirming at last that their patriarch was not a creator, but a critic only. His heritage amounts to a collection of abstract ideas, meaningful only to a world of bookworms. His "proletariat" is a purely literary concept, formed and sustained by the written word. It was real only so long as it denied, and did not embody, the actual state of things at any given time. Today we are beginning to realize that Marx was only the stepfather of socialism. Socialism contains elements that are older, stronger, and more fundamental than his critique of society. Such elements existed without him and continued to develop without him, in fact contrary to him. They are not to be found on paper; they are in the blood. And only the blood can decide the future.

But if socialism is not Marxism, then what is it? The answer will be found in these pages. Some people already have an idea of what it is, but they are so diligently involved with political "standpoints," aims, and blueprints that no one has dared to be sure. When faced with decisions, we have abandoned our former position of firmness and adopted milder, less radical, outmoded attitudes, appealing for support to Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the like. We take steps against Marx, and yet at every step we invoke his name. Meanwhile the time for fashioning ideologies has passed. We latecomers of Western civilization have become skeptics. We refuse to be further misled by ideological systems. Ideologies are a thing of the previous century. We no longer want ideas and principles, we want ourselves.

Hence we now face the task of liberating German socialism from Marx. I say German socialism, for there is no other. This, too, is one of the truths that no longer lie hidden. Perhaps no one has mentioned it before, but we Germans are socialists. The others cannot possibly be socialists.

What I am describing here is not just another conciliatory move, not a retreat or an evasion, but a Destiny. It cannot be escaped by closing one’s eyes, denying it, fighting it, or fleeing from it; such actions would merely be various ways of fulfilling it. Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. The spirit of Old Prussia and the socialist attitude, at present driven by brotherly hatred to combat each other, are in fact one and the same. This is an incontrovertible fact of history, not just a literary figment. The elements that make up history are blood, race—which is created by ideas that are never expressed—and the kind of thought which coordinates the energies of body and mind. History transcends all mere ideals, doctrines, and logical formulations.

For the work of liberating German socialism from Marx I am counting on those of our young people who are sound enough to ignore worthless political verbiage and scheming, who are capable of grasping what is potent and invincible in our nature, and who are prepared to go forward, come what may. I address myself to the German youth in whom the spirit of the fathers has taken on vital forms, enabling them to fulfill a Destiny which they feel within themselves, a Destiny which they themselves are. They must be willing to accept obligations despite hardship and poverty; they must possess a Roman pride of service, modesty in the exercise of authority, and the willingness to take on duties readily and without exception rather than demand rights from others. These conditions once met, a silent sense of awareness will unite the individual with the totality. Such potential awareness is our greatest and most sacred asset. It is the heritage of anguished centuries, and it distinguishes us from all other people—us, the youngest and last people of our culture.

It is to these representatives of German youth that I turn. May they understand what the future expects of them. May they be proud to accept the challenge.

I. The Revolution

No people in history has had a more tragic development than our own. In times of serious crisis all other peoples have fought either for victory or momentary setback; with us the stakes have always been victory or annihilation. Witness our military history from Kolin and Hochkirch to Jena and the Wars of Liberation, when the attempt was made on French soil to win Prussia’s allies for Napoleon by proposing partition; to the desperate hour at Nikolsburg when Bismarck contemplated suicide; to Sedan, which just barely staved off a general offensive of the armies poised at our borders by preventing Italy’s declaration of war; to the frightful tempest of wars on our entire planet, the first thunderclaps of which have just died away. Only in Frederick the Great’s and Bismarck’s states was resistance at all feasible.

In all these catastrophes Germans have fought Germans. That it was often tribe against tribe or sovereign against sovereign is significant only for the surface of history. Beneath all these conflicts lay the intense discord that inhabits every German soul, an inner struggle that first erupted ominously in the Gothic age, in the personages of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry the Lion at the time of the Battle of Legnano. Has anyone understood this dichotomy in the German soul? Who has recognized in Martin Luther the reincarnation of the Saxon Duke Widukind? What inscrutable drive was it that made Germans sympathize and fight with Napoleon when, with French blood, he was spreading the English idea on the Continent? What makes us conclude that the riddle of Legnano is profoundly similar to that of Leipzig? Why did Napoleon regard the destruction of the little world of Frederick the Great as his most urgent problem, and in his innermost thoughts as an insoluble one?

Now, in the evening of the Western culture, we can see that the World War is the great contest between the two Germanic ideas, which like all genuine ideas are lived rather than expressed. Following its actual outbreak in the Balkan outpost skirmish of 1912, it first assumed the outward appearance of a conflict between two great powers, one of which had everybody, the other nobody on its side. It reached a provisional conclusion in the stage of trench warfare and the devastation of huge armies. During this stage a new formula was found for the unresolved inner discord in the German breast. Currently, owing to a nineteenth century habit of overestimating the economic factor, we characterize the conflict by the superficial terms "socialism" and "capitalism." What is actually taking place behind this verbal façade is the last great struggle of the Faustian soul.

At the moment in question, although the Germans themselves were not aware of it, the Napoleonic riddle made its reappearance. With the goal of destroying this masterpiece of a state, our most genuine and personal creation—so personal that no other people has been able to comprehend or imitate it, hating it instead like everything daemonic and inscrutable—an English army invaded Germany.

Believe it or not, that is exactly what happened. The lethal blow in this was not necessarily aimed by the preachers of cosmopolitanism or other treacherous elements. It was we ourselves who brought about this calamity—we Germans, with our almost metaphysical will, our stubborn and selfless determination, our honest and enthusiastic patriotism. This will of ours is by its very nature a handy weapon for any external enemy with the practical sense of the English. It is a precarious compound of political ideas and aspiration, one which only the English are really capable of mastering and implementing. For us, despite all our passion and self-sacrificing zeal, it has led to political dilettantism; its effect on our political existence has been disastrous, poisonous, suicidal. It is our invisible English army, left by Napoleon on German soil after the Battle of Jena.

Our deficient sense of reality, so pronounced as to have the force of a Destiny, has counteracted the other instinct in the German people, and has caused our external history to develop as a steady sequence of dreadful catastrophes. It failed us at the height of the Hohenstaufen period, when the glorious rulers considered themselves exalted above the demands of mundane life, just as it did in the nineteenth century, giving rise to the provincial philistinism that we have personified as "the German Michel." Michelism is the sum of all our weaknesses: our fundamental displeasure at turns of events that demand attention and response; our urge to criticize at the wrong time; our need for relaxation at the wrong time; our pursuit of ideals instead of immediate action; our precipitate action at times when careful reflection is called for; our Volk as a collection of malcontents; our representative assemblies as glorified beer gardens. All these traits are essentially English, but in German caricature. Above all, we cherish our private morsel of freedom and guaranteed security, and we are fond of brandishing it at the precise moments when John Bull, with sure instinct, would conceal it prudently.

July 19, 1917, was the first act in the drama of the German Revolution. Rather than simply a change in leadership, it was, as our enemies could tell by the brutal forms it took, the coup d’état of the English element in us, which saw its opportunity at just that time. It was not a revolt against the power of an incompetent, but against power in general. Incompetence at the top level? It is nearer to say that these "revolutionaries," among them not a single true statesman, beheld the mote in the eyes of the men in positions of authority. Did they, at that moment, have anything at all to offer in place of incompetence besides an abstract principle? It was not a popular revolt. The people looked on anxiously and doubtfully, though not without a certain amount of Michel-like sympathy for measures taken against "those at the top." It was a revolution of the caucus rooms. The term "majority party" does not, in our sense, have anything to do with the greater number of the people; it is the name of a club with two hundred members. Matthias Erzberger was tactically the most gifted demagogue among them, excelling at scandal mongering, intrigue, and ambush, a virtuoso at the child’s game of overthrowing ministers. He lacked the slightest trace of the English parliamentarian’s gift for statesmanship; all he did was borrow their tricks. He attracted a swarm of nameless opportunists who were after some public office or other. These were the late descendants of the philistine revolution of 1848; for them, political opposition was a Weltanschauung. These were the latter-day Social Democrats, trying to function without the iron hand of August Bebel. Bebel’s acute sense of reality would not have tolerated this shameless spectacle. He would have demanded and achieved a dictatorship either of the Right or the Left. He would have capsized this parliament and put the pacifists and League of Nations zealots before the firing squad.

This, then, was the Storming of the Bastille—auf deutsch.

Sovereignty of party leaders is an English idea. In order to put it into effect one would have to be an Englishman by instinct and have mastered the English style of conducting public affairs. Mirabeau had this in mind when he said, "The time in which we live is very great; but the people are very small, and as yet I see no one with whom I would care to go aboard ship." In 1917 not one person had the right to repeat this proud, sad statement. This coup d’état was entirely negative in character. It broke the oppression of political power, it refused to yield to decisions from above, but it lacked the ability to make new decisions. It overthrew the state and replaced it with an oligarchy of party subalterns who regarded opposition as a vocation and responsible government as a presumption. It undermined, shifted, and dismantled everything piece by piece, to the amusement of political opponents and the despair of observers on the inside. It tried out newly gained power on the most important officials like a native chieftain testing a rifle on his slaves. This was the new spirit that prevailed until, in the black hour of final resistance, the state disappeared.

Following the assault by our English insurgents there came, of necessity, the uprising of the Marxist proletariat in November of 1918. The scene changed from the halls of the Reichstag to the city streets. Encouraged by the mutiny of the "Home Army," the readers of the radical press broke loose, even though they had been abandoned by their leaders, who were wise enough by now to be only half-convinced of their cause. Following the revolution of stupidity came the revolution of vulgarity. Once again it was not the people who initiated action, not even the socialistically trained masses; it was a mob led by the vermin of journalism. The true socialists were still engaged in the final struggle at the military front, or lay in the mass graves of Europe. They had risen up in 1914, and now they were being betrayed.

It was the most senseless act in German history. One looks in vain for anything like it in the history of other countries. A Frenchman would justifiably reject a comparison with 1789 as an insult to his nation.

Was that the great German Revolution?

