Carl Schmitt

Note: The following short synthesis of Schmitt’s classic essay The Concept of the Political stems, in part, from a recent discussion with the Bay Area Nationalist Book Club.

However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.

The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.

“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”

One.

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.

Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge.  (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).

The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (“the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend-enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

Four.

Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.

Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity.  For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”

Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.

This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.

Five.

The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.

In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics).  The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.

This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.

Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.

Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history

It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.

Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.

When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.

This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.

To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.

Six.

The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.

War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.

But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)

Seven.

Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (“conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.

Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.

But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”

In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.

Eight.

Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.

Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.

Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.

The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.

In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.

It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.

Nine.

The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.

In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.

Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.

Ten.

“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”

The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.

Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.

Eleven.

Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.

In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.

At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.

The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.

In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.

Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.

The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”

If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.

All else is simply “politics.”

“Socialisme fasciste” is the title of an essay by Drieu La Rochelle. Fascist socialism, though, has been largely symbolic, since it is more an idea than a record of actual achievement.

At certain points, all fascist movements had to come to terms with socialism. And all took inspiration from it: Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers Party, Mussolini was a socialist school teacher, José-Antonio Primo de Rivera was a symbol of national-syndicalist socialism, Codreanu’s Iron Guard was a movement of students and peasants, Mosley in England had been a Labour Minister, Doriot in France was a former Communist and his PPF emerged from a Communist cell in Saint-Denis.

Historically, fascist movements were liberation movements opposing the confiscation of power by cosmopolitan capitalism and by the inherent dishonesty of democratic regimes, which systematically deprive the people of their right to participate [in government].

With the exception of Peron’s Argentina, circumstances have always been such as to prevent the realization of fascism’s socialist vocation.

Those fascist movements that succeeded in taking power were compelled, thus, to reconstitute an economy ruined by demagogues, to re-establish an order undermined by anarchy, to create ways of overcoming the chaos besetting their lands or to repel external threats. These urgent and indispensable tasks required a total national mobilization and dictated certain priorities.

Circumstances, in a word, everywhere prevented fascists from realizing the synthesis of socialism and nationalism, for their socialist project was necessarily subordinated to the imperative of ensuring the nation’s survival.

These circumstances were further exacerbated by another difficulty: Fascist movements were generally reluctant to destroy the structure of capitalist society.

Given that their enemy was plutocracy, foreign capital, and the usurpers of national sovereignty, the immediate objective of these movements was to put the national interest above capitalist interest and to establish a regalian state capable of protecting the nation, as kings had once done against the feudal powers.

This [fascist] policy of conserving ancient structures may have transformed the prevailing consciousness and shifted power, but it did not entail a revolutionary destruction of the old order.

Fascist nostalgia for the old regime has, indeed, been so profound that it routinely reappears [today] in neo-fascist movements that are national-revolutionary more in word than in deed.

This phenomenon is evident throughout Europe, in Italy and Germany, in Spain, in France . . .

Is it, then, a contradiction distinct to neo-fascism that it has been unable to combine the conservation of hierarchical structures upon which Western Civilization rests with measures specifically socialist?  Or do neo-fascists simply — unconsciously — express the impossibility of grafting measures of social justice onto a civilization profoundly foreign to their ideal . . . ?

We need at this point to turn to [first] principles.

Every new vision of social relations rejecting Marxism rests on a certain number of postulates, which, I believe, are common to all radical oppositional movements.

1. The first of these condemns political and economic liberalism, which is the instrument of plutocratic domination. Only an authoritarian regime can ensure that the nation’s interest is respected.

2. The second postulate rejects class struggle. Class struggle is native to Marxism and [inevitably] leads to the sabotage of the nation’s economy and to a bureaucratic dictatorship, while true prosperity benefits everyone and can be obtained only through a loyal collaboration and a fair distribution.

3. The third protects the nation’s “capital” (understood as the union of capital and labor) and represents all who participate in the productive process . . . It is a function of the [fascist] state, thus to promote labor-capital collaboration and to do so in a way that does not put labor at the mercies of capital.

4. Given that the nation’s economy is a factor crucial to the nation’s independence, it, along with the Army and other national institutions, are to be protected from all forms of foreign interference.

