THE STATE
(C)
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS
I
To Politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good
for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about
the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are
accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for
facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters
their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their
action--supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known
what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign
to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional
thinkers who have turned their attention to the _faits accomplis_
of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they
have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions--for preference,
abstraction-myths like justice, virtue, freedom--and then applied them
as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening.
Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts,
and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political
science whereby we can form the course of the world according to an
ideal recipe. As nothing of the kind has ever or anywhere happened,
political doing has come to be considered as so trivial in comparison
with abstract thinking that they debate in their books whether there is
a “genius of action” at all.
Here, on the contrary, the attempt will be made to give, instead of
an ideological system, a _physiognomy_ of politics as it has actually
been practised in the course of general history, and not as it might
or ought to have been practised. The problem was, and is, to penetrate
to the final meaning of great events, to “see” them, to feel and
to transcribe the symbolically important in them. The projects of
world-improvers and the actuality of History have nothing to do with
one another.[791]
The being-streams of humanity are called History when we regard them
as movement, and family, estate, people, nation, when we regard them
as the object moved.[792] Politics is the way in which this fluent
Being maintains itself, _grows_, triumphs over other life-streams.
_All living is politics_, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost
marrow.[793] That which we nowadays like to call life-energy
(vitality), the “it” in us that at all costs strives forward and
upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the
same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth,
the “home”-land; the directedness, the need to actualize--it is this
that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking
naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it
shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or _it dies out_;
there is no third possibility.
For this reason the nobility, as expression of a strong race-quality,
is the truly political Order, and training and not shaping is the truly
political sort of education. Every great politician, a centre of forces
in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling
of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is
microcosmic and “intellect” is unpolitical, and so there is a something
of priestliness in all program-politics and ideology. The best
diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something,
a cosmic “it” that is bound up in the individual being breaks out
immediately and with the sure tread of the sleep-walker. They do not
learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older--hence
the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman.
It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of
the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible,
therefore, in the plural. A people _is_, really, only in relation to
peoples.[794] But the natural, “race,” relation between them is for
that very reason a relation of war--this is a fact that no truths
avail to alter. War is the primary politics of _everything_ that
lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and
being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for
this, like “_orrusta_” and “_orlog_,” mean seriousness and destiny in
contrast to jest and play--and the contrast is one of intensity, not
of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries
to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and
though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of
all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary
relationship between diplomacy and the war-art endures. The character
of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the
necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the
operations. The aim, too, remains the same--namely, the growth of one’s
own life-unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other’s. And every
attempt to eliminate the “race” element only leads to its transfer
to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of
parties, or that of areas, or (if there also the will to growth is
extinct) that of the adventurers’ retinues, to whose doings the rest of
the population unresistingly adjusts itself.
In every war between life-powers the question at issue is which is
to govern the whole. It is always a life, never a system, law, or
program that gives the beat in the stream of happening.[795] To be the
centre of action and effective focus of a multitude,[796] to make the
inward form of one’s own personality into that of whole peoples and
periods, to be history’s commanding officer, with the aim of bringing
one’s own people or family or purposes to the top of events--that is
the scarce-conscious but irresistible impulse in every individual
being that has a historical vocation in it. There is only _personal_
history, and consequently only _personal_ politics. The struggle of,
not principles but men, not ideals but race-qualities, for executive
power is the alpha and omega. Even revolutions are no exception, for
the “sovereignty of the people” only expresses the fact that the ruling
power has assumed the title of people’s leader instead of that of king.
The method of governing is scarcely altered thereby, and the position
of the governed not at all. And even world-peace, in every case where
it has existed, has been nothing but the slavery of an entire humanity
under the regimen imposed by a few strong natures determined to rule.
The conception of executive power implies that the life-unit--even in
the case of the animals--is subdivided into subjects and objects of
government. This is so self-evident that no mass-unit has ever for a
moment, even in the severest crises (such as 1789), lost the sense of
this inner structure of itself. Only the incumbent vanishes, not the
office, and if a people does actually, in the tide of events, lose
all leadership and float on haphazard, it only means that control has
passed to outside hands, that it has become _in its entirety_ the mere
object.
Politically gifted _peoples_ do not exist. Those which are supposed
to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling
minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form. The
English as a people are just as unthinking, narrow, and unpractical in
political matters as any other nation, but they possess--for all their
liking for public debate--a _tradition of confidence_. The difference
is simply that the Englishman is the object of a regimen of very old
and successful habits, in which he acquiesces because experience has
shown him their advantage. From an acquiescence that has the outward
appearance of agreement, it is only one step to the conviction that
this government depends upon his will, although paradoxically it is
the government that, for technical reasons of its own, unceasingly
hammers the notion into his head. The ruling class in England has
developed its aims and methods quite independently of the “people,”
and it works with and within an unwritten constitution of which the
refinements--which have arisen from practice and are wholly innocent of
theory--are to the uninitiated as opaque as they are unintelligible.
But the courage of a troop depends on its confidence in the leadership,
and confidence means involuntary abstention from criticism. It is the
officer who makes cowards into heroes, or heroes into cowards, and
this holds good equally for armies, peoples, classes, and parties.
_Political talent in a people_ is nothing but confidence in its
leading. But that confidence has to be acquired; it will ripen only in
its own good time, and success will stabilize it and make it into a
tradition. What appears as a lack of the feeling of certainty in the
ruled is really lack of leadership-talent in the ruling classes, which
generates that sort of uninstinctive and meddlesome criticism which by
its very existence shows that a people has got “out of condition.”
II
How is politics _done?_ The born statesman is above all a valuer--a
valuer of men, situations, and things. He has the “eye” which
unhesitatingly and inflexibly embraces the round of possibilities.