How drab, how feeble, how utterly void of conviction it all was! Where we expected heroes we found ex-convicts, journalists, deserters roaming about yelling and stealing, drunk with their own importance and impunity, ruling, deposing, brawling, and writing poetry. It is said that such types have sullied every revolution. Perhaps that is true. But in other revolutions the entire people rose up with such elemental force that the dregs simply disappeared. Here it was the dregs alone who went into action. Not a sign of the great mass, forged into unity by a common idea.

The party of August Bebel had militant qualities which distinguished it from the socialism of all other countries: the clattering footsteps of workers’ battalions, a calm sense of determination, good discipline, and the courage to die for a transcendent principle. Yet the soul of the party expired when its more intelligent leaders of yesteryear surrendered to the enemy of yesteryear, reactionary philistinism. They did this out of fear of responsibility, out of fear of succeeding in a cause they had championed for forty years. They dreaded the moment when they would have to create reality rather than combat it. When this happened, Marxism and socialism, i.e., class theory and collective instinct, parted ways for the first time. Only the Spartacists retained a modicum of integrity. The smarter ones had lost faith in the dogma, but lacked the courage to break with it openly. Thus we witnessed the spectacle of a working class divorced from the people by a few ideas and doctrines learned by rote. Leaders were actually deserters; followers plodded ahead leaderless; and over on the horizon was a book which the followers had never read and which the leaders had never understood in its proper limitations.

In a revolution the victor is never a single class (the common interpretation of 1789 is false, "bourgeoisie" is just a word). The true victor—and this cannot be repeated often enough—is the blood, the idea become flesh and spirit, a force that drives the totality onward. The victors of 1789 called themselves the bourgeoisie; but every true Frenchman was then and is today a bourgeois. Every true German is a worker. It is part of his way of life. The Marxists held power, but they gave it up voluntarily; the insurrection came too late for their convictions. The insurrection was a lie.

Do we know anything at all about revolution? When Bakunin was opposed in his intention to crown the Dresden revolt of 1848 by burning all public buildings, he declared, "The Germans are just too stupid for that," and went on his way. The indescribable ugliness of our November Days is without precedent. Not one forceful moment, nothing in the least inspiring. Not one great man, no enduring words, no incisive actions; only pettiness, loathsomeness, and folly. No, we are not revolutionaries. No emergency, no party, no press can stir up an anarchic tempest having the same force as that exhibited in the name of order in 1813, 1870, and 1914. This revolution seemed to everyone, except for a handful of fools and opportunists, like the collapse of a building, perhaps most of all to the socialist leaders themselves. It was a unique situation: they had won suddenly what they had coveted for forty years, absolute power—and they were miserable. The same soldiers who fought as heroes for four years under the black-white-red banner turned spineless and impotent under the red flag. This revolution did not impart fortitude to its adherents; it robbed them of it.

The classical site of Western European revolutions is France. The resounding of momentous phrases, streams of blood in the streets, la sainte guillotine, terrifying nights of conflagration, heroic death at the barricades, orgies of the crazed masses—all these things point up the sadistic mentality of this race. The whole repertoire of symbolic words and deeds for the perfect revolution originated in Paris, and we only gave a bad imitation of them. The French showed us in 1871 what a proletarian insurrection looks like in the face of enemy artillery. And this was surely not the only time.

The Englishman attempts to persuade the domestic enemy of the weakness of his position. If he is unsuccessful he simply takes sword or pistol in hand and, eschewing revolutionary melodrama, presents him with the choice. He decapitates his king, for instinct tells him that this is required as a symbol. For him, such a gesture is a sermon without words. The Frenchman does such things out of revanche, for the sheer pleasure of watching a bloody scene. He is titillated by the clever idea of lopping off the royal head. Without human heads impaled on spikes, aristocrats hanging from lampposts, and priests slaughtered by housewives, he would be frustrated. He could care less about the outcome of such days of grandeur. The Englishman desires the goal, the Frenchman desires the means.

What was our desire? All that we accomplished was a travesty of both techniques. We produced pedants, schoolboys, and gossips in the Paulskirche and in Weimar, petty demonstrations in the streets, and in the background a nation looking on with faint interest. A real revolution must involve the whole people: one outcry, one brazen act, one rage, one goal.

The real German Socialist Revolution took place in 1914. It transpired in legitimate and military fashion. In its true significance, scarcely comprehensible to the average person, it will gradually overshadow the sordid events of 1918 and make them appear as phases in the long-range development of the Revolution itself.

And yet popular historical opinion will not give prominence to this Revolution, but to the November uprising. It is easy to imagine how, under ideal conditions, a true proletarian revolution might have started at the time. This only indicates the glaring cowardice and mediocrity of those who declared themselves in support of the proletarian cause. Great revolutions are fought with blood and iron. What might the great popular leaders, the Independents and the Jacobins, have done in this situation? And what did the Marxists do? They had the power, they could have done just about anything. One great man from the ranks of the people could have had the entire nation behind him. Yet never has a mass movement been more thoroughly ruined by the incompetence of its leaders and their lieutenants.

The Jacobins were prepared to sacrifice everything because they sacrificed themselves: "Marcher volontiers, les pieds dans le sang et dans les larmes," as Saint-Just put it. They did battle against the majority within the nation and against half of Europe at the front. They swept everything along with them. They created armies out of nothing. They won victories without officers or weapons. If only their parrot-like German imitators had unfurled the red banner at the front and declared war to the death against capitalism! If only they had set an example by staking their lives in the struggle! Had they made this choice they would not only have breathed life into the mortally exhausted army and its officers, they would have won over the entire West as well. It was a moment when personal sacrifice would have spelled victory.

But they ducked out. Instead of stepping to the command of red legions they grabbed top positions in well-salaried workers’ soviets. Instead of winning the battle against capitalism they conquered window panes and liberated stores of provisions and state treasuries. Instead of selling their lives they sold their uniforms. This revolution failed from cowardice. Now it is too late. We shall never recover what was lost during the Armistice. The mass ideal degenerated into a series of corrupt wage deals, forced through without reciprocal promises. In their valor these "revolutionaries" did not shrink from sponging on the rest of the people, on the farmers, the civil servants, and the intellectuals. Instead of initiating action they bellowed the slogans "soviet," "dictatorship," and "republic" so often that within two years’ time they will have become a laughing-stock. The only "action" that occurred was the overthrow of the monarchy. And yet a republican form of government has nothing at all to do with socialism.

All this proves that, as opposed to the rest of the people (and it turns out that it is opposed to them), the "fourth estate," which is actually a negative concept, [2] is incapable of constructive action. It proves that if this was indeed the socialist revolution, then the proletariat cannot be its most effective champion. No matter what is yet to ensue, this question is now definitely resolved. The social class trained by August Bebel for the decisive struggle has failed right down the line. And it has failed for all time, because momentum of this sort, once lost, can never be regained. A grand passion cannot be replaced by embitterment. From now on let there be no illusions among the advocates of the erstwhile "socialist" program; they have completely alienated the valuable element of the working class. Formerly the leaders of a great movement, they will one day find themselves as big-mouthed heroes of street brawls in the suburbs. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step.

(2. The Decline of the West, II, 354 ff.)

Such, then, was the great German Revolution, the event that was heralded in poetry and song for generations. It was a spectacle of such fearful irony that decades must pass before the Germans can see it in its true light: a revolution that succeeded in overthrowing its own aims, and that now aims for something else—without knowing exactly what.

Let us imagine for the moment that we are citizens of the future looking back on these three revolutions: the honorable English Revolution, the superb French Revolution, and the absurd German Revolution. We can conclude that through these events the three latest peoples of the Western world attempted to achieve the three ideal forms of existence enunciated in the famous motto: "Liberty, equality, and brotherhood." These ideals appear in the political programs of liberal parliamentarism, social democracy, and authoritarian socialism. In each case it seemed that such ideals were a new concept for these peoples, whereas in reality the ideals were the purest and most extreme expression of their wholly personal and immutable patterns of life.

In antiquity the purpose of revolutions was to establish the basis on which a stable existence was at all feasible. Despite the outward signs of passionate struggle that accompanied them, they were all defensive actions. No one, from Cleon on down to Spartacus, ever thought to look beyond the immediate crisis toward a general reordering of ancient society. The three great Western revolutions, on the other hand, have dealt essentially with a problem of power: Is the will of the individual to be subjected to the common will, or vice versa? Once a decision was reached, the intention was to force it on the whole world.

English instinct decided that power belongs to the individual. Life is a free-for-all, every man for himself, the stronger man wins. The English opted for liberalism and the belief in the inequality of men. The state was to exist no longer; everyone was to fight his own battles, for in the end it would benefit all.

The instinct of the French decided that all men are equal, and hence power should belong to no one. There was to be no such things as subordination, and therefore no order and no state—in fact, nothing at all. This theoretical ideal of anarchy has, in practice, been periodically reaffirmed (in 1799, 1851, 1871, and 1918) by the despotic rule of generals and presidents.

Both of these systems may be called democracy, but for very different reasons. Neither had anything to do with class struggle in the Marxist sense. The English Revolution, which produced the type of citizen who leads his life in private and is responsible only to himself, directed its action against the state rather than the estates. The secular and religious powers that sustained the state were abolished, and in their place came a reliance on the advantages of England’s insular location. The estates still exist today, recognized and respected by all—even by the workers, who honor them instinctively. Only the French Revolution was a genuine "class conflict," but it was a conflict between social rather than economic ranks. In France the privileged few were integrated with the homogenous mass of the people, the bourgeoisie.

In contrast to these two, the German Revolution grew out of a theory. German, or more precisely, Prussian instinct declares that power belongs to the totality. The individual serves the totality, which is sovereign. The king, as Frederick the Great maintained, is only the first servant of his people. Each citizen is assigned his place in the totality. He receives orders and obeys them. This is authoritarian socialism as we have known it since the eighteenth century. It is essentially nonliberal and antidemocratic, at least when compared with English liberalism and French democracy. But it is also clear that the Prussian instinct is antirevolutionary. The task of transposing the state organism from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century—a process that might be described as liberal and democratic but in an entirely different, Prussian sense—was one for organizational talent. But the radical theoretical mind invented a "fourth estate" out of a portion of the citizenry, which was senseless in a country of farmers and civil servants. Theory gave the name "third estate" to the most numerous segment of the population, the one containing a motley variety of occupations and professions, thus singling it out as an element in a "class conflict." And finally, it made the socialist idea a prerogative of the "fourth estate." With these abstractions in mind the theorists set out in November, 1918, to achieve what had actually been in existence for a long time. Beclouded by slogans, they failed to apprehend the actual state of affairs, and in the end succeeded in destroying it. They not only ruined the state, they also crushed Bebel’s party, the masterpiece of a truly socialist man of action, a genuinely authoritarian and militant organization, the best weapon the workers had in their battle to infuse the state with the spirit of the new century.

