XII. 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]

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]

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.

XIII. THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE

(A)

MONEY

The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contained kind of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately--an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property--and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic picture were David Hume[845] and Adam Smith.[846] Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic thinking of a single Culture on a particular development-level. Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its conditions, needs, and motives, instead of from the Soul--of generations, Estates, and peoples--and its creative power. It looks upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of the big personality and history-shaping will, of individuals or of groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation to religion and politics--these again being considered as individual self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying “the” science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco--as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,[847] and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.

Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the sense of a morphology of the economic side of life and more particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their formations--concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration--of economic styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the secret of its inner form, its soul, demands the physiognomic flair. To succeed in it it is necessary to be a “judge” of it as one is a “judge” of men or of horses, and requires even less “knowledge” than that which a horseman needs to have of zoölogy. But this faculty of “judgment” can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of the race-instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external position--the economic “stuff,” the need--in harmony with their own inner character. All economic life is the expression of a soul-life.

This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond all Capitalism and Socialism--both of which were products of the jejune rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic thought, like legal,[848] stands now on the verge of its true and proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age) sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.

The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.

Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not of the waking-consciousness, the intellect.[849] In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may be said, not to have history, but to be history. Irreversible Time, the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not, as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic Destinies as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in religious, there is timeless connexion of cause and effect.

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of “condition” of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life’s will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as self-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit as other-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through--the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger--with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one’s life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman has been discussed in an earlier chapter.[850] There is a private history which represents “life in space” as a procreation-series of the generations, and a public history that defends and secures it as a political “in-form”-ness--the “spindle side” and the “sword side” of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of State, but also in the primary form of the house[851] wherein the good spirits of the marriage-bed--the Genius and the Juno of every old Roman dwelling--were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this private history of the family the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation,[852] so the middle of the house in another sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.

For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form-language; everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is “in condition,” well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently--this is the time when the banal assertion that “hunger and love” are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of “happiness of the greatest number,” of comfort and ease, of “panem et circenses”; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like politics, a customary ethic and not a moral--yet again the distinction of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation-class, like an Estate, possesses a matter-of-course feeling for (not good and evil, but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honour, law. For those engaged in the economic life, too, honour stands as central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is “the right thing”--something quite separate from the sin-idea underlying the religious contemplation of the world. There exist, not only a very definite vocational honour amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for thieves and beggars, in so far as two or three of them feel themselves as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these customary-ethics, but they exist, and, like class-ethics everywhere and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership. Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and comradeship, which are found in every vocational society, there appear clean-cut notions of the ethical value of industry, of success, of work, and an astonishing sense of distinction and apartness. This sort of thing a man has--and without knowing much about it, for custom is evidenced to consciousness only when it is infringed--while, on the contrary, the prohibitions of religion which are timeless, universally valid, but never realizable ideals, must be, learned before a man can know or attempt to follow them.

Religious-ascetic fundamentals such as “selfless,” “sinless,” are without meaning in the economic life. For the true saint economics in itself is sinful,[853] and not merely taking of interest or pleasure in riches or the envy of the poor. The saying concerning the “lilies of the field” is for deeply religious (and philosophical) natures unreservedly true. The whole weight of their being lies outside economics and politics and all other facts of “this world.” We see it in Jesus’s times and St. Bernard’s and in the Russian soul of to-day; we see it too in the way of life of a Diogenes and a Kant. For its sake men choose voluntary poverty and itinerancy and hide themselves in cells and studies. Economic activity is never found in a religion or a philosophy, always only in the political organism of a church or the social organism of a theorizing fellowship; it is ever a compromise with “this world” and an index of the presence of a will-to-power.[854]

That which may be called the economic life of the plant is accomplished on and in it without its being itself anything but the theatre and will-less object of a natural process.[855] This element underlies the economy of the human body also, still unalterably vegetal and dreamy, pursuing its will-less (in this respect almost alien) existence in the shape of the circulatory organs. But when we come to the animal body freely mobile in space, being is not alone--it is accompanied by waking-being, the comprehending apprehension, and, therefore, the compulsion to provide by independent thought for the preservation of life. Here begins life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm.[856] Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant’s shrewdness in obtaining small advantages--both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at one glance. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic thought that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.