The judge of horses takes in an animal with one glance and knows what
prospects it will have in a race. To do the correct thing without
“knowing” it, to have the hands that imperceptibly tighten or ease the
bit--his talent is the very opposite to that of the man of theory. The
secret pulse of all being is one and the same in him and in the things
of history. They sense one another, they exist for one another. The
fact-man is immune from the risk of practising sentimental or program
politics. He does not believe in the big words. Pilate’s question is
constantly on his lips--truths? The born statesman stands beyond true
and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of
systems. “Truths” or “errors”--which here amount to the same--only
concern him as intellectual currents, and in respect of _workings_. He
surveys their potency, durability, and direction, and duly books them
in his calculations for the destiny of the power that he directs. He
has convictions, certainly, that are dear to him, but he has them as a
private person; no real politician ever felt himself tied to them when
in action. “The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience
except the spectator,” said Goethe, and it is equally true of Sulla
and Robespierre as it is of Bismarck and Pitt. The great Popes and
the English party-leaders, so long as they had still to strive for
the mastery of things, acted on the same principles as the conquerors
and upstarts of all ages. Take the dealings of Innocent III, who very
nearly succeeded in creating a world-dominion of the Church, and deduce
therefrom the catechism of success; it will be found to be in the
extremest contradiction with all religious moral. Yet without it there
could have been no bearable existence for any Church, not to mention
English Colonies, American fortunes, victorious revolutions, or, for
that matter, states or parties or peoples in general. It is _life_, not
the individual, that is conscienceless.
The essential, therefore, is to understand the time _for_ which one
is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces,
who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward
on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the
surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day--he is not
of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his.
Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for
some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the
Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the
reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility
of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no
difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation
over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to
a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate
history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic
logic as character.
But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word,
an educator--not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but
an exemplar in doing.[797] It is a patent fact that a religion has
never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the
waking-consciousness, the _intellectual_ man, it threw new light on
another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity,
resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life
it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great
personality--the “it,” the race, the cosmic force bound up in that
personality--has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training)
and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples.
It is not “the” truth or “the” good or “the” upright, but “the” Roman
or “the” Puritan or “the” Prussian that is a fact. The sum of honour
and duty, discipline, resolution, is a thing not learned from books,
but _awakened_ in the stream of being by a living exemplar; and that
is why Frederick William I was one of those educators, great for all
time, whose personal race-forming conduct does not vanish in the course
of the generations. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the
“mere politician”--the player who plays for the pleasure of the game,
the _arriviste_ on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and
rank--as also from the schoolmaster of an ideal, by the fact that he
dares to demand sacrifices--_and_ obtains them, because his feeling
that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands,
transforms them to the core, and renders them capable of deeds to which
otherwise they could never have risen.[798]
Highest of all, however, is not action, but the _ability to command_.
It is this that takes the individual up out of himself and makes him
the centre of a world of action. There is one kind of commanding that
makes obedience a proud, free, and noble habit. That kind Napoleon,
for example, did _not_ possess. A residue of subaltern outlook in him
prevented him from training men to be men and not bureau-personnel,
and led him to govern through edicts instead of through personalities;
as he did not understand this subtlest tact of command and, therefore,
was obliged to do everything really decisive himself, he slowly
collapsed from inability to reconcile the demands of his position with
the limit of human capabilities. But one who, like Cæsar or Frederick
the Great, possesses this last and highest gift of complete humanity
feels--on a battle-evening when operations are sweeping to the willed
conclusion, and the victory is turning out to be conclusive of the
campaign; or when the last signature is written that rounds off a
historical epoch--a wondrous sense of power that the man of truths
can never know. There are moments--and they indicate the maxima of
cosmic flowings--when the individual feels himself to be identical with
Destiny, the centre of the world, and his own personality seems to him
almost as a covering in which the history of the future is about to
clothe itself.
The first problem is to make oneself somebody; the second--less
obvious, but harder and greater in its ultimate effects--_to create
a tradition_, to bring on others so that one’s work may be continued
with one’s own pulse and spirit, to release a current of like activity
that does not need the original leader to maintain it in form. And here
the statesman rises to something that in the Classical world would
doubtless have been called divinity. He becomes the creator of a new
life, the _spirit_-ancestor of a young race. He himself, as a unit,
vanishes from the stream after a few years. But a minority called into
being by him takes up his course and maintains it indefinitely. This
cosmic something, this soul of a ruling stratum, an individual _can_
generate and leave as a heritage, and throughout history it is this
that has produced the durable effects. The great statesman is rare.
Whether he comes, or wins through, too soon or too late, incident
determines. Great individuals often destroy more than they have built
up--by the gap that their death makes in the flow of happening. But
_the creation of tradition means the elimination of the incident_. A
tradition breeds a high average, with which the future can reckon--no
Cæsar, but a Senate, no Napoleon, but an incomparable officer-corps.
A strong tradition attracts talents from all quarters, and out of
small gifts produces great results. The schools of painting of Italy
and Holland are proof of this, no less than the Prussian army and the
diplomacy of the Roman Curia. It was the great flaw in Bismarck, as
compared with Frederick William I, that he could achieve, but could not
form a tradition; that he did not parallel Moltke’s officer-corps by
a corresponding race of politicians who would identify themselves in
feeling with his State and its new tasks, would constantly take up good
men from below and so provide for the continuance of the Bismarckian
action-pulse for ever. If this creation of a tradition does not come
off, then instead of a homogeneous ruling stratum we have a congeries
of heads that are helpless when confronted by the unforeseen. If it
does, we have a _Sovereign People_ in the one sense of the phrase that
is worthy of a people and possible in the world of fact--a highly
trained, self-replenishing minority with sure and slowly ripened
traditions, which attracts every talent into the charmed circle and
uses it to the full, and _ipso facto_ keeps itself in harmony with the
remainder of the nation that it rules. Such a minority slowly develops
into a true “breed,” even when it had begun merely as a party, and the
sureness of its decisions comes to be that of blood, not of reason. But
this means that what happens in it happens “of itself” and does not
need the Genius. _Great politics_, so to put it, _takes the place of
the great politician_.
What, then, _is_ politics? It is the art of the possible--an old
saying, and almost an all-inclusive saying. The gardener can obtain
a plant from the seed, or he can improve its stock. He can bring to
bloom, or let languish, the dispositions hidden in it, its growths
and colour, its flower and fruit. On his eye for possibilities--and,
therefore, necessities--depends its fulfilment, its strength, its whole
Destiny. But the basic form and direction of its being, the stages and
tempo and direction thereof, are _not_ in his power. It must accomplish
them or it decays, and the same is true of the immense plant that we
call a “Culture” and the being-streams of human families that are bound
up in its form-world. The great statesman is the gardener of a people.
Every doer is born in a time and for a time, and thereby the ambit of
_his_ attainable achievement is fixed. For his grandfather, for his
grandson, the data, and therefore the task and the object, are not the
same. The circle is further narrowed by the limits of his personality,
the properties of his people, the situation, and the men with whom
he has to work. It is the hall-mark of the high politician that he
is rarely caught out in a misappreciation of this limit, and equally
rarely overlooks anything realizable within it. With this--one cannot
too often repeat, especially to Germans--goes a sure discrimination
between what “ought” to be and what _will_ be. The basic forms of the
state and of political life, the direction and the degree of their
evolution, are given values unalterably dependent on the given time.