That is what makes this revolution so desperately comical. It succeeded admirably in setting its own house on fire. What the German people had promised itself in 1914; what it had already begun to bring about, slowly and dispassionately; what millions of men had died for on the battlefields—all this was denied and destroyed. And then embarrassment set in. Nobody knew how to convey the impression that an active revolution was actually taking place. Such an explanation was urgent, because the workers, who had expected something quite different, viewed their leaders with increasing distrust. The constant barking of slogans into thin air was no solution.

And so the German Michel, that inveterate liberal, set the overturned throne aright and seated himself upon it. The guileless heir to this revolutionary prank, intensely antisocialist by nature, he was equally repelled by Conservatives and Spartacists and fearful that these groups might one day discover what they have in common. He was Schiller’s Karl Moor in an easy chair, tolerant of all political faiths including the most questionable ones—provided that they upheld the republican-parliamentarian-democratic principle, provided that they were long on talk and short on action, provided that they kept out of his sight such authoritarian qualities as resoluteness, audacity, and disciplined obedience. To protect himself, our good friend Michel beckoned to the one outstanding personality of the November episode, and it is not insignificant that this man was a dyed-in-the-wool soldier. Whereupon Michel immediately reverted to his old distrust of the military spirit, without which the Weimar farce would have ended swiftly.

This sorry display of ignorance, incompetence, weakness, and indignity should suffice to discredit parliamentarism forever in Germany. Under the black-red-yellow banner, which has now become the everlasting symbol of folly, we witnessed a repetition of all the stupidities of 1848, when politics was likewise not action but empty talk and theorizing. The liberal of 1917 was in his glory. He had his armistice, his League of Nations, his peace, and his government. Michel doffed his cap with a smile in the expectation that John Bull would be "simply splendid." But his smile turned to tears as he signed the papers: John Bull was using a crazed Frenchman as his business manager.

In the heart of the German people Weimar is doomed. It is not even a laughing matter. The ratification of the Constitution has been greeted by absolute indifference. Its authors thought that the dawn of parliamentarism had arrived, whereas even in England it is rapidly growing dusk. Such as it is, the English system presupposes the presence of strong personalities, distributed between two very old, mutually complementary political groups. In Weimar, where there was a desperate lack of strong personalities, it was believed that political opposition was the very hallmark of the parliamentarian system. And so they dutifully started opposing a government that no longer existed. It was like a schoolroom when the teacher is away.

The future will most certainly look on this episode with profound contempt. The year 1919 is the nadir of German dignity. The Frankfurt Paulskirche contained honest fools and academicians, altogether a comical collection of eggheads. In Weimar one had the feeling that clever operators were behind the scenes. It makes no difference whether the acting politicians were conspirators themselves or just the dupes of conspirators; these parties confused the fatherland all too often with their own advantage. What we now have is a pre-Thermidor Directoire. Woe to us if we have to make up for the phase we passed over!

It is equally certain that the dismal comedy of this counterfeit revolution will end. The outside world is preparing for a new phase of the World War. Things happen fast these days. In our National Assembly, a degenerate Reichstag, the politicians are using the ruins of our demolished state to build a makeshift shelter. Soon the only activities there will be graft and fraudulent dealings in salaries, merchandise, and official positions. Meanwhile, other people are beginning to think differently about the events of last year. They are comparing what is now being constructed with what was there previously. They are beginning to understand that, in reality, a people can never choose between different types of government. It can choose the outer trappings of government, but not the essential thing, the spirit of government—even though public opinion constantly confuses the two. What gets written into a constitution is never essential. The important thing is how the instinct of the people interprets it. The English Parliament governs according to unwritten and, in part, quite undemocratic laws that have evolved through long practice. And that is precisely why it is so successful.

Make no mistake, the revolution is not yet ended. No matter how you interpret it, as senseless or significant, as a failure or as an auspicious beginning, as the prelude to a world revolution or merely as a mob uprising in a single country, the fact remains that we are in the midst of a crisis. And like everything organic, like every disease, this crisis will follow a more or less typical course that cannot be influenced by artificial means. In the light of this fact such ethical distinctions as "just cause" and "treachery" are quite worthless. >From now on, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike must have expert knowledge of human nature; they must be able to grasp and exploit the immediate situation with deliberateness and sobriety. Instead of practicing the ancient art of diplomatic psychology on diplomats and sovereigns, they must learn to apply it to the mass mind, which responds much more rapidly to errors of tact.

Popular leaders, even those of mediocre intelligence, have an infallible knack for this sort of thing. The lack of instinct shown by our present political leaders is perhaps best explained by the typical German thoroughness of their "theoretical" training. The truly popular leader must have an absolutely accurate sense of the duration, the tempo, the rhythm, the crescendo and decrescendo of each phase of the situation; one false move and he will lose all control. What is more, he must know exactly which factors he can control, and which ones he must allow to run their course, waiting out the time when he can exploit them in a broader context or, by skillful manipulation, steer them in the direction he deems necessary. Great revolutionaries have always possessed the tactical know-how of great generals. For an army, the prevailing mood of a single hour can spell victory or defeat.

To the theoretical mind, the most important part of a revolution is its beginning, when forces are arrayed in clear and definite opposition to each other. The skeptical mind prefers, however, to study the final phase of a revolution, for it has much greater significance and is psychologically more instructive. Matters of state have never been so complicated as they are today. The outbreak of the German Revolution was at the same time the betrayal of our nation to the enemy. As a result, our emotional attitude toward Marxism differs radically from that of all other countries. In 1792, nation and revolution were one and the same; in 1919, they are opposites. The English Revolution confined itself to an island, and the French insurgents, owing to their bravery in the field, were able to keep the situation in hand at all times. In our own revolution, each new phase occurs under pressure of foreign designs. Paris, London, and New York are all involved—not with their labor movements but with their armies, which they will send against us should the German Revolution take on undesirable forms. That is the way our Marxists wanted it, and they had better be prepared to take the consequences. Besides the Spartacists’ hand grenades and the machine guns of the Reichswehr, we have the French Army of Occupation and the English fleet to reckon with.

Our newspapers are full of "heroic" bolshevist pronouncements. Every day we can take our pick among massacres of Western capitalists—on the editorial pages. Journalism is no substitute for a true revolutionary front line, backed up by heavy artillery. The longer they preach about world revolution the less threatening it becomes. There is mostly anger, and very little confidence, in the revolutionary talk we hear and read these days. It should be pointed out that not even the Russian revolutionaries made cowardice in the face of the enemy a cardinal point in their program. And it must not be forgotten that many of those who participated in the November insurrection did so, not out of enthusiasm for this or that political solution, but because they were hungry and desperate, because their nerves could no longer stand the strain. The decisions reached at Versailles have caused the state of war to continue. But how much longer can the psychological effect of those decisions be an aid, rather than an obstacle, to the designs of the Marxists? The general strike has outlived its usefulness as a weapon. The past year has dissipated whatever energies the Marxist movement had to start with, and at this point revitalization is out of the question. The absurd goings-ons in the National Assembly are bound to produce nothing but contempt for the parliamentary idea.

There comes a time in every revolution when the people will settle for peace and domestic order at any price, when no revolutionary minority can persuade them, not even with the most drastic methods, to make fundamental political decisions. When this point is reached the revolution has virtually come to an end, and no one has the power to avoid its effects or postpone them. We need only compare the actual number of votes cast in the Jacobin plebiscite with those cast at the installation of Bonaparte as first consul to see that the French people had finally had enough of the revolution. We are now rapidly approaching this terminal point in the German Revolution. And the patience of the German people will be exhausted even more quickly.

Nevertheless, it is not only the confirmed advocates of radical change who are in danger of committing errors; their equally confirmed opponents can make mistakes just as easily. A strong but indeterminate feeling of disappointment is still a long way from the actual decision to capitulate. The sense of political failure that is widespread in the German people today is like an open wound that is sensitive to the touch. If the opposition were to make the slightest attempt to end the revolution by violence, they would release in the people an irresistible wave of bitterness and fury such as the radicals themselves are no longer capable of arousing. We would experience a protest of contagious force, a sudden quickening of the popular mood which resolute leaders could exploit for action of a very drastic sort. While it is true that such a development would not affect the duration or essential meaning of historical events, it would nonetheless alter their form and intensity to a decisive degree. Things could get very bloody.

We have now reached a crucial stage in this revolution, a time when the inscrutable mass mind could confuse even the most knowledgeable observers by giving a surprise twist to the course of events, as it has in previous great revolutions. Does the tense silence that prevails in some quarters of our country indicate the presence of an indomitable will? Is the irritable clamoring we hear from other quarters to be interpreted as a growing awareness of final defeat? Is it too late for the insurgents to take action? Too early for the opposition?

It is common knowledge that certain political structures which seem invincible at the moment can, after two years’ time, fall of their own weight. That was true in 1918 and will again be true, though with a nearly opposite effect, in the near future. Yesterday’s courtiers can be the regicides of today, and today’s regicides, the princes of the future. In such times no one can be sure of how long his convictions can endure.

But to what unit of time should we now adapt our thinking? Should we start thinking in months, or in years? The tempo and duration of the German Revolution were determined by the time and manner in which it began. No one may have knowledge of these factors, yet they exist and they operate with the inevitability of Destiny. Whoever tries to interfere with them will perish. The Girondists perished because they thought that the climax of the revolution was behind them; Babeuf met his fate because he believed that the climax was yet to come. The intrinsic nature of the Revolution would remain intact even if new wars were to break out, even if a great personality were to make his appearance. Such occurrences might cause a sudden and complete change in the historical appearance of the German Revolution—which is all that matters to the ordinary observer—but their true function would be to confirm its deeper and more essential significance. A great man is one who understands the spirit of his time, who is himself the incarnation of that spirit. He does not come to destroy, but to fulfill it.