All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself.[857] It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless,[858] producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental and contemptible. To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed an acquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object--as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world--an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings would agree with a town population for a market-peace of a fortnight, after which weapons were drawn and booty-making started.

Politics and trade in developed form--the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority--are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in great seafarers like the Phœnicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes are like the kingdoms and have their history,[859] and Polycrates and Solon, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Jürgen Wullenweber are far from being the only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.

But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately.[860] One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II--has the will to wealth, the will to be “rich in land and subjects,” but it is with and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendour or even dissipation--if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist so far as he is concerned.

He who is out for purely economic advantages--as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours--is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows--especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers’ and employees’ unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he--makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business successes[861] awaken an unbridled sense of public power--in the very word “capital” one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it is only in a few individuals that the colour and direction of their willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change. Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as “his own business,” and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up of immense riches--there is little to choose in this respect between Versailles and the Jacobin Club, business bosses and trade-union leaders, Russian governors and Bolshevists. And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have “got there” is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great-city sort.

All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders, nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place, its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike, in a well-ordered society,[862] and down below, the economic life moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money thenceforward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence. Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each other’s acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political self-satisfaction spreads a critical-edifying world-sentiment. But out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual life-courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to become destiny for the whole.

And thus we begin to discern the morphology of economic history. First there is a primitive economy of “man,” which--like that of plants and animals--follows a biological[863] time-scale in the development of its forms. It completely dominates the primitive age, and it continues to move on, infinitely slowly and confusedly, underneath and between the high Cultures. Animals and plants are brought into it and transformed by taming and breeding, selection and sowing; fire and metals are exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul-fear, sex-love, art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.

Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply marked off in tempo and duration, are the economic histories of the high Cultures, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally.[864] In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady contempt upon the pristine land-economy that continues all around it, while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a Civilized world-economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a few centres, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy, while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive (“patriarchal”) custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great-city worker of Cæsar’s Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid’s Baghdad, and of the present-day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China--unless, of course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian’s time.

Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically “in form” as an economic class, just as they are in form for world-history as a political Estate. Each individual has an economic position within the economic order just as he has a grade of some sort in the society. Now, both these kinds of allegiances make claims upon the feelings, thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made worse confounded by the fact that, to-day, as in Hellenistic times, political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the upkeep-standards of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of factory-workers.

Confusion--for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are Estate-like formations that mean something. So, too, the body of scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood[865] and has a very sharply definite kind of class-exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The Tiers, already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of political protest, so that the importance it creates for itself is a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not as a bourgeois, but because he is a “liberal” and thus part and parcel of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as adhering to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of its social “form,” the economic “form” of the bourgeoisie becomes all the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the way in which he makes his living.

Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of life is that of the peasant,[866] which is pure production, and therefore the pre-condition of every other mode. Even the primary Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon hunting, stock-keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly honourable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the mode of the acquisitive middleman or intervener,[867] powerful out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in quite early conditions--a refined parasitism, completely unproductive and, therefore, land-alien and far-ranging, “free,” and unhampered spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third kind of economy, the preparatory economy of technics, grows up in numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply reflections upon nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up in achievement.[868] Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who--as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns--have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or “Black Jews.”[869]

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading--in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,[870] promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects--but it exists, it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England--an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase--and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant--but, even apart from that, all these things are quite incapable of being compared amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of it, bring it to pass that farm-labourers, bank clerks, and tailors’ hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by means of catchwords into a protest-combination, with the intention of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law--that is, so far as the body-Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist[871]--but economically he might be land-worker or craftsman, or even director or wholesale merchant with a huge capital (peculium), with palaces and country villas and a host of subordinates--freemen included. And what he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear in the sequel.