They are the track of political success and not its goal. On the
other hand the worshippers of political ideals create out of nothing.
Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the
mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty
and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the
top storey downwards. The master of fact, for his part, is content to
direct imperceptibly that which he sees and accepts as plain reality.
This does not seem very much, yet it is the very starting-point of
freedom, in a grand sense of the word. The knack lies in the little
things, the last careful touch of the helm, the fine sensing of the
most delicate oscillations of collective and individual souls. The
art of the statesman consists not only in a clear idea of the main
lines drawn undeviably before him, _but also_ in the sure handling of
the single occurrences and the single persons, encountered along those
lines, which can turn an impending disaster into a decisive success.
The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
An adept in the game can, like Talleyrand, go to Vienna as ambassador
of the vanquished party and make himself master of the victor. At the
Lucca meeting, Cæsar, whose position was wellnigh desperate, not only
made Pompey’s power serviceable to his own ends, but undermined it
at the same time, and without his opponent’s becoming aware of the
fact. But the domain of the possible has dangerous edges, and if the
finished tact of the great Baroque diplomatists almost always managed
to keep clear, it is the very privilege of the ideologues to be always
stumbling over it. There have been turns in history in which the
statescraftman has let himself drift with the current awhile, in order
not to lose the leadership. Every situation has its elastic limit, and
in the estimation of that limit not the smallest error is permissible.
A revolution that reaches explosion-point is always a proof of lack of
the political pulse in the governors _and_ in their opponents.
Further, the necessary must be done _opportunely_--namely, while it
is a present wherewith the governing power can buy confidence in
itself, whereas if it has to be conceded as a sacrifice, it discloses
a weakness and excites contempt. Political forms are living forms
whose changes inexorably follow a definite direction, and to attempt
to prevent this course or to divert it towards some ideal is to
confess oneself “out of condition.” The Roman nobility possessed this
congruence of pulse, the Spartan did not. In the period of mounting
democracy we find again and again (as in France before 1789 and Germany
before 1918) the arrival of a fatal moment when it is too late for
the necessary reform to be given as a free gift; _then_ that which
should be refused with the sternest energy is given as a _sacrifice_,
and so becomes the sign of dissolution. But those who fail to detect
the first necessity in good time will all the more certainly fail to
misunderstand the second situation. Even a journey to Canossa can be
made too soon or too late--the timing may settle the future of whole
peoples, whether they shall be Destiny for others, or themselves the
objects of another’s Destiny. But the declining democracy also repeats
the same error of trying to hold what was the ideal of yesterday. This
is the danger of our twentieth century. On the path towards Cæsarism
there is ever a Cato to be found.
The influence that a statesman--even one in an exceptionally strong
position--possesses over the _methods_ of politics is very small, and
it is one of the characteristics of the high-grade statesman that he
does not deceive himself on this matter. His task is to work in and
with the historical form that he finds in existence; it is only the
theorist who enthusiastically searches for more ideal forms. But to
be politically “in form” means necessarily, amongst other things, an
unconditional _command of the most modern means_. There is no choice
about it. The means and methods are premisses pertaining to the time
and belong to the inner form of the time--and one who grasps at the
inapposite, who permits his taste or his feelings to overpower the
pulse in him, loses at once his grip of realities. The danger of an
aristocracy is that of being conservative in its means, the danger of
a democracy is the confusion of formula and form. The means of the
present are, and will be for many years, parliamentary--elections and
the press. He may think what he pleases about them, he may respect
them or despise them, but he _must command them_. Bach and Mozart
_commanded_ the musical means of their times. This is the hall-mark
of mastery in any and every field, and statecraft is no exception.
Now, the publicly visible outer form thereof is not the essential but
merely the disguise, and consequently it may be altered, rationalized,
and brought down to constitutional texts--without its actualities
being necessarily affected in the slightest--and hence the ambitions
of all revolutionaries expend themselves in playing the game of
rights, principles, and franchises on the surface of history. But the
statesman knows that the extension of a franchise is quite unimportant
in comparison with the technique--Athenian or Roman, Jacobin or
American or present-day German--of _operating_ the votes. How the
English constitution reads is a matter of small import compared with
the fact that it is managed by a small stratum of high families, so
that an Edward VII is simply a minister of his Ministry. And as for the
modern Press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is
constitutionally “free”--but the realist merely asks at whose disposal
it is.
Politics, lastly, is the form in which is accomplished the history of
a nation within a plurality of nations. The great art is to maintain
one’s own nation inwardly “in form” for events outside; this is the
natural relation of home and foreign politics, holding not only for
Peoples and States and Estates, but for living units of every kind,
down to the simplest animal swarms and down into the individual bodies.
And, as between the two, _the first exists exclusively for the second
and not vice versa_. The true democrat is accustomed to treat home
politics as an end in itself; the rank and file of diplomats think
solely of foreign affairs; but just because of this the individual
successes of either “cut no ice.” No doubt, the political master
exhibits his powers most obviously in the tactics of home reform; in
his economic and social activities; in his cleverness in maintaining
the public form of the whole, the “rights and liberties,” both in tune
with the tastes of the period and _at the same time_ effective; and
in the education of the feelings without which it is impossible for a
people to be “in condition”--namely, trust, respect for the leading,
consciousness of power, contentment, and (when necessary) enthusiasm.
But the value of all this depends upon its relation to this basic fact
of higher history--that a people is not alone in the world, and that
its future will be decided by its force-relationships towards other
peoples and powers and not by its mere internal ordering. And, since
the ordinary man is not so long-sighted, it is the ruling minority that
must possess this quality on behalf of the rest, and not unless there
is such a minority does the statesman find the instrument wherewith he
can carry his purposes into effect.[799]
III
In the early politics of all Cultures the governing powers are
pre-established and unquestioned. The whole being is strictly in
patriarchal and symbolic form. The connexions with the mother soil are
so strong, the feudal tie, and even its successor the aristocratic
state, so self-evident to the life held in their spell, that politics
in a Homeric or Gothic age is limited to plain action within the cadre
of the given forms. In so far as these forms change, they do so more
or less spontaneously, and the idea that it is a _task_ of politics to
bring about the changes never definitely emerges into anyone’s mind,
even if a kingdom be overthrown or a nobility reduced to subjection.