Let us now investigate the origins of the spirit of German socialism.

II. Socialism as a Way of Life

Six thousand years of higher human history lie before us. Amid the great mass of persons and events that have appeared on the entire planet we can distinguish those elements that make up history in the proper sense: the spectacle and destiny of the great cultures. They appear to the eye of the observer as formal entities having a basically similar structure, as visible manifestations of powerful forces of the human soul, as the real and vital expressions of the most profound mysteries of human evolution.

In each culture there resides an immutable principle which gives it its particular features of belief, thought, feeling, and action, of government, art, and social structure. This same principle has brought forth what we know as the various "types" of man: the Classical, Indic, Chinese, and Western. Each has had its own unity of instinct and consciousness, its own "race" in the spiritual sense.

Moreover, each of these cultural units is complete in itself and independent of all others. Traditional historiography has been interested solely in historical influences on cultures, not realizing that such influences are in fact of the most superficial kind. Inwardly, all cultures remain just what they are. They arise and flourish on Nile and Euphrates, Ganges and Hwang Ho, in the Semitic Desert, on the shores of the Aegean, or on the river-lined plains of Northern Europe. Each culture gathers together the human beings in its locality and breeds them to form a people; a people, in other words, is not the creator but the creature of its culture. [3] Dorians and Ionians, Hellenes and Etrusco-Romans, the peoples of ancient China, Teutons and Latins, Germans and Englishmen—each people has its own peculiar mentality and significance, each stands in passionate contrast to the others. Seen from the outside and compared with foreign cultures, each assumes a unified form: we speak of Classical man, Chinese man, and Western man.

(3. The Decline of the West, II, 165.)

At the base of every culture lies an idea that is expressed by certain words of profound significance. In Chinese culture these words are tao and li; for the Apollonian Greeks this cultural idea was contained in the worlds lógos and tò ón ("that which is"). In the languages of Faustian man the basic cultural idea is expressed by the words "will," "strength," and "space." Faustian man differs from all others in his insatiable will to reach the infinite. He seeks to overcome with his telescope the dimensions of the universe, and the dimensions of the earth with his wires and iron tracks. With his machines he sets out to conquer nature. He uses his historical thinking to take hold of the past and integrate it into his own existence under the name of "world history." With his long-range weapons he seeks to subdue the entire planet, including the remains of all older cultures, forcing them to conform to his own pattern of life.

How long, we may well ask, will this striving continue? After a certain number of centuries each culture is transformed into a civilization. What was formerly alive becomes rigid and cold. Expansiveness of mind and spirit is replaced by a lust for expansion in the material world. "Life" in the sense used by Meister Eckart becomes "life" in the political and economic sense; the militant power of ideas becomes imperialism. One sign of the onset of this transformation is the enunciation of ultimate but very earthly ideals; a mood of ripeness, of age and experience begins to take hold within the culture. Socrates, Lao-tse, Rousseau, and Buddha each presaged a downward turn in his respective culture. [4] All of these thinkers are inwardly related. None possessed a genuine metaphysics; each of them was the proponent of practical but terminal ideas and attitudes to which we have applied such comprehensive titles as Buddhism, Stoicism, and socialism.

(4. The Decline of the West, I, 351 ff.; II, 305 ff.)

Socialism, then, is not an instinct of dark primeval origin like the instincts that found expression in the style of Gothic cathedrals, in the lordly mien of great emperors and popes, or in the founding of the Spanish and British empires. It is, rather, a political, social, and economic instinct of realistically-minded peoples, and as such it is a product of one stage of our civilization—not of our culture, which came to an end around 1800.

And yet this instinct, totally directed to the outside world, still nourishes the old Faustian will to power and the infinite; now it has become the direful will to absolute domination of the world in the military, economic, and intellectual sense. It can be felt in the historical fact of the World War and in the concept of a world revolution, the idea of forging the swarming multitudes of humanity into a single whole. The imperialism of Babylon aimed only at control of the Near East, while that of the Indic people was limited to India itself; Greek and Roman imperialism was bounded by Britain, Mesopotamia, and the Sahara, and China’s empire extended no further than the Caspian Sea. Modern imperialism, on the other hand, aims at possessing the entire globe. We recognize no borders or limits at all. By means of a new Völkerwanderung we have made America a part of Western Europe. We have constructed on every continent our special kind of cities, and have subjected the native populations to our own way of life and thought. Such activity is the highest possible expression of our dynamic sense of world power. What we believe, what we desire, is meant to be binding on all. And since life has come to mean for us external, political, social, and economic life, all must submit to our political, social, and economic ideal, or perish.

This drive toward universal domination is what I have termed "modern socialism." We are now growing more and more conscious of its presence. It is what we of the Western world have in common. It is active in every human being from Warsaw to San Francisco, and each of our peoples is fascinated by the spell of its promises and potentialities.

Yet we are the only peoples who partake of it. Classical, Chinese, or Russian socialism in this sense does not exist.

Still, at the base of this powerful collective consciousness there is inner hostility and contradiction. Concealed within the soul of every culture is a single, irreparable fissure. The history of each culture is a never-ending conflict between peoples, classes, individuals, or tendencies within an individual—it is always the same awesome problem. As soon as one historical element makes its appearance it immediately calls forth an opposing element. Nietzsche has identified for us the great dichotomy of Classical life which reappeared again and again in various forms: Apollo and Dionysus, Stoics and Epicureans, Sparta and Athens, senate and plebs, tribunate and patriciate. With Hannibal at Cannae, Epicurean Hellenism stood in opposition to the Rome of the Stoics and senators. At Philippi, the Spartan element of Rome was defeated by the Athenian element personified by the Caesars. Even in Nero’s matricide we can discern a triumph of the Dionysian idea of panem et circenses over the Apollonian rectitude of the Roman matrons. Throughout all the epochs of Chinese history, in Chinese life and thought, battles and books, we can perceive the antithesis connected with the names of Confucius and Lao-tse and the untranslatable concepts of li and tao. Similarly, it is one and the same schism in the Faustian soul that has shaped our destiny through the Gothic and Renaissance, Potsdam and Versailles, Kant and Rousseau, socialism and anarchism, and which will go on shaping it right up to our last days.

Yet even so, this Destiny is unified. The discord and antithesis serve a higher reality. Epicureanism is but another form of Stoicism; Aeschylus brought together Apollo and Dionysus; Caesar combined senate and plebs; the Taoism of Lao-tse helped to create Confucianist China. And the Western peoples whose instinct is anarchic are themselves truly socialistic in the larger Faustian sense.

III. Prussians and Englishmen

Three Western peoples have embodied socialism in this larger sense: Spain, England, and Prussia. Florence and Paris were the sources of the anarchic antithesis to socialism: Italy and France. The conflict between these two dispositions toward life and the world forms the basic outline of what we call modern world history.

The Gothic spirit, with its tremendous urge to break through all limitations, manifested itself in the figures of the great emperors and popes, in the Crusades, the imposing cathedrals, the institution of knighthood, and the religious orders. In the fifteenth century the soul of Florence rose up to oppose this spirit. What we call the Renaissance [5] is the anti-Gothic principle of artistic limitation and graceful thinking. Characteristic of its narrower focus are the myriad robber-principalities, republics, and condottieri that sprang up in the Italy of the time, the small-scale, opportunistic political scheming reflected in Machiavelli’s classic work, and the modesty with which even the Vatican pursued its plans for hegemony. It was a protest against the depth and breadth of Faustian universalism. The Italian people, as a type, had its origin in Florence.

(5. The Decline of the West, I, 232 ff.)

The second appearance of the antithetical element occurred in France during the grand siècle. There we find Racine assuming an artistic role analogous to that of Raphael; the esprit of the Parisian salons recaptured the atmosphere of the Medici palace; the policy of the Borgia and Sforza clans found its continuation in the predatory wars of Louis XIV; and this king’s famous dictum, "L’état c’est moi," is an expression of the Renaissance ideal of the free and masterful personality. France and Italy are truly close relative.

Between the birth dates of these two peoples came Spain’s outstanding century, dating from the Sack of Rome (1527), when the Spanish spirit conquered the spirit of the Renaissance, to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Spain was finally forced to yield to France. [6] This episode marked the last grand flourishing of the Gothic principle. The Castilian grandee is the last of the feudal knights (Don Quixote, the Spanish Faust!). The Society of Jesus is the final, indeed the only, great institution since the knightly orders established as a weapon against the infidels. The empire founded by the Spanish Habsburgs was the realization of the Hohenstaufen ideal, just as the Council of Trent realized the ideal of the papacy.

(6. The Decline of the West, II, 388 ff.)

With the advent of the Spanish-Gothic spirit of the Baroque, a severe and impressive style of living spread throughout the Western European world. The Spaniard sensed within himself a great mission—not an "ego" but an "id." He was either a soldier or a priest. He served either God or his king. In fact, it was not until the rise of Prussia that such a stringent and submissive ideal was again embraced. Prussians ought to have recognized familiar traits of character in the Duke of Alba, the man with an incomparable sense of duty. The Spanish and the Prussians are the only peoples who rose up against Napoleon. What we call the modern state was created in the Escorial. All the techniques of modern statesmanship had their origin in Madrid: national and dynastic politics on the grand scale, cabinet diplomacy, the use of war as a deliberate and calculated move in the intricate chess game of grand strategy. Bismarck was the last of the Spanish-style statesmen.

In Florence and Paris, border disputes sufficed to satisfy the urge for conquest. Leibniz once suggested to Louis XIV that he overrun Egypt—and the King refused. Columbus sought aid for his expedition in both cities—in vain. Since that time Italian and French political thought has centered on such matters as subduing Pisa, securing the Rhine border, reducing the neighboring country’s territory, and humiliating the enemy. How different these petty concerns are from those of imperial Spain! The Spanish spirit was out to conquer the earth and establish an empire that would never see the setting sun. We need only compare the Spanish conquistadores with the condottieri in Italy. It was the Spaniards who first made the entire globe the object of Western-European political planning. Italy itself became a Spanish province. And it is important to understand the spiritual conflict that led to the Sack of Rome: this action put an end to the Renaissance Church. The Spanish-Gothic mentality, which holds sway even today in the Vatican, rose up at that time against the Renaissance Church and the closely related Reformation churches. Since then the idea of world domination have never been put aside. From that moment on, the spirit of the Italian and French peoples has remained hostile to the Church, though less as a religion institution than as the embodiment of the Spanish concept of universal hegemony. This explains the "Gallic" religious policy pursued by the French kings, by the Revolution, by Napoleon, as well as the anti-clerical attitude of the Italian monarchy. The Church, however, found support in Madrid and Vienna.

