The State (C): Philosophy of Politics

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.”

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

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 adversary⁠⁸⁰⁷ 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) 4551848, 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

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 Capitalism⁠⁸⁴⁴—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.