There is only class-politics, Imperial- or Papal- or vassal-politics.
Blood and race speak in actions undertaken instinctively or
half-consciously--even the priest behaves, _qua_ politician, as the
man of race. The “problems” of the State are not yet awakened. The
sovereignty, the primary orders, the entire early form-world, are
God-given, and it is on them as premisses, not about them as objects
of dispute, that the organic minorities fight their battles. These
minorities we call _Factions_.
It is of the essence of the Faction that it is wholly inaccessible
to the idea that the order of things can be changed to a plan. Its
object is to win for itself status, power, or possessions within this
order--like all growing things in a growing world. There are groups in
which relationships of houses, honour and loyalty, bonds of union of
almost mythic inwardness, play a part, and from which abstract ideas
are totally excluded. Such were the factions of the Homeric and Gothic
periods, Telemachus and the suitors in Ithaca, the Blues and Greens
under Justinian, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Houses of Lancaster
and York, the Protestants,[800] the Huguenots, and even later the
motive forces of Fronde and First Tyrannis. Machiavelli’s book rests
entirely on this spirit.
The change sets in as soon as, with the great city, the Non-Estate, the
bourgeoisie, takes over the leading rôle.[801] Now it is the reverse,
the political _form_ becomes the object of conflict, the problem.
Heretofore it was ripened, now it must needs be shaped. Politics
becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible
ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against
blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; _in
place of the Estate, the Party_. A party is not a growth of race, but
an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates
in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. It is the mortal enemy of
naturally matured class-ordering, the mere existence of which is in
contradiction with its essence. Consequently, the notion of party
is always bound up with the unreservedly negative, disruptive, and
socially levelling notion of _equality_. Noble ideals are no longer
recognized, but only vocational interests.[802] It is the same with the
freedom-idea, which is likewise a negative.[803] _Parties are a purely
urban phenomenon._ With the emancipation of the city from the country,
everywhere (whether we happen to know it evidentially or not) Estate
politics gives way to party politics--in Egypt at the end of the Middle
Kingdom, in China with the Contending States, in Baghdad and Byzantium
with the Abbassid period. In the capitals of the West the parties form
in the parliamentary style, in the city-states of the Classical they
are forum-parties, and we recognize parties of the Magian style in the
Mavali and the monks of Theodore of Studion.[804]
But always it is the Non-Estate, the unit of protest against
the essence of Estate, whose leading minority--“educated” and
“well-to-do”--comes forward as a party with a program, consisting of
aims that are not felt but defined, and of the rejection of everything
that cannot be rationally grasped. _At bottom, therefore, there is
only one party_, that of the bourgeoisie, the liberal, and it is
perfectly conscious of its position as such. It looks on itself as
coextensive with “the people.” Its opponents (above all, the genuine
Estates--namely, “squire and parson”) are enemies and traitors to “the
people,” and its opinions are the “voice of the people”--which is
inoculated by all the expedients of party-political nursing, oratory in
the Forum, press in the West, until these opinions do fairly represent
it.
The prime Estates are nobility and priesthood. The prime Party is that
of money and mind, the liberal, the megalopolitan. Herein lies the
profound justification, in _all_ Cultures, of the ideas of Aristocracy
and Democracy. Aristocracy despises the mind of the cities, Democracy
despises the boor and hates the countryside.[805] It is the difference
between Estate politics and party politics, class-consciousness
and party inclination, race and intellect, growth and construction.
Aristocracy in the completed Culture, and Democracy in the incipient
cosmopolitan Civilization, stand opposed till both are submerged in
Cæsarism. As surely as the nobility is _the_ Estate (and the Tiers État
never manages to get itself into real form in this fashion), so surely
the nobility fails to feel as a party, though it may organize itself as
one.
It has in fact no choice but to do so. All modern constitutions
repudiate the Estates and are built on the Party as self-evidently
the basic form of politics. The nineteenth century--correspondingly,
therefore, the third century B.C.--is the heyday of party politics.
Its democratic character compels the formation counter-parties, and
whereas formerly, as late even as the eighteenth century, the “Tiers”
constituted itself in imitation of the nobility as an Estate, now
there arises the _defensive_ figure of the Conservative party, copied
from the Liberal,[806] dominated completely by the latter’s forms,
bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois, and obliged to fight with
rules and methods that liberalism has laid down. It has the choice of
handling these means better than its adversary[807] or of perishing;
but it is of the intimate structure of an Estate that it does not
understand the situation and challenges the form instead of the foe,
and is thus involved in that use of extreme methods which we see
dominating the inner politics of whole states in the early phases of
every Civilization, and delivering them helpless into the hands of the
enemy. The compulsion that there is upon every party to be bourgeois,
at any rate in appearance, turns to sheer caricature when below the
bourgeoisie of education and possessions the Residue also organizes
itself as a party. Marxism, for example, is in theory a negation
of bourgeoisie, but as a party it is in attitude and leadership
essentially middle-class. There is a continuous conflict between its
will--which necessarily steps outside the bounds of party politics
and therefore of constitutionalism (both being exclusively liberal
phenomena), and can in honesty only be called civil war--and the
appearances which it feels obliged, in justice to itself, to keep up.
But for Marxism, again, these appearances are indispensable, at this
particular period, if durable success is to be attained. A noble party
in a parliament is inwardly just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the
bourgeoisie is in its natural place there.
In Rome, from the introduction of the Tribunes, in 471, to the
recognition of their legislative omnipotence, in the revolution of
287,[808] patricians and plebeians had fought their fight essentially
as Estates, classes. But thereafter these opposite terms possessed
hardly more than genealogical significance, and there developed instead
parties, to which the terms liberal and conservative respectively
may quite reasonably be applied--namely, the Populus,[809] supreme
in the forum, and the nobility, with its fulcrum in the Senate. The
latter had transformed itself (about 287) from a family council of
the old clans into a state council of the administrative aristocracy.
The associations of the Populus are with the property-graded Comitia
Centuriata and the big-money group of the Equites, those of the
nobility with the yeomanry that was influential in the Comitia Tributa.
Think on the one hand of the Gracchi and Marius, and on the other of
C. Flaminius, and a little penetration will disclose the complete
change in the position of the Consuls and the Tribunes. They are no
longer the chosen trustees of the first and third Estates, with lines
of conduct determined by that fact, but they represent party, and on
occasion change it. There were “liberal” consuls like the Elder Cato
and “conservative” Tribunes like the Octavius who opposed Ti. Gracchus.