5. Since modern nations have become political-economic enterprises whose power resides in those who control the economy as much as it does in those who make political decisions, the nation must play a leading role in the economic as well as the political systems. The instrument appropriate to such participation in the nation’s life have, however, yet to be invented. . . .

6. Above all, the nation’s interest must take priority over every particular interest. . . .

There is nothing specifically “socialist,” as this term is understood today, in these principles, since contemporary socialism is nothing other than a form of social war whose inevitable culmination is the rule of those bureaucratic entities claiming to represent the workers [i.e., national union federations].

Nevertheless, these principles accord with another conception of socialism — one that favors a fair distribution to all who participate in the productive process. This is not the underlying idea, but the consequence thereof, inspiring our postulates.

A fair distribution, however, will never result from sporadic, recurring struggles challenging the present degradations of money. Instead, it is obtainable only through the authority of a strong state able to impose conditions it considers equitable.

Simon Downer is a thug. He plunged a knife into the stomach of a girlfriend and got six years in prison. Whilst there he met another woman, Tracey, a single mother in her late 30s.

Tracey fell head over heels in love, married the violent criminal on his release and brought him home to live with her 8-year-old daughter. The married couple were very happy together.

Until they had an argument one night, just three months after their marriage. Simon Downer shoved aside his stepdaughter, stabbed his new wife fatally in the heart telling her “that’s what happens if you push it with me.”

Most women would not have married the thug. Even so, there has been a spate of reports in recent times of women, sometimes quite respectable professional women, choosing to have relationships with violent criminals.

One thing this tells us is that the ruling idea of human nature in Western societies is mistaken. John Kekes describes this ruling idea as follows:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

If you accept this view of human nature as adequate, then you will think it not only possible but desirable to leave each individual to arrive at their own moral view. The ideal will be a society of free, equal and morally elevated individuals, untouched by any external restraints on their choices.

But the liberal view of human nature hasn’t brought us closer to a society of independent, high-minded gentlemen and women who freely, and therefore most virtuously, choose to discipline their lives to some morally elevated purpose.

Look what happens, for instance, when the “no rules” principle is applied to women like Tracey Downer. Her sexuality is liberated from the influence of traditional morals, which then unleashes a destructive attraction to violent, dangerous men. The result is disastrous.

The problem is that we are not equal in our natures. Not everyone has the same level of moral conscience, prudence and self-discipline. Nor are we entirely rational in our natures. We are moved too by passions and loves, which for both better and worse define the human experience in important ways.

Liberals worry that if a society sets a moral standard, or if we are influenced by the culture we live in to be good, that we are acting like automatons, and losing the virtue of freely choosing the good. A liberal wants to feel morally elevated because of his own autonomous character.

I think this fear is mistaken. There will always be the possibility of acting badly, no matter how great the influence of society. Our moral free will to choose for the better or the worse will always be there. All that a society can do is to bolster the voice of moral conscience and encourage prudence.

Second, it can be argued that it’s the liberal view which undercuts the need for character and moral will. After all, if people are naturally and equally good, then doing the good will come easily. It’s only if you think that human nature is fallen, with each individual struggling to follow the better part of his nature, that our acts of goodness become achievements of character.

From Oz Conservative, February 24, 2010

Original news article.

I have always enjoyed the escapism of reading a good book about the White Republic. It is a relief to return on occasion to an earlier chapter of American history when the racial and cultural foundations of our national identity were unquestioned. White men once enjoyed the luxury of being able to engage in real politics. Back then our nation was not yet under the control of alien parasites.

Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is a chronicle of America’s youthful innocence. It was a very different time from our own. From 1789 to 1815, the United States was unquestionably a “white man’s country.” The first several naturalization laws restricted citizenship to “free white persons.” Neither major political party considered women fit for the political responsibilities of republican citizenship. The Indians were not thought of as “Native Americans,” but as savages and foreigners allied with America’s enemies, Britain and Spain. Blacks were considered an inferior race best enslaved, dominated, or deported.

Racial attitudes hardened in this period. After 1800, Jefferson’s hereditarian account of racial differences overwhelmed Samuel Stanhope Smith’s naive environmentalism. In the North, several states passed anti-miscegenation laws, black codes, and restricted black voting rights. Southerners passed new laws against free blacks and placed new restrictions on black voting rights and civil liberties. Antislavery sentiment in the South waned and collapsed after the Haitian Revolution and Gabriel’s Rebellion.