Vienna, too, is a creation of the Spanish spirit. Language alone does not make a people. In this instance a people, the Austrian people, was created first by the aura of its court life, then by its clergy, and finally by its nobility. In the process it has alienated itself irrevocably from the rest of the Germans, for a people with firm historical roots can never change, even though it may consider itself from time to time as undergoing change. The Austrian people is Spanish and Habsburg by nature, whether there are living members of the Habsburg family or not. Austrian thinkers may deny this, but Austrian instinct confirms it. Spanish Germany, represented by the Imperial Court, met its defeat in 1648 at the hands of French Germany, i.e., the multitude of individual princes. From then on these princes chose to think, live, and act according to the particularist and provincial style of Versailles, their ambitions limited to minor extensions of their private borders, their ears deaf to major plans of conquest. The climax of Spanish ambition was reached when Wallenstein proposed the march on Constantinople and the transformation of the Baltic Sea into a base for the Spanish fleet. His defection and fall mark the turning point. Spanish-French Germany was defeated at Könniggrätz. Yet even as late as 1914, Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia was a diplomatic move staged in the Spanish cabinet manner of the sixteenth century. England, on the other hand, did not declare the World War in this fashion, but forced its outbreak by means of tactically superior techniques developed during the nineteenth century.

The English Peace of Fontainebleau and the Prussian Peace of Hubertusberg, both signed in 1763, brought France’s great century to a close. With a decline of the Latins, the control of Western Europe’s destiny passed into the hands of the Germanic peoples. The birth of the modern English nation occurred in the seventeenth, that of the Prussian nation in the eighteenth century. They are the youngest and the last of the Western peoples. Freshly created from unspoiled humanity, they possess the Faustian will to power and infinity in its purest, most vital form. Compared with them, France and Italy seem small indeed, and their epochs of political success appears as mere interludes in a great historical drama. Only the Spanish, the English, and the Prussians have given European civilization universal ideas: ultramontanism, capitalism, and socialism in a higher sense than the one implied by the word as it is used today.

Yet we must realize that France’s decline also meant the end of Western culture. Paris inherited the creative principles of Early Gothic, the Italian Renaissance, and the Spanish Baroque, and combined them in their final, ripest, and sweetest form, the rococo style. Indeed, French culture is the only culture. England meant the beginning of civilization. French style is a style of manners, intellect, and taste; England has perfected the style of practical living, of money.

I should like to make clear what I mean by the term "Prussianism." The name, of course, refers to an area of Europe where certain attitudes took on impressive shape and began to evolve. But Prussianism is, first and foremost, a feeling, an instinct, a compulsion. It is the embodiment of spiritual and intellectual traits—and that means also of certain physical qualities—that have long since become the distinguishing characteristics of a race, or rather of the best and most typical representatives of this race. Certainly not every person born in England is "English" in the racial sense; and not everyone born in Prussia in genuinely "Prussian." This word denotes everything we Germans possess by way of destiny, will, inner drive, and ability, and nothing of our vague ideas, desires, and whims. There are true Prussian types in all of Germany—I am thinking of men like Friedrich List and Hegel, of certain inventors, scholars, engineers, and organizers, but especially of a particular type of German worker. Since the Battles of Rossbach and Leuthen there have been many Germans who in the depth of their souls have harbored a small strain of Prussianism, a potential source of energy which can become active at great moments of history. As yet, however, the only real Prussian achievements have been the creations of Frederick William I and Frederick the Great: the Prussian state and the Prussian people.

Every supreme reality begets later realities. The Prussian element is again making itself felt in the Germans, or rather in the German type, of today; it is gradually reducing the effectiveness of outmoded ideologies. Although the best Germans are not aware of it, Prussianism, with its combination of realism, discipline, energy, and esprit de corps, is a great promise for the future. At the moment, the German people, indeed every individual German, is threatened by what we have dubbed "the German Michel"—the hodgepodge of faded beliefs which we often think of as ingenuous, but which really are useless or even dangerous for Western civilization.

The concept of "the Germans" as used in the idealistic sense by professors and enthusiasts is an artificial construct based on the spurious foundation of a common language. It is unpolitical and impractical; it does not denote a "race" in the sense of instincts having a unified function in the real world. The idea is made up of the ossified remains of the Medieval Gothic mentality, together with the confused gropings of eternally childish souls. The Romantic movement in Germany, with its dreamy politics of 1848, once again brought these traits to the fore. Gothic vestiges, mixed with bits and shreds of English ideas, comprise the basis for such trivial beliefs as cosmopolitanism, international friendship, and universal humanitarianism. In serious cases people have been induced to treason by naively adopting such ideologies, singing and writing and talking about things which the Spanish sword and English money have actually achieved.

Such are the perennial provincialists, the simple-minded heroes of the German Bildungsroman, who may undergo a certain amount of inner development but who display an astounding lack of talent when it comes to dealing with things of the real world. Such are the portly gentlemen of our bowling clubs, our beer halls, and our parliamentary assemblies, who excuse their own lack of ability by griping about the governmental departments they manage so badly. They are the ones with the sleepy tendency toward English liberalism and its hostility to the state, a feeling that pleases them even though they are ignorant of the strong initiative displayed by the private English citizen in political and other matters. Theirs is the narrow-minded, Italian and French preference for smallness in politics, the refusal to pursue political thought beyond the boundaries of their immediate neighbors. They consider order as inimical to culture, and yet they have been unable to capture the spirit of the culture they praise so highly. At the same time they are the outspoken advocates of Spanish-style ecclesiastical authority, which only leads to squabbles among the various denominations.

Such, then, are our "typical Germans": impractical, servile, stupid but honest, formless without any promise of improvement, old-fashioned, small-minded, thought-stifling, and degrading. They are the inner enemy of every true German as an individual and of all Germans as a nation. Together they represent the "German Michel," of the five "typical" personifications of modern creative peoples, the only one that is negative in character. They represent a form of Gothic humanity that has resisted the efforts of post-Renaissance and post-Reformation culture to create a race in the new sense of the term.

The organized colonization of the Slavic frontier involved Germans of all tribes, but the area was ruled by nobles from Lower Saxony. Thus the Prussian people, by origin, is closely related to the English. It was the same Saxons, Frisians, and Angles who, as roving Viking bands, and often under Norman and Danish names, subdued the Celtic Britons. Saxon settlements sprang up along the Thames just as they had in the desert-like region near the Havel and Spree Rivers, a stretch of land comparable in desolate expanse and fateful importance only to Latium, the Roman Campagna. By contemplating the rigid figures of Duke Widukind, the Margrave Gero, and Henry the Lion, we can gain an impression of the type of men who first set this people on its path of Destiny.

But the Viking spirit and the communal spirit of the Teutonic knights gradually gave rise to two antithetical ethical imperatives. One side bore the Germanic idea actively within itself, while the other felt itself subject to it: personal independence on the one hand, and suprapersonal community spirit on the other. Today we refer to these concepts as "individualism" and "socialism." Virtues of the most exalted kind are summarized by these words: in the one case personal responsibility, self-reliance, determination, and initiative; and in the other, loyalty, discipline, selflessness, and a sense of obligation. To be free and to serve—there is nothing more difficult that this. A people whose spirit and being are capable of it, a nation that can truly serve and be free, deserves to take upon itself a great destiny.

Service—that is the style of Old Prussia, similar to that of Old Spain, which also created a people by engaging in knightly warfare against the heathen. Not "I" but "we"—a feeling of community to which every individual sacrifices his whole being. The individual does not matter; he must offer himself to the totality. All exist for all, and all partake of that glorious inner freedom, the libertas oboe dientiae which has always distinguished the best exemplars of Prussian breeding. The Prussian army, Prussian civil service, and August Bebel’s workers’ brigades are all products of this breeding principle.

The urge to individuality and independence, however, later drove many of those with Viking blood in their veins—Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians—to seek their fortunes on the American prairie. This adventure was, in effect, a late resumption of the expeditions from Greenland at the time of the Eddas, when Vikings touched the Canadian coast: a tremendous migration of Teutons filled with a longing for distance and limitless expanses, teams of adventurers who were to lay the groundwork for yet another people with Saxon characteristics. Yet this new people was to arise apart from the maternal soil of the Faustian culture, and thus lacked the "inner basalt" of which Goethe speaks in his poem "America." It retained certain races of noble blood and the concomitant virtues of vigor and industriousness, but was without roots and therefore without a future.

Such was the origin of the English and Prussian types. The difference between them is that between a people whose soul has developed out of an awareness of insular security, and one that has been forced to maintain a frontier without natural borders to protect it from its enemies. In England, "splendid isolation" replaced the organized state. A stateless nation was only possible under those conditions; isolation was the necessary ingredient in the development of the spirit of modern England, a spirit that first gained full confidence in the seventeenth century, when the English became the undisputed masters of their island. It is a case of creative topography: the English people shaped and formed itself, while the Prussian people was shaped in the eighteenth century by the Hohenzollern, who brought with them the frontier experience of southern Central Europe, and who had thus become advocates of the organized state.

As real political entities, as state and non-state, Prussia and England embody the maximum and minimum functioning of the suprapersonal socialistic principle. The liberal English "state" is completely intangible; it makes not a single claim on the individual citizen, nor does it make of him a meaningful element in a political system. It serves him exclusively as a means to an end. During the century between Waterloo and the World War, England went without compulsory education, compulsory military service, and compulsory social security—out of sheer antipathy to these negative privileges. The hostility of the English toward centralized organization is neatly expressed in their word "society," which has displaced in their thinking the ideal notion of the "state." The concept entered the French Enlightenment as société, Montesquieu arrived at this opinion: "Des sociétés de vingt à trente millions d’hommes—ce sont des montres dans la nature." This was an anarchical French idea, but in British formulation. Rousseau, as is well known, used this word to conceal his hatred of rules and commands issued by authority; and Karl Marx, whose pattern of thought was likewise predominantly English, merely followed suit. Lessing, as a representative of the German Aufklärung, employed the term Menschengeschlecht in the sense of "human society." Goethe, Schiller, and Herder preferred the word Gesellschaft, which then became a favorite expression of the German liberals, who used it to blot out of their minds the nobler but more demanding idea of the Staat.