Both parties put up candidates at elections, and used every sort of
demagogic operation to get them in--and when money had failed to win an
election, it got to work afterwards with (increasing) success upon the
person elected.
In England Tories and Whigs constituted themselves, from the beginning
of the nineteenth century, as parties, both becoming in form bourgeois
and both taking up the liberal program literally, whereby public
opinion as usual was completely convinced and set at rest.[810] This
was a master-stroke, delivered at the correct moment, and prevented the
formation of a party hostile to the Estate-principle such as arose in
France in 1789. The members of the lower House, hitherto emissaries of
the ruling stratum, became popular representatives, but still continued
to depend financially upon it. The leading remained in the same hands,
and the opposition of the parties, which from 1830 assumed the titles
of Liberal and Conservative almost as a matter of course, was always
one of pluses and minuses, never of blank alternatives. In these same
years the literary freedom-movement of “young Germany” changed into a
party-movement, and in America under Andrew Jackson the National-Whig
and Democratic parties organized themselves as opposites, and open
recognition was given to the principle that elections were a business,
and state offices from top to bottom the “spoils of the victors.”[811]
But the form of the governing minority _develops steadily from that of
the Estate, through that of the Party, towards that of the Individual’s
following_. The outward sign of the end of Democracy and its transition
into Cæsarism is not, for example, the disappearance of the party of
the Tiers État, the Liberal, but the disappearance of party itself
as a form. The sentiments, the popular aim, the abstract ideals that
characterize all genuine party politics, dissolve and are supplanted by
_private_ politics, the unchecked will-to-power of the race-strong few.
An Estate has instincts, a party has a program, but a following has a
master. That was the course of events from Patricians and Plebeians,
through Optimates and Populares, to Pompeians and Cæsarians. The period
of real party government covers scarcely two centuries, and in our own
case is, since the World War, well on the decline. That the entire mass
of the electorate, actuated by a common impulse, should send up men who
are capable of managing their affairs--which is the naïve assumption
in all constitutions--is a possibility only in the first rush, and
presupposes that not even the rudiments of organization by definite
groups exists. So it was in France in 1789 and in 1848. An assembly has
only to _be_, and tactical units will form at once within it, whose
cohesion depends upon the will to _maintain_ the dominant position once
won, and which, so far from regarding themselves as the mouthpieces of
their constituents, set about making all the expedients of agitation
amenable to their influence and usable for their purposes. A tendency
that has organized itself in the people, has already _ipso facto_
become the _tool_ of the organization, and continues steadily along the
same path until the organization also becomes in turn the tool of the
leader. The will-to-power is stronger than any theory. In the beginning
the leading and the apparatus come into existence for the sake of the
program. Then they are held on to defensively by their incumbents for
the sake of power and booty--as is already universally the case to-day,
for thousands in every country live on the party and the offices and
functions that it distributes. Lastly the program vanishes from memory,
and the organization works for its own sake alone.
With the elder Scipio or Quinctius Flamininus comradeship on campaign
is still the implication when we speak of their “friends.” But the
younger Scipio went further and his “Cohors Amicorum” was no doubt the
first example of an organized following whose activity extended to
the law-courts and the elections.[812] In the same way the old purely
_patriarchal and aristocratic relation of loyalty_ between patron and
client evolved into a community of interest based on very material
foundations, and even before Cæsar there were written compacts between
candidates and electors with specific provisions as to payment and
performances. On the other side, just as in present-day America,[813]
clubs and election committees were formed, which so controlled or
frightened the mass of the electors of their wards as to be able to do
election business with the great leaders, the pre-Cæsars, as one power
with another. Far from this being the shipwreck of democracy, it is its
very meaning and necessary issue, and the lamentations of unworldly
idealists over this destruction of their hopes only show their blind
ignorance of the inexorable duality of truths and facts and of the
intimate linkage of intellect and money.
Politico-social theory is only one of the bases of party politics, but
it is a necessary one. The proud series that runs from Rousseau to Marx
has its antitype in the line of the Classical Sophists up to Plato and
Zeno. In the case of China the characteristics of the corresponding
doctrines have still to be extracted from Confucian and Taoist
literature; it suffices to name the Socialist Moh-ti. In the Byzantine
and Arabian literature of the Abbassid period--in which radicalism,
like everything else, is orthodox-religious in constitution--they
hold a large place, and they were driving forces in all the crises of
the ninth century. That they existed in Egypt and in India also is
proved by the spirit of events in the Hyksos time and in Buddha’s.
Literary form is not essential to them--they are just as effectively
disseminated by word of mouth, by sermon and propaganda in sects and
associations, which indeed is the standard method at the close of the
Puritan movements (Islam and Anglo-American Christianity amongst them).
Whether these doctrines are “true” or “false” is--we must reiterate
and emphasize--a question without meaning for political history.
The refutation of, say, Marxism belongs to the realm of academic
dissertation and public debates, in which everyone is always right
and his opponent always wrong. But whether they are _effective_--from
when, and for how long, the belief that actuality can be ameliorated
by a system of concepts is a real force that politics must reckon
with--that does matter. We of to-day find ourselves in a period of
boundless confidence in the omnipotence of reason. Great general
ideas of freedom, justice, humanity, progress are sacrosanct. The
great theories are gospels. Their power to convince does not rest
upon logical premisses, for the mass of a party possesses neither the
critical energy nor the detachment seriously to test them, but upon the
sacramental hypostasis in their keywords. At the same time, the spell
is limited to the populations of the great cities and the period of
Rationalism as the “educated man’s religion.”[814] On a peasantry it
has no hold, and even on the city masses its effect lasts only for a
certain time. But _for_ that time it has all the irresistibleness of
a new revelation. They are converted to it, hang fervently upon the
words and the preachers thereof, go to martyrdom on barricades and
battle-field and gallows; their gaze is set upon a political and social
other-world, and dry sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of
death.