III

With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic life of settled form.[872] The life of the population is entirely that of the peasant on the open land. The experience of the town has not yet come. All that elevates itself from amongst the villages, castles, palaces, monasteries, temple-closes, is not a city, but a market, a mere meeting-point of yeomen’s interests, which also acquired, and at once, a certain religious and political meaning, but certainly cannot be said to have had a special life of its own. The inhabitants, even though they might be artisans or traders, would still feel as peasants, and even in one way or another work as such.

That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike producer and consumer is goods, and traffic in goods is the mark of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or even the farm. A piece of goods is that which adheres by some quiet threads of its essence to the life that has produced it or the life that uses it. A peasant drives “his” cow to market, a woman puts away “her” finery in the cupboard. We say that a man is endowed with this world’s “goods”; the word “pos_session_” takes us back right into the plantlike origin of property, into which this particular being--no other--has grown, from the roots up.[873] Exchange in these periods is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another. They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding-scale of felt relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure--for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized.[874]

Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener.[875] In the market the acquisitive and the creative economics encounter one another, but even at places where fleets and caravans unload, trade only appears as the organ of countryside traffic.[876] It is the “eternal” form of economy, and is even to-day seen in the immemorially ancient figure of the pedlar of the country districts remote from towns, and in out-of-the-way suburban lanes where small barter-circles form naturally, and in the private economy of savants, officials, and in general everyone not actively part of the daily economic life of the great city.

With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens.[877] As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life “out there” is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this--the true urban man is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep.

With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.

With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number.[878] Both are entirely inorganic. The economic picture is reduced exclusively to quantities, whereas the important point about “goods” had been their quality. For the early-period peasant “his” cow is, first of all, just what it is, a unit being, and only secondarily an object of exchange; but for the economic outlook of the true townsman the only thing that exists is an abstract money-value which at the moment happens to be in the shape of a cow that can always be transformed into that of, say, a bank-note. Even so the genuine engineer sees in a famous waterfall not a unique natural spectacle, but just a calculable quantum of unexploited energy.

It is an error of all modern money-theories that they start from the value-token or even the material of the payment-medium instead of from the form of economic thought.[879] In reality, money, like number and law, is a category of thought. There is a monetary, just as there is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the world-around. From the sense-experience of a house we obtain quite different abstracts, according as we are mentally appraising it from the point of view of a merchant, a judge, or an engineer, and with reference to a balance-sheet, a lawsuit, or a danger of collapse. Next of kin to thinking in money, however, is mathematics. To think in terms of business is to calculate. The money-value is a numerical value measured by a unit of reckoning.[880] This exact “value-in-itself,” like number-in-itself, the man of the town, the man without roots, is the first to imagine; for peasants there are only ephemeral felt values in relation to now this and now that object of exchange. What he does not use, or does not want to possess, has “no value” for him. Only in the economy-picture of the real townsman are there objective values and kinds of values which have an existence apart from his private needs, as thought-elements of a generalized validity, although in actuality every individual has his proper system of values and his proper stock of the most varied kinds of value, and feels the ruling prices of the market as “cheap” or “dear” with reference to these.[881]

Whereas the earlier mankind compares goods, and does so not by means of the reason only, the later reckons the values of wares, and does so by rigid unqualitative measures. Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. Whether and how this measure of value finds symbolic expression in a value-sign--as the written, spoken, or represented number-sign is, in a sense, number--depends on the economic style of the particular Culture, each of which produces a different sort of money. The common condition for the appearance of this is the existence of an urban population that thinks economically in terms of it, and it is its particular character that settles whether the value-token shall serve also as payment-medium; thus the Classical coin and probably the Babylonian silver did so serve, whereas the Egyptian deben (raw copper weighed out in pounds) was a measure of exchange, but neither token nor payment-medium. The Western and the “contemporary” Chinese bank-note,[882] again, is a medium, but not a measure. In fact we are accustomed to deceive ourselves thoroughly as to the rôle played by coins of precious metal in our sort of economy; they are just wares fashioned in imitation of the Classical custom, and hence, measured against book-values of credit money, they have a “price.”