England did away with the principle of the organized state, and put in its place the notion of the free private citizen. The citizen demands permission to fight alone in the ruthless struggle for existence, for this is the only way he can satisfy his Viking instincts. Buckle, Malthus, and Darwin later postulated that the basic essence of "society" was the naked struggle for existence. And they were absolutely right, at least as far as their own country and people were concerned. To be sure, in modern England this principle operates in a highly refined and perfected fashion. But evidence of a more rudimentary adherence to it can be found in the Icelandic sagas, where such behavior is obviously spontaneous and not borrowed from another culture. The forces with which William the Conqueror took England in 1066 could be called a "society" of knightly adventurers, and English trading companies have subdued and expropriated entire countries—most recently, since 1890, the inland regions of South Africa. Gradually the entire English nation assumed the characteristics of a "society." The Old Norse instinct for piracy and clever trading has, in the end, influenced the Englishman’s attitude toward all of reality, including property, work, foreign peoples, and the weaker individuals and classes among his own people. The same instinct has also yielded political techniques that are extremely effective weapons in the struggle for mastery of the globe.

A concept complementary to that of "society" is the "private citizen." He represents the sum of certain positive ethical qualities which like all great ethical virtues are not acquired through training or education, but are borne in the blood and perfected after passing through generation after generation. The peculiarly English style of politics is essentially one that involves private citizens or groups of such individuals. This, and only this, is the very meaning of parliamentary government. Cecil Rhodes was a private citizen who conquered foreign countries. The American billionaires are private citizens who rule foreign countries by means of an inferior class of professional politicians. German liberalism, on the other hand, is ethically valueless. It merely says "No!" to the state, and is unable to justify its opposition by offering equally high-minded and vigorous positive suggestions.

Among the political attitudes that prevail in Germany today, only socialism has the potentiality of inner value and integrity. Liberalism is for the simple-minded, for those who like to chat a great deal about things they can never achieve. That is how we Germans are; we cannot possibly be like the English, we can only be caricatures of them—and that we have been often enough. Every man for himself: that is an English idea. Every man for every other man: that is the Prussian way. Liberalism, however, means "the state for itself, and every man for himself." That is a formula impossible to follow unless one is willing to take the liberal course, which is to say one thing while being dead set against its opposite, but in the end to let the opposite take over anyway.

There are in Germany a number of unpopular and disreputable political philosophies, but none is more fervently despised than the liberal view. Liberalism, in its German form, has always stood for mental sterility, for the ignorance and incomprehension of historical necessities. It has meant the inability to cooperate with others or to make sacrifices for others. Its position has always been one of entirely negative criticism, though not as an expression of an indomitable will to change society—as manifested by Bebel’s Socialists—but simply out of the desire to "be different." While our liberals have never been at a loss for "standpoints" to adopt, they have lacked the inner vitality and discipline, the confidence and purposeful vigor that are so characteristic of the English form of liberalism. They are, in fact, nothing but obstacles on our historical path.

Since Napoleonic times liberalism has captured the minds of our educated classes. Pseudo-intellectuals (Nietzsche’s "cultural philistines") and ivory-tower scholars, shut off from the real world by a barrier of abstract knowledge, have been its staunchest defenders. Even the historian Mommsen, who mastered his difficult field of knowledge with true Prussian aplomb, and who recognized and admired the Prussian elements in Roman history, adopted as a member of the Assembly an uncomprehending standpoint of opposition to Bismarck’s policies. An interesting comparison could be drawn between Mommsen and the English translator and editor of his History of Greece, George Grote, a banker and liberal.

With rabbit-like prolificacy, our writers and professors have sired book after book and scheme after scheme in which the English concepts of the free citizen, the free personality, the people as sovereign, and of a universal, free, and progressive humanity are lifted out of the reality of English business offices and emblazoned high in the German clouds. Bismarck, whom Bruno Bauer called in 1880 a "socialist imperialist," had some interesting things to say about these scholars who mistake the world of their books for the real world. August Bebel once demonstrated his infallible instinct by soundly berating the academics who had entered his party. He felt out the anti-Prussian instinct of the German intellectual, who was secretly undermining his country’s order and discipline. And time has proved him right. Since Bebel’s death, "educated" Socialists have cracked the strength of the party and joined forces with our "educated" middle-class liberals. Together, the two groups are now staging in the Court Theater at Weimar a revival of the ideological drama of the Frankfurt Paulskirche, in which professors hold scholarly conversations about the wording of a paper constitution.

In their "splendid isolation" the English have achieved on the basis of their ethical instinct a unity, both internal and external, such as no other modern Western European people has attained. England has produced a unique form of respectable society, a class of "ladies and gentlemen" joined together by a strong sense of common interest and by uniform patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. Since 1750 this magnificent type of society has been the model for all of modern civilization, and in France first of all. The artistic fashion known as "Empire" served as a background for this style of living. It was essentially a practical and restrained form of rococo, and it imbued this society’s whole environment with elegant and refined taste. In this connection we think today particularly of the masters of the civilized portrait, Gainsborough and Reynolds.

The English were united by a common feeling of success and good fortune, unlike the Prussians, who were moved by a sense of challenge and duty. We may think of the English as Olympians of the business world at the banquet table, or as Vikings returned from distant explorations, but not as knights on the field of battle. Next to noble parentage, wealth is the major condition for acceptance in the group; it is also the criterion for rank within the group’s social structure. Wealth is the Englishman’s prime virtue, his distinguishing mark, his goal and his ideal. Today, only England has what may be called social culture, although it does not possess any other, more philosophical form of culture. The English are a people of profound superficiality; we Germans, in the "land of poets and thinkers," so often display merely a superficial profundity.

There is not and cannot be a German or Prussian type of society like the English. A society made up of separate egos, lacking the unifying pathos of a common purpose and goal, always strikes us as somewhat ridiculous. In imitation of the English "club" and "banquet," our German individualists and liberals have invented the Verein and the Festessen; these are his devices for the development of "cultural solidarity."

The Prussian style of living, in contrast to all this, has produced a profound and vigorous rank-consciousness, a feeling of unity based on an ethos of work, not of leisure. It unites the members of each professional group—military, civil service, and labor—by infusing them with a pride of vocation, and dedicates them to activity that benefits all others, the totality, the state. Such a feeling of solidarity within each group finds symbolic expression in words: at the top level there are Kamaraden, in the middle Kollegen, and at the bottom, but with the same sense of pride, Genossen. The bond of unity at all levels is a supreme ethos of dedication, not of success. The distinguishing feature of membership is rank, not wealth. The captain is superior to the lieutenant, even though the latter may be a prince or a millionaire. The French used the term "bourgeois" during their Revolution to underscore the ideal of equality, but this corresponds neither to the English nor the German sense of distance in social relations. A feeling for distance is common to both Germanic peoples; we differ only in the origins of the feeling. When a German worker uses the word "bourgeois" he means a person who, in his opinion, has merely obtained a certain social rank without performing any real work—it is the English ideal seen from the German perspective. England has its snobs, Germany its title-seekers.

The centuries-old feeling of group solidarity in both countries has brought forth a magnificent conformity of physical and mental attitudes, in the one case a race of successful businessmen, in the other a race of workers. One important symbol of this process, albeit an external one, is the English taste in men’s clothing. England has produced civilian dress in the purest sense: the uniform of the private individual. Their fashion holds unopposed sway in all of Western Europe. England has clothed the world in its uniform, the symbol of free trade, private fortune-making, and "cant." The counterpart of this English style is the Prussian uniform. It is an emblem of public service, not of private existence. Rather than symbolizing the success gained by diligent activity it stands for that activity itself. "I am the first servant of my state," said the Prussian king whose father had made the wearing of uniforms a customary practice among the nobility. How many have fully understood the significance of the phrase "the king’s mantle"?

England’s fashion in men’s wear is a matter of social obligation, even stricter than the specifications for uniform-wearing in the Prussian state. Whoever is anybody in England would not think of appearing before his peers in "civilian" dress, i.e., contrary to fashion and custom. But only the Englishman is capable of making a proper appearance in this "gentleman’s" costume. The Bratenrock of the provincial German philistine is a poor copy of the English model. Beneath it the philistine German heart continues to throb for "freedom" and "human dignity." The Bratenrock is the symbol of the ideals of 1848, and is worn today with pride by the German socialists-gone-liberal. [7]

(7. The Frenchman, who regards Faustian drives as embarrassing, gives his creative attention to women’s fashions rather than the uniforms of profession and success. In France, business and civic duty have had to give way to l’amour.)

To the Prussian way of thinking, the will of the individual is subsumed under the will of the totality. The officers’ corps, the members of the civil service branches, August Bebel’s army of workers, and ultimately the German Volk of 1813, 1870, and 1914 have all felt, willed, and acted as a suprapersonal unity. This is not just herd instinct; it is an expression of sublime strength and freedom, something which the outsider can never understand. Prussianism is exclusive. Even in its proletarian form it rejects the workers of other countries together with their egoistic pseudo-socialism. Servility, snobbishness—these are words for attitudes that are understood and despised only when they degenerate. The genuine Prussian despises no one; but he is himself feared.

The English, indeed the whole world, will never understand that the Prussian ethic carries with it a profound inner independence. For people of sufficient mental capacities a system of social obligations guarantees a supreme freedom of the inner life, which is not possible under a system of social privileges. A mentality such as that of General Moltke is unthinkable in England. The Englishman pays for his practical freedom with the loss of the other kind of freedom: he is inwardly a slave, whether as puritan, rationalist, sensualist, or materialist. For two centuries now he has been the inventor of all philosophies that do away with inner independence. Most recently he has produced Darwinism, which makes man’s entire psychic makeup dependent on material forces. Incidentally, the particularly crass form of Darwinism propagated by Büchner and Haeckel has become the Weltanschauung of the German philistine.