But for this very reason documents like the _Contrat Social_ and the
_Communist Manifesto_ are engines of highest power in the hands of
forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to
form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses.[815]
The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends
in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and
their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom--which has killed
Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up,
not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with
it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined
that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application
of concepts. When Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries defined
and blended the various kinds of Classical constitution so as to obtain
a wise and beautiful resultant, all the world listened, and Plato
himself tried to transform Syracuse in accordance with an ideological
recipe--and sent the city downhill to its ruin.[816] It appears to me
equally certain that it was philosophical experimentation of this kind
that put the Chinese southern states out of condition and delivered
them up to the imperialism of Tsin.[817] The Jacobin fanatics of
liberty and equality delivered France, from the Directory onward, into
the hands of Army and Bourse for ever, and every Socialistic outbreak
only blazes new paths for Capitalism. But when Cicero wrote his _De
re publica_ for Pompey, and Sallust his two comminations for Cæsar,
nobody any longer paid attention. In Tiberius Gracchus we may discover
perhaps an influence derived from the Stoic enthusiast Blossius, who
later committed suicide after having similarly brought Aristonicus
of Pergamum to ruin;[818] but in the first century B.C. theories had
become a threadbare school-exercise, and thenceforward power and power
alone mattered.
For us, too--let there be no mistake about it--the age of theory is
drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism
all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half
a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with
its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its
extreme logical conclusion; it is therefore an end-term. But, as
belief in Rousseau’s Rights of Man lost its force from (say) 1848, so
belief in Marx lost its force from the World War. When one contrasts
the devotion unto death that Rousseau’s ideas found in the French
Revolution with the attitude of the Socialists of 1918, who had to keep
up before and in their adherents a conviction that they themselves
no longer possessed--for the sake, not of the idea, but of the power
that depended on it--one discerns also the stretches of the road
ahead, where what still remains of program is doomed to fall by the
way as being henceforth a mere handicap in the struggle for power.
Belief in program was the mark and the _glory_ of our grandfathers--in
our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is
developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from
tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found
a new Hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright
concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the “Second
Religiousness.”[819]
IV
This is the one side, the verbal side, of the great fact Democracy.
It remains now to consider the other, the decisive side, that of
race.[820] Democracy would have remained in minds and on paper
had there not been amongst its champions true master-natures for
whom--unconscious though they may be, and often have been, of the
fact--the people is nothing but an object and the ideal nothing but a
means. All, even the most irresponsible, methods of demagogy--which
inwardly is exactly the same as the diplomacy of the _ancien régime_,
but designed for application to masses instead of to princes and
ambassadors, to wild opinions and sentiments and will-outbursts
instead of to choice spirits, an orchestra of brass instead of old
chamber-music--have been worked out by honest but practical democrats,
and it was from them that the parties of tradition learnt them.
It is characteristic, however, of the course of democracy, that the
authors of popular constitutions have never had any idea of the actual
workings of their schemes--neither the authors of the “Servian”
Constitution in Rome nor the National Assembly in Paris. Since these
forms of theirs are not, like feudalism, the result of growth, but of
thought (and based, moreover, not on deep knowledge of men and things,
but on abstract ideas of right and justice), a gulf opens between the
intellectual side of the laws and--the practical habits that silently
form under the pressure of them, and either adapt them to, or fend them
off from, the rhythm of actual life. Only experience has ever taught
the lesson, and only at the end of the whole development has it been
assimilated, that the rights of the people and the influence of the
people are two different things. The more nearly universal a franchise
is, the _less_ becomes the power of the electorate.
In the beginning of a democracy the field belongs to intellect alone.
History has nothing nobler and purer to show than the night session
of the 4th August 1789 and the Tennis-Court Oath, or the assembly in
the Frankfurt Paulskirche on the 18th May 1848--when men, with power
in their very hands, debated general truths so long that the forces
of actuality were able to rally and thrust the dreamers aside. But,
meantime, that other democratic quantity lost no time in making its
appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of
constitutional rights only when one has money.[821] That a franchise
should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work
presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the
electors (in _its_ interest) to the extent that its available money
permits. As soon as such leadership does appear, the vote ceases to
possess anything more than the significance of a censure applied by
the multitude to the individual organizations, over whose structure
it possesses in the end not the slightest positive influence. So also
with the ideal thesis of Western constitutions, the fundamental right
of the mass to choose its own representatives--it remains pure theory,
for in actuality every developed organization recruits itself.[822]
Finally the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no
effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties.
For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control,
through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and
are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual’s opinions as they
please _above_ the parties, and, on the other, through their patronage,
influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of whole-hearted
supporters (the “Caucus”) which excludes the rest and induces in it a
vote-apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great
crises.
In appearance, there are vast differences between the Western,
parliamentary, democracy and the democracies of the Egyptian, Chinese,
and Arabian Civilizations, to which the idea of a universal popular
franchise is wholly alien. But in reality, for us in this age of ours,
the mass is “in form” as an _electorate_ in exactly the same sense as
it used to be “in form” as a collectivity of obedience--namely, as an
_object for a subject_--as it was “in form” in Baghdad as the sects,
and in Byzantium in its monks, and elsewhere again as a dominant army
or a secret society or a “state within a state.” Freedom is, as always,
purely _negative_.[823] It consists in the repudiation of tradition,
dynasty, Caliphate; but the executive power passes, at once and
undiminished, from these institutions to new forces--party leaders,
dictators, presidents, prophets, and their adherents--towards which
the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object.[824]
“Popular self-determination” is a courteous figure of speech--in
reality, under a universal-inorganic franchise, election has soon
ceased to possess its original meaning. The more radical the political
elimination of the matured old order of Estates and callings, the
more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely
is it delivered into the hands of the new powers, the party leaders,
who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of
intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods
which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend;
and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for
blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle,
is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and
further on the road to suicide.[825]
The fundamental rights of a Classical people (demos, populus) extended
to the holding of the highest state and judicial offices.[826] For
the exercise of these the people was “in form” in its Forum, where
the Euclidean point-mass was corporeally assembled, and there it was
the object of an influencing process in the Classical style; namely,
by bodily, near, and sensuous means--by a rhetoric that worked upon
every ear _and eye_; by devices many of which to us would be repellent
and almost intolerable, such as rehearsed sob-effects and the rending
of garments;[827] by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic
lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and
resounding cadenzas (of which there came to be a perfect repertory
for this place and purpose) by games and presents; by threats and
blows; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens
of 400,[828] and its appalling culmination in the Rome of Cæsar
and Cicero. As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations
of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party
candidates, an arena ready for the intervention of money, and, from
Zama onwards, of ever bigger and bigger money. “The greater became the
wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals,
the more the fight for political power developed into a question of
money.”[829] It is unnecessary to say more. And yet, in a deeper
sense, it would be wrong to speak of corruption. It is not a matter of
degeneracy, it is the democratic ethos itself that is foredoomed of
necessity to take such forms when it reaches maturity. In the reforms
of the Censor Appius Claudius (310), who was beyond doubt a true
Hellenist and constitutional ideologue of the type of Madame Roland’s
circle, there was certainly no question but that of the franchise as
such, and not at all of the arts of gerrymandering--but the effect was
simply to prepare the way for those arts. Not in the scheme as such,
but from the first applications of it, race-quality emerged, and very
rapidly it forced its way to complete dominance. And, after all, in a
dictatorship of money it is hardly fair to describe the employment of
money as a sign of decadence.