In spite of the American government’s professed benevolent intentions toward the Indians, White settlers poured across the Appalachians into the Northwest and Southwest, violated Indian treaties, and soaked the frontier in low level warfare. The Indians suffered several major defeats against the U.S. Army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814). By 1815, the various Indian tribes of Transappalachia had surrendered most of their land, and philanthropists were advocating their resettlement on Western reservations.

I believe it was Leonard Zeskind who recently said that America has always had two hearts: one beating heart is White and Christian, the other heart is liberal and democratic. The two have often been at odds. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is more about the latter than the former. Although every major figure in this period was a White male, Wood doesn’t really draw attention to this. The irreducible whiteness of the Early Republic is taken for granted. It is assumed like the water in an aquarium.

The real story that Gordon Wood wants to tell is the division of Americans into Federalists and Republicans. The America of 1815 wasn’t envisioned by the Founders. They didn’t anticipate the rise of political parties or the partisan press. They created a republic, not a liberal democracy. When the Constitution was ratified, “democracy” was still held in disrepute. It was a discredited political theory. “Democrat” was a pejorative term.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the Federalists began to have second thoughts about the popular forces they had unleashed. Their ideal was a strong European style nation-state with a formidable military and commercial economy. They looked forward to the day when America would mature into a class based society like England. The Federalists wanted a republic presided over by the better sort of men: the wise, learned, propertied, well born, cosmopolitan. They believed hierarchy was the foundation of civilization and moral virtue the bedrock of the social order.

Some Federalists wanted America to become a monarchy. They advised George Washington to imitate the British court throughout his presidency. John Adams was obsessed with titles and the trappings of aristocracy. Alexander Hamilton called democracy a “disease.” After American independence was secured and a strong national government was created, the Federalists wanted all the revolutionary jargon to go away. They often spoke about bringing “erroneous notions of liberty and equality” to heel.

The U.S. Constitution was designed to reverse the democratic excesses of the state legislatures. The Federalists were appalled by the Jacobinism and licentiousness they saw spreading through American society. Commoners were refusing to show their customary deference. Parvenus were everywhere aspiring to gentlemen status. “Aristocrat” was becoming an abusive term. It was a charge the Federalists were often slimed with.

The Republican social revolution that followed the ratification of the Constitution was a time of ferment and chaos more profound than the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. By the time it was over, the traditional social hierarchy of the eighteenth century was in shambles. Slavery fell in the Northern states. Patriarchy took a hit. Honor was on the way out. Divorce laws were liberalized. Primogeniture was abandoned. The prison system replaced the mutilation that prevailed in colonial times. Illegitimacy and alcoholism skyrocketed. The mainline Protestant churches were disestablished. Jews were extended rights they previously had not enjoyed.

The acid of liberty and equality systematically eroded every hierarchical institution. The Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians lost their former dominance to Baptists and Methodists. America became the most commercialized society in the world. Wealth became the primary determinant of social status, not birth, blood, or education. After the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans, a wave of egalitarianism swept away the distinctions that had once existed between White men.

By 1815, America had evolved from an aristocratic republic to the liberal capitalist democracy that it remains to this day. Corporations were sprouting up everywhere. In the North, a middling commercialized society of religious fundamentalists had emerged. In the South, the invention of the cotton gin was creating the Cotton Kingdom of the Antebellum era. Slaveowners had lost their previous enthusiasm for revolutionary liberalism. In Congress, the familiar sort of politicians (ex. Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren) were being elected to public office.

Much of Empire of Liberty is given over to what you would expect: the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the XYZ Affair, the Quasi War with France, the Crisis of 1798/1799, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Court and judicial review, the Louis and Clark expedition, the Burr conspiracy, Jefferson’s embargo on Britain, and the War of 1812. I found it to be an excellent introduction to all of these topics.

The seeds of America’s racial decline were sown in the earliest years of the White Republic. In these years, the Republicans began the practice of celebrating the Declaration of Independence. Centuries later, Americanism would be redefined by their successors as the ideological principles of liberty and equality. The degenerate society that our generation inherited evolved out of the flaws inherent in that document. Empire of Liberty is a useful resource in understanding how that ball was set into motion.