The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old possession, bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the fortune, which is essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not consist in goods, but it is laid out in them. Considered by itself, it is a purely numerical quantum of money-value.[883]

As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and, therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third course. The very words “acquisition,” “gain,” “speculation,” point to a profit tricked off from the goods en route to the consumer--an intellectual plunder--and for that reason are inapplicable to the early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for “money.” The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman, inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker, and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to this rule. But with money-traffic there appears between producer and consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the middleman, whose thought is dominated a priori by the business side of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire of him. He elevates mediation to a monopoly and thereafter to economic primacy, and forces the other two to be “in form” in his interest, to prepare the wares according to his reckonings, and to cheapen them under the pressure of his offers.

He who commands this mode of thinking is the master of money.[884] In all the Cultures evolution takes this road. Lysias informs us in his oration against the corn-merchants that the speculators at the Piræus frequently spread reports of the wreck of a grain-fleet or of the outbreak of war, in order to produce a panic. In Hellenistic-Roman times it was a widespread practice to arrange for land to go out of cultivation, or for imports to be held in bond, in order to force up prices. In the Egyptian New Empire wheat-corners in the American style were made possible by a bill-discounting that is fully comparable with the banking operations of the West.[885] Cleomenes, Alexander the Great’s administrator for Egypt, was able by book transactions to get the whole corn-supply into his own hands, thereby producing a famine far and wide in Greece and raking in immense gains for himself. To think economically on any terms but these is simply to become a mere pawn in the money-operations of the great city. This style of thought soon gets hold of the waking-consciousness of the entire urban population and, therefore, of everyone who plays any serious part in the conduct of economic history. “Peasant” and “burgher” stand not only for the difference of country and city, but for that of possessions and money as well. The splendid Culture of Homeric and Provençal princely courts was something that waxed and waned with the men themselves--we can often, even to-day, see it in the life of old families in their country-seats--but the more refined culture of the bourgeoisie, its “comfort,” is something coming from outside, something that can be paid for.[886] All highly developed economy is urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places, the “money-markets” of the world[887]--in Babylon, Thebes, and Rome, in Byzantium and Baghdad, in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The residue is a starveling provincial economy that runs on in its narrow circles without being conscious of its utter dependence. Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, are concentrated. Shaw is entirely right when he says: “The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization ... the two things [money and life] are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life....”[888] What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful--now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

Through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money. The peasant-wars of the beginning of a Late period (in the Classical, 700-500; in the Western, 1450-1650; in the Egyptian, end of Old Kingdom) are the first reaction of the blood against the money that is stretching forth its hand from the waxing cities over the soil.[889] Stein’s warning that “he who mobilizes the soil dissolves it into dust” points to a danger common to all Cultures; if money is unable to attack possession, it insinuates itself into the thoughts of the noble and peasant possessors, until the inherited possession that has grown with the family’s growth begins to seem like resources merely “put into” land and soil and, so far as their essence is concerned, mobile.[890] Money aims at mobilizing all things. World-economy is the actualized economy of values that are completely detached in thought from the land, and made fluid.[891] The Classical money-thinking, from Hannibal’s day, transformed whole cities into coin and whole populations into slaves and thereby converted both into money that could be brought from everywhere to Rome, and used outwards from Rome as a power.

The Faustian money-thinking “opens up” whole continents, the water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests, the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is laid out in one way or in another--in the shape of press, or elections, or budgets, or armies--for the realization of masters’ plans. Ever new values are abstracted from whatever world-stock is still, from the business point of view, unclaimed, “the slumbering spirits of gold,” as John Gabriel Borkman says; and what the things themselves are, apart from this, is of no economic significance at all.