The career of office in Rome from the time when its course took form
as a series of elections, required so large a capital that every
politician was the debtor of his entire entourage. Especially was
this so in the case of the ædileship, in which the incumbent had
to outbid his predecessors in the magnificance {sic} of his public
games, in order later to have the votes of the spectators. (Sulla
failed in his first attempt on the prætorship precisely because he
had not previously been ædile.) Then again, to flatter the crowd of
loafers it was necessary to show oneself in the Forum daily with a
brilliant following. A law forbade the maintenance of paid retainers,
but the acquisition of persons in high society by lending them money,
recommending them for official and commercial employments, and covering
their litigation expenses, in return for their company in the Forum
and their attendance at the daily levee, was more expensive still.
Pompey was _patronus_ to half the world. From the peasant of Picenum
to the kings of the Orient, he represented and protected them all,
and this was his political capital which he could stake against the
non-interest-bearing loans of Crassus and the “gilding”[830] of every
ambitious fellow by the conqueror of Gaul. Dinners were offered to the
electors of whole wards,[831] or free seats for the gladiatorial shows,
or even (as in the case of Milo) actual cash, delivered at home--out of
respect, Cicero says, for traditional morals. Election-capital rose to
American dimensions, sometimes hundreds of millions of sesterces; vast
as was the stock of cash available in Rome, the elections of 54 locked
up so much of it that the rate of interest rose from four to eight per
cent. Cæsar paid out so much as ædile that Crassus had to underwrite
him for twenty millions before his creditors would allow him to depart
to his province, and in his candidature for the office of Pontifex
Maximus he so overstrained his credit that failure would have ruined
him, and his opponent Catulus could seriously offer to buy him off.
But the conquest and exploitation of Gaul--this also an undertaking
motived by finance--made him the richest man in the world. In truth,
Pharsalus was won there in advance.[832] For it was for _power_ that
Cæsar amassed these milliards, like Cecil Rhodes, and not because he
delighted in wealth like Verres or even like Crassus, who was first and
foremost a financier and only secondarily a politician. Cæsar grasped
the fact that on the soil of a democracy constitutional rights signify
nothing without money and everything with it. When Pompey was still
dreaming that he could evoke legions by stamping on the ground, Cæsar
had long since condensed the dream to reality with his money. It must
be clearly understood, however, that he did not introduce these methods
but found them in existence, that he made himself master of them but
never identified himself with them. For practically a century parties
grouped on principles had been dissolving into personal followings
grouped upon men who pursued private political aims and were expert in
handling the political weapons of their time.
Amongst these means, besides money, was influence upon the courts.
Since Classical assemblies voted, but did not debate, the trial before
the rostra was _a form of party battle_ and the school of schools for
political persuasiveness. The young politician began his career by
indicting and if possible annihilating some great personage,[833] as
the nineteen-year-old Crassus annihilated the renowned Papirius Carbo,
the friend of the Gracchi, who had later gone over to the Optimates.
This was why Cato was tried no less than forty-four times, though
acquitted in every case. The legal side of the question was entirely
subordinate in these affairs.[834] The decisive factors were the party
affinities of the judges, the number of patrons, and the size of the
crowd of backers--the number of the witnesses was really only paraded
in order to bring the financial and political power of the plaintiff
into the limelight. The intention in all Cicero’s oratory against
Verres was to convince the judges, under the veil of fine ethical
passion, that the condemnation of the accused was _in the interests of
their order_. Given the general outlook of the Classical, the courts
self-evidently existed to serve private and party interests. Democratic
complainants in Athens were accustomed at the end of their speeches to
remind the jurymen from the people that they would forfeit their fees
by acquitting the wealthy defendant.[835] The tremendous power of the
Roman Senate consisted mainly in their occupancy of every seat of the
judicial (jurors’) bench, which placed the destinies of every citizen
at their mercy; hence the far-reachingness of the Gracchan law of 122
which handed over the judicature to the Equites and delivered over the
nobility--that is, the official class--to the financial world.[836]
In 83 Sulla, simultaneously with his proscription of the financial
magnates, restored the judicature to the Senate, _as political weapon_,
of course, and the final duel of the potentates finds one more
expression in the ceaseless changing of the judges selected.
Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum of Rome, drew
the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to compel
it to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the
“contemporary” English-American politics have created _through the
press_ a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions
in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted
to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling personality
somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against
statics, Faustian against Apollinian world-feeling, the passion of the
third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak
to man;[837] the press and its associate, the electrical news-service,
keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under
a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes,
feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere
function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass,
politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into
cards and wine. It is turned into _force_, and its quantity determines
the intensity of its working influence.
Gunpowder and printing belong together--both discovered at the
culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical
thought--as _the two_ grand means of Faustian distance-tactics.
The Reformation in the beginning of the Late period witnessed the
first flysheets and the first field-guns, the French Revolution in
the beginning of the Civilization witnessed the first tempest of
pamphlets of the autumn of 1788 and the first mass-fire of artillery at
Valmy. But with this the printed word, produced in vast quantity and
distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands
of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter
of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that,
and deliberately seeking to produce impressions on the reader. The war
of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, that was waged from London on
French soil against Napoleon is the first great example. The scattered
sheets of the Age of Enlightenment transformed themselves into “the
Press”--a term of most significant anonymity. Now the _press campaign_
appears as the prolongation--or the preparation--of war by other means,
and in the course of the nineteenth century the strategy of outpost
fights, feints, surprises, assaults, is developed to such a degree that
a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired--because the Press has
won it meantime.
To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual
artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment
that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The
will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished
off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is
actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has
ever existed. The liberal bourgeois mind is _proud_ of the abolition
of censorship, the last restraint, while the dictator of the
press--Northcliffe!--keeps the slave-gang of his readers under the
whip of his leading articles, telegrams, and pictures. _Democracy has
by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of
the people._ The book-world, with its profusion of standpoints that
compelled thought to select and criticize, is now a real possession
only for a few. The people reads the _one_ paper, “its” paper, which
forces itself through the front doors by millions daily, spellbinds the
intellect from morning to night, drives the book into oblivion by its
more engaging layout, and if one or another specimen of a book does
emerge into visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects
by “reviewing” it.