From Occidental Dissent, January 15, 2010

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.

Read Part 1 here.

2. The Culture of Critique

It was the failure to comprehend the nature of the Absolutist State system (its avoidance of divisive political questions of faith and belief) that gave rise to the Enlightenment and its culture of critique.

For once the religious wars came to an end and authority was secularized, European society “took off.”

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the bourgeoisie, formerly an important but subordinate stratum of medieval European society, had become the chief economic power of an 18th-century society more and more dependent on its economic prowess. Made up of “merchants, bankers, tax lessees, and other businessmen” who had acquired great wealth and social prestige, this rising class (whose deism and materialism took “political” form in liberalism’s scientistic ideology) was nevertheless kept from State power and powerlessly suffered monarchical infringements on its monied wealth.

Resentful of State authority, the intelligentsia of this rising class took its stand in the private moral realm, which the Absolutist State had set aside for the subject and his moral conscience.

Through this breech between the public and the private, the chief ideologue of this rising bourgeoisie, John Locke, would step. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding – “the Holy Scripture of the modern bourgeoisie” — helped blur the boundary between moral and State law, as the former assumed a new authority and the distinction between the two diminished.

Pace Hobbes, Locke argued that bourgeois moral laws (now divorced from religion and anchored in rationalist notions of self-interest devoid of transcendental reference) had arisen in the human conscience, which the State had exempt from interference. As such, the citizen had a right to pass moral judgements on the State.

Such judgements, whatever the motive, eventually made State law dependent on the consent or rejection — the rule, in effect — of the bourgeoisie’s allegedly “objective” opinion.

In this situation, the bourgeois view of virtue and vice — its “religion of technicity” — took on a political charge, superseding the realm of private individual opinion, as it became “public opinion.”

At the same time, bourgeois critics favored the risk-free sphere of the unpolitical private realm, where they sought to dictate policy. Instead, then, of forthrightly challenging the underlying metaphysical principles of the Absolutist order, they framed their defining metaphysical identity (matters of faith — in this case their godless theology) in moral and economic terms devoid of political responsibility.

Bourgeois morality, not the State’s “reason,” proceeded in this way to take hold of the public — society — and set the standard for the “moral value of human action.”

This opened the way to a reconfiguration of the Absolutist relationship between morality and politics.

The public realm in Locke’s bourgeois philosophy was accordingly re-conceived as a social realm of individual consciences and this realm’s opinion as the “law” that was to bind the public.

Bourgeois morality, as such, not only entered, but soon conquered society, as its private views rose to that of public opinion.

Few, moreover, would be able to resist the pressure of its judgment.

“Reasons of State” were henceforth subject to the secular, calculating “reason” of the bourgeoisie — as “reason” ceased to be the avoidance of civil war and became the self-interest of the rationalist acting individual.

This made society increasingly independent of the State, just as State laws were increasingly subject to the “empowering” moral (and economic) judgments of society.

In the course of the 18th century, the bourgeois as citizen would assume, through his culture of critique, the “rank of a supreme tribunal” — ultimately passing judgment on the State (though doing so safely removed from the day-to-day imperatives of the political realm).

In England, following the oh-so Glorious Revolution of 1688 (a terrible, fateful year, with more to follow, in Irish history), the Whig bourgeoisie, through Parliament, became dominant, entering into an alliance with the constitutionally-bound monarch (William of Orange).

On the more religiously polarized continent, where Absolutist States had a greater role to play, the antithesis between State legislation and bourgeois secular morality (rooted in Protestantism’s critical essence) assumed a different, more antagonistic character.

This continental polarization of morals and politics — compounded by the growing social weight of the bourgeoisie and the discontent generated by its political disenfranchisement — grew in the course of the 18th century, as the bourgeoisie increasingly assumed the leadership of “society.”

Its moral critique of the State and of the ancien régime — a critique posed in secular and rationalist, rather than Christian terms — is what is known as the “Enlightenment,” that metapolitical “culture of critique,” whose light allegedly emanated from the bourgeoisie’s rational conscience (which was modeled in many ways on that of the Jews, for it was based on the dictates of money and its unpolitical affirmation of the private).