As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible to-day to translate intelligibly the money-idea that underlay the barter and the bill business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the book-keeping of China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from Haroun-al-Raschid’s day. All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money--the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function.[892]

Economically, as in other ways, Classical man saw his world-around as a sum of bodies that changed their place, travelled, drove or hit or annihilated one another, as in Democritus’s description of Nature. Man was a body among bodies, and the Polis as sum thereof a body of higher order. All the needs of life consisted in corporeal quantities, and money, too, therefore represented such a body, in the same way as an Apollo-statue represented a god. About 650, simultaneously with the stone body of the Doric temple and the free statue true-modelled in the round, appeared the coin, a metal weight of beautiful impressed form. Value as a magnitude had long existed--in fact as long as this Culture itself. In Homer, a talent is a little aggregate of gold, in bullion and decorative objects, of a definite total weight. The Shield of Achilles represents “two talents” of gold, and even as late as Roman times it was usual to specify silver and gold vessels by weight.[893]

The discovery of the Classically formed money-body, however, is so extraordinary that we have not even yet grasped it in its deep and purely Classical significance. We regard it as one of the “achievements of humanity,” and so we strike these coinages everywhere, just as we put statues in our streets and squares. So much and no more it is within our power to do; we can imitate the shape, but we cannot impart the same economic significance thereto. The coin as money is a purely Classical phenomenon--only possible in an environment conceived wholly on Euclidean ideas, but there creatively dominant over all economic life. Notions like income, resources, debt, capital, meant in the Classical cities something quite different from what they mean to us. They meant, not economic energy radiating from a point, but a sum of valuable objects in hand. Wealth was always a mobile cash-supply, which was altered by addition and subtraction of valuable objects and had nothing at all to do with possessions in land--for in Classical thinking the two were completely separate. Credit consisted in the lending of cash in the expectation that the loan would be repaid in cash. Catiline was poor because, in spite of his wide estates,[894] he could find nobody to lend him the cash that he needed for his political aims; and the immense debts of Roman politicians[895] had for their ultimate security, not their equivalent in land, but the definite prospect of a province to be plundered of its movable assets.[896]

In the light of this, and only in the light of this, we begin to understand certain phenomena such as the mass-execution of the wealthy under the Second Tyrannis, and the Roman proscriptions (with the object of seizing a large part of the cash current in the community), and the melting down of the Delphian temple-treasure by the Phocians in the Sacred War, of the art-treasures of Corinth by Mummius, and of the last votive offerings in Rome by Cæsar, in Greece by Sulla, in Asia Minor by Brutus and Cassius, without regard to artistic value when the noble stuffs and metals and ivory were needed.[897] The captured statues and the vessels borne in the triumphs were, in the eyes of the spectators, sheer cash, and Mommsen[898] could attempt to determine the site of Varus’s disaster by the places in which coin-hoards were unearthed--for the Roman veteran carried his whole property in precious metal on his person. Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money; a Classical money-market was not a centre of credit like the bourses of our world and of ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world’s cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Cæsar’s time much more than half of the Classical world’s gold was in Rome.

But when, from about Hannibal’s time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men’s eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person[899] and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the regions “opened up” to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax-farmers became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested fortunes, and hence the enormous slave-masses of the Roman period, which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ, their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and judgment-debtors.[900] It was in the sixth century that Chios made a beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The difference between these and the far more numerous paid labourers was originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the systematic opening-up of energy-sources, the slaves of the Roman age did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed--more or less--so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained. Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account, so that they could become rich;[901] free labour was undersold--all this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.[902] The bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not bound up to a natural limit like the stock of metal available in those days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply for slave-getting, but to slave-hunting by private entrepreneurs all along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new way of making the proconsuls’ fortunes, which consisted in bleeding the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt. The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day. When Cæsar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by the money-poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation--the transformation of corporeal objects into money.

In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money--money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.[903] Compare the pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words “cheque,” “account,” and “checking”)[904] with the “contemporary” gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the “first capitalist power of the world”;[905] and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.