What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and
hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds
on which to determine “the truth”--but what it obtains is just _its_
truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters
for effects and successes in the fact-world, is to-day a product
of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke,
transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of press work, and the
truth is acknowledged by everybody.[838] Its bases are irrefutable
for just so long as money is available to maintain them intact. The
Classical rhetoric, too, was designed for effect and not content--as
Shakespeare brilliantly demonstrates in Antony’s funeral oration--but
it did limit itself to the bodily audience and the moment. What the
dynamism of our Press wants is _permanent_ effectiveness. It must
keep men’s minds continuously under its influence. Its arguments are
overthrown as soon as the advantage of financial power passes over to
the counter-arguments and brings these still oftener to men’s eyes and
ears. At that moment the needle of public opinion swings round to the
stronger pole. Everybody convinces himself at once of the new truth,
and regards himself awakened out of error.
With the political press is bound up the need of universal
school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking.
In this demand there is an element--quite unconscious--of desiring
to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the
newspaper’s power-area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded
popular education, without _arrière pensée_, as enlightenment pure
and simple, and even to-day one finds here and there weak heads that
become enthusiastic on the Freedom of the Press--but it is precisely
this that smooths the path for the coming Cæsars of the world-press.
Those who have learnt to read succumb to their power, and the visionary
self-determination of Late democracy issues in a thorough-going
determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.
In the contests of to-day tactics consists in depriving the opponent
of this weapon. In the unsophisticated infancy of its power the
newspaper suffered from official censorship which the champions of
tradition wielded in self-defence, and the bourgeoisie cried out that
the freedom of the spirit was in danger. Now the multitude placidly
goes its way; it has definitively won for itself this freedom. But in
the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by
buying the press. Without the reader’s observing it, the paper, _and
himself with it_, changes masters.[839] Here also money triumphs and
forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals
more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will
storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated,
terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will
become quiet and go home. The Press to-day is an army with carefully
organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers
as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and
war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader
neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is
used, nor even the rôle that he is to play. A more appalling caricature
of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare
to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only
a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as _his_
liberty.
And the other side of this belated freedom--it is permitted to everyone
to say what he pleases, _but_ the Press is free to take notice of
what he says or not. It can condemn any “truth” to death simply by
not undertaking its communication to the world--a terrible censorship
of silence, which is all the more potent in that the masses of
newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists.[840] Here,
as ever in the birth-pangs of Cæsarism, emerges a trait of the buried
springtime.[841] The arc of happening is about to close on itself. Just
as in the concrete and steel buildings the expression-will of early
Gothic once more bursts forth, but cold, controlled, and Civilized,
so the iron will of the Gothic Church to power over souls reappears
as--the “freedom of democracy.” The age of the “book” is flanked on
either hand by that of the sermon and that of the newspaper. Books
are a personal expression, sermon and newspaper obey an impersonal
_purpose_. The years of Scholasticism afford the only example
in world-history of an intellectual discipline that was applied
universally and permitted no writing, no speech, no thought to come
forth that contradicted the _willed_ unity. This is spiritual dynamics.
Classical, Indian, or Chinese mankind would have been horrified at this
spectacle. But the same things recur, and as a _necessary_ result of
the European-American liberalism--“the despotism of freedom against
tyranny,” as Robespierre put it. In lieu of stake and faggots there
is the great silence. The dictature of party leaders supports itself
upon that of the Press. The competitors strive by means of money to
detach readers--nay, peoples--_en masse_ from the hostile allegiance
and to bring them under their own mind-training. And all that they
learn in this mind-training, is what it is considered that they should
know--a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them.
There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose
military-service liability on the subject--one whips their souls with
articles, telegrams, and pictures (Northcliffe!) until they _clamour_
for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they
_willed_ to be forced.
This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is _proof_
that decides all, in that of facts it is _success_. Success means that
one being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the
dreams of the world-improvers have turned out to be but the tools of
_master-natures_. In the Late Democracy, _race_ bursts forth and either
makes ideals its slaves or throws them scornfully into the pit. It
was so, too, in Egyptian Thebes, in Rome, in China--but in no other
Civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable
a form as in this of ours. The thought, and consequently the action,
of the mass are kept under iron pressure--for which reason, and for
which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters--that
is, in a dual slavery--while the parties become the obedient retinues
of a few, and the shadow of coming Cæsarism already touches them. As
the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliaments
will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As
then sceptre and crown, so now peoples’ rights are paraded for the
multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really
signify--it was for this reason that the _cautious_ Augustus never let
pass an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman
freedom. But the power is migrating even to-day, and correspondingly
elections are degenerating for us into the farce that they were in
Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of those who
possess it,[842] and election affairs become a preconcerted game that
is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally
_revolution in legitimate forms_,[843] it has exhausted those forms,
and what takes place is that mankind “elects” its Destiny again by the
primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of money become
intolerable.
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has
destroyed intellect. But, just _because_ the illusion that actuality
can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has
fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality
one power-will _can be overthrown only by another_ (for that is the
great human experience of Contending States periods); there wakes
at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still
lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope
for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour
and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And
now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which
the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the
depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility
that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of
high money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound
enough to be, in Frederick the Great’s words, the _servant_--the
hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring _servant_--of the State, all
that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast
to Capitalism[844]--all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense
life-forces. Cæsarism _grows_ on the soil of Democracy, but its roots
thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. The Classical
Cæsar derived his power from the Tribunate, and his dignity and
therewith his permanency from his being the Princeps. Here too the soul
of old Gothic wakens anew. The spirit of the knightly orders overpowers
plunderous Vikingism. The mighty ones of the future may possess the
earth as their private property--for the great political form of the
Culture is irremediably in ruin--but it matters not, for, formless and
limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the
unwearying care for this world as it is, which is the very opposite of
the interestedness of the money-power age, and demands high honour and
conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final
battle between Democracy and Cæsarism, between the leading forces of
dictatorial money-economics and the _purely political_ will-to-order
of the Cæsars. And in order to understand this _final battle between
Economics and Politics_, in which the latter _reconquers_ its realm, we
must now turn our glance upon the physiognomy of economic history.