The Englishman belongs to his "society" in the spiritual sense as well. His clothing is also an expression of his uniformed conscience. He cherishes his right to act as a private citizen, yet for him there exists no such thing as private thinking. His life is governed by a unified, theologically oriented philosophy of little real content, as fashionable as frockcoat and gloves. The term "herd instinct" is appropriate here, if anywhere.

The German Reformation has had no inner consequences. Lutheranism was an end, not a beginning. [8] Gothic Germany was on its deathbed, but rose up one final time to perform this great, personal act. Luther himself is understandable only in the context of the Renaissance mood that prevailed in the visible Church of his time. Its public image was that of the Medici court; popes and cardinals were actually condottieri; Church administration systematically robbed the faithful of their private fortunes; religious faith itself was a formal matter, and the proportion of penance to sin had become just as much a question of taste as the relationship between column and architrave. The Northern Gothic sensibility reacted angrily to these developments, but the ensuing revolt was in fact naïve and peasant-like; it produced a Church minus the papacy, and Gothic faith minus the clever emphasis on formalities. It stopped far short of the innermost core of the Church’s institutional strength. The revolt arose from the spirit of negation; its fruitful passion could not endure for very long.

(8. The Decline of the West, II, 296.)

In its wake came the flourishing spirit of the Baroque, when the Spanish created the Counter-Reformation and the contentious Jesuit Order. This was a truly creative and affirmative movement, and it brought Catholicism to new heights of vital power. Following this, in the seventeenth century, the new Northern nations set about creating new forms of religious life using the limitless possibilities offered by Christianity. Common to all these attempts was the rigorous will to action, a far cry from the leisurely culture of Florence and the sterile, self-castigating dialectic of Pascal and the French Jansenists.

The results were revolutionary Independentism in England and, under its influence, the Pietistic movement in Swabia and Prussia. Pietism, with its quiet persuasiveness, had a momentous effect on the Prussian type that began to emerge at the time. It helped produce individuals who, on the outside, performed obedient and self-effacing service for their state, but whose inner life was free of the limitations imposed by worldly existence—people with a tender, profound abundance of emotion and genuine inner simplicity. Queen Louise, William I, Bismarck, Moltke, and Hindenburg are prime examples of this type, persons whose piety has virtually been free of dogma. They have concealed their piety from others, feeling that it is best exemplified by dutiful public action and not by public confessions.

The English Independent, on the other hand, was externally free, just as his Norman forebears were free. He fashioned for himself a pure lay religion using the Bible as fundament, granting to each individual the privilege of interpreting the text as he wished. Whatever the Independent undertook was therefore, as it were by definition, morally correct. The Englishman never entertains a single doubt on this score. Success is a proof of Divine Providence. While the Pietist regarded himself as solely responsible for the morality of his behavior, the Independent placed this responsibility with God. No one has the power to alter such deep convictions. Rationalizations can always be devised for compulsive desires, and, should compulsion lead to decay and decline, that is simply the inevitability of fate.

With truly remarkable self-assurance the instinct of the English formed its own religious consciousness from the sterile, doctrinaire, formalistic, and thus typically French teachings of Calvin. In the minds of Cromwell and his soldiers the doctrine of predestination meant that the nation was the Community of Saints, the English nation in particular was the Chosen People. Every act was justified before God simply because it was possible to perform; every guilt, every brutality, indeed every crime committed on the path to success was "predestined by God" and thus He alone was responsible. On the basis of this boundless self-confidence and ruthlessness, England has become the mighty nation that it is.

Although Pietism exerted its most powerful influence in the German-speaking areas of Europe, it was hardly a direct expression of a German race. It definitely had impractical and provincial traits. It brought small circles of believers together in a spirit of intimate congeniality. For them life became an ideal of service; one’s meager portion of earthly existence amid toil and misery took on meaning only in the framework of some higher duty.

Yet such a duty had to be imposed, and this was the superb accomplishment, partly willed and partly unintentional, of the great Hohenzollerns, the heirs to the knightly ideal of the East European colonies. From amid all the blemishes of princely and urban egotism, from beneath all the weakness of royalty, there emerged the idea of Old Prussia, the one great idea that has come forward in Germany since that time. It has won a place in the souls of the best Germans ever since, even when their hearts have been opposed to it.

The Pietism of Swabia eventually degenerated into middle-class sentimentality, or gave up its best minds—Hegel, for example—to the North, where the Old Prussian ideal brought forth a new type, the hard-thinking proponent of this religious sensibility. A profound contempt for mere wealth, luxury, convenience, pleasure, and prosperity characterizes the Prussian spirit of these centuries. Here we find the germ of the later ideals of military and public service. All these comforts are incompatible with the knightly sense of dignity and obligation. But for the English they are gifts of God; comfort, for them, is proof of Divine Providence, and they accept it with devout gratitude.

A sharper contrast is hardly imaginable. Work, for the pious Independent, is a consequence of the Fall; the Prussian regards it as a Divine Commandment. Two interpretations of the nature of work are here at odds with each other: work as business and as vocation. Let us contemplate the sound and sense of these words. "Vocation" means "calling": a call from God Himself. In this view, work is in itself morally good. To the Englishman and American, moral success is contained in the goal of work, in success, money, wealth. Work is merely a path toward these goals, to be chosen with special consideration of its comfort and security. Obviously, conflict is unavoidable on the path to success, but the Puritan conscience can justify any means. Whoever stands in the way is simply pushed aside—individuals, whole classes, whole nations. That, after all, is the will of God. It is easy to see how such ideas, once applied in real life, can bring a nation to the very greatest heights of achievement.

In order to overcome man’s inborn lethargy, the Prussian socialist ethic maintains that the chief aim of life is not happiness. "Do your duty," it says, "by doing your work." The English capitalist ethic says, "Get rich, and then you won’t have to work any more." There is doubtless something provocative about this latter motto. It is tempting, it appeals to very basic human instincts. The working masses of ambitious nations have understood it well. As late as the nineteenth century it produced the Yankee type with his irresistible practical optimism. The other motto is forbidding. It is for the few who wish to inject it into the community and thus force it upon the masses. The first maxim is for a stateless country, for egoists and Viking types with the urge for constant personal combat, such as we find in English sportsmanship. It implies extreme independence of mind, the right to gain happiness at the expense of all others, as long as one’s strength holds out—in other words, scientific Darwinism. The other, however, is an expression of the socialist idea in all its profundity: the will to power, the struggle for happiness, but for the happiness of the totality, not of the individual. In this sense Frederick William I, and not Marx, was the first conscious socialist. The universal socialist movement had its start with this exemplary personality. Kant, with his categorical imperative, provided the movement with a formula.

In the final phase of Western European culture two great schools of philosophy were founded, the English school of egoism and sensualism around 1700, and the Prussian school of idealism around 1800. They express what these nations are, as ethical, religious, political, and economic entities.

Philosophy in itself is nothing—a collection of words, a series of books. Nor is it either true or false, in itself. It is language of the life of a great mind. For the Englishman, Hobbes is speaking the truth when he sets up the "selfish system" of egoism and the optimistic Whig philosophy of the common good ("the greatest happiness for the greatest number"). And Shaftesbury also speaks the truth, for the Englishman, with his portrait of the gentleman, the Tory, the sovereign personality living life to the fullest. Yet for us Kant is just as truthful with his contempt for "happiness" and usefulness, his categorical imperative of duty. Hegel, in our view, speaks the truth when, with his powerful sense of reality, he places the concrete destiny of individual nations, and not the well-being of "human society," at the center of his historical deliberations. Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, declares that the egoism of the individual is the driving force of the state; Fichte says it is the obligation to work. Which is the highest goal—freedom by means of wealth, or freedom from wealth? Ought we to prefer Kant’s categorical imperative: "Behave as if the precepts governing your behavior were to become law for all," or Bentham’s "Behave in such a way that you will have success"?

Vikings and knights—both of these types live on the antithesis of the English and Prussian moral systems. The philosophical teachings that have since arisen out of these separate worlds of sensibility, the progeny of the philosophers of both nations, all bear the same distinguishing marks. The Englishman is a utilitarian, in fact the only one in Western Europe. He cannot be otherwise, and whenever he attempts to deny this strongest inner drive of his the result is the phenomenon that has become famous as "cant"—it can be found in its purest form in the letters of Lord Chesterfield. The English are a nation of theologians. Their great revolution took on primarily religious forms, and following the abolition of the state no language except theological language remained with which to express the concerns of communal life. And so it has been: a biblical interpretation of questionable business dealings can ease the conscience and greatly increase ambition and initiative. Out of consideration for the chances of success in the personal struggle for existence, the theological mentality tends to avoid naming by its proper name the true goal of all activity: wealth.

If there is a similar conflict within the Prussian atmosphere, then it is concerned with position and rank. In many cases one is tempted to call it excessive ambition and title-seeking. In principle, however, it is a manifestation of the will to take on higher responsibility because one feels ready to do so.

Among all the peoples of Western Europe these two are distinguished by a rigid social hierarchy. This is a sign of their drive for dynamic activity. It puts every individual in the precise location in which he is needed most. Such an ordering is the result of a wholly unconscious and involuntary conservation of energies. It is natural and proper to a particular people only; no other people, no man of genius or ever so powerful will can possibly re-create it. It is an expression of the people’s fundamental moral and ethical attitude. Centuries are required for the clarification and realization of this special feeling for social structure. The Viking spirit and the spirit of the medieval knights are apparent here also: the ethos of success and the ethos of duty. The English people is structured along lines of wealth and poverty, the Prussian along lines of command and obedience.

The meaning of class distinctions is thus completely different in these two countries. In an association of independent private citizens the lowest class is the group that has nothing; in a true state the lowest class is the group that has nothing to say. In England democracy means the possibility that everyone can get rich; in Prussia it means that the existing ranks are open to everyone. Within the structure of Prussian society the individual receives his place according to his ability, not according to the demands of tradition.