Read Part 3 here.

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959) is one of the great dissertations of the 20th-century German university system.

It cast new light not just on the past it re-presented, but on the present, whose own light informed its re-presentation.

This was especially the case with the potentially cataclysmic standoff between American liberalism and Russian Communism and the perspective it gave to Koselleck’s study of the Enlightenment origins of the Modern World.

How was it, he asked, that these two Cold War super-powers seemed bent on turning Europe, especially Germany, into a nuclear wasteland?

The answer, he suspected, had something to do with the moralizing Utopianism of 18th-century rationalism, whose heritage ideologically animated each hegemon.

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

Koselleck was one of Carl Schmitt’s postwar “students” and his work is indebted to Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938).

Like his mentor, Koselleck saw modern ideologies, despite their atheistic rejection of faith, as forms of “political theology” that spoke to the faith-based heart that decides how one is to live.

In this sense, the self-proclaimed Enlightenment of the 18th century was a philosophical rebuttal to political Absolutism, whose institutional response to the breakdown of medieval Christendom occurred in ways that frustrated the liberal aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie.

In the century-long blood-letting that had followed the Protestant critique of medieval Catholicism, Europe’s ecclesiastical unity and its traditional social supports were everywhere shattered.

As the old estates broke down and old ties and loyalties were severed, there followed a period of anarchy, in which Catholics and Protestants zealously shed each others blood in the name of their contending truths.

In this sectarian strife — this bellum omnium contra omnes — where ecclesiastical authority ceased to exist and each man was thrown back upon his individual conscience, morality became a banner of war and the public observance of morality a justification for murdering Europeans with dissenting beliefs.

It was the advent of the Absolutist State system, philosophically anticipated in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that brought these bloody religious conflicts to a halt, establishing a peaceful basis to European life — by “privatizing” morality, secularizing authority, and depriving individual mentalities of political effect.

The neutralization of religious belief that came with the Absolutist secularization of the State would secure conditions requisite to the citizen’s peaceful pursuit of his private will or gain, as private ideals ceased to be obligatory duties and the State became “the artifact of atomized individuals.”

Absolutist regimes succeeded in this way in “reducing measures of contingency, conflict, and compulsion” to the status of differences of opinion — bare, in effect, of religious significance, as “external compulsion” imposed restraints on the individual’s “inner freedom.”

The historians’ designated Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment begins, then, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought not just the Thirty Years War in the German-speaking lands, but all Europe’s religious wars to an end (except on the borderlands of Ireland and the Balkans) — and ends only with the advent of another European civil war, which opened with the liberal revolutions of 1776/1789 and closed with the English triumph over Napoleon in 1814.

History, though, rarely conforms to the tidy categories scholars make of it.

Unlike the Continent, England went from religious war to Absolutism and then to bourgeois revolution and finally to a bourgeois Restoration all in the course of a half-century (c. 1642 – 1688), experiencing an intense though only brief period of Absolutism.

England’s expanding maritime power, opened to all the world it dominated, had, in fact, merely a transitional need of Absolutism, for it would soon become the first implicitly liberal of the “modern” regimes.

Koselleck focuses on the longer, more pronounced Continental developments, treating England as a variant of the larger trend.

In his depiction, the Absolutist State system emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a transformation of political authority — which divided the “public sphere” into two sharply separate domains: That of political authority proper (the sovereign State) and that of society, conceived as a subaltern realm of individual “subjects.”

The subject’s moral conscience in this system was subordinated to the requirements of political necessity — what Hobbes called “reason.”  This restricted morality to the social realm of private opinion, depriving it of political effect.

With Absolutism, the public interest, about which the sovereign alone had the right to decide, ceased to lay under the jurisdiction of the individual’s moral conscience.

The Continent’s new monarchical States — with Louis XIV’s France the model of the others — would govern according to a raison d’état (Staatsräson), which made no reference to religious considerations.

Law here was severed from special interests and religious factions, becoming part of a domain whose political decisions — ideally — transcended “Church, estate, and party.”

“To traditional moral doctrines, [Hobbes] opposes one whose theme is political reason.”