The decisive event, however, was the invention--“contemporary” with that of the Classical coin about 650--of double-entry book-keeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. Goethe calls this in Wilhelm Meister “one of the finest discoveries of the human intellect,” and indeed its author may without hesitation be ranked with his contemporaries Columbus and Copernicus. To the Normans we owe our modes of reckoning and to the Lombards our book-keeping. These, be it observed, were the same two Germanic stocks which created the two most suggestive juristic works of the early Gothic,[906] and whose longing into distant seas gave the impulses for the two discoveries of America. “Double-entry book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton.... With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy.... Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities.”[907]

Double-entry book-keeping is a pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the “Firm.” The coinage of the Classical world had only permitted of arithmetical compilations with value-magnitudes. Here, as ever, Pythagoras and Descartes stand opposed. It is legitimate for us to talk of the “integration” of an undertaking, and the graphic curve is the same optical auxiliary to economics as it is to science. The Classical economy-world was ordered, like the cosmos of Democritus, according to stuff and form. A stuff, in the form of a coin, carries the economic movement and presses against the demand-unit of equal value-quantity at the place of use. Our economy-world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value,[908] which is represented by a book-entry. “Quod non est in libris, non est in mundo.” But the symbol of the functional money thus imagined, that which alone may be compared with the Classical coin, is not the actual book-entry, nor yet the share-voucher, cheque, or note, but the act by which the function is fulfilled in writing, and the rôle of the value-paper is merely to be the generalized historical evidence of this act.

Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money corresponding in reality to the economics in thought. In just the same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic, which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it befell that the evolution of these three intellectual form-worlds of ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flowerlike unfolding, but in the shape of a progressive emancipation from the notion of magnitude. The mathematic had already achieved this by the close of the Baroque age.[909] The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task,[910] but this century is going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically, not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces and performances, relations and capacities--organizing talents and intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy-sources--and not mere existence of corporeal things. The “Romanist” thing-thought of our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually adding till the World War came, has indeed made a rôle for itself off the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern economy it has nothing to do; and if as the result of the war it were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered thereby.[911]

Unhappily, the modern national economics were founded in the age of Classicism. Just as statues and vases and stiff dramas alone counted as true art, so also finely stamped coins alone counted as true money. What Josiah Wedgwood (1758) aimed at with his delicately toned reliefs and cups, that also, at bottom, Adam Smith aimed at in his theory of value--namely, the pure present of tangible magnitudes. For it is entirely consonant with the illusion that money and pieces of money are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an effecting in a world of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but not marked off--but the result of the effecting, considered entirely materially, that which is worked-up, a tangible thing showing nothing noteworthy about it except just its extent.

In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality--more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. But this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,[912] and its value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather it is itself money--Faustian money, namely, which is not minted, but thought of as an efficient centre coming up out of a life--and it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to the significance of a fact. Thinking in money generates money--that is the secret of the world-economy. When an organizing magnate writes down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as an economic centre vouches for a corresponding heightening of the economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the word “Credit” for us. But all the gold pieces in the world would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous “expropriation of the expropriators” were to eliminate the superior capacities from their creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less, empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just as truly a product of the Romanist law-thought as Adam Smith; he sees only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the acquisition of outlet-markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not occur.[913]

If anyone seeks to enunciate a theory of modern work, let him begin by thinking of this basic trait of all life. There are subjects and objects in every kind of life as lived, and the more important, the more rich in form, the life is, the clearer the distinction between them. As every stream of Being consists of a minority of leaders and a huge majority of led, so every sort of economy consists in leader-work and executive work. The frog’s perspective of Marx and the social-ethical ideologues shows only the aggregate of last small things, but these only exist at all in virtue of the first things, and the spirit of this world of work can be grasped only through a grasp of its highest possibilities. The inventor of the steam-engine and not its stoker is the determinant. The thought is what matters.

And, similarly, thinking in money has subjects and objects: those who by force of their personality generate and guide money, and those who are maintained by money. Money of the Faustian brand is the force distilled from economy-dynamics of the Faustian brand, and it appertains to the destiny of the individual (on the economic side of his life-destiny) that he is inwardly constituted to represent a part of this force, or that he is, on the contrary, nothing but mass to it.