France (and this means Florence as well) has never had a natural and instinctive class structure of this sort, not even before 1789. Social anarchy was the rule; there existed arbitrary privileged groups of various sizes and composition, and no firm system of relationships among them. Besides the class of court nobility there were the judicial nobles; there were types such as the abbé and the tenants généraux, and fine distinctions such as those between factions of the urban merchant class. This lack of hierarchic social structure existed in France from the very beginning, and is an outcome of the typically French penchant for égalité. In England nobility gradually came to mean primarily the nobility of wealth, in Prussia the nobility of military achievement. The French noble class has never attained such a uniformity of social significance. The English Revolution was directed against the state, i.e., against the "Prussian" sense of order in the Church and in public life. The German Revolution fought against the "English" system of wealth and poverty, which originated in industrial and commercial developments of the nineteenth century and had become the focal point for anti-Prussian and antisocialist tendencies. The French Revolution was not directed against a foreign, and therefore immoral, order; it combatted order per se. That is democracy, French style.

Here, finally, we can grasp the profound ethical meaning of the slogans "capitalism" and "socialism." They represent two systems of social stratification, one that is based on wealth and the uninhibited struggle for success, and one that is founded on authority and legislation. The Englishman would never accept commands from someone poorer than himself, nor would the Prussian ever pay homage to wealth for its own sake. Yet even the class-conscious worker in the erstwhile party of August Bebel obeyed the party leadership with the same sureness of instinct as the English laborer respects a millionaire as a recipient of divine favors. Proletarian class conflict is incapable of affecting such deeply rooted attitudes. The entire English labor movement is based on the distinction between rich and poor within the working class itself. Under such conditions it is impossible to imagine anything like the iron discipline of a Prussian-style party of millions.

"Unequal distribution of wealth" is the typically English proletarian formula, used repeatedly by Shaw. Though it sounds ridiculous to us, it is precisely appropriate to the ideal of living professed by the civilized Viking. With due respect to the magnificent flowering of this ideal in the Yankee type, we might speak of two forms of socialism existing in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Germany: socialism for the billionaires and socialism for civil servants. As an example of the first type we can point to Andrew Carnegie, who first transformed a large amount of public funds into a private fortune, only to turn around and distribute it with sovereign gesture among public enterprises. His pronouncement, "Whoever dies poor dies in dishonor," implies a high regard for the will to power over the totality. This kind of private socialism, in extreme cases simply the dictatorial administration of public monies, ought not to be confused with the socialism of true public servants and administrators (who themselves can be quite poor). Examples of this latter form of socialism are the otherwise quite different personalities of Bismarck and Bebel.

George Bernard Shaw is today the prime exponent of "capitalistic" socialism, which still sees wealth and poverty as the controlling factors in the economic sphere. "Poverty is the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes" (Major Barbara). He preaches against the "cowardly masses that cling to the feeble prejudice that it is better to be good than rich." The worker should try to get rich—this was the policy of the English trade unions right from the beginning. That is why there has never been a socialism in the proletarian sense in England, from Owen to Shaw—it was impossible to distinguish from the capitalism of the lower class.

For us, the controlling factor of society is the interplay of command and obedience in a strictly ordered community, be it state, party, officers’ corps, or civil service. The member of any one of these communities is a servant of that community. Travailler pour le roi de Prusse—that means doing one’s duty without giving oneself up to corrupt notions of private profit. The wages paid to Prussian officers and civil servants since the days of Frederick William I have been ridiculously small when compared to the sums required to belong even to the middle class in England. But the Prussians have worked harder, more selflessly, and more honestly. The real compensation for this work is rank. It was the same in August Bebel’s party. This workers’ state-within-a-state did not want to get rich, it wanted to rule. During their enforced strikes these workers starved often enough, but in the interest of gaining power, not for higher wages. They struck in support of a philosophy that was supposedly or actually opposed to that of their employers. They struck for a moral principle, and a defeat in their battle could ultimately mean a moral victory.

English workers were completely unable to understand this. They were not poor, and during their strikes they accepted the hundreds of thousands of pounds offered to them by German workers, who imagined that their comrades across the Channel were fighting for the same cause. Thus the November Revolution in Germany was a case of insubordination in the workers’ party as well as in the armed forces. The sudden transformation of the disciplined labor movement into a wild struggle for higher wages, fought by single groups independent of each other, was a victory for the English idea. Its failure was underscored by the fact that a new, highly disciplined organization reappeared in the Army. The only really talented personality to appear on the scene was a soldier. The German Revolution will continue in this manner, as a series of successes and failures of military authority.

The same contrast prevails in the economic thought of both countries. Political economists have committed the fateful error of thinking solely in materialistic terms. Instead of considering the multiplicity of economic instincts in the world, they always speak in general terms of the economic stratification of "man," of "the modern age," and of "the present." When using such language the scientific discipline of political economics displays all the shortcomings of its English origins. For it had its start among modern Englishmen, with all their self-confidence and lack of psychological tact. It became their only "philosophy"; it corresponded to their sense of mercantile competition, success, and personal gain. With this purely English interpretation of economic affairs they have infected the minds of the Continent since the eighteenth century.

The Teutonic knights that settled and colonized the eastern borderlands of Germany in the Middle Ages had a genuine feeling for the authority of the state in economic matters, and later Prussians have inherited that feeling. The individual is informed of his economic obligations by Destiny, by God, by the state, or by his own talent—these are simply different words for the same fact. Rights and privileges of producing and consuming goods are equally distributed. The aim is not ever greater wealth for the individual or for every individual, but rather the flourishing of the totality. Thus Frederick William I and his successors colonized the marshlands in the East, regarding this as their divine mission. The modern German laborer, with his fine sense of reality, has thought and acted along precisely these lines, although the theories of Karl Marx have obscured for him the close connections between his own aims and those of the Old Prussians.

The pirate instinct of the insular nation has a wholly different understanding of economic affairs. There economic activity is considered a matter of combat and booty—ultimately, the individual’s share in the booty. The Norman state, which developed a refined technique of amassing money reserves, was based entirely on the piracy principle. The feudal system was introduced as a magnificent and elegant means to the same piratical end. The barons exploited the land apportioned to them, and were in turn exploited by the duke. The goal of all was wealth. God bestowed it on the venturesome. The modern science of accounting had its start with these sedentary pirates. The words "check," "account," "control," "receipt," "record," and the modern term for the English treasury, "Exchequer," originated in the accounting chambers of the Norman Duke Robert le Diable (died 1035). [9] When England was conquered in 1066 the Norman barons expropriated the Saxons, their tribal relatives, in the same way. Their descendants have inherited their outlook.

(9. The Decline of the West, II, 372.)

The same style is still apparent today in every English trade company and every American trust. Their aim is not to work steadily to raise the entire nation’s standard of living, it is rather to produce private fortunes by the use of private capital, to overcome private competition, and to exploit the public through the use of advertising, price wars, artificial stimulation of the consumer, and strict control of the ratio of supply and demand. When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country. As Friedrich Engels wrote, "Nothing is more foreign to the English mentality than solidarity." Even in sports and recreation the Englishman sees a test of personal, and especially physical, superiority. He engages in sports for the sake of national and world records; he enjoys prize-fighting, a sport that is closely related to his economic habits and is quite alien to the minds of gymnasts in Germany.

All this proves that the economic existence of England is synonymous with business, i.e., a refined form of piracy. The English instinct regards all commodities as booty, items to be manipulated in order to get rich. The English machine industry was created in the interest of commerce and trade, its chief aim being the production of cheap goods. When English agriculture began to limit wage cuts by fixing its own prices, it was simply abandoned in the interest of commerce. The battles between capital and labor in English industry in 1850 were concerned with the commodity "labor"—one side wanted to get it cheap, the other wanted a high price for it. Everything that Marx has to say with grudging admiration about "capitalistic society" refers principally to English, and not to a universal, economic instinct.

The sublime term "free trade" is part and parcel of Viking economics. The Prussian, i.e., socialist term would be "state control of the exchange of goods." This assigns to trade a subordinate rather than a dominant role within the complex of economic activity. We can understand why Adam Smith harbored a hatred of the state and the "cunning beasts called statesmen." Indeed, government officials must have the same effect on tradesmen as policemen on burglars and naval cruisers on the crews of pirate ships.

Likewise characteristic of the Englishman is his overestimation of the importance of capital sums for economic health. The materialist finds it impossible to understand that the English concept of capital is psychologically, and therefore practically (the practical life is, after all, an expression of psychic conditions) different from the French system of private means and the Prussian concept of administrative funds. The English have never been good at psychology. They have always considered their own ideas as logically binding on "mankind." In fact, all of modern political economics rests on the basic error of equating economic life everywhere in the world with an exclusively English interest in business, and the error is committed even by those who reject the theories of the Manchester school. Marxism, in the very act of negating this theory, has adopted its patterns quite completely. This explains the grotesque fiasco of all predictions concerning the outbreak of the World War; it was said that the collapse of world economy would follow within a few months.

English-style capitalism is the only true counterpart to Marxist socialism. The regulation of economic affairs by the state, a Prussian idea, transformed German capitalism instinctively into a socialist economic pattern. The first step in this process was the protective tariff legislation of 1879. The large syndicates were, in effect, economic states within the state. They represent "capitalism’s first practical and systematic large-scale attempt, although it was not consciously planned, to understand the mysteries of its own techniques and to gain control of social forces which up to then had been regarded as natural and unfathomable, requiring passive, blind submission" (Lensch, Drei Jahre Weltrevolution).

Nevertheless, German liberalism—the Englishman within us—still worships free trade, not just the freedom of the human spirit. In doing so, the "liberal" German cuts his silliest figure. Because he has misunderstood and tended to favor certain Viking instincts, he has "summarily" rejected the authoritarian state, the suprapersonal will, and the suppression of the individual in favor of the totality. By adopting this attitude he has acted, or so he believes, "metaphysically." That is the belief of "educated" Germans who lack practical experience: the professors, the poets and thinkers, all those who write profusely and never do anything. They cannot, of course, understand or morally accept the other form of liberalism, the pirate principle of free trade with its every-man-for-himself philosophy. They simply have never grasped the connection between the abstract notion of the autonomous self and the practical application of this notion in the offices of the large industrial and commercial firms. Therefore German stock-market liberalism has hitched the German professor to its own wagon. It has sent him to the political meetings to talk and be talked to. It has put him in the editor’s chair, where with philosophical acumen he has turned out article after profound article, conveying to a gullible public (for whom the newspaper has long since replaced the Bible as