Persecuting churches and religiously bound social fractions were hereby forced to give way to the sovereign authority of the Absolutist monarch, who recognized no higher authority than God Himself.

As Absolutist peace took priority to faith, the individual subject — previously situated in a loose medieval hierarchy, imbued with certain corporate rights and responsibilities — was transformed into an apolitical subject.

He had, as such, to submerge his conscience to reasons of State — to reasons necessary for maintaining the peace.

This privatization of morality dictated by the State’s secularization was not directed against religion per se, but against a religious conscience whose political claims, in a period of general breakdown, threatened war.

What the Absolutist State did — and what Hobbes theoretically legitimated in the Leviathan — was to transform the individual’s conscience into a matter of “opinion,” of subjective belief, separate from politics — and thus from the political reasons of the State.

This was accomplished by making the public interest the prerogative of the sovereign, not that of the individual’s religious conscience, for the latter inevitably led to religious strife.

In this secular political system, State policy and laws became the sole concern of the sovereign monarch, who stood above religion, anchoring his laws not in a higher transcendence, but in State imperatives.

In Hobbes’ famous formulation: “Laws are made by authority, not by truth.”

Hereafter, State policy and laws would be legislated by reasons of State — not the moral conscience and not self-interest and faction.  For the State could fulfill its function of securing peace and maintaining order only if individuals ceded their rights to the sovereign, who was to embody their larger welfare.

Contested issues were thereby reduced to differences of opinion that could be resolved by reasons of State.

Through Absolute sovereignty, it was possible again to create an internal realm of peace, separate from other Absolutist State systems, each of which possessed a similar peaceful interior, where the individual was free to believe whatever he wished as long as no effort was made to impose his “private” belief on the public, whether Catholic or Protestant.

This would keep religious fanaticism from trespassing on domestic tranquility and, at the same time, guarantee the State’s integrity.

Among Absolutist States, relations remained, of course, that of “a state of nature” — for each upheld and pursued policies based on their own rational sense of self-interest (raison d’état).

Conflict and war between Absolutist States were nevertheless minimized — not just by the fact that they accepted the integrity of the other’s moral conscience — but also by a sense of sharing the same Christian civilization, the same standards of significance and style, the same general, interrelated history that distinguished them from non-Europeans.

On this basis, the community of European States after 1648 grew into a family of sovereign powers, each respectful of the others’ domestic integrity, each of whose kings or queens shared the blood of other royal families, each of whose wars with other Europeans was governed by a jus publicum europaeum.

Read Part 2 here.

is section no. 38 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. A discussion question: How might Nietzsche be used to explain why America’s founding generation and the presidents drawn from it were greater than every subsequent generation brought up under the system they created?

38. My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of “pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.

is section no. 39 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

39. Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good enough for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Reich.

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.

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In a contribution to Takimag from last summer, Austin Bramwell asked “Why are movement conservative intellectuals so obsessed with refuting positions (e.g., that the United States is an inherently “liberal” regime) that nobody has actually believed in fifty years?” Those few, we band of brothers, who read the piece sighed and muttered to ourselves, “Well, because so many people keep on asserting that the United States is an inherently liberal regime.” It is the standard excuse for ignoring traditionalist viewpoints in academia and the media, and it turns up again in Kevin Gutzman’s recent post, “There is no Authentic American Right—and a Good Thing, Too.”

Gutzman is a libertarian Bourbon, who has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For him “Louis Hartz posited long ago . . . that America is dominated by a broad Lockean consensus . . .  Hartz was right: there’s one wing in American politics. The question is almost always what kind of Left it will be.”

Gutzman, of course, is right about one thing. As conservatives and right-wingers like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Whittaker Chambers and many others have pointed out for over a century, free marketeers (19th century liberals or modern libertarians) differ from Marxists and democratic socialists (20th century liberals) only superficially, while sharing fundamental traits that range from a commitment to economic reductionism (what Albert Jay Nock and Wilhelm Röpke called “economism”) to a pervasive obsession with globalism. Gutzman is right about himself and his fellow libertarians.  They are left-wingers and do not differ in fundamentals from other left-wingers.

Gutzman is wrong, however, about the United States and the people who created this nation. . . . More