The word “Capital” signifies the centre of this thought--not the aggregate of values, but that which keeps them in movement as such. Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its opposite is the provincial economy. It was the unconditional supremacy achieved by the coin in Classical life (including the political side of that life) that generated the static capital, the ἀφορμή or starting-point, that by its existence drew to itself, in a sort of magnetic attraction, things and again things en masse. It was the supremacy of book-values, whose abstract system was quickly detached from personality by double-entry book-keeping and worked forward by virtue of its own inward dynamism, that produced the modern capital that spans the whole earth with its field of force.[914]

Under the influence of its own sort of capital the economic life of the Classical world took the form of a gold-stream that flowed from the provinces to Rome and back, and was ever seeking new areas whose stock of worked-up gold had not yet been “opened up.” Brutus and Cassius carried the gold of Asia Minor on long mule-trains to the battle-field of Philippi--one can imagine what sort of an economic operation the plunder of a camp after a battle must have been--and even C. Gracchus, almost a century earlier, alluded to the amphoræ that went out from Rome to the provinces full of wine and came back full of gold. This hunt for the gold possessions of alien peoples corresponds exactly to the present-day hunt for coal, which in its deeper meaning is not a thing, but a store of energy.

But, equally, the Classical craving for the near and present could not but match the Polis-ideal with an economic ideal of Autarkeia, an economic atomization corresponding to the political. Each of these tiny life-units desired to have an economic stream wholly of its own, wholly self-contained, circling independently of all others and within the radius of visibility. The polar opposite of this is the Western notion of the Firm, which is thought of as an entirely impersonal and incorporeal centre of force, from which activity streams out in all directions to an indefinite distance, and which the proprietor by his ability to think in money does not represent, but possesses and directs--that is, has in his power--like a little cosmos. The duality of firm and proprietor would have been utterly unimaginable for the Classical mind.[915]

Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. For this was completely absent even as an idea from Classical man. His finance was one of provisional expedients made rule and habit. The wealthy burgher of Athens and Rome could be burdened with the equipment of war-ships. The political power of the Roman ædile (and his debts) rested on the fact that he not only produced the games and the streets and the buildings, but paid for them too--of course, he could recoup himself later by plundering his province. Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required--even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one’s own temples, sea-piracy against one’s own city, confiscation of the wealth of one’s own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens--a proceeding to which plenty of people besides Eubulus of Athens owed their popularity.[916] Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy. The “economic management” of Roman provinces was a system of robbery, public and private, practised by senators and financiers without the slightest consideration as to whether the exported values could be replaced. Never did Classical man think of systematically intensifying his economic life, but ever looked to the result of the moment, the tangible quantum of cash. Imperial Rome would have gone down in ruin had it not been fortunate enough to possess in old Egypt a Civilization that had for a thousand years thought of nothing but the organization of its economy. The Roman neither comprehended nor was capable of copying this style of life,[917] but the accident that Egypt provided the political possessor of this fellah-world with an inexhaustible source of gold rendered it unnecessary for him to make a settled habit of proscription at home; the last of these financial operations in massacre-form was that of 43, shortly before the incorporation of Egypt.[918] The amassed gold of Asia Minor that Brutus and Cassius were then bringing up, which meant an army and the dominion of the world, made it necessary to put to the ban some two thousand of the richest inhabitants of Italy, whose heads were brought to the Forum in sacks for the offered rewards. It was no longer possible to spare even relatives, children, and grey-heads, or people who had never concerned themselves with politics. It was enough that they possessed a stock of cash and that the yield would otherwise have been too small.

But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares--because men were again living the peasant life[919]--and this explains the immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian’s reign, which has hitherto been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus’s reign onwards, tried in vain to check--till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff[920] money-economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.

XII. THE STATE…

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XII. THE STATE

XIII